Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week'

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I first discovered the poetry of the 14th-century Welsh bard Dafydd ap Gwilym when, planning a poem about my roof-nesting herring-gull family, I cast around the internet for company and ideas. I was thrilled by the radiance of the poem I discovered, Yr Wylan: Gwilym’s seagull soars, alive and shining, even in English translation. Literary allusion takes on a typographical turn when the tadpoles in the water’s “sandy shallows” are seen as “hundreds / and hundreds of fat commas swept / from the compositor’s workbench …” The metaphor may connect the double life of the amphibian with the coexistence of type and text, print and language. It may also allude to one of the translations in Rowan Williams’s collection, In the Days of Caesar by Waldo Williams. The latter is a beautiful poem, intensely of and for Wales and the Welsh people, but suggesting a transformation that seems boundless. This is the last stanza: It is the first poem in a delightful new 12-poem collection, A Map of Love, which Wynn Thomas has edited for the University of Wales Press. The bilingual collection hops across the centuries from Gwilym to the present, and includes stylish linocuts by the artist, Ruth Jên Evans. It would make a good Valentine’s Day gift, and, if you’re Welsh, you’d only be a little late to offer the collection to a loved one in honour of St Dwynwen, the patron saint of love, whose day was celebrated on 25 January.

If you aren’t too keen on this fate for your child, take heart. A different version of the poem has Wednesday’s Child fated to be “merry and glad”. You can see this version below in the Variations section. Thursday’s Child There is a popular contemporary Christian song by Curtis Chapman called “Tuesday’s Child”. In this song, he interprets the meaning of Tuesday’s Child’s as having a strong faith in God.There wasn’t love but there was what love becomes —”. This is an enticingly authoritative opening statement: who doesn’t want to know what love is and isn’t and what it sometimes becomes? In which direction will the speaker send us? Love poetry is a long-lived, heavily worked genre: queer love poetry is part of that tradition, but, if not always silenced, it has been muffled and narrowly boxed inside it. Now, if a queer poet has Olayiwola’s skill, passion and daring, they can re-launch reader expectations and alter the gravitational forces that bind us. The latest collection by the Galway-based poet Rachel Coventry, The Detachable Heart, has its share of sensuously down-to-earth love poems, more than a few of which are spiked with disenchantment. There are images of love as damage, and, in the title poem, the disclosure of both the wound and its healing becomes for the speaker an enabler of poetry (“I will wear the scar proudly. / It will be my next collection”). The last line of The Detachable Heart, in a poem called Punishment, fearlessly proclaims its edict: “Let the ferocious heart love,” having insisted that, despite the lover’s depiction as an “old Tantalus”, “the heart wants what it wants”. A “Book of Hours’” depicting “turrets”, “red-thorn bowers” and “ladies in bright tissue” – can such images really belong to a poem by DH Lawrence? Grey Evening first appeared in the 1916 collection, Amores. Some of the pieces in his first collection, Love Poems and Others (1912), are less concerned with static images, more freely constructed. In many ways Grey Evening a traditional love lyric. At times, its lapidary quality reflects the medieval Book of Hours which provides its central metaphor.

Children born on a Tuesday are typically associated with good manners, grace, refinement and elegance.They are considered courteous and full of good will. For centuries, people have also tried to make predictions about the days of the week and how they relate to other important (and mundane) events. It’s just a short poem, but it has had a huge impact on parents through the generations, hoping to gain some insight into the future that beholds their precious child. At first glance, the poem looks formal. It might be a 20th-century Elizabethan song, with verses cut to a regular length. Only they’re not: the first verse has seven lines, the second eight, the third nine – two odd numbers bookending an even one. It’s as if even at the most basic level of form, there’d been a decision both to reflect stasis – the immutable “lunar beauty”– and the movement of time. In the crucial line in verse two, “time is inches”, and one might add that time is also the pulse of the poem, the dimeter rhythm carrying the thought from line to line, the sonic pattern of assertions and echoes. For Hannah Stone’s narrator, the second sleep is a haunt of deeper nightmare, and the dream she recounts evokes an involuntary dash at an uncontrollable and fatal pace. The “bruised psyche” is strapped on a hurdle, being dragged along by galloping horses driven by the dead. One of the definitions of “hurdle”, and the most relevant to this nightmare, is “a frame or sled formerly used in England for dragging traitors to execution”.Next, you can read the traditional nursery rhyme, which was published for the first time in “Traditions of Devonshire”* by A.E. Bray in 1838. Monday’s Child Poem: The sonnet begins with an occupation by, rather than of, a place. That place is the sky: it feels so close it tells the speaker “what it is to have the stars/sown through the utility of the body”. The body is like a field, the word “sown” suggests, which has been seeded with stars. Rich harvest is implied, but the simply stated cancellations of the second verse register a lonelier mood. The tent, “the chapel of the canvas” provides a necessary refuge, its artificial sky sealing the speaker into a place of more internal focus. Beehive chapels come to mind. Revelation occurs in the perception of “how deeply I was momentary”. To be “momentary” might assume time to be threatening, but to be momentary “deeply” suggests an analogy with music, and how a single note, of one beat or less, can still be a chord, an embedding of vertical harmonies. Although the musical analogy isn’t made directly, the poem now seems to slip easily into the auditory world, central to which is listening to the minutest sounds, and “a new aptitude for silence”.

A more detailed glossary can be found here, as well as the texts of The Twa Corbies and The Three Ravens. The shared absence the poem records is not necessarily the result of death. Perhaps a child has left home? That form of bereavement, popularly tagged “empty nest syndrome”, might have been quietly set up in the earlier reference to the birds no longer singing, no longer coming to the window sill to be fed. In its very reticence to describe the nature of the loss, the poem shows us it was a radical one. Wisely, the last verse doesn’t seek or foresee “closure”, but observes simply that after more “such days”, the weather will change, perspective will be returned. And so the scene is almost set for words to flow again. Second Sleep is an evocative phrase: it could connote death, the post-death sleep some religions believe occurs before resurrection, or an uncanny, perhaps magical, daylight doze. Hannah’s explanation chimed with my own experience: I often “sleep off” my first tiredness for a couple of hours, then feel fresh enough to start a mini-day. The second sleep brings the most interesting dreams. For me, they often dramatise a long-term fear, and have a mysteriously shadowy public setting – railway station, airport, concert hall, classroom. I have some control of these spaces, being simultaneously lost and in a determined kind of hurry. Escalators, corridors and occasionally a gigantic computer screen (aaaaaargh) may feature. Again, Gwilym avoids the self-centred lyric rhetoric of an Elizabethan sonneteer or Romantic love poet. Gwilym’s voice always sound natural, even at its most elevated. Here, the diction is flatter, plainer. Even temporary absence is a state of dull, starless loss.Over the years we’ve had poetry in schools, poetry in burger vans, poetry on the news, poetry on the side of buildings, poetry strapped to the legs of carrier pigeons, and much much more. We are told few details about the “story” at the heart of the poem. The second verse comes the nearest to disclosure, and does so with a palpable flinch: “Just now, I glimpsed her face / as it was, in your glance, / but dared not look again.” These are brilliantly suggestive lines. We learn from the next verse that, whoever has so painfully vanished, she had the energy to make plentiful “draughts”. National Poetry Day is a UK-wide celebration of poetry, taking place on 5th October 2023, and our theme is Refuge. Perhaps, though, it’s also implied that, in a different age and setting, on the ground where the speaker once stood, other women will provide the “force”. They will determinedly make their own future, as the speaker has had to, overcoming the limits imposed by failed structures – social and economic. Finally, I see a glimmer of optimism. The future simply can’t be taken away from a word like “future” – and its use now helps the poem to repair the damage it has so coolly and cleverly symbolised. A child born on a Saturday is thought to be hard-working, responsible, and particularly dedicated to and passionate about their work. In this interpretation, Saturday’s child has an enviable fate, making lasting contributions to society and the world.