All in green went my love riding

I have a recording of Joan Baez singing this one. I have loved the poem itself since sometime in the 60s.

Aye, edgar, so have I. Joan Baez has a fine voice for such a piece, a lilting and sometimes plaintive voice.

Another poem I like very much, "The Great Silkie of Sule Skerrie", was likewise put to music, and Baez sang it in the 60's, as did Judy Collins and others. I find the idea of silkies rather entrancing.

When I first ran across the poem, I was curious to know where lies Sule Skerrie. I found it is but a tiny speck, a rock I suppose, far to the north of Scotland. Ever since, I have had a pipedream of going there someday. But not today; I'm sufficiently cold right here in mid-America. Today, I'd rather be a deerhunter in a southern greenwood, stalking a buck with my 35mm Canon. God only knows what I'll prefer to be tomorrow.

Here's the silkie poem.

http://www.bartleby.com/243/31.html

This is my favorite e e cummings:

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer's lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seam
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
--when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of thing
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
--whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it's they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn't: blow death to was)
--all nothing's only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live.

Wow!