Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
--W.H. Auden, “September 1,
1939”
As I have confessed once before in this space, I believe that poetry matters—that it can be an important, even necessary, part of life. This is one of the strangest and least defensible things that I believe, and I am fully aware of just how weird it is. But there is no point in trying to talk me out if it at my age. This quirky, romantic notion is just part of who I am.
Unlike most of the things that I have
believed in my life, I can point to the exact moment that I started believing
that poetry mattered. It was not, ironically enough, during the 12 years that I
spent studying literature in college and graduate school. Indeed, for most of
that time, I would have been repelled by the idea that poetry had any practical
value. Spurred on by Seneca and Newman, I had
come to believe that worthwhile intellectual pursuits were supposed to be
useless.
And then Erica died.
Erica was one of my students in an Introduction to Literature class that I taught during my last semester at UCSB. Most of the class was on poetry, which I dutifully and competently (but, alas, dispassionately) explicated for the students every day while they dutifully and competently took notes. About halfway through the semester, Erica and two of her friends were involved in a horrible single-car accident. All three of them were killed, and several of Erica’s best friends were in the class. I was at a loss how to proceed with the rest of the semester.
My supervising teacher, who was also a poet, had a remarkable idea. “This is a chance,” he suggested, “to show the students that poetry really does have value. Rather than cancelling class (which was my first thought) or pretending like nothing happened (my second thought), e-mail the students and ask them to bring in a poem that, in some way, will help them deal with their emotions about Erica’s death.” We did it, and it worked. Some students wrote their own poems, some brought in things that we had read in class, and others searched and found a poem that helped them express their thoughts or pay tribute to Erica. It was an almost surreally positive experience.
I read a poem that day too--one that I had read before but never really experienced until that moment. The poem was Theodore Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane,” which the poet wrote when one of his students was killed after being thrown by a horse. The last stanza of this poem perfectly captured my feelings of deep grief, but also an embarrassed wondering if I was entitled to that grief given my fairly shallow relationship with Erica after only a few weeks in class:
Erica was one of my students in an Introduction to Literature class that I taught during my last semester at UCSB. Most of the class was on poetry, which I dutifully and competently (but, alas, dispassionately) explicated for the students every day while they dutifully and competently took notes. About halfway through the semester, Erica and two of her friends were involved in a horrible single-car accident. All three of them were killed, and several of Erica’s best friends were in the class. I was at a loss how to proceed with the rest of the semester.
My supervising teacher, who was also a poet, had a remarkable idea. “This is a chance,” he suggested, “to show the students that poetry really does have value. Rather than cancelling class (which was my first thought) or pretending like nothing happened (my second thought), e-mail the students and ask them to bring in a poem that, in some way, will help them deal with their emotions about Erica’s death.” We did it, and it worked. Some students wrote their own poems, some brought in things that we had read in class, and others searched and found a poem that helped them express their thoughts or pay tribute to Erica. It was an almost surreally positive experience.
I read a poem that day too--one that I had read before but never really experienced until that moment. The poem was Theodore Roethke’s “Elegy for Jane,” which the poet wrote when one of his students was killed after being thrown by a horse. The last stanza of this poem perfectly captured my feelings of deep grief, but also an embarrassed wondering if I was entitled to that grief given my fairly shallow relationship with Erica after only a few weeks in class:
If only I
could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
Since that day, I
have suffered from the incurable delusion that poetry matters, and I have
turned to it—often late at night and in embarrassed secrecy—to help me sort out
actual problems and process powerful emotions. Recently, when Facebook told me that
April was “National Poetry
Month,” I made a quiet resolution to post a few lines from one of my
favorite poems every day. After all of these years sneaking around and loving poetry on the sly, I
had quite a store.
This worked very well until yesterday, and then something terrible happened. A bomb exploded at the Boston marathon killing at least three people and wounding many more. On the heels of the Newtown shootings and other recent tragedies, this seemed like too much to bear. I needed poetry more than ever.
This worked very well until yesterday, and then something terrible happened. A bomb exploded at the Boston marathon killing at least three people and wounding many more. On the heels of the Newtown shootings and other recent tragedies, this seemed like too much to bear. I needed poetry more than ever.
And there was one
poem that kept coming back to me as I contemplated the violence, the tragedy,
and also the real human compassion and goodness that many people exhibited in
the aftermath of the bombings. The Poem that I turned to—”September 1, 1939” by
W.H. Auden, was written on the day that Germany invaded Poland—that day that
(we know now) World War II began. I had read and taught this poem many times,
but, as before, I never experienced it until yesterday. I posted the
penultimate stanza to my Facebook page:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Ironically, Auden did not consider this a good poem, and he chose not to include it in his Collected Works. Fortunately, anthologists and editors have disagreed and have kept the poem in circulation for many years—largely, I suspect, because it is the sort of poem that lends itself to the kind of historical, contextual, analytical readings that professor like me love to inflict on their students.
But when I finally allowed myself to surrender to the force of the poem, it was a moment of revelation and grace that assured me, among other things, that human beings can draw together after a tragedy, that language gives us the power to turn great pain into profound insight, that beauty can exist in a broken world, and that both the creative mind and the human spirit are—or at least can be—more powerful than the evil things that try to destroy them.
On April 15, 2013, these were precisely the things that I needed to know.
