When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

song from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

Hello, poets! Dora here to welcome you to the first poetics of March. As I write this, I can hear the driving rain against the window panes announcing that winter’s frost will be seeing its last days and spring is on its way. Soon this northern half of the earth will be young and green once more, bursting with new life. It lifts our hearts, reminds us of days when time moved much more slowly and we didn’t, careening around every corner, days when we were so young.

In recounting the seven ages of man in his pastoral comedy As You Like It, Shakespeare said of the first three:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow.

By virtue of our very youth, we were also very green, were we not? Ready to rush in where angels fear to tread because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and, boy, did we think we knew it all?!

Mark Twain is often quoted as saying: “When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn’t want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.”

The creator of Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne wrote the following poem in the voice of a child who had just turned six:

When I was One,
I had just begun.
When I was Two,
I was nearly new.
When I was Three
I was hardly me.
When I was Four,
I was not much more.
When I was Five,
I was just alive.
But now I am Six,
I’m as clever as clever,
So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.

— “Now We Are Six”

Looking back on his childhood, Dylan Thomas concludes “Fern Hill” by recalling how oblivious he was to time’s passage, taking his idylls for granted.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

–excerpt from “Fern Hill”; listen to Richard Burton read the whole poem here.

There were lessons we’ve learned now that we wish we had known then, lessons of love as well as life. A. E. Housman writes:

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

— “When I Was One and Twenty”

In “Being Young and Green,” Edna St. Vincent Millay picks up on that theme of naïveté in love:

Being Young and Green, I said in love’s despite:
Never in the world will I to living wight
Give over, air my mind
To anyone,
Hang out its ancient secrets in the strong wind
To be shredded and faded—

Oh, me, invaded
And sacked by the wind and the sun!

I’d like us for Poetics this week to write a poem on being “young and green” from whatever persona or viewpoint you choose to adopt, including Milne’s, which takes on the knowing mindset of a six-year-old; Housman’s or Millay’s of looking back at our younger selves with irony, or in Twain’s case, with amusement; or Thomas’ fond reminiscing at a seemingly timeless childhood paradise regained in memory. However you choose to approach it, let’s be “young and green” just for today.

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