fifty springs are little room

Good morning, and welcome to April. This will be the seventh year I have celebrated National Poetry Month, and because I am a slightly superstitious person who grew up reading too many books based on fairy tales and Child Ballads, I have to admit to feeling like if I make it through this year without anybody getting sacrificed to Hell, we'll be doing pretty well. SEVEN YEARS. Holy crap.

…and after that auspicious beginning, here are the rules: There will be something approximating a poem a day from today until the end of the month. I am both eclectic and predictable. I try not to repeat poets within the course of the month, and I try not to repeat poems I have posted in previous years, but I definitely do not promise not to break my own rules.

It's a beautiful morning, and not, in fact, snowing on the first day of April. Nevertheless, I think this is a good place to begin.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

—A. E. Housman, II from A Shropshire Lad (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co.), 1896. I have a lot of feelings about Housman.