For April · 1poems & readings
Easter Poems
Spring's great morning: poems of light returning, gardens waking, and hope rolled away from its tomb — for services, baskets, and the family table.
Easter gave English poetry one of its most ingenious artifacts: George Herbert's 'Easter Wings' (1633), printed in the shape of two pairs of wings that narrow as the soul falters and widen as it rises — resurrection performed by typography. The devotional tradition runs deep, but Easter's poems have always had a second congregation: anyone watching a garden come back from the dead in April.
That double audience is the practical point. For church services, Herbert and the hymn-poems carry the theology; for the family table and the children's baskets, a short rhyme about eggs, blossom, and beginning again does the job. Either way, the subject is the same and inexhaustible: the stone moved, the cold ended, everything green again.
Common questions
What is a good Easter poem?
For services, George Herbert's 'Easter Wings' — a poem literally shaped like its subject; for children's baskets, a short rhyme about eggs and spring keeps things light.
What do you write in an Easter card?
A line of spring — blossom, light, beginning again — plus your wish for their season. Religious or secular, Easter cards want renewal in them.