DISCUSSION

 

Sometimes (like now) when I`m struggling through the remnants of a cold, the tele`s lost all it`s charm, and workmen are banging away at my kitchen, I find myself trying to fathom out the meaning of  some particularly difficult poem.

 

At such times I like to ponder on what the past poets themselves have said about the trade they practice: Shelly and his `legislators`…Keats, with his `beauty is truth` or his `Negative Capability` or Wordsworth with his `speech of common people`

 

Nothing seems to help very much so –when things get really bad – I turn to these lines of the poet Francis Thompson addressed to a young child uncomprehendingly lisping her mamas  poem.

…………………………….

And ah, we poets…..

Are little more than thou!

And speak a lesson taught we know not how,

And what it is that from us flows

The hearer better than the utterer knows.

 

You can foreshape thy word:

The poet is not lord

Of the next syllable may come

With the returning pendulum;

 And what he plans today in song,

Tomorrow sings it in another tongue.

Where the last leaf fell from his bough,

He knows not if a leaf shall grow:

Where he sows he doth not reap,

He reapeth where he doth not sow.

He sleeps, and dreams forsake his sleep

To meet him on his waking way,

Vision will mate him not by law and vow:

Disguised in life`s most hodden grey

By the most beaten road of every day

She waits him, unsuspected and unknown,

The hardest pang whereon

He lays his mutinous head may be a Jacob`s stone,

In the most iron crag his foot can tread

A dream may strew her bed,

And suddenly his limbs entwine,

And draw him down through rock as sea nymphs might through brine.

But, unlike those feigned temptress ladies who

In guerdon of a night the lovers slew,

When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled,

 Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead!

And though he cherisheth

The babe most strangely born from out her death,

Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe, -

It is not she!

 

I`m not a devotee of the `Poetry is magic` school but, when I read these lines, I cast my eyes back to the `difficult` poem I`ve been reading and take a bit more trouble to try to understand what`s in front of me.

 

Does anyone else have some lines of poetry about poetry which help them like this?