Life – long pleasure
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 some 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, or even 90, 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 two to share. The first is by the American, Robert Pinsky whose marvelous 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 a favoruite 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 the world, the latest absurdities in international banking circles; the revolting stories or women and children abused; the mayhem on the roads; the slow and suspicious circling around each other of the politicians. 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.