If you do not read poetry you miss much. You miss star showers around your head and arrows near your heart. You miss the fire that lights itself. You miss the hawks that soar towards the sun. You miss the marigolds in your path. You miss the sudden jolt of newness in an old world.
In his endlessly entrancing book about poetry, A Private Art, Geoffrey Grigson writes that most people read poetry but not much of it. “The poems most people know and enjoy and turn over and over again through their lives are like prayers addressed to the mystery of themselves. They don’t need to add to their small stock, they don’t want to, either.”
I have not been like that in my own life. I have always wanted to add to my stock of poems and grow into loving them. There is hardly a week I do not add to that stock. Lately I was re-reading the love poems of Hitamoro, thirteen centuries old, Japan’s “Saint of Poetry,” one poem especially about leaving his wife behind as he goes on a long trip and he writes so beautifully of her clinging to him, clinging to his side as he goes, not wanting him to leave, swaying at his side like sea-leaf tendrils in the rise and fall of the sea. I would not like to be without such poetry in my life.
Good poems are instantly recognizable. They startle, shock new life into old ideas, impress on the mind patterns of beauty and truth previously unnoticed. Often, as John Keats wrote, they “strike the reader as the wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a remembrance.” Let me share a few poems which I have added to my stock of “prayers addressed to the mystery of myself.”
- Here is a powerful poem by Tennessee Williams, one of the 20th century’s most celebrated playwrights. He is not much known as a poet. But sometimes he wrote poems which are simple, searing and unforgettable. This I think is one of them.
Your Blinded Hand
Suppose that
everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand.
Suppose that your cry and mine were lost among numberless cries
in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that somehow I would find your blinded hand.
Through flames everywhere
consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
I would
find your hand.
I know as, of course, you know
the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you’d hear mine and each of us
would find
the other’s hand.
We know
that it might not be so.
But for this quiet moment, if only for this moment,
and against all reason,
let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
that somehow it would be so.
I’d hear your cry, you mine –
And each of us would find a blinded hand.
- In some terrible future, perhaps soon to come, will anyone, except eccentric scholars, read a Gustave Flaubert novel – Madame Bovary, say, or The Sentimental Education – in book form? It is to be feared that reading books will increasingly become an anachronistic foible among a very few and that the love and habit of reading books will die out as generations pass. But I find that this is by no means a new thought. There is a poem by Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet, written about fifty years ago:
To Posterity
When books have all seized up like the bones in graveyards
And reading and even speaking have been replaced
By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
Or will your birds be always wingless birds?
- I read of the Etruscans, a great and civilized people by the account of others. But a tragedy befell them. The writings they left behind have never been decoded so we cannot see into their soul. The poet Richard Wilbur sums up the tragedy that befalls a civilization, a culture, when it loses its readers:
To The Etruscan Poets
Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young
Took with your mothers’ milk the mother tongue,
In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,
You strove to leave some line of verse behind
Like a fresh track across a field of snow,
Not reckoning that all could melt and go.
