Poetry!

Who doesn’t love a poem? 

To answer my own question: Me. I don’t particularly like poems.

What is this I hear? Gasps of astonishment and dismay? I know, I know, I am an uncultured swine. Why, I can’t even tell Burns from Tennyson. Shocking! So in an attempt to remedy this situation, I have bought a book of Burns and a book of Keats.

Why those particular poets? Because they are old-fashioned. It’s rather romantic to read poetry that the people in books have read. But mainly because they were free. (Go figure.) I am a cheapskate.

Keats looks interesting.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk…

Hemlock is always interesting.

So far my knowledge of Poetry is restricted to the poems found in two books my grandmother gave me when I was little. Useful little things, the poems are often rather cutesy, but also sturdy and funny and whimsical. Here are two of my favorites.

“Bed in Summer” (Robert Louis Stevenson)

In Winter I get up at night

And dress by yellow candle-light.

In summer quite the other way,

I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see

The birds still hopping in the tree,

Or hear the grown-up people’s feet

Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,

When all the sky is clear and blue,

And I should like so much to play,

To have to go to bed by day?

And

“Weather” (Anon)

Whether the weather be fine,

Or whether the weather be not,

Whether the weather be cold,

Or whether the weather be hot,

We’ll weather the weather

Whatever the weather,

Whether we like it or not!

Very profound.

But I do have one other poem that I still have memorized, and it’s a more dramatic and emotional piece. I like it because it is serious and when you say it, you must say it in a low, solemn voice.

“Sympathy” (Paul Laurence Dunbar)

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!

When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;

When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass

And the river flows like a stream of glass;

And the faint perfume from its chalice steals--

I know how the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing

Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;

For he must fly back to his perch and cling

When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars

And they pulse again with a keener sting--

I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,

When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,--

When he beats his bars and he would be free;

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,

But a plea that upward to Heaven he flings--

I know why the caged bird sings!

So perhaps I am not entirely ignorant. Off I go to study “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Adieu.