Tsunami, 49 & 50. Poetry.

Yesterday was World Poetry Day. When I heard it, it was in the evening of a lazy day, so I didn't feel much like writing. It was one of those days in which I want to be where I am, but also somewhere else, only I don't know where. In the end, we went for a drive up in the hills. We discovered my husband's car can get through rocky paths more proper for tractors. The fact that today there is a brush fire near where we drove has nothing to do with us.

I've always liked poetry. Short, concise ideas and emotions, read at a fell swoop that contain the entire truth of the world in a few syllables. Yet, poetry is falling more and more out of favor with the general reading public. How many have bought a book of poetry in the last year? How many even consider poetry true literature?

It is merely skimmed over in most school curriculums. I dimly recall learning the different types of poems in primary school. By secondary, we were more into reading and understanding the message the poet was trying to convey. In our local schools, it is merely brushed over without much ado. I think I read more of Machado's poems in Spanish foreign language class back in Boston, than any high school students read in his own country. 

Caminante, son tus huellas

el camino y nada mas;

Caminante no hay camino,

se hace camino al andar...

That poem has stayed with me since I read it in Ms Ponte's Advanced Placement Spanish class. Walker, your footprints/are the way and nothing else;/Walker, there is no path,/the path is made by walking... Hopefully next year we can visit Machado's grave in Collioure, France, where he died in exile after the Spanish Civil War. 

One whose tomb I never visited, even though it was close behind my house in Forest Hills Cemetery, in Boston, was e.e. cummings. I particularly like his poem, next to of course god america i. It seems quite appropriate now, as well.

...why talk of beauty what could be more beau-

tiful than these heroic happy dead

who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter

they did not stop to think they died instead

then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"...

Poetry, though much older than prose, has been shunted aside by thrillers that spend weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Yet, it was how thrillers used to be told. The Iliad is one of the earliest examples of an epic poem. Beowulf is the first literature to be written in what would evolve into modern English. El Cantar de mío Cid is Spain's first epic poem written in old Castilian rather than Latin. The poem La Chanson de Roland is the first major work written in French. All are poems, and all tell heroic tales of famous men of their time. They were mostly meant to be told, rather than read, but they were written down at some point, so as not to be lost. Few people knew how to read in those times; the monks copied them down, and thanks to them, we can enjoy them now. 

Modern life tends to shun poetry. Yet, it survives. John F. Kennedy was the first to have an inaugural poet, with Robert Frost, Joe Biden the latest, with Amanda Gorman. A poem brings as much force as a speech, or more. It brings a state of mind, a way of thinking. It clears up the air, setting things in their place. Sometimes, a poem says more than an hour's speech. I remember once, on Boston's Channel Five news, a commentator, whose name I've forgotten, read a poem one year's end. It was by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and it said all that we needed to know.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light. 

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

 

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow.

The year is going, let him go;  

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

 

Ring out the grief that saps the mind, 

For those that here we see no more;

Ring out the feud of rich and poor;

Ring in redress to all mankind.

 

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of lfie,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

 

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

 

Ring out the false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

 

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

The presenter stopped there, the thought complete, though the poem continues with a last stanza:

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Written in the nineteenth century, that poem was still perfect for the end of the twentieth, and for this tumultuous twenty-first century we are living. Poetry lasts forever because humans don't change.

Life continues.