Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Thursday, March 18th. Today I'm going to read for you a poem by William Wordsworth, one of the founders of English Romanticism, one of its most central figures, and one of the most important and beloved poets in the English language. Wordsworth lived from 1770 to 1850, nice round numbers there.

He was born in Cumberland in the Lake District of England, which is an area closely associated

with him to this day. Many poetry lovers go there in a sort of poetry pilgrimage to see where Wordsworth wrote.

And one of the reasons for this is because Place is such an important feature in Wordsworth poetry.

He writes a lot about nature and the connection between the human soul and the natural world.

And of course, as one of the founders of English Romanticism, he wrote

in the colloquial language, he wanted to write his poetry in the language of common man and not

be intellectualized. I bet it would be ashamed to him to know that his poetry is mostly read in

classrooms these days because he was such an advocate for poetry as being the language

of ordinary life. Other features of romantic poetry are a great value of sentiment in the inner

life and a sense of poetry being a proclamation of revelation and the poet of being some kind of, I guess, profit of special

knowledge. It was Shelley who said, another romantic poet who wrote that poets are the unacknowledged

legislators of the world. So romantic poetry really captures that idea of the human soul

being drawn out by the beauty and the grandeur of the natural world. And as poets being

prophets, so to speak, of this special revelation and understanding within the poetic world.

And today I'm going to read for you a pretty simple poem

fitting for this time of year. The poem is called Written in March, and it has a subtitle here,

while resting on the bridge at the foot of Brothers Water. This is how it goes.

The cock is crowing, the stream is flowing. The small birds twitter.

The lake doth glitter. The green field sleeps in the sun. The oldest and youngest are at work with the strongest. The cattle are grazing. Their heads never raising. There are 40 feeding like one.

Like an army defeated, the snow hath retreated, and now doth fare ill at the top of the bare hill.

The ploughboy is whooping, anon, anon. There's joy in the mountains, there's life in the

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