Poetry: Sighing and Quoting with Learned Looks

This is how I thought poets looked. Bongos, anyone?

I have a sort of on again, off again relationship with poetry. I love it. I used to write poems in my journal all the time as a child and an angsty adolescent. Poetry was something I never felt I could really get into because my cartoonish mind focused on how a poet should look (thanks "Doug") and I didn't fit the bill.

In reality though, poetry is one of those beautiful art forms that-- to risk sounding cliche-- speaks to me. All the mushy love poems make me sigh, all the nature poems are something I relate to or long to experience myself. The way that poetry can sound so pretty and still say so much, even with form limitations, is wholly impressive. I loved it on my own even though I wilted at the thought of poetry in high school English classes.

I took a poetry workshop class in college as an elective. People have very different opinions on what poetry is, I've learned. Some of my classmates were the snap-your-fingers, sit-in-a-hookah-bar-and-write types, but others just took their experiences and made them real to the rest of us. I encountered Doty, Howe, and Alexie. I was falling in love again, and it strengthened as I read Shakespeare, and was fortified in my Brit Lit class.

I found a poem in the anthology for class when I was flipping through trying to find an assigned poem. It was "Adam's Curse" by William Butler Yeats, and it was moving and emotional, profound and beautiful all at once. Something about it stood out to me, and I find myself returning to it and musing about the old, high way of love and how to attain it.

Adam’s Curse

"We saw the last embers of daylight die..."

By William Butler Yeats
 

We sat together at one summer’s end,

That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,   

And you and I, and talked of poetry.

I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.   

Better go down upon your marrow-bones   

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones   

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;   

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet   

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen   

The martyrs call the world.’

                                          And thereupon

That beautiful mild woman for whose sake   

There’s many a one shall find out all heartache   

On finding that her voice is sweet and low   

Replied, ‘To be born woman is to know—

Although they do not talk of it at school—

That we must labour to be beautiful.’

I said, ‘It’s certain there is no fine thing   

Since Adam’s fall but needs much labouring.

There have been lovers who thought love should be   

So much compounded of high courtesy   

That they would sigh and quote with learned looks   

Precedents out of beautiful old books;   

Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.’

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;   

We saw the last embers of daylight die,   

And in the trembling blue-green of the sky   

A moon, worn as if it had been a shell   

Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell   

About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:   

That you were beautiful, and that I strove   

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown   

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.