Someone asked me today why I like poetry. Answering that question can either be the easiest thing in the world, or the hardest.
Poetry is the food of the soul. Giving yourself to it is like being in love, only a hundred thousand times more so. It can make you feel more alive, more vital, as though you are seeing the world through a refracting glass that makes it at once grander and more terrible, heightening the joys and intensifying the woes.
A certain wonderful symmetry this world attains; if the moment is right the words on the page gain a life of their own, an improbable perfection that seems to have come from the golden lyre of Apollo himself.
The world the verses build around you is ephemeral, perhaps, but however swiftly it is gone it has enriched your life by its touch. Teresa Macri wanders through it, forever young, forever beautiful, forever the Maid of Athens. The heroes created by a hundred generations of poets are frozen in that moment of divine glory that can come to any human being only once. Even those whose tales end in tragedy are endowed with an exquisite gravity that raises them far higher than the proudest of monarchs or warriors.
It is in these immortal verses that we know what has come before, that we can read, if we are wise, what will come after. Bone fragments and pottery shards tell you how the people of the past lived, what they ate and whether or not they had domesticated the carthorse. Their poetry speaks to you of their souls, their dearest hopes and worst fears.
Archaeologists might tell you, with a certain degree of accuracy, when the Trojan War was fought. Only Homer can tell you how Achilles felt when, having chosen eternal glory over long life, he stood on the sands of Asia Minor looking at Priam's impregnable fortress. Only Homer can make you feel it yourself.
In that he is sublime, for it is to him we turn when we want to know, not the physical substance of the ancient world, but its proud, beautiful, terrible heart. He who is blind makes us see with eyes that are something more than mortal.
This, too, is how they will remember us three thousand years from now. They will not ask what kind of clothes we wore or concern themselves unduly with whether or not phytoplankton was considered a delicacy. They will turn to the works our poets, writers and artists have left behind, and read in those our innermost souls.
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4 comments:
Still, why poetry? Prose, grammatical ly sound, can also be beautifully written.
Poetry is prose infused with rhythm. Prose speaks, declaims, declares. Poetry does all that too. But it also sings and serenades and longs and mourns like prose never can. Prose is often not much more than the idea contained in it. Poetry is a thought carved and crafted in meter, wrapped in rhythm, and infused with life by melody.
(apologies, the previous comment was grammatically unsound)
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