Reading a biography now of an author who wrote poetry when he was in high school, as if that were a normal thing to do, I wonder. Was it because he lived with a poet, in a house that hosted poets? Was it because he had friends – friends different from him, and from one another – was it because his friends wrote poetry, that he, too, wrote? Was poetry what young people did a hundred years ago, in small-town America? Was it because their minds were not filled with processed and packaged slogans and jingles, songs and rhymes, chosen by another? Was it because poetry is what they read? Was it because it is beauty?
I do not know. I do know that poetry, of most every sort, has almost always eluded me: enjoying it, appreciating it, understanding it. One time or another I have found, enjoyed, appreciated, or even learned a poem or two, and that has tantalized me, but sufficed. One, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, I recited from memory when in tenth grade; that, and another, I share with you now, because there ought to be more poetry.
Monsignor Smith
'Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend'
Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen
justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And àll tràdes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
