Seamus Heaney’s “Storm on the Island”
Today’s poem weathers the unfriendliness of the natural world. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with o...
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The Daily Poem
The Daily Poem offers one essential poem each weekday morning. From Shakespeare and John Donne to Robert Frost and E..E Cummings, The Daily Poem curates a broad and generous audio anthology...
Episodes
20 of 938 episodes
William Shakespeare’s “As fast as thou shalt wane...” (Sonnet 11)
In today’s poem the bard urges his subject not to bury the gifts of Nature in the grave. Happy reading. Want to send your teen to a day of S...
Li Bai’s “Taking Leave of a Friend”
Today’s poem–a masterclass in subtlety and imagery–makes you feel the scale of the farewell before it arrives. Happy reading. This is a publ...
“Sweeney Praises the Trees”
Today’s poem, translated from the Irish by Seamus Heaney, delivers precisely what the title promises. Happy reading. This is a public episod...
Helen Hunt Jackson’s “September”
Today’s poem praises September and mystifies it with a coy turn in the final stanza. Enjoy the last day of this finest of months. Happy read...
Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to the Yellow Bird”
Today’s poem is a lament over a caged beauty. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers...
Edward Lear’s “How Pleasant To Know...”
Today’s poem is a comic self-portrait in verse from a poet who spent years working as a painter. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If...
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”
In today’s poem, death is a country beyond the sea. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscr...
George Herbert’s “The Pulley”
Today’s poem gives us a poet making sense of his restlessness and finding in it the mechanism that draws him upward to God. Happy reading. T...
Marsden Hartley’s “Salutations to a Mouse”
In today’s poem, the poet discovers unexpected value in his writing. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this...
Annie Dillard’s “How we spend our days”
Today we are remembering Annie Dillard. Her poem offers not only advice for living, but an approach to understanding a life in retrospect. H...
Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Sestina”
Today’s poem heightened the form it’s named for by adding patterned rhyme. Even with the added complexity, this sometimes-rigid form strikes...
Scott Cairns’ “Chemo With Coleridge”
Today’s poem, from Cairns’ new Against Certainty , ponders the value of intravenous poetry. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'...
Wendell Berry’s “Sabbath Poem III, 1994”
Today’s poem is, quite simply, one of my favorites. Berry uses Shakespeare to tell us we cannot see our life clearly until we have passed th...
Wendell Berry’s “The Guest”
Today’s poem confesses the discomfort and undesirability of loving our neighbor. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to d...
Wendell Berry’s “In a Motel Parking Lot, Thinking of Dr. Williams”
Today’s poem is part tribute, part poetic manifesto. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subsc...
Jane Austen’s “Mock Panegyric on a Young Friend”
Today’s poem marshals Austen’s characteristic wit to praise feminine virtues via comparison to American geography. Fellas, don’t try this at...
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Grief”
Today’s poem, pitting Victorian stoicism against Victorian sentimentality, contends that the truest grief is the most austere and long-lived...
Wendell Berry’s “Testament”
Composed in 1971 as a self-eulogy, today’s poem is a remembrance of Wendell Berry who embarked for the greater Port Royal yesterday at the a...
Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “The Last Leaf”
Holmes wrote that the man who inspired today’s poem reminded him of "a withered leaf which has held to its stem through the storms of autumn...