So, do you think your child’s personality could be tied to the day of the week they were born? Or, is it all a bunch of rubbish? There’s an ominously placed line-break between the third and fourth lines of the second verse: “tolled” takes the emphasis, and is repeated in the first line of verse three. The bell seems solidly installed “between the cold and dark”. But something changes. The narrator comments on the quality of the bird’s song (“a clear true voice he had”) and perhaps it’s envy that prompts the bell’s response. We’re not told how its pitch or pace are altered – only that the narrator “knew it” (the bell) “had gone mad”. Children born on a Tuesday are typically associated with good manners, grace, refinement and elegance.They are considered courteous and full of good will. Many organisations over the years have celebrated with us. We've had social media take-overs; lunchtime readings; poem-a-thons and much more. Think about how you could bring poetry into your workplace this National Poetry Day. Let us know how you get on. To cut to the chase, who wins the argument? Although Slog has the last word in the form of a punchy aphorism, “Windows don’t happen”, he must know, as a poet, that they sometimes do, or at least appear to. Sunlight, both poets would concede, is the necessity: the dilemma concerns the best way to invite it in.

Upper Kentmere, an area once prey to the Scottish raiders (reivers), belongs now the Lake District National Park. There are areas in the British Isles that have been turned into museums of the ideal: they exist for tourists and the associated hospitality industries. Beautiful and comfortable, they stimulate false images of nationhood, they are part of an identity through consumption. There’s a human narrator, but s/he bows out after three lines. Of the two crows, one has a single, though essential, line: “Where sall we gang and dine today?” The other, having reconnoitred the scene already and worked out the feeding strategy, replies in vivid, uncompromising detail. Anthropomorphism of this kind can be justified on the grounds that the invented bird-talk reflects real, observable bird behaviour regarding food, territory and judicious co-operation. In the last line of the translation, the Old English compound “wordhoard” may suggest that lesser nations, too, will be redeemed, as poems, or perhaps one poem, by the “laureate of heaven”. The tadpoles in Pool are perhaps the punctuation marks vital to opening the verbal treasury. Send a poem to a friend or loved one. Or use #NationalPoetryDay to share any poems more widely. Find an event near you Wednesday Addams from the Addams Family is a modern example of this archetype, and some children’s charities are inspired by this interpretation of “Wednesday’s Child”.A child born on a Saturday is thought to be hard-working, responsible, and particularly dedicated to and passionate about their work. In this interpretation, Saturday’s child has an enviable fate, making lasting contributions to society and the world. There is a popular contemporary Christian song by Curtis Chapman called “Tuesday’s Child”. In this song, he interprets the meaning of Tuesday’s Child’s as having a strong faith in God.

Again, Gwilym avoids the self-centred lyric rhetoric of an Elizabethan sonneteer or Romantic love poet. Gwilym’s voice always sound natural, even at its most elevated. Here, the diction is flatter, plainer. Even temporary absence is a state of dull, starless loss. National Poetry Day celebrations have got bigger and bigger each year, with more and more people joining in. In another of Bhatt’s poems, The Swan Princess Speaks, the narrator declares “I wanted to be everything: / a girl and a swan. I wanted to be free / to be a bird at home in any land, / at home on water and in the air.” Although the tone and style of Der Kleiber: Eurasian Nuthatch are quite different from the impassioned, wounded mythologising of The Swan Princess Speaks, perhaps the simple bird-as-itself also represents versatility and freedom, being the natural inhabitant of two elements, the air and the earth-rooted trees. Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d buildThat the birds’ hunger has been aroused is suggested by their “making a moan” – they’re not simply making a noise, but are disturbed and excited. When the alpha crow sets out the plan, the other bird, notably, doesn’t argue. The two are a couple, with a nest to furnish. If the male bird is lording it over the hen, the hen doesn’t complain. Importantly, many of the Watershed poems engage with the human psychology that’s so frequently, and so foolishly, ignored at the present tumultuous “watershed” moment. Padel uncovers the mirror, reveals the universality of climate denial. She allows us a small smile towards our inner Mrs Noah, who tries operatically to resist boarding the Ark, and has to be “dragged up the gangplank / waving a goblet / shouting I will stay with my gossips.” (Rehearsing Noye’s Fludde). On the other hand, there’s the “blast / of climate terror,” the sudden, equally incapacitating sensation “as if a pub in that crystal cave at the end of the world / held a darts match for the blind / and the boards were our bodies … our hearts.” (Lady of the Lake). Few of the poems are as painful as that image, but they all dramatise the loss we face. The seventh poem changes key, then opens out from a “vast dark history” to “the local text, / for whomsoever is lost”. The date in line three probably denotes the year when Guillaume Dufay (c 1397-1474) composed the Lamentatio sanctae matris ecclesiae Constantinopolitae, a four-part motet that is a “great lamentation stretched across the western landmass / for the fall of Constantinople.” Collective loss is combed into the thin traces of individual people individually cared about, but no one is found: “whomsoever” remains doubly displaced, “hidden in what’s left of the world / where would that be now?” Dufay’s lamentation and the “version / still sung in Greek villages” both seem unequal to what they mourn, insufficient in human “proof”. Stone’s prompt, the editorial call-out for poems on “seconds”, coincided with her interest in a concept that apparently preceded the introduction of street lighting. She explains: “I was aware from a poem I wrote about Pepys that in the 18th century it was common for people to conduct all sorts of business, in and out of the bedroom, in the intervals between sleeps. As an accomplished insomniac, I have plenty of experience of night-time lucidity, and I have observed that the majority of my most vivid dreams happen in the pre-dawn slice of somnolence. I wrote this poem in the aftermath of my mother dying, just after Christmas 2021, which coincided with me getting Covid, which is still with me in its postviral state, and produces a lot of very weird mental processes and sleep issues, among other things.”

Now other metaphorical shapes appear. The sun is “God’s ball”: it also has a mysterious, special “fringe”. The metaphors are given more space and separation in the original, but there’s something to be said for the clustering in the shortened version. The sun after all is no simple object. No one can hold it steady. It can change shape radically as the eye perceives it at different times of day and through various kinds of weather. Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran Children born on a Thursday have “far to go”. This is perhaps the line most open to interpretation in the poem. Ronald Stuart Thomas was born in Cardiff in 1913. When he was five, his father, who had served as an officer in the merchant navy, began working for the Irish ferry service and moved the family to Holyhead, described later by Thomas as “a horrible little town with a glorious expanse of cliff and coastal scenery”. Thomas went on to study classics at the University College of North Wales (now Bangor University). Ordained as a minister of the Church of Wales, he subsequently left north for mid-Wales and elsewhere, but still seems to have felt an outsider; his ancestors were mostly English speakers from the south of the country and English was his mother tongue. Although he learned Welsh as a young man, and chose it as the medium for his autobiographical writings, it wasn’t the language of his poetry.The sonnet begins with an occupation by, rather than of, a place. That place is the sky: it feels so close it tells the speaker “what it is to have the stars/sown through the utility of the body”. The body is like a field, the word “sown” suggests, which has been seeded with stars. Rich harvest is implied, but the simply stated cancellations of the second verse register a lonelier mood. The tent, “the chapel of the canvas” provides a necessary refuge, its artificial sky sealing the speaker into a place of more internal focus. Beehive chapels come to mind. Revelation occurs in the perception of “how deeply I was momentary”. To be “momentary” might assume time to be threatening, but to be momentary “deeply” suggests an analogy with music, and how a single note, of one beat or less, can still be a chord, an embedding of vertical harmonies. Although the musical analogy isn’t made directly, the poem now seems to slip easily into the auditory world, central to which is listening to the minutest sounds, and “a new aptitude for silence”. Literary allusion takes on a typographical turn when the tadpoles in the water’s “sandy shallows” are seen as “hundreds / and hundreds of fat commas swept / from the compositor’s workbench …” The metaphor may connect the double life of the amphibian with the coexistence of type and text, print and language. It may also allude to one of the translations in Rowan Williams’s collection, In the Days of Caesar by Waldo Williams. The latter is a beautiful poem, intensely of and for Wales and the Welsh people, but suggesting a transformation that seems boundless. This is the last stanza: Second Sleep is an evocative phrase: it could connote death, the post-death sleep some religions believe occurs before resurrection, or an uncanny, perhaps magical, daylight doze. Hannah’s explanation chimed with my own experience: I often “sleep off” my first tiredness for a couple of hours, then feel fresh enough to start a mini-day. The second sleep brings the most interesting dreams. For me, they often dramatise a long-term fear, and have a mysteriously shadowy public setting – railway station, airport, concert hall, classroom. I have some control of these spaces, being simultaneously lost and in a determined kind of hurry. Escalators, corridors and occasionally a gigantic computer screen (aaaaaargh) may feature.