I have a penfriend, sorry, email friend, who made it clear at the very outset that she was a sworn enemy of poetry. “I hate poetry” were her words.
As a poetry-lover, I was stung, mortified. I knew people did not readily take to verse after their bitter struggle with it at school. I also knew hate, like love, could be blind.
It is common knowledge that intense hate can damage the mind. I had no missionary zeal to reform that poetry-hater. Yet I kept baiting her with a variety of simple poems from my numerous anthologies — now a Robert Frost, an Edward Thomas, a Rudyard Kipling, or a Thomas Hardy — and bided my time. Needless to say she finally bit. Now, she bombards me with poems she hunts up on the Internet!
Most folks shy away from poetry on the assumption that poems are hard to follow. That is only partly true. There are numerous poems that are readily accessible and can touch the lay reader emotionally.
Among the many definitions of poetry is this: emotions recollected in tranquillity. There may be some truth in this, as may be seen, for instance, in a poem such as William Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud (Daffodils) or Robert Frost’s Stopping by woods on a snowy evening.
Consider the lines in this simple poem by George Crabbe:The ring so worn, as you behold,/So thin, so pale, is yet of gold:/The passion such it was to prove;/Worn with life’s care, love yet was love.How much the lines tell!
Or, in a lighter vein, consider the anonymous poem Frog: What a wonderful bird the frog are/When he stand he sit (almost);/When he hop he fly (almost)./He ain’t got no sense hardly;/He ain’t got no tail hardly either./ When he sit, he sit on what he ain’t got (almost).
And you laugh your head off (almost).
Even poetry-haters can possibly enjoy comic verse. The English language is rich in that genre. The Oxford Book of Comic Verse contains over 500 poems! If one can enjoy those, one may eventually get to appreciate poetry.
I have compiled, by way of a novice’s baptism in poetry, a few poems that I feel have instant appeal — such as D.H. Lawrence’s Piano, Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop, Fleur Adcock’s For a five-year-old, and Cecil Day Lewis’s Walking away.
I have no brief to promote or popularise English poetry. I was myself not a poetry enthusiast until I bought a copy of the BBC’s The Nation’s Favourite Poems (1995), an anthology based on the results of a nationwide poll in Britain. And now I have quite a few anthologies to keep me going ad infinitum! Like a monkey, I keep jumping from one branch to another on the immense tree called poetry!
What better can you hope for at 95?
pmwarrier9@gmail.com
