A friend asked me how important a part poetry plays in my life. I replied seriously that I could not imagine being without the unusual beauty and clarity the best poetry brings into my life.
A day is dulled and dimmed if it passes and I do not pick up a book of poems in my library, browse in some anthology, find a new poem in the latest issue of some literary magazine or at least before my eyes shut glance at some old favourite lines from Hopkins, Walcott, Yeats, Carter or a score of other supreme masters of the art and craft of making poems.
In most peoples’ lives I find that poetry is entirely absent. Of course I do not in the least blame or condemn them for this, especially as many live better, more considerate, more caring and more constructive lives than I do. But I do not understand how they can live completely without the blessing and benefit of poetry.
How sad, I think, that he or she may never have read, and may never read, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s great and terrible sonnets or Yeats’s Among School Children (which I once heard Martin Carter call the best poem ever written) or Derek Walcott’s astonishing autobiographical poem Another Life or the agonizing lines about the death of his wife by Robinson Jeffers in his poem Hungerfield or any one of a thousand other masterpieces.
I also think how sad that I in my turn will never read the countless other thousands of masterpieces which life is a thousand-fold too short to find and treasure. This is, by the way, one more reason why I can never understand the view that one full lifetime of 70 to 80 years is about right for any human being. It is not nearly, nearly enough for all there is to savour.
Here are three poems that appeal to me. The first is by Kenneth Koch. The poem appeals to me, makes me think of when I was in the pomp of youth and saw no reason why every achievement and every pleasure should be out of reach!
You want a social life, with friends
You want a social life, with friends,
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.
There isn’t time enough , my friends –
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends –
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?
Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.
The second poem is mildly heretical but I do not choose it for that but because it expresses very well the insight, which has always intrigued me, that every second of history could have given rise to an entirely different universe to the one we by chance inhabit. The poem is by Paul Groves.
Scenario in an alternative universe
We understand Mary’s grief for her firstborn.
Had there been room at the inn this would not
have happened. Stables are inappropriate
for human birth. Sheep and cows, though neutral
and in a sense attractive, are far from ideal
companions during confinement. Clean towels
and pure water would have helped. Within days
the child was febrile. She wept, as if tears
could cool the small brow, but it was too late.
The baby was lowered into a shallow grave
In its swaddling clothes, Joseph was disconsolate.
Who knows what the boy might have become:
tax collector, scribe, fisherman, carpenter…
The worst part was that, three days later, a dog
unearthed the corpse as if it were a bone
and carried it away into the moonlight.
The third poem is about that everyday, dogged, faithful sort of love which is not the subject of many poems but which gives everlasting depths to all adorations. The poem is by EU Fanthorpe, an old English lady who began to write poems late in her life and who in my mind had an extraordinary ability to discover what is wondrous in the ordinary.
Atlas
There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;
Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;
Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists
And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds
The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living; which is Atlas.
And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my family wiring;
Laughs at my dry rotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.
I could go on putting these poems down, overflowing on to other pages, crowding out the horrors of Somalia and Darfur, the desperate sadness of Haiti, the now discredited claims of the free market fanatics, proliferating revelations of Guyanese narco-trafficking, the slow and suspicious circling around each other of our politicians. But I do not think the editor would indulge me. I have no illusion that for every reader who takes the time to read these poems and perhaps finds some interest or revelation in them, there will be a score or a hundred who, seeing the stanza form on the page, will almost instinctively turn elsewhere. Poetry is a passion I am glad I acquired it young, but it is not a passion that many share.
