A Poem A Day

“Hope is the thing with feathers. That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all”- Emily Dickinson.

That was the opening line from the poem “Hope” by American poet Emily Dickinson, who has been a favourite of mine since I studied her works in secondary school and wrote on her for my Leaving Cert English exam. I bought an attractive book of her collected poems on a whim about a year ago, however it was 3 months ago on 23/12/19 that I sat down and reread the above poem. I then made a note of it and the date on a sheet of paper and thus began a little hobby of mine that I have been working on every day since then. Essentially I read 1 poem every day, record the date, title and writer and if I particularly enjoyed the piece I will put an asterisk beside it so that I may return to it at a later stage.

I started this simply because I wanted to encourage myself to read more poetry. It was easily the section of my secondary school English course I put the most effort into, in fact I am pretty sure I still have the large mind maps I made for each poet somewhere in my “archives”. This earned me the result that has lead to me essentially attempting to make a career out of the subject. I continued my love affair with verse during my university years but ultimately it was the novel that I ended up focusing on as my specialty and have spent the past 2 years studying, so poetry has been left to the side until now. Since starting I have bought a few more collections (some of them very pretty looking if we are judging a book by its cover) and have read poems from old favourites such as Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath and W.B. Yeats and Romantic poets I studied at university; Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and William Blake. More recently I have also connected this hobby to my area of research interest, American Literature by reading the works of more American poets such as Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg.

It is my intention to continue this little project until the year anniversary at least (23/12/20). Fortunately there are plenty of great poems and poets to keep me going until then and possibly after. I have never been able to write poetry but returning to reading it more regularly in my post-college life has been fulfilling so far and has given me an even greater appreciation of the art.