Poetry and hope

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately. Not very unusual to be honest. I enjoy it and there’s so much I don’t know and haven’t read. So many contemporary poets I’ve never even heard of, and quite a few poets of past eras as well. What tends to happen when I start reading poetry though is that I go back to poems I know and love. I get the urge to re-read old favourites. And I do. I read my favourite Emily Dickinson, Sappho, Shelley, Auden, Langston Hughes, Shakespeare, Robert Frost, William Blake, Pablo Neruda and the list goes on. In most cases I don’t know anywhere near everything they’ve written, in most cases I don’t feel the need to. I do love stumbling across poems I’ve forgotten, or never read before that can move me to laughter or tears or rage or melancholy all in the space of a few short lines. I love that language can be used so efficiently, so beautifully and so justly.

Personally I don’t write poetry, for the same reason that I don’t paint. I have absolutely no gift for it. I just admire those who can. Whoever reads this should now breathe a sigh of relief, I will never subject anyone to any bad poetry of mine. (My bad prose is an entirely different story), I will however occasionally borrow the works of others. And today I’ve been thinking a lot about a poem by Emily Dickinson about hope. A friend of mine once mentioned that romantic hope had no business growing in his vicinity, and yet it sprouts up. (Of course he’s incorrect in his assumption that romantic hope has no business around him. He’s in many ways the poster boy for romantic hope.) Hope exists everywhere if you let it, in places and people where you fear it might have died a long time ago. And good old Emily described hope beautifully.

Hope is the thing with feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson

(Jan 6, 2006)