I talk about poetry
not because I think
it’s important, not really;
or if it does rank
among the things that matter,
surely it’s only
as a communication
from writer to book
and thence to reader,
needing no further conversation
to make it work.
I talk about poetry
because it’s something
to talk about. I don’t care
what we’re talking
about, just as long as we
talk. If all my speech
was of true things, vital things,
just the important
things, just what I really meant;
why, then all my speech
would communicate nothing
to my companions
except love, love and longing:
a longing to be
close, closer than their own skins
to them, to be them,
to occupy the same air.
For each human soul
is alone: mind never speaks
to mind except through
two unfaithful messengers,
a mouth and an ear.
And so my study through all
my life has been of the fittest words
to transmit thoughts between minds,
and that, I suppose, is why
I talk about poetry.
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This resonated with me in a way I can't quite put my finger on. I suspect it's because I do the same thing, a lot of the same things. Every so often you run across a poem (or a prose) which flattens you with the revelation that language can *do* this; a clutch of those 'fittest words /to transmit thoughts between minds'.
ReplyDelete'Thoughts between minds', incidentally, is a beautiful phrase.
I like the subtlety of the structuring, here; at first it looks like lazy free verse, that you could relineate and it would be prose. And then I had another look and started to see the places where the line-breaks set up little meaningful disconnects: 'For each human soul / is alone: mind never speaks' is a case in point, where for a moment it seems as if the sentence ends there, before the next line carries on the thought.
And finally the whole vocabulary of this particular poem has something faintly antique, oddly dignified, about it. Again, can't quite put my finger on it; but a particular sort of effect created by the collocation of words like 'companions' and 'fittest' and 'unfaithful' and 'thence' - words just a trifle too heavy for casual conversation, but not glaringly out-of-place.
Thanks for reading and commenting. I'm delighted with each of your opinions on this: I hoped you would find yourself in agreement with the conceit of the poem, and I'm very pleased with what you said about the words I used. Even the fact that it looked like lazy free verse at first is a kind of compliment, because this thing is written in pretty tight form: all but three lines have either 7 or 5 syllables, and it's slant-rhymed throughout. I'm glad I managed to avoid wrenching my vernacular tongue to fit the form (although I confess I did cheat a bit on lines 10, 11, 35 and 36, because after all, if it's going to look like free verse, it might as well be free verse, n'est-ce pas?).
ReplyDeleteThe antique diction... my pen did hover for a while over "why, then...", but on the whole I'm glad I left it in.