Every so often, I get a bee in my bonnet about poetry. When we homeschooled, we read and sometimes memorized poems. We’ve since moved on to other kinds of schooling, and it’s been a good choice, overall. But to my everlasting chagrin, so many teachers teach my kids that poetry is a kind of catch basin for emotion.
Prose, they learn, is for when you have orderly thoughts to express with precision; but poetry is the place to open the floodgates and wallow, and nobody can possibly say you’re doing it wrong, because there are no rules.
And this is true, as long as the poetry is utter garbage.
This utter garbage approach to poetry accounts for why so many young people love to write but hate to read poetry. Wallowing feels great when you’re in the middle of it (when you’re in the mood), but no healthy person likes to flail around in someone else’s muck.
A good poem works in the opposite way: The writer does all the work, and the reader — well, the reader has to do some work, too, but if he’s willing, he’ll be rewarded with something of great and lasting value. Have you seen an uncut, unpolished diamond? It doesn’t look like much. Most of its beauty is in its potential, and it’s not until it’s carefully, skillfully cut and polished that it sparkles and reflects the light.
The same is true with the ideas and passions that animate poetry. In a formless stream-of-consciousness poem that’s allowed to spill itself thoughtlessly onto the page, the ideas and passions that animate it may be present, but they won’t do much for the reader until they’re brought out by skillful, time-consuming word smithing, and ruthless editing.
Of course, you can make perhaps the opposite mistake, and approach a well-crafted poem the way a dealer approaches a precious jewel, and think only of what it can deliver. This is what Billy Collins protested against in his poem, Introduction to Poetry. He pleads with his students to listen to, to live with a poem; to encounter it on its own terms, to experience it. To hear the sounds it makes and be open to the various things they might suggest.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
People who teach poetry this way should be sent to work in the salt mines. They can meet up with the wallowers once a week and think about what they’ve done wrong.
Anyway, as I mentioned, every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet and start printing out poetry and tacking it up on the walls of my house. I pin up a new batch every year or so, and once they become tattered enough, I tell myself they’ve probably been read by somebody. I’m far too tired and busy to lead any seminars, but at least it’s something.
The theory is that it’s possible to ruin a wonderful poem by torturing a message or moral out of it, and it’s possible to miss out on the power and import of a good poem by skimming over the surface of it and not stopping to consider why it’s made the way it is; but at least with the second error, you’ve had a moment of pleasure. And if the thing is hanging around long enough and the poem is good enough, you’re bound to let it inside your head, where it may colonize.
Here are some lists of poems I’ve hung in the past, in no particular order. Most of them are short enough to print out on a single page.
“The Tyger” William Blake
“Still, Citizen Sparrow” Richard Wilbur
“Dust of Snow” Robert Frost
“Spring and Fall” G.M. Hopkins
“Love (III)” George Herbert
“Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird” Wallace Stevens
“When I Was One-and-Twenty” (from A Shropshire Lad) A. E. Housman
“Epistemology” Richard Wilbur
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” William Butler Yeats
“The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” Dylan Thomas
“maggie and milly and molly and may” e. e. cummings
“The Walrus and the Carpenter” Lewis Carroll
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” Robert Frost
“Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau” William Blake
“At the Sea-Side” Robert Lewis Stevenson
“Marginalia” Richard Wilbur
“I Knew a Woman” Theodore Roethke
“She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” William Wordsworth
“Where Did You Come From, Baby Dear?” by George MacDonald
“As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden
“Intimations of Immortality” (excerpt – the stanza with “trailing clouds of glory do we come”) by Wordsworth
“Inversnaid”by G. M. Hopkins
“Macavity the Mystery Cat” by T.S. Eliot
“The Beautiful Changes” by Richard Wilbur”
“Acquainted With the Night” by Robert Frost
“God’s Grandeur” by G. M. Hopkins
“April 5, 1974” by Richard Wilbur
“The Garden” by Ezra Pound
“Cold Are the Crabs” by Edward Lear
“Domination of Black “by Wallace Stevens
“A Hero” by Robert Service
“Having Misidentified a Wildflower”by Richard Wilbur
“The Lanyard” by Billy Collins
“Sonnet CXLIII” by Shakespeare
“Sea Calm” by Langston Hughes
“A Red, Red Rose” by Robert Burns
“Trolling for blues “by Richard Wilbur
“Examination at the womb door ” by Ted Hughes
“The Great Figure” by William Carlos Williams
“End of Summer” by Stanley Kunitz
“Faith” by Maria Terrone
“Gazebos” by Roger McGough
“Eulogie” by Sherman Alexie
“Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas
“Walking West” by William E. Stafford
“The Gift” by Louise Gluck
“The Lesson of the Moth” by Don Marquis
“There Is a Gold Light in Certain Old Paintings” by Donald Justice
“No Time “by Billy Collins
“The End and the Beginning” by Wisława Szymborska
If you love poetry, what would you add?
photo credit: emileechristine Bejeweled via photopin (license)
A version of this essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly in October of 2019.
Goblin Market by Christina Rosetti
I would definitely include The Bright Field by R.S. Thomas!
I would also not be above printing out ALL of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and papering the walls of my house with them.
I’ve never seen a purple cow,
I never hope to see one.
But I can tell you anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one.
(Written several years later)
Ah yes, i wrote the purple cow,
I’m sorry now I wrote it.
But I can tell you one thing now,
I’ll kill you if you quote it.
The end of ‘Examination at the Womb Door’ made me laugh out loud.
Theodore Roethke:
The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Conrad Aiken’s Tetelestai should be high on any list of poems to be rescued from semi-obscurity.
“If” by Rudyard Kipling.
“Waltzing Matilda” Banjo Paterson
I like ‘If’ too. 🙂
The up and the fan or the fan and the cup.
Somewhere I have never traveled gladly beyond
By ee Cummings
Do Not Go Gentle
By Dylan Thomas
Jenny Kissed Me
By Leigh Hunt
Upon Julia’s Clothes
By Robert Herrick
The Squaw-Man
By Robert W. Service
They Are Not Long
By Ernest Dowson
To His Coy Mistress
By Andrew Marvell
Lullaby
By W.H. Auden
What! No Emily Dickinson? Surely you jest!
Seriously, you need to include at least “A Narrow Fellow In The Grass.”
Other women poets who should be considered: Elizabeth Bishop, Stevie Smith, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The only real great among those is Stevie Smith. Although they’re all worth reading many times over.
Here is one by Stevie S:
I feel ill. What can the matter be?
I’d ask God to have pity on me,
But I turn to the one I know, and say:
Come, Death, and carry me away.
Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god
Who comes as a servant when he is called, you know,
Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp,
Come Death. Do not be slow.
I love this! I’d add another George Herbert (“The Collar”), “When I consider how my light is spent” by John Milton, and a few stanzas of Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.”
Rather embarrassed by how few poems on the list that I am familiar with. (I suppose the Iliad is too large to hang a wall, except maybe as wallpaper.) Anyway, à propos of yesterday’s posting on fighting the battles you can win, I offer the following which, ironically enough, is one of the few poems that have ever been hung in the Knox household:
We Wear the Mask, by Paul Laurence Dunbar
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!