Tastes and fads in poetry change as they do in other areas, such as fashion, music, and movies. That’s to be expected, of course, but sometimes we go too far. For instance, poetry use to employ musicality, imagery, and fresh ways of saying things most readers could relate to, but now, I seldom see those qualities that make a good poem great.
Part of this occurred because tastes change, but more often, today’s poems became impoverished because of their subject matter – me, me, me. In addition the advent of the Internet gave everyone the opportunity to publish lines broken down the page that the person calls a poem. With no editor or publisher to teach or tell them otherwise, that now seems to be the norm.
It’s also possible that Internet-published poets have never read poetry except what was forced on them in school. Maybe they don’t even know how delightful a poem can be when given a broader subject or a sense of music or an insightful thought or an awareness of the beauty of language.
Having begun this blog well over a decade ago, I think I can safely say that most of the many, many aspects of poetry have been addressed in various posts, each of which can be called up with a key word or subject typed into the Search box. But at the moment, let’s focus on some memorable lines of poetry that provide examples of the beauty that language can achieve.
In Sonnet 73, William Shakespeare might have been thinking of the winter-bare trees or of the ruined monasteries emptied of monks when he wrote:
“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sing.”
In “God’s Grandeur,” Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed his delight in the beauty of nature and the created world:
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining shook foil.”
In “The Second Coming,” W.B. Yeats wrote what he thought might happen in the end of time. If the falconer is meant to be God, the poem makes more sense to me.
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost wrote:
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
In the rain with black umbrellas all around him, Ezra Pound wrote these gorgeous lines, which comprise the whole poem:
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.”
In “Phenomena,” Robinson Jefferson (who lived near the Pacific Ocean) memorialized smugglers signaling each other in the dark:
“Shining at night in the wave-stir like drowned men’s lanterns....”
During “The Raids, 1940, Night and Dawn,” in England, Dame Edith Sitwell wrote these lines that open with the poem’s title:
“Still falls the Rain---
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss---
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.”
In “The Burial of the Dead” from his book The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot also wrote in a war-torn time:
“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilies out of the dead land...”
Wilfred Owen, a young soldier in WWI, wrote about a bitterly cold night with bullets flying and flares lighting the sky in the poem “Exposure.” That whole poem has exquisite lines and deep insight to express the unglamorous side of war. Unfortunately, the 25-year-old poet’s poems are few as he was killed in action one week before the Armistice:
“Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces—
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed....”
Lord willing, I’ll continue to add to this collection of beautiful lines in future posts. In the meantime, I hope the ones included here will encourage us to raise the standards of our poems as we thoughtfully give voice to a wide range of topics and experiences.
