My love for poetry was almost an afterthought. Poetry for me back then was lines and lines of incomprehensible sentences strung together, and to make them look and sound pretty, they have rhyming words at each line. A fine example is this:
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert th' Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
Some may find this familiar, but if you don't, it's a part of Milton's great opus, Paradise Lost. Words that I, from henceforward , have never heard, seen and/or wrote before are jumbled and pushed together with familiar words that sometimes I wondered back then whether my English teacher was teaching me a different language altogether. Wast? Satst? Illumin? What in the world are these words? Thou know'st? This effectively killed my interest for poem - until I read this in a local newspaper.
I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
It was my first proper introduction to poetry.
In Wordsworth's poem I found that words can be musical if read properly and correctly. Imagine, a fifteen-year-old, recognising this for the first time! The words actually rhyme so wonderfully it made me sit still for a long time, reading and re-reading the page, tasting the delicious rhyme in my mouth like some flavour newly sampled. I carried this poem for a long time, basing most of my own meager poems on this structure. Also, later I found out that in poetry, the usually rigid laws of sentence construction can be happily bent out of shape, or even broken (GASP) in order to fit your subject matter.
In Wordsworth's poem I found that words can be musical if read properly and correctly. Imagine, a fifteen-year-old, recognising this for the first time! The words actually rhyme so wonderfully it made me sit still for a long time, reading and re-reading the page, tasting the delicious rhyme in my mouth like some flavour newly sampled. I carried this poem for a long time, basing most of my own meager poems on this structure. Also, later I found out that in poetry, the usually rigid laws of sentence construction can be happily bent out of shape, or even broken (GASP) in order to fit your subject matter.
But this fellow is not in my top three. It took another encounter with similar structure that I finally know who is my main poet. This is the other encounter, and no, he is not my top three either. But he's no slouch in the poem department:
He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
The first time I read this I was appalled, then sympathised, then finally, happily nodded. My only input of Oscar Wilde was his horror psychological story, 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' which actually led me to this poem of 'The Ballad of the Reading Gaol'. Since it was a narrative poem, it was several pages long. But I endured it to the end, and came away happy. Now I realised that poem can be a story, too, the sky's the limit!
Okay. We'll start from the bottom. Here's my third poet.
3. Edgar Allan Poe
3. Edgar Allan Poe
Poem Hook: The Raven
Favourite: Annabel Lee
Yeah, it's the 18th century gothic emo-writer that got me really into poetry. After reading the inescapable 'The Black Cat' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart' I was immediately hooked. What else could this scary writer with a mind that can turn a seemingly harmless black cat into a nightmare? I found 'The Raven'.
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'
What stroke of genius made Poe put voice into a wandering raven nobody will probably be able to decipher, but I am thankful for it. The poem is a practice in a matter Poe is very familiar with: redundancy made nightmarish. As a poem lover, this is arguably a must-know poem. But my love is with Annabel Lee.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
Yes, it's there again: redundancy. Poe's redundancy, however irritating it may seem, might be the important nail that holds everything together. Imagine if the Raven could say other things, or that Annabel Lee and kingdom by the sea is replaced by something else. It just doesn't feel right. Analysis aside, this poem is touching, and almost frightening, in its alacrity and obsessiveness.
2. Dante Alighieri
Poem Hook: The Divine Comedy*
Favourite: Inferno
Midway upon the journey of our life,
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.
And so begins one of mankind's great literature prizes. Okay, so Dante wrote more poems than this, but this is borne out of my other great love: classical music. Tchaikovsky wrote an overture for Francesca da Rimini, and needless to say, it piqued my interest to explore this poem. I was immediately interested when Dante began describing hell and its tenants, no details spared. Yeah, so I am yet to read the whole poem in Italian, but there are so many translations out there that also merit a time to read.Midway upon the journey of our life,
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.
*This is the version translated by Longfellow.
1. Emily Dickinson
Poem Hook: Because I Could Not Stop For Death
Favourite: The Heart asks Pleasure First
The little woman of poetry did not publish much of her only-now critically lauded poems when she was alive. She kept much of her unpublished gems in little papers and it did not help that her handwriting was hard to decipher. Her frequent use of dashes and (back then) unconventional rhyming would have been enough for the literary circle to crucify her. However today her poems are the rage.
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –
None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air –
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
Even today it is hard to actually understand why the frequent use of dashes, as seen here. A little mystery goes a long way in getting people interested. But I am not interested in mysteries. I am very partial to her other poem, which is what I will leave you, gentle readers, with:
The heart asks pleasure first,
And then, excuse from pain;
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;
And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.