WORLD POETRY DAY
Every 21st of March the World Poetry Day celebrates one of humanity’s most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity.
Practiced throughout history – in every culture and on every continent – poetry speaks to our common humanity and our shared values, transforming the simplest of poems into a powerful catalyst for dialogue and peace.
UNESCO first adopted 21 March as World Poetry Day during its 30th General Conference in Paris 1999, with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard. World Poetry Day is the occasion to honour poets, revive oral traditions of poetry recitals, promote the reading, writing and teaching of poetry, foster the convergence between poetry and other arts such as theatre, dance, music and painting, and raise the visibility of poetry in the media.
Poetry can also be therapeutic for both its writers and its readers. It can give us advice about how to live teach us important lessons about the past. Through the skilful use of language, metaphor and symbolism, poetry expresses human feelings in a way that day to day conversations doesn't.
Today our Head Boy, Zachary Valentine, who is a great lover of poetry, had accepted our petition of reading one of his favourite poems, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” from Williams Wordsworth, who reads like that:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Check out the video to hear him reading it out loud in our lovely gardens.