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 Hopkins, Walcott, Yeats, Carter or a score of other supreme masters of the art and craft of making poems.
In most people’s lives poetry is entirely 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 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.
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 loose-leaved poems and choose three to share. The first is by the American, 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 Robert Cooperman about the Roman poet Ovid whose poems I remember falling in love with when I was a schoolboy and our Latin master, Achilles Daunt, used to chant Ovid’s poems, first in Latin then in translation, to us in the fifth form. I have never forgotten that.
The Exiled Roman Poet Ovid Contemplates the
First Winter Storm in Tomis on the Black Sea
I know that after six more months of winds
howling like wolves celebrating a kill
on blood-pooled snow, I will loathe, fear
these blizzards flung down in huge fistfuls
by northern demons who laugh when men freeze.
But tonight – if it is night, the sun gobbled
by the great white bear of snow – I feel only
the peace of a rich man counting his hoard:
Luka stitching some essential garment.
Magir asleep, after watching the storm.
We laughed over the many beasts I formed
with my fingers on the wall, the hearth’s flames
making silhouettes: healthier hauntings
than the Roman revels my wife and I
would attend in nude, delirious lust.
But thinking of those nights, I feel every
fang-mark of wind and snow, and the coming
raids of vicious Scythians, each winter
no different, until the ice breaks: natives
claiming the bears that sleep beneath the river
have awoke, to drag laggard riders down.
Rome, suddenly I miss your climate, mild
as a mother’s loving good-night embrace.
Luka glances from her sewing, and knows
without a word said how it is with me.
She lays down her thread and skins, and holds me
as If I were Magir, flung from nightmares.
The third poem is a favorite of mine. It 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 Victoria 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.
I could go on putting these poems down, overflowing on to other pages, crowding out the horrors of Afghanistan and the Congo, the latest absurdities in international banking circles, the revolting stories of women and children abused, the mayhem on the roads, the slow and suspicious circling around each other of the politicians as elections loom. 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.
