I shared a sonnet by the Irish poet Thomas Caulfield Irwin a little while ago; he is largely forgotten, but I have been reading his sonnets recently. It’s far from being spring, it’s miserable and dampish, and rainy with a chilly wind, and altogether a disagreeable sort of a winter, depressing. I want sharp night frosts under clear starlit skies, I want bright mornings and fresh not bitter winds… so as the warm weather has brought the spring flowers out early, here is another of Irwin’s sonnets looking forward to a better season.
He was born in 1823 and died in 1892, and his poetry has been described by Gregory A. Schirmer, in ‘Out of What Began: a History of Irish Poetry in English’, as lush and descriptive, focussing on landscapes with ‘few if any traces of violence, oppression, poverty and famine that transformed the Irish countryside in the nineteenth century.‘
Lush and descriptive… here is Irwin’s sonnet:
Spring
Blow, summer wind, from yonder ocean blow
Along the wild sea banks and grasses drear,
And loamy shores, where mosses brown and sere
And pale pinks in the sandy ridges grow;
Float round yon promontory in the brine,
Whose stretching arm in deepest azure lies,
Where quiet browse the heavy-uddered kine
By rock and shining shallow, grey and clear;
And fill, this listless hour, the dreamy ear
With thy scarce toned and wordless harmonies:
For here with Nature will I rest, and please
My heart with sweetest fancies all the noon,
Until the limpid crescent of the moon
Lights the blue east above the evening trees.
Lois Elsden 