Or should I say, let me take you on an outing with my secret love.
“Who?” you ask.
“Poetry,” I whisper.
Those of you who’ve read Shadows Fall have probably guessed that I’m a huge fan of William Wordsworth and Emily Brontë. I’m a poetry fan, all the way around. I love dead poets, old poets, young poets, and poets yet to be born. While writing that novel, I feared that I’d bore all the non-poetry fans with my unrelenting references to poems. I held back as best I could. For instance, I wanted to quote the entire body of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” and the entire portion I was then familiar with of Emily Brontë’s “The Prisoner.” Which reminds me, until recently I was only aware of five stanzas of that Brontë poem, beginning with:
“He comes with Western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars:”
and ending with:
“When the pulse begins to throb—the brain to think again—
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.”
I’m not sure why, in my prior ignorance, I only read those five, when there are in fact many more. I’ll blame it on the printings I read, which must’ve been abridged. Those five stanzas comprise a complete poem in themselves, and they’re the ones I’m most at home with, so I hope the poet will forgive me taking my time to unearth and integrate the rest.
I’d quote all my favorite Wordsworth passages here, but that would take a book-length post, so I’ll leave it at my all-time favorite four lines:
“Hast thou seen with flash incessant
Bubbles gliding under ice,
Bodied forth and evanescent,
No one knows by what device?”
I don’t have my character Beth Gray’s gift of flawless memory, but I used to work at memorizing favorites, like a single stanza of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” and as a teenager I copied into a journal numerous Emily Dickenson and Sara Teasdale poems. I jotted down poetic song lyrics, too. John Denver’s “The Wings That Fly Us Home” and Don McClean’s “Winterwood” come to mind, as well as Cat Stevens’ “Oh Very Young.” Song lyrics tend to go best with the music they were intended for, but the combination is a kind of poetry, with the power to touch our depths or carry us away.
One happy discovery of the past few years has been my introduction to the poems of Mary Oliver. Her tribute titled, “The Buddha’s Last Instruction,” inspires a vision of a sunrise, as well as the impression of a soul so ignited. (It can be found in her book, House of Light.) Don’t take my word for it, and don’t be satisfied with the tidbits available online. Mary Oliver is a living poet, and I encourage everyone to support living poets by buying their work. I feel thirsty for poetry just contemplating the title of her collection, Thirst. I long to gather her entire works, including her poetry and essays, immerse myself in poetic expression, then join forces with the cosmic rendering of words into new forms: She’s also written two books on writing, A Poetry Handbook and Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse.
You might like her poetry as much as I do, or you might want to try the works of any number of other living poets, such as Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, John Ashbery, or Annie Dillard.
If all language had to be delivered as poetry, I’d be too silent (some people think I already am), because I’m so in awe of the great poets. I’d spend my attention listening to them, and never think what to say myself. But there’s no point in those of us who are less gifted remaining silent, when letting one’s words take wing requires practice. Think what a lovely world that would be — all poetry.
Hi Barbara -
Glad to “see” you again! Thanks for visiting my butterflies; I was sure those photos had gone forever.
Poetry… gosh. I loved poetry when I was reading a lot of it in college. Wrote some and destroyed it. Thanks for the sweet old memory. (John Denver stinks, though.)
-karen
One of my favorites: The world is too much with us, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Little we have in life that is ours…
Wish I could remember where it’s from, who wrote it.
And then there’s John Donne whose poetry does not scan but whose sermons read beautifully as blank verse: No man is an island. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less as well as if a manor of thine own or thy friends were. Therefore send not to know for whom the bell tolls….
Many’s the time I’ve recited poetry to myself on long walks or lonely train rides or riding an oxcart down an Indian path between villages. From memory and probably with errors, but it was as if the authors were keeping me company in my solitary journeys.
Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
See now? You’ve got me started visiting my old friends once more. Thank you and good night.
There are so very many of my favorite bloggers who have fallen in love with poetry. I am a fan of a few poets, but have never taken the time to really study it…maybe I should.
Thanks for sharing your love of poetry with us.
Sometimes, although far from having a poet’s gift with rhyme and meter, I find that simply trying to write a poem can help shape an image, a thought, and, in the rush to put the words down, carry me beyond the poem itself into a story that I hadn’t expected to find.
And I’ve discovered that reading a poet’s work-especially the poems of Mary Oliver, a favorite of mine, too-can serve as a worthwhile way to “break the ice” each morning before sitting down to write.
If you enjoy reading poetry online, you might take a look at this project… http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/ Perhaps you’ll find a handful of new poets to add to your shelf.
Oh my, I’m afraid I have always had a tin ear for poetry. I never even wrote poetry as a teenager. It was, however, interesting to read about your love for it, and, indeed, sometimes I wil read isolated lines that are quite beautiful or powerful.
Hmmm…actually I wrote a few snippets of faux poetry for an old short story we did called Beauty More Stealthy, which was also the name of a poem our detective’s rather callow, young friend had written. I also wrote some purposely dreadful versus for Five For Silver, in which one of the characters was a perfectly dreadful poet.
[...] Right now I’m reading Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, which I mentioned in a previous post. [...]