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

Today's poem is by an English romantic poet and novelist named Charlotte Turner Smith.

She lived from 1749 to 1806. And I discovered this poem that I'd never read before in a book that I've mentioned before,

Robert Haas is a little book on Form and Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry.

There's a poem in here called Written in October. It's from 1797. And it is a, like I said,

it's one that I had never read before. I've read a few things of Charlotte Smith's

before, and I'll say a few words about who she was when I'm making my comments on this

particular poem. But it being October, you know, it seemed like the right time to read a poem

called written in October. I was kind of leaning towards not doing another autumn poem,

just because I don't, you know, I want to just do seasonally themed poems,

but I liked this one enough to share it with you, and I think that her story is worth sharing as

well. So this is Charlotte Smith's written in October 1797.

The blasts of autumn as they scatter round the faded foliage of another year,

and muttering many a sad and solemn sound drive the pale fragments or the stubble sear,

are well attuned to my dejected mood.

Ah, better far than airs that breathe of spring, while the high rooks, that hoarsely clamoring,

seek in black phalanx the half-leafless wood. I rather hear than that enraptured lay harmonious

of love and pleasure-borne, which from the golden furs or flowering thorn awakes the shepherd in the

eyes of May.

Nature delights me most when most she mourns, for never more in me the spring of hope returns.

So I wanted to share a paragraph that Richard, Robert Hass rather, he shares three sonnets by Charlotte Smith in his chapter called Reading the Sonnet.

And then he has this paragraph about her.

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