Taking a… err… leaf… out of Peter Green’s blog, here’s a book off one of the shelves in the study.
Feeling a bit out of sorts this morning – waking at 0300 and failing to go back to sleep due to fidgetty chihuahuas and unleashed thoughts will do that to you – and sitting in the cold study I couldn’t settle to anything.
So I picked the book up and read W.H. Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats.
I love the first reading of a poem, where all the images just flash before my eyes and I have a sort of A HA! moment.
The A HA! is different for every poem. With this one:
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
I am thinking of Nelson Mandela, lying in hospital on life support.
Thinking also of those I know who died recently.
When will my last afternoon as myself come? No not morbid, just thinking about life and the things we do and what matters.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living.
The poet leaves her work as her legacy.
The second, third, and subsequent readings are still good, but it’s always the first reading that gets that visceral reaction from me. I think this is why I always seem to take forever to read poetry – I don’t want that wonderful A HA! to pass. I wish it was preservable… At least it can be recreated every time I read something new to me.
This book is certainly life saving for me – certainly it is life making too, for every time I open it something does happen, if only in my mind.
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.
One Comment
Your post prompted me to write something about poetry on my blog (in process). I don’t think that we are a generation that knows how to read poetry. It takes too long to really absorb and requires relection. On the other hand I think the poets of today are the lyric writers whose song lyrics resonate. I had R.E.M. on my iPod this morning. You know what I mean.