As we continue with remote learning once again, it seemed only right to revive the cherished FHS lockdown tradition: Poem of the Day! Today’s poem has been chosen and introduced by Mr Macdonald-Brown.

“As in the summer, the English department will be serving up a daily poem to enrich, enlighten, cheer or console, and generally make sense of life. So, to kick off Season 2 of Poem of the Day, here’s a gorgeous and suitably wintry one: Snow by the 20^th century Northern Irish poet, Louis MacNeice.  

It’s a poem of things vividly observed within a cosy room at a particular moment: snow suddenly ‘spawned’ against a windowpane; pink roses; a tangerine; a fire. These things combine, like chemicals, to inspire in MacNeice a series of awesome realisations – epiphanies! – about the world’s abundance and variety: there’s just so much ‘more of it than we think’. I love how the poet’s mind swirls this way and that, between his room and ‘world’, between the physical and the abstract, between the sensory and the philosophical, the singular ‘I’ and the universal ‘we’. (In the third stanza, ‘I’ and ‘we’ seem to resolve into ‘one’.)  

Snow reminds us that you don’t need to climb mountains or even go outside to be astonished by the world. Just lend your ‘tongue…eyes…ears…palm of [your] hands’ to what’s in front of you. Eating a tangerine is amazing if you give it your full attention. So is this poem. Attend; appreciate!”