Poetry is so interesting because part of me thinks it is really rather pointless, which sounds like sacrilege and sort of is, and yet... Poetry is obscure, sometimes unreadable, and often inaccessible. It can feel dated, and especially in its older forms—sonnets and such—restrictive and even ridiculous. Why 14 lines? Why a couplet at the end? What’s the point of it all?
And yet. You know there was and yet, didn’t you? There had to be, and it’s quite a big one, because despite all the stuff I just said—which I do believe, sort of—I love poetry. At least, I love some poetry. I love the idea of poetry. Mostly. And so this is why this post is about my relationship with poetry, because like so many relationships in life…
It’s complicated.
My first remembered experience of poetry was when I was nine and bored. My mother was redecorating the guest room and to do this she was burning paint off the skirting boards with an instrument of the 1970s that looked lethal and simply must be illegal now, for about a thousand reasons. I tried to google a picture of one and I couldn’t probably because they were outlawed even when my mother was using one. This thing looked like the heating element of an electric stove with a handle. It glowed bright red and gave off a singed smell, and that was before my mother started burning off the paint with it, which probably had lead in it because this was 1982, so I shudder to think what the effects on us were.
But I digress. Because I was bored, my mother suggested I memorise a poem. [I wonder how that would go over these days…] And so I did. Together we memorised Daffodils by Williams Wordsworth, and I know the whole poem to this day. In fact, last summer when I was visiting my mother in her nursing home, we said the whole poem together—this despite the fact that she has a form of dementia known as aphasia, which means she can’t speak, but she could say that whole poem with me. I was the one struggling, although that was due to my tears.
But I digress again. In all honesty, I didn’t get much out of that poem at nine years old, except that I’d managed to memorise it and anytime it came up in conversation [which actually did happen on occasion] I was always quick to say how I knew it by heart. And if I was feeling particularly smug/stupid/annoying, I would recite it to my bemused listeners.
But memorising Daffodils did open up something inside me—a curiosity or interest or desire, however you want to describe it, so, when about three years later, my brother, who is ten years older than me and whom I have referred to as my ‘(tor)mentor’, suggested we memorise poetry competitively [I bet you didn’t know that could be a thing, did you?]. I was up for it, again, mainly because I was bored, but also because I tend to be quite competitive.
My brother and I, over the course of a few years, memorised a very random assortment of poems from a slim volume of poetry [if poetry is ever mentioned in a novel, it’s always a slim volume] called A Book of Treasured Poems. This was the most eclectic assortment of poetry you could imagine. I spent many bored summer afternoons at our cottage in Canada [no internet, not that that was even a thing then, and no TV] flipping through this slim volume so I know it quite well. We memorised Death be Not Proud by John Donne; parts of Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came by Robert Browning [hard going!]; A Bag of Tools by RL Sharpe [although in A Book of Treasured Poems it was written by Anonymous] ; Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll; parts of Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson; Oh Captain My Captain! by Walt Whitman… and those are only the ones I can remember. We both recall that brief period with much fondness.
And it led me into writing my own poetry on the Smith Corona typewriter I got for the Christmas I was twelve. Oh, I have so many happy memories of that typewriter! I also have a faded pink folder of some angsty, typewritten poetry. To give you a sample I can still remember: When I think about death it feels all wrong/They’re still here now but not for long/Without them I will be all alone/No one to care or be at home/Death makes me feel tired and used/old and bruised/sad and confused.
You can tell I was into rhyming, can’t you? But it was all part of my writing [or should I say rhyming?] journey, and I continued to write poetry throughout my teens and dare I admit it, even into my twenties, none of it very good at all.
But what I really wanted to write about was how poetry, like music, can unlock something inside of ourselves without us ever understanding what or why. An Oxbridge [Cambridge/Oxford, for my non-UK readers] has an English literature interview question that is: ‘Should poetry be understood?’ I find that so interesting because I’m really not at all sure I know the answer.
When I was sixteen, I read On His Blindness by John Milton and was deeply moved by it without really understanding what it meant. The last line ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’ resonated with me even though the idea within it—of frustration at going blind and not being able to use the gift that is ‘death to hide’—was far from my experience, yet something in it touched upon the universal human experience of fear and frustration as well as comfort and quietness, and that is why I think poetry can be so powerful.
My taste in poetry is quite random based on what resonates with me, as with On His Blindness, but one of my absolute favorite poems is Anybody Lived in a Pretty How Town by ee cummings. What I think is brilliant about this poem is how it evokes ideas and feelings without any kind of concrete language or straightforward sense. Some of my favorite lines are about Anybody and his fellow townspeople: ‘He danced his didn’t he sang his did’ and then the people in the town who ‘sowed their isn’t and reaped their same’ Now I know neither line makes true linguistic sense, but let me just ask you… which kind of person would you rather be?
About ten years ago, we went through a brief but happy phase of reading poetry after dinner. This really did not last long at all, but my kids all still recall it fondly and quote some of the poems we chose [each child chose a different poem], especially my son’s choice—‘isn’t it pleasant to have money, heigh-ho!’
Over the years, various poems and in particular certain lines have resonated with me—the last verse of WB Yeats’ Adam’s Curse—I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:/that you were beautiful, and that I strove/To love you in the old high way of love; That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown/As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.
Now, I can’t exactly tell you why that verse resonates with me so much. I don’t feel particularly weary-hearted or hollow, and yet something about it all reminds me how loving anyone can be both hard and beautiful.
Some other lines that I love is the last ones from Ozymandias by Percey Bysshe Shelley: Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Does it not give you a sense of the smallness of human endeavour, lost in those sweeping sands?
Which brings me to the real point of my relationship with poetry and poetry in general: not fully understanding things does not rob them of their power [sorry for the double negative]. In fact, it’s their very opaqueness that resonates with a person at a deep and visceral level; if poetry was written like prose, with everything spelled out neatly and clearly, it would be both dull and insipid. The truth is, if we were able to understand everything, then it might not be worth knowing. [I will say, though, some poetry is truly impenetrable and that does rob it of its power… there must be some inkling of understanding.]
This relates most directly to the idea of God. I have encountered many people, and have had many conversations, about how they don’t understand how God could allow X [usually some kind of personal or general suffering] and therefore God must not exist. This is a somewhat absurd if heartfelt argument, because of course if God could be entirely knowable by one small human being, He wouldn’t be much of a God at all. And while to many that sounds like a copout, it really isn’t. An entirely knowable God is not one worth knowing… and yet, amazingly, as Christians believe, God has made Himself known through Jesus Christ, and so that, really, most be the most amazing thing at all—an unknowable God who makes Himself known, even if, as with poetry, human beings can only grasp one small aspect of His entire character.
On a scientific note [and I am no scientist], I recently read that the more scientists learn about the universe, the more unknowable it has revealed itself to be, with so-called ‘dark matter’ making up, they think, as much as thirty percent, and most likely being the force that holds the universe together—and yet we know nothing about it!
The unknowable is mysterious, wonderful, awe-inspiring and powerful… and that includes poetry, in its many forms—except, I hasten to add, that which is found on Instagram, which tends to be truly dreadful.
But I’ll leave you with some verses to inspire you, from another favourite poem of mine, by William Carlos Williams. Some people might not think of his short verses as poetry, but I love them in their strangely powerful simplicity:
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens