Calendar

• Calendar is a poem about the seasons of the natural world yet uses human concepts to quantify it.
• Spring: "swallows crochet and minim the telephone wires" "sing volts"

  Musical quality - joyous and energetic season. Personification of birds. "telephone wires" links to Swallows.
• Summer represents fullness, climax of the year.
• "nervous like a lover's first time"

  Loss of virginity - sexual imagery "bees go down"
• "lips of foxgloves"


  Ominously poisonous as well as medicinal, could foreshadow images of medicine and illness.
• Autumn "a spider has danced" "a fingerprint"


  Lyrical and beautiful - rare appreciation of spiders. Emphasis on individuality and uniqueness.
• The Winter stanza creates a shift in mood, more negative and sinister imagery. Connotations of stillness and hibernation.
• "Nests clot in the veins"

  Medical imagery - blood clots kill people.
• "the rooks are a passing infection"


  Rooks associated with bad fortune and suffering. "Passing" temporary creates hope. Fleeting nature of time and seasons.