Flowers For Socrates

Today is Umbrella Day, because on February 10, 1899, John Warren filed a patent for an improved folding umbrella.

Of course, in searching for poems about umbrellas, I found a huge amount of dreadful poetry, but very few poems, good or bad, with the umbrella as its central theme. It seems to be more of a prose object, as I found far more words written in prose about umbrellas than in poetry:

I raised the hood of my cape and opened my umbrella. Headmistress had given it to me for my twenty-first birthday, knowing how fond I was of the purple foxglove that bloomed in the park. When open, the underside revealed in each of the panels a spray of painted stems, lush with lavender bells. “No matter how bad the weather, you will always be able to look up and see something that will cheer you,” she had said, knowing that my quiet moods often concealed an orphan’s melancholy.”
― Karen Essex, Dracula in Love

To see her small and larger than life. she is both fragile and determined,
like a paper umbrella in the rain. – Jessica de la Davies

Going around under an umbrella interferes with one’s looking up at the sky.  – Jerzy Kosinski

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For more literary brollies, and one umbrella in a poem, click:

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