{"id":352,"date":"2006-12-08T00:01:44","date_gmt":"2006-12-08T05:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=352"},"modified":"2006-12-12T14:30:21","modified_gmt":"2006-12-12T19:30:21","slug":"poetry-friday-that-poem-i-keep-forgetting-to-remember","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=352","title":{"rendered":"Poetry Friday: That Poem I Keep Forgetting To Remember"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>*{Note: Read <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/chickenspaghetti.typepad.com\/chicken_spaghetti\/2006\/12\/poetry_friday_s_1.html\">here<\/a><\/strong> at Chicken Spaghetti for today&#8217;s Poetry Friday round-up}<\/em> . . . <\/p>\n<p>Happy Poetry Friday, everyone.<\/p>\n<p>We had our first snow of the season Monday.  We&#8217;re having a bit more today.  It&#8217;s almost winter, and it seems especially sudden after such a mild autumn.  The leaves are gone, the radiators are clanging and hissing, all the stores have their snow shovels on display&#8230;  It&#8217;s funny, but the same thing happens to me every year around this time.  I get a couple of lines stuck in my head from this poem, only I can never actually remember the rest of the poem, or the poet.\u00a0 Just these words:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The sunlight on the garden<br \/>\nHardens and grows cold<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But every time I step outside to that sort of frigid bright winter sunlight &#8211; the kind that looks plenty warm from inside, but always comes with that fierce, inhuman New England wind &#8211; those lines pop into my head.  And then they kind of scroll around in my brain on autoplay, over and over, until I have to look it up.  And I discover (again) that the title is, in fact, &#8220;The Sunlight on the Garden.&#8221;  And it&#8217;s by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poets.org\/poet.php\/prmPID\/755\"><strong>Louis MacNeice<\/strong><\/a>, an Irish-born poet and playwright from the first half of the 20th century.  And I discover (again) how achingly lovely this poem is, and why the imagery stays with me year after year:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The sunlight on the garden<br \/>\nHardens and grows cold,<br \/>\nWe cannot cage the minute<br \/>\nWithin its nets of gold;<br \/>\nWhen all is told<br \/>\nWe cannot beg for pardon.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.rice.edu\/~ssiyer\/minstrels\/poems\/757.html\"><strong>Here&#8217;s<\/strong><\/a> the rest of the poem.  Enjoy, and have a lovely day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>*{Note: Read here at Chicken Spaghetti for today&#8217;s Poetry Friday round-up} . . . Happy Poetry Friday, everyone. We had our first snow of the season Monday. We&#8217;re having a bit more today. It&#8217;s almost winter, and it seems especially sudden after such a mild autumn. The leaves are gone, the radiators are clanging and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry-friday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=352"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}