A Life in Verse
An ode to the things that have stuck
I’ve always envied poets and songwriters, people who can capture an idea or a feeling in a handful of words—big emotions, big thoughts, all squeezed down into pure essences, compacted into something hard and perfect like a diamond, while the rest of us meander on for paragraphs and pages (as I am about to do).
That’s what I love about a poem—the way it can be bigger on the inside, like Dr. Who’s TARDIS. The way it can say more than it says. It’s a sliver of words that enters your brain and then expands and explodes and embeds itself in you, like a virus.
I never feared poetry when I was a kid or saw it as something intimidating. My mother used to read poems to me, and if my friend, Christopher Robin, could show up in a poem just as easily as in a story, it didn’t occur to me to have a problem with it. It was only the slightest of steps from poems about characters I knew to poems that were entirely new, like this wonderful one, also from A. A. Milne.
That “disobedience poem,” with the wise son and the unruly mother, feels pretty close to Shel Silverstein’s poems and also this little, out-of-print book of nonsense verse, which I loved. Once you follow the path to where the sidewalk ends, you’re probably hooked.
I’ve written about music and books and movies that have been important to me. So, how about some poems?
I have to warn you, though: I’m no scholar. This is not a study of the greatest poems ever written. It’s a pretty pedestrian list, to be honest. Half of it is stuff I read in English class, decades ago. You might look at some of the titles and roll your eyes, saying “Seriously? That one?”
And that’s fine. I’m not trying to impress anyone. These are just some of the poems I’ve encountered in my life that have stuck with me—lines and images that have vibrated strings in my heart and played notes that have echoed and lingered through the years. These are the slivers that infected me.
I think “Prufrock” may have been the first “grown up” poem I grappled with in school. It’s certainly the first one I remember. I probably read it in 10th grade with my beloved English teacher, Miss Achille. I don’t remember stumbling upon it at home, even though we had a big book of T.S. Eliot poems, which I opened often—though just for the cat poems (long before that musical).
There was a time when I had all of “Macavity: the Mystery Cat” committed to memory. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.
I remember being dazzled by little things in “Prufrock,” like Eliot’s use of internal rhyme in the first stanza, or his use of consonance and hard consonants to convey harsh feelings (“a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas”). I loved the sound of it all. I think it was the first time I really noticed those things and how they worked.
That’s the technical stuff. But I also remember feeling a sense of kinship with poor, old Prufrock and a sense of wonder at young Tom’s ability to feel the impinging middle-aged-ness of a person who doesn’t light up a party (at any age), who doesn’t hold court in conversation, who doesn’t get noticed when he walks into a room and isn’t missed when he leaves. You didn’t have to have thinning hair to understand J. Alfred, or to hope that maybe, someday, things might change for him.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
There will be time, there will be time…and yet, within a single poem, we move from “Do I dare disturb the universe?” to “Do I dare to eat a peach?”
Prufrock never answers those questions.
Did I ask them when I was 14 or 15? I probably did. Quietly.
There are words and cadences in this poem—and others from Eliot—that latched onto me young and have stayed with me and infected my thinking and my writing ever since.
I read this poem in my first English class during my freshman year of college. When I think of it, even now, I can see the words on those thin, flimsy pages of the Norton Anthology—the big, green book with Queen Elizabeth on the cover, whose regal face had been at some point been disfigured with a moustache and a monocle.
Sorry, Bess—nothing personal. Love you. Love the book. I carried it around with me for a long time after college.
This is another poem whose phrases are always readily at hand for me. “Had we but world enough and time;” “But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;” “Though we cannot make our sun/Stand still, yet we will make him run.”
When I’m in a carpe-diem kind of mood, I’ll think of “gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” like any good English major and/or fan of Dead Poets Society, but then I’ll reach for these phrases from Andrew Marvell. They were powerful when I was a college student. They’re even more powerful now, when I really hear that chariot coming.
This is a strange little poem that I would have read once and forgotten about if it hadn’t been for my lunatic friends, Angela and Kate, who loved, “generations have trod, have trod, have trod,” and made the phrase part of their regular vocabulary for our entire college career. Any time someone wanted to complain about too much homework or too many rehearsals, you could count on someone saying “generations have trod, have trod have trod.”
“Why do men then now not reck his rod?” also came in for some rude use on occasion.
Hopkins’ use of language in this poem is weird and wonderful and surprising. His images, things like shook foil and oozing oil, are not the kinds of phrases you expect when you’re reading about the glory of God. I love how he throws the word “crushed” onto a separate line after the ooze of oil to surprise you even more. I love how ugly and smelly and vivid he can make his language:
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell
And then, after all of that, he talks about nature and “the dearest freshness deep down things.” I love how he doesn’t say in deep down things, or deep down in things. I love how a line of poetry can exist in a Schrodinger-esque state of suspension, almost saying two different things but never settling down into either of them.
And then he leaves us, at the end, with the Holy Ghost brooding over the world with “warm breast and ah! bright wings.” I don’t know much about the Holy Ghost, but I love the fact that Hopkins puts his exclamation point after the actual exclamation and not at the end of the sentence. I love that so much.
If I were an artist, I would spend my life trying to paint what “ah! bright wings” looks like.
This is another one I read back in college, but I don’t actually remember it very well. I remember the last stanza—or, really, the last line. And yet, I put the title down when I was making my list. Why?
I wasn’t really sure at first, so I figured I’d better read it again.
It’s got an interesting structure. Matthew Arnold spools out a quiet reflection or reverie over the first three stanzas: looking out over the English channel to France and feeling a sense of sadness at the ebb and flow of the tides; then remembering Sophocles and what he thought about the sea; then talking about the metaphorical Sea of Faith and how it, to him, is also a tide that is withdrawing from the world. It’s all a little bleak and, to be honest, a little academic. Stuffy, even.
The poem is an argument—it’s almost an essay. That aspect doesn’t jump out at you the way it does in Marvell’s poem, with its '“If…but…therefore” structure. But Arnold is laying out an argument here. And it’s a tough one to take once you get to the big finish.
Everything leads to the final stanza, which is the part I remembered. That dispassionate, poetic reverie gives way to a more personal and despairing tone. It catches you by surprise. All of those poetic “tides” have gone out from the world, and…what’s left? Nothing but darkness and chaos.
“Ah, love, let us be true/To one another!” Arnold says. Modern life has, “neither joy, nor peace, nor help for pain.” We end the poem with an image of the whole world being a “darkling plain…where ignorant armies clash by night.”
And that’s it. That’s the end.
That last stanza is a whole poem by itself, which is why it’s the part I remember. But it’s even more powerful than I thought, coming after what feels like an academic treatise about history. You are definitely not expecting that ending, and Arnold doesn’t give you any happy way out of it. It’s as if he’s saying, “I’m sorry—did you think poetry was just pretty words that moody men think up while standing at the seashore? No, buddy—this is me at the edge.”
When I read the poem now, I feel like I felt when I read the ending of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. It’s all fun and games until the bottom falls out. I can feel the 20th century heading straight for this Victorian-era author like a runaway train. He can see it coming. I feel badly for him. And for us.
English degree in hand, I easily could have left school and put poetry behind me. But that was not to be. While I was out in California for graduate school, I got a call from my friend, Thor, who was working as a dishwasher at Yosemite Park while trying to write something that was part novel and part nuclear policy thesis—a quintessentially Thor thing to do. He wanted me to come up to visit him for a weekend, and he had some very specific requests for things he needed in his weird isolation. Among his requests were some pop culture magazines and a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
I brought him both, and in return (though I didn’t ask for anything), he gave me an old, patched up pair of jeans and an equally old rugby shirt. That rugby shirt was the real deal. Thor had been a rugby player back at Emory. I wore that shirt until the threads dissolved.
Anyway. Leaves of Grass. It’s possible I had read a short excerpt back in high school or college. I don’t know. If I did, it didn’t resonate with me. It’s hard to get Whitman if you don’t take him in big gulps. He is large and he does contain multitudes, as he readily admits.
Whitman and Thor will forever be entwined in my brain, because my sense of what Whitman is and why he matters is absolutely tied to my memory of sitting in Thor’s little tent in his M*A*S*H-like compound, reading parts of “Song of Myself” to each other.
We have lost so much in this country, but one of the things I mourn the most is the sense of big, embracing exuberance and confidence and joy that Whitman’s poems embody, a thing he did deliberately to create a new kind of poetry for a new country and a new world and a new way of being.
That voice is still out there, somewhere (like that of my dear, lost friend)—ghostly, patient, still believing in us. I can hear it.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
I didn’t love Emily Dickinson as a student, maybe because the anthologized poems were already too well known and felt trite and shopworn to me. I couldn’t hear them. But this little poem surprised me when I encountered it sometime in my thirties.
She speaks of two elemental forces—fire and flood—and of our inability to control them. The first stanza is straightforward. If a fire can ignite itself, who are you to put it out? Fine. I love how absolute it is. It’s not that you often can’t put a fire out, or that you can’t put certain kinds of fire out. No. You just…can’t.
The second stanza is weird.
“You cannot fold a flood”? Okay…. “And put it in a drawer”?
Why? “Because the Winds would find it out/And tell your Cedar floor.”
Short, sharp, strange, and…we’re done. I kind of love it. No explanation, no apology. Even the “because” doesn’t give you anything like a reason. It’s one of those images that you can’t explain logically, because it has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with a feeling. It feels true even if you can’t put words to it. When the fire burns in your life—when the floods come—you know you can’t tamp it down or fold it away in a drawer. It will consume you and roar past you. We’ve all been there.
Well…maybe not Prufrock. But you know what I mean.
E. E. Cummings was another poet I dismissed in school because I kept seeing the same three or four poems anthologized. They were…fine. A little cutesy in their wacky punctuation and line breaks. The goat-footed balloon man was a little much. A little twee. If there was something worth talking about there (and of course there was), my teachers didn’t help me see it.
That’s the problem with anthologies (and with studying poems in school). You’re given the most accessible and perhaps the most simplistic things an author has to offer. Or actually complex things are rendered accessible and simplistic so that you do your homework and then pass a test.
Sometimes, finding the good stuff and finding the good in it requires a little independent work.
My first clue that there was more to Cummings was this beautiful love poem, which I discovered when it was read aloud during the movie, Hannah and Her Sisters.
In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me
or which i cannot touch because they are too near.
THAT was the goat-footed balloon man guy? I needed to know more.
I bought the Collected Works—the same book used in the movie. And I lingered over every line of this poem—maybe the most beautiful love poem I know. I don’t know any other lines of verse that capture the sense of mystery and awe that come from realizing how deeply you love someone:
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
Years later, I memorized this poem so that I could speak it aloud to my wife. In public. I did it in front of a classroom of her students in New York City. I knew she was teaching a poetry unit and was having each student memorize a poem to present out loud. So, I showed up one day, by surprise, and delivered this poem to her. She was gob-smacked. The girls in the class all went, “awwww,” and the boys in the class were all embarrassed about whatever silliness they had brought in to recite.
And that, class, is what poetry is for.
Partly.
“Meanwhile the world goes on.”
I don’t remember how I discovered Mary Oliver, but it’s only been in the last ten years or so—and what a waste not to have known her earlier. Everybody seems to know Mary Oliver, these days. I see lines from her poems on bumper stickers and posted on social media.
It doesn’t surprise me. Her poetry is beautiful but not complicated. It is not hard to figure out; it says what it says. But for all that, it can still cut deep. It can still make you catch your breath or want to put the book down for a minute and just breathe.
I have a quote from a different Oliver poem on my wall: “Be ignited or be gone.” It’s a good reminder. Good advice. Hard advice, but that’s okay. Maybe you cannot put a fire out, but sometimes it’s hard to get one lit.
She can scold, a little—warn, a little—but she can also console. I think that’s one of the things people love about her and why they share her lines. There is a forgiving gentleness to her.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Then there’s this one.
Not every poem is a love poem. Some poems howl in pain. This is one of those.
I honestly don’t know what to make of this poem, but I can’t get rid of it. The English translation of the title is “Death Fugue,” and that’s exactly what it is. The language is controlled and restrained and somehow relentless. Paul Celan works with only a few images and ideas, repeated with slight variations and switch-ups, over and over again—just like a musical fugue. He repeats things in a way that feel like a trance or a hallucination. It’s a very bad dream.
You know what the bad dream is about pretty quickly, though he never says it outright. He comes close in a line or two, just enough in the first stanza to anchor the poem to a historical moment and make sure you’re with him. But then he circles and orbits around it with his fugue, and every slight variation and repetition digs deeper into your stomach.
He doesn’t tell you what’s literally happening. What is the “black milk of daybreak,” exactly? Who are Margarete with the golden hair and Sulamith with the ashen hair?
You already know. You can feel it in your bones. A literal this-means-that doesn’t matter. What matters is the dread he wants you to feel.
Do I “like” this poem? I don’t even know. But I’m awed by it, and it’s in me, somehow, no less than Whitman or Cummings. Or Eliot.
You know how it is: we contain multitudes.
Let’s end with this one.
Poems about art are not usually my favorites, but this one is different, because Rilke pulls a bit of a bait-and-switch at the very end. He seems to be doing something simple: describing an ancient, Greek sculpture. But he’s not really describing it; he’s describing how he feels while looking at it. He’s sharing his sense of astonishment at how powerful this old sculpture can be, even without a head to it. The statue is nothing more than a torso, but it has such physical power in it, so much life-force bursting out of it, that the poet is not just taken aback; he’s a little scared. Even though there is no head to the statue, no face, no eyes, the poet says:
here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
I love the idea that a confrontation with art can affect and disturb you in unpredictable ways, leaving you shaken—leaving you feeling as though life as you’re living it is not quite enough—that your life, your little life, could contain some of the primal energy you’re feeling from the art you’re encountering.
And why shouldn’t it? What is art, if not life compressed into something crystalline and luminous and pure? Why shouldn’t you feel challenged to disturb the universe a little, if you’ve been measuring out your life with coffee spoons?
If art doesn’t make you think twice about life, why bother with it? And we ought to think twice—at least twice—and wake up to the life we’re living before sleep overtakes us permanently. As Rilke says in another poem that I love:
But because just being here matters, because
the things of this world, these passing things,
seem to need us, to put themselves in our care
somehow. Us, the most passing of all.
Once for each, just once. Once and no more.
And for us too, once. Never again. And yet
it seems that this—to have once existed,
even if only once, to have been a part
of this earth—can never be taken back.
Love this! Will read again with more time, but I also really enjoyed the subtitle :)