Poetry

When I was a child my familiarity with poetry was through poems I had to memorise for school homework.  I could never work out why we had to do this. Certainly it did not give me any greater appreciation of the poems and it didn't make me understand better what the poet might have meant when he wrote the lines I so laboriously rehearsed again and again.

I can still remember the first line of the first poem that sticks in my memory - "O Captain,my captain, thy fearful trip is done...."  Only now when I looked it up, did I discover that the poem running around in my subconscious is by Walt Whitman and metaphorically referred to the US Civil War and Abraham Lincoln. Who knew?  Perhaps if all this had been taught to me the poem might have had more meaning.  All I remember is repeating the damned lines over and over again to my poor  mom and dad and trying desperately to remember the lines, never the meaning.  I believe children are still required to memorise poems as part of their English lessons.  How much more meaningful it would be if we were to choose poems from the vast selection out there and create our own interpretations and meanings and bring that to school.  Maybe we could even choose music to match the poems and paintings too.  For me this might have worked.  I would have remembered the poems for the right reasons, rather than memorising in the same was as I memorised telephone numbers or multiplication tables.

Even though my introduction to poetry was through nursery rhymes and long-forgotten dry remembered texts I have always loved reading poetry and can well recall afternoons in my room reading the poetry of ee cummings and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  Like so many teenagers I was particularly obnoxious and thought myself very advanced at the age of 15.  I read voraciously since it was the best means of escape in my house. Reading was considered a really worthwhile past time so no one bothered me while I was reading.  I ran through volumes of poetry and eventually stopped to re-read ones that resonated with my mercurial moods.  This is an excerpt of one of the poems by ee cummings that I still remember 40 years later:

"here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)"


Once I can remember, when I was 14 or 15 I illustrated a book of Shakespeare's love sonnets.  I remember flowers and butterflies and my beautifully careful calligraphy decorating page after page of sonnets.  I also remember being extremely distressed when the pundits announced that Shakespeare may have written these sonnets for his male lover.  Wait a minute, I thought they were for me, they spoke so loudly to me.  Even Elisabeth Barrett Browning and her melancholy, saccharine sonnets didn't escape my teenage romantic yearnings.  I devoured them all and was in awe of the poet's ability to express in words what I could only at that time imagine feeling. Poetry seemed to make sense of my scrambled feelings in the simplest way in just a few lines.

At different periods of my life I have also looked to poets for solace.  In the period following the death of my son I read a lot of poetry.  There was never a memorial service for him. There was a funeral and much mourning, but no memorial and yet I read poem after poem about death and loss and renewal and I feel inside that I had my own memorial.  The poetry expressed my sadness in a quieter way that seemed to help resolve something broken.

Poetry is more than words.  It is feelings with spirit, with wings.  The poetry that universally touches us all expresses all of our feelings.  The Songs of Solomon in the Bible express the sense of wonder of love in a much better and less embarrassed way than any of us can anymore. I am reading a book at the moment and the beginning passages are poetry of Rumi:

"The minute I heard my first love story,

I started looking for you, not knowing

how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere,

they're in each other all along."

I am so very touched by these words and they express my own feelings and at the same time define them.  Maybe this is the real point of poetry, to define and expand my own thinking, the thinking I didn't even know was there until I read it.  When I read these few words by Rumi I was simultaneously touched and completely unsurprised.  Of course, of course, this is how I feel too. How wonderful to connect with others in this most simple way.

I finish today in unashamedly mawkish mood, full of feelings, sentimental and feeling truly connected to the wonder of life.  Here is one of my all time favourite ee cummings poems:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)