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 Poetry Review or the New Yorker or some other magazine or at least before my eyes shut glance at some old favourite lines from Walcott, Hopkins, 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 absent. Of course I do not blame or condemn them, especially as many live better, more considerate, more caring and constructive lives than I do. But I do not understand how they can live 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 Hopkin’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.
Mind you, I also think how sad that I in my turn will never read the countless other thousands of masterpieces which life is a thousandfold 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 enough for all there is to savour.
I take my sheaf of some favourite poems and choose three to share. The first is by Robert Pinsky, whose marvellous short book The Sounds of Poetry anyone interested in the music in poems should read.
Samurai Song
When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.
When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.
When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had no
Mother I embraced order.
When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend, When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.
When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.
When I have no means fortune
Is my means, when I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune
Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.
The second poem is by Kenneth Koch. The poem appeals to me, makes me think of when I was in the pomp and ambition 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.
My sons have grown into adults so quickly it alarms and saddens me. We try our best for them – and now for the grandchildren – but really now they are on their own. My third poem is Yehuda Amichai’s lovely poem on the subject.
My Children Grew
My children grew and flourished around
tears and laughter
like fruit, like houses, but the tears and the
laughter
stayed inside the kernel, just as they were.
Our Father, Our King!
That’s all for today on fathers and kings.
Go, children I begot: get yourselves into the
next century,
when the tears and the laughter will
continue, just as they were.
I remember giving them a stern warning:
“Never, never stick your hand out the
window of a moving bus.”
Once we were on a bus and my little girl
piped up, “Daddy, that guy
stuck his hand into the outside!”
That’s the way to live: to stick your hand
into the infinite outside
of the world, turn the outside inside out,
the world into a room and God into a
little soul
inside the infinite body.
I could go on putting these poems down, overflowing on to other pages, crowding out the horrors of the world and of our own domestic scene, the latest scandals, the latest bitter and divisive accusations and counter-accusations, the endless suspicious circling around each other of our politicians with no real sense of what the nation needs.
But I do not think my editor would indulge me. I have no illusion that for every reader who takes the time to read these poems and perhaps finds some delight 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 young but it is not a passion that many share.
