Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Phyllis McGinley, an American poet and an author of children's books

who lived from 1905 to 1978.

She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961.

You have heard her maybe five or six times over the course of the

last 15 or 16 months here on the podcast, which seems about the right ratio. She is worth

turning to every now and then. She is known for kind of a light verse and very humorous, satiric

in her in her poetry, lots of satirizing of suburban life. And this poem called November, which I'm reading on November 1st,

is no different as far as those themes go.

This is how it goes.

Away with the vanity of man.

Now comes to visit here the maiden aunt, the Puritan, the spinster of the year.

She likes a world that's furnished plain, a sky that's clean and bare,

and garments eminently sane for her consistent wear.

Let others deck them as they please in frill and furbelow. She scorns alike the fripperies of flowers and of snow. Her very speeches shrewd and

slight, with innuendos done, and all of her as hard, thin light or shadow sharp as sun.

Indifferent to the drifting leaf, and innocent of guile, she scarcely knows there dwells a brief

enchantment in her smile.

So love her with a sparing love.

That is her private fashion, who fears the August ardor of a demonstrated passion.

He'd love her somewhat. It is meat. And for our own defense, after October, defines sweet,

...