What Poetry Can Teach Us
What use is poetry? Couldn’t society get on quite well without it? I mean it doesn’t really DO anything now does it? By Elaine Dobbyn
Wendy Cope captures society’s attitude to poetry vividly in the bitterly sarcastic ‘Engineers’ Corner’:
We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints –
That’s why so many poets end up rich, While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets.
Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch?
Whereas the person who can write a sonnet
Has got it made. It’s always been the way, For everybody knows that we need poems And everybody reads them every day.
Yes writing poetry is not exactly a lucrative endeavour and yet generation after generation of writers and readers are called to it. Why? Well, as I see it, poetry feeds the bits of us that money can’t. Money can’t buy you love or family, comfort in starkest despair or happiness for that matter. Poetry, however, can help us when it comes to these matters. …when I’m weary of considerations, And life is too much like a pathless wood…
It can help us cope with grief and loss, it can remind us what really brings joy in life, it can shine a light on injustice, it can record for posterity a story, a picture, a feeling.
One of John F Kennedy’s last speeches was in honour of Robert Frost and in it he said: When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgment.
‘The basic human truths’ – that’s what poetry does. It strips away all the nonsense – all filters, artifice, dishonesty, all the smoke and mirrors that we throw up between
ourselves and others, between ourselves and this life we barely understand, between ourselves and ourself. I find myself reaching for lines from poems to express what I’m trying to say even here:
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open
Heaney was describing a visit to the Flaggy shore in Clare on a wild, windy day but he might also be describing this life of ours and those rare precious moments when we lift our blinkers and see the true beauty of the world around us.
On this year’s Leaving Cert poetry course there are poems to inspire, nurture, record and speak out. Poems that speak out against injustice include Boland’s ‘Famine Road’, Frost’s ‘Out Out –‘ and ‘Translation’ by Ní Chuilleanáin. Poems that inspire me personally include: Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘To Niall Woods’ (written for a wedding where she was allotted a two-minute speech!), Boland’s ‘Love’, Durcan’s ‘Parents’ and Keats’ ‘To one who has been long in city pent’.
A teenager sitting their Leaving Cert might pick a completely different list of poems; one who lives in an isolated part of the countryside might pick different poems to one who lives in a busy urban centre, a shy kid, different poems to the confident one.
Maybe the same poems can appeal to very different people. Poetry can create a shared bond across generations, religions and cultures, it can live on long beyond the lifetime of the poet because it speaks to these ‘basic human truths’. Perhaps this is what Keats was trying to get at: ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”