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

I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, May 27, 2020.

It's Garden Week. It's Garden Theme Week here on The Daily Poem, with the passing of Memorial Day on Monday.

Summer is ostensibly here.

So this week I wanted to read four poems that have that theme of gardening.

So yesterday I read Andrew Marvell's The Garden. And today it's a poem by W. H. Auden.

Auden lived from 1907 to 1973. He was a British American poet, I suppose, and is quite famous,

of course, for poems like The Shield of Achilles and September 1, 1939,

Funeral Blues, a number of other poems. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his

1947 poem, The Age of Exiety, which was a long poem. And he also was a professor of poetry

at Oxford, among other positions.

You've heard from him before on this podcast, and the poem that I'm going to read today is called

Their Lonely Bettors.

I want to shout out Alan Jacobs again on his Monday morning email that he sends out every now

and then he mentioned this poem and the Andrew Marvell poem

has great poems for this time of the year. And so I wanted to remind you that you can go check

his newsletter out. It is called Snakes and Ladders. If you Google Alan Jacob's snakes and ladders,

you'll come across his website where you can find that. There's lots of great content in there

about culture and the news even and music and painting and gardening and things like that so it's a great

little uh great little newsletter to get to get in your inbox every couple weeks highly

recommended so i wanted to thank him for reminding me of this poem and uh make sure that

shutting him out a little bit.

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