For many individuals, poetry seems to lack the pop and pizzazz of other
forms of artistic expression and entertainment. While this may be
superficially true, I have come to realize that the energy and drive of
a poem (at least the good ones) become apparent only from multiple
readings and intense interpretation. To extract the soul of a poem, the
reader must first be willing to bare his own. Unlike modern Western
theater and the contemporary cinematic experience (where the viewer is
rather passive, a recipient of expression), the poem requires an active
participant.
While I would love to write for hours on Keats, or Yeats, or Blake, I haven’t the time. However, because it is National Poem in Your Pocket Day (see today’s impressive Netcetera feature), I feel compelled to share a bit of Auden: "Musée des Beaux-Arts." While the poem covers a lot of philosophical and aesthetic territory, I have always valued the continual relevance of its subject matter: our ability as humans to continue our daily routines, our work, and our entertainment (or poetry reading) with the knowledge that tragedy and suffering are occurring simultaneously.
Of course, not all poetry is this somber (see Mark Doty’s "Golden Retrievals").
Anyway, for your reading pleasure:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Devin Felter
Web Production
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