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

Today's poem is by Louis McNeice, a British poet who lived from 1907 to 1963. He was from

Northern Ireland and was actually a member of a group of poets that included W.H.

Auden, Steven Spender, and Cecil Day Lewis.

And the poem that I'm going to read today is called To Posterity.

This was sent over by a friend and is a great poem, I think, for the springtime.

It goes like this.

When books have all seized up, like the books in graveyards, and reading and even speaking have been

replaced by other less difficult media, we wonder if you will find in flowers and fruit the

same color and taste they held for us for whom they were framed in words.

And will your grass be green, your sky be blue, or will your birds be always wingless birds?

That's the whole thing. It's a short poem. That is only seven lines long.

If McNeese died in 1963, then this poem couldn't have been written after that, obviously.

Which means that even then, 56 years ago, people were concerned about the fading away of books,

but the onset of even less media. Certainly, TV and radio and such things were rapidly

growing in popularity then. And certainly in these comments, I could focus on this being a poem about

the warning of those sorts of media. But what I'm most fascinated by in this short little poem

is the way that it contemplates the nature of language.

So he says, we wonder, first of all, who is the we, I wonder, but we wonder if you will find in

flowers and fruit the same color and taste they held for us for whom they were framed in words.

Will your grass be green, your sky blue?

Green and blue certainly being names of things that we experience. And so as other media come on,

...