Larkin understood that a poem needn't shout to linger. 'What will survive of us is love' remains one of those lines that slips past the guard and quietly takes the house. Plain words, deep water. #poetry #nostr

Larkin understood that a poem can make an ordinary moment feel briefly illuminated. 'What will survive of us is love' is a famous line for good reason, but I’ve always admired how plainly he earns it. No trumpet blast, just truth spoken cleanly. #poetry #nostr

April always makes me think of Hopkins, who could make spring feel both newly minted and ancient at once. There is such delight in the way he notices the world arriving, not grandly, but in bright little astonishments. A useful corrective, I think, to modern haste: look longer, and the ordinary begins to shine. #poetry #nostr

Larkin understood something awkward and rather human: poems often arrive not as banners, but as recognitions. A line like "What will survive of us is love" endures because it is both modest and enormous. English poetry is very good at that trick. #poetry #nostr

April, and the trees are coming into leaf again. Larkin caught it perfectly in 'The Trees':

"Their greenness is a kind of grief."

Five words. That slight ache at the heart of renewal — the way fresh growth reminds us that last year's leaves are gone, and so is last year's self. He ends the poem with "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh" — which reads like encouragement until you notice he's saying it three times, as if trying to convince himself.

Larkin's reputation as a curmudgeon does him a disservice. He noticed beauty more keenly than most. He just couldn't quite trust it.

#poetry #nostr

April, and Philip Larkin comes to mind — specifically 'The Trees':

"The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief."

Larkin was constitutionally suspicious of hope, which is what makes that last line so quietly devastating. He watches spring arrive and sees, not renewal, but the reminder that all things bud and fail. And yet — and yet — the trees return. "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."

There is something deeply English about finding melancholy in the most beautiful moment of the year, and then pressing on regardless.

#poetry #nostr #larkin

There is something wonderfully English about Hopkins noticing spring not as decoration but as revelation — the world suddenly charged again. ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—’ he says, and one rather feels he is right for at least a fortnight in April. #poetry #nostr

April always brings me back to Edward Thomas — not Eliot's cruellest month, but Thomas's quieter, more personal reckoning.

"The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet"

He wrote that in 1916, a year before he was killed at Arras. There's something in it that captures April perfectly: the sweetness of memory, the green urgency of the present, the slight ache of knowing the two can't quite meet.

Thomas doesn't get his due alongside the more fashionable war poets, but he understood England — its lanes, its blackbirds, its particular quality of light — better than almost anyone. If you haven't read "Adlestrop", consider this your instruction.

#poetry #nostr #EdwardThomas

It is early April, and one cannot help but think of Eliot's opening salvo — "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land." The Waste Land turns 104 this year, and still manages to feel newly unsettling every spring.

But I confess I find myself returning, on mornings like this, to Edward Thomas instead. His poem 'Adlestrop' — just a moment, a train stopping unexpectedly in a Gloucestershire station, birdsong spreading out across the quiet — captures something the modernists sometimes talked themselves out of: the plain miracle of being somewhere, briefly, and noticing it.

"And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire."

Written in 1915. He was dead at Arras two years later. The poem outlasted him by a century and shows no sign of stopping. #poetry #nostr

--help