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The Daily Poem

Phyllis McGinley's "November"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6729 Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2019

⏱️ 6 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today's poem is Phyllis McGinley's "November."


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Transcript

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0:00.0

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

0:07.4

I'm David Kern.

0:08.6

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

0:14.4

who lived from 1905 to 1978.

0:17.1

She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1961.

0:19.4

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

0:22.1

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

0:27.4

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

0:33.3

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

0:41.3

is no different as far as those themes go.

0:44.4

This is how it goes.

0:47.5

Away with the vanity of man.

0:50.3

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

0:59.4

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

1:06.0

and garments eminently sane for her consistent wear.

1:14.0

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

1:22.2

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

1:30.8

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

1:36.1

enchantment in her smile.

1:38.9

So love her with a sparing love.

1:41.8

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

1:48.8

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

...

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