Breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Land (Part One!)

April, the cruelest month (ha!) is also National Poetry Month. This means that it is time for me to tell you what I think about poetry, and to, in theory, hear what you think thereon. My thoughts about poetry, I should say going in, are even more confused than my thoughts about novels or my thoughts about the role of literature in modern American intellectual life, if you can imagine such a thing. But here are some poems I like and a little on why, and hopefully you can use these as a goad to celebrate the month properly until we get to New Zealand Music Month (no joke!).

First up: “Corinna’s Going A-Maying” by Robert Herrick. Before we get to him though, since NZMM is fast approaching, here’s Murray Hewitt:

“I’m not, you know, embarrassed to admit this, but I can’t really put my emotions into words, so I’ve decided to use lyrics.”

Writing lyrics when you haven’t got any music to put them on top of is kind of like giving yourself leave to write terrible poetry. If things slow up, through a few “ooohs” in. Or allow people to imagine that caterwauled it will do better. Or bring up your dead budgie to bring up emotions. Anyway, this Herrick poem seems to be the opposite. This poem seems to me to be among the best at doing what songs ought to do. Its stanzas bounce back and forth between long and short lines, as the speaker gets himself more and more excited about going a-maying with Corinna. He basically provides a swift-moving list, Dr. Seuss style, of things that the other kids are already out doing – “Some have dispatched their cakes and cream/Before that we have left to dream”. And, jubilantly songlike, Herrick sustains his one mood of relatively (compared to say, Marvell) innocent ebullience just until the last stanza when his almost de rigeur, for his century, remarks on the ubiquity of death show up for some gravity. It has been nice out in Massachusetts the last few days, and I have gotten much use out of “Corinna’s Going A-Maying.”

The remaining poems are nothing like that at all.

Here’s another one on nature, but this time Nature catapulted into thought and Proper Noundom, by Wordsworth, in his “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern blah blah”, which I boycotted in High School but have come to love. My favorite part of this kind of broody but hopeful poem is this:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration

That chunk is the second thing I think poems can do so well (after reverse the damage done by crappy, songless, non-word lyrics), especially broody poems like this, is put enough verbiage around a thought to arrest it and make it available for study. I think that most people have done what Wordsworth is doing here – basically, being nostalgic – but not most people have paid so much attention to what they are doing. A poem like “Lines blah blah” – and even more so Wordsworth’s Prelude, which I am still a little terrified of and have yet to finish reading – slows cognition down, forcing you to take account of exactly the words that are constitutive of that experience. The unpacking just to be done in Wordsworth’s last phrase – tranquil restoration – is a solid and rewarding exercise. This is, in a different way from lyrical doggerel, another opposite of Herrick’s poem, in which words sped themselves up in joy; Wordsworth slows us down in contemplation.

This is getting long, and for only like the second time since I had to show up at Commencement, I have important business tomorrow. I do have two more poems, and some Northrop Frye, that I want to tell you about, so, meet me here tomorrow night? For Browning and Yeats? Kthanxbai.