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I interviewed my sister who chose Chocolate Cake by Michael Rosen but as Nathaniel has already included this as his favourite poem I decided to interview our form tutor Ms Moore. You can read and listen to Chocolate Cake on Nathaniel’s page. Ms Moore likes poetry a lot! Almost every day she has a different favourite poem to suit her mood. On the day I interviewed her ‘Isabel or the Pot of Basil’ by John Keats was her favourite because it is melodramatic, visual and visceral (the story includes a severed head). The poem is very long so here is a link to it. ‘The Trees’ by Philip Larkin is another of her all time favourites, and that is the poem I’ve included here. She particularly likes the way the poem ends, “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.”
The Trees
Philip Larkin
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.