Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern. Today is Tuesday, May 26th, 2020. I hope that everyone had a really nice long weekend, a nice Memorial Day. I hope you got to spend it with some good weather, some good food, some good people, hopefully, and that may even some good literature, if possible. Of course, Memorial Day is,

for many of us, the signal that summer is here. It's the beginning of summer vacations for a lot of

people, although I know school schedules have been thrown up in the air this year. But at any rate,

Memorial Day is kind of the signal of the changing of the seasons.

Warm weather will be here soon if it hasn't arrived where you live.

And with summer comes Gardens.

And I receive an email newsletter from a writer named Alan Jacobs.

It's called Snakes and Ladders.

And it's a great newsletter sent out months a week or so.

And in it, he posted the poem that I'm going to read to you today.

And it inspired me to do poems this week, so four days this week.

And all of these poems will be inspired by the idea of gardens, garden-themed poems, if you will.

And so this first one is one of the most famous garden poems of all time, and it's called The Garden.

It's by Andrew Marvell.

Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet who lived from 1621 to 1678.

He was also a politician.

He was in the House of Commons and was also a satirist.

And he was a friend of John Milton.

So he's a very important figure from the era.

And this is one of the most famous poems of the era.

It's a little bit long, so I probably won't read it twice and may not even offer many comments.

I just want to share it with you to kick off Garden Week here on the Daily Poem.

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