January Weather

                                                                               Primroses

 

Dear reader,

I am putting up 'January Weather' again this week.  It is one of my favourite poems and I don't think Christmas week was a good place for it.  Everyone was busy and my blog suffered!! Two weeks ago I had 2,000 hits on the blog and last week 3. Only 3.  I can never tell how the blog  is going to work, or whether you readers like the things I write about or not.  Obviously some pieces you like better than others but I have no way of telling which these are going to be.

I was telling my daughter Jessica who has just started to teach dance as a free lance, that constancy is the answer. And she must believe in herself and what she is offering. As many of you know I have been writing this blog now for eight years and I just have to believe in myself and be reliable in putting it out every week.  I left school when I was 15 years old with next to no qualifications.  But over the years I have taught myself, read many books on diverse subjects and happily went to the Open University for four years. 

Try reading 'January Weather' again and I hope you enjoy it, this time, as much as I did writing it.

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From Samuel Pepys   January 16th   1660 in Westminster

'I stayed up till the bell man came by with his bell just under my window as I was writing of this very line, and cried, 'Past one of the clock, and a cold , frosty , windy morning.'

 

From Katherine Mansfield   January 20th   1915 in Buckinghamshire

'A man outside is breaking stones.  The day is utterly quiet. Sometimes a leaf rustles and a strange puff of wind passes the window.   The old man chops, chops, as though it were a heart beating out there.'

 

From Richard Hayes  January 21st   1762 in Kent

'As mild a day as though May. N.B. I saw a spotted butterfly - brown in colour.'

      

January Weather

 

 

 

We know from recorded history,

that in St. Merryn

a hundred years ago,

there blew great winds

and the sea was smoking white.

 

We know it was warm in Kent,

where the thrushes thought spring

had come, and piped away.

And primroses were a yellow carpet

in North Norfolk,

or so the parson wrote.

 

We know of cutting winds in Hampshire,

of icicles and frost, and

in Skiddaw on a mild day,

a brown spotted butterfly was seen.

We know that hungry church

mice ate bible markers, 

hungry people died of cold.

 

And we know that this dark winter month

had days of snow, that wild clouds

gathered in the sky unleashing icy rain,

churning up the plough.

 

And yet, again, we also know

the sun shone in that distant year,

it was warm enough to push through

early snowdrops, and Holy Thorn.

Light was glimpsed, here and there,

all life struggled for its moments.

 

 

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With very best wishes, Patricia