Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Curd.

Today's poem is by an English poet named Alice Maynell. She lived from 1847 to 1922. She was a writer and a critic and also a suffragist, though now she is primarily remembered as a poet.

Many people, it seems like, don't remember her that well. I don't know that she was

widely known, although her work, I read on Wikipedia, actually, that her work was praised

widely or warmly, rather by Ruskin,

and that he particularly was fond of a sonnet or two that she wrote.

From what I can tell, it seems like her life and her reputation during her life

was had primarily to her work as a suffragist and as an editor

for a number of journals and magazines and newspapers and things like that.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is called the rainy summer.

And it goes like this.

There's much afoot in heaven and earth this year.

The winds hunt up the sun, hunt up the moon, trouble the dubious dawn, hasten the drear height of a threatening noon.

No breath of boughs, no breath of leaves of fronds may linger or grow warm. The trees are loud.

The forest rooted, cosses in her bonds bonds and strains against the cloud.

No sense may pause within the garden fold.

The rifled flowers are cold as ocean shells.

Bees humming in the storm carry their cold wild honey to cold cells.

I love this poem for the way that it is so sensory, I suppose,

but not just in the sense that it appeals to what we might see or even though we might smell. But there's this real attention to sound to what we hear.

I was just speaking to a poet named Morris Manning, who we've heard from in this podcast before,

and he was telling about how for him it's so important to pay attention to sound,

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