Lasting Potential of Poetry

 

Cafe Nero inside Blackwell's Bookshop on Broad Street, Oxford

Path along the Cherwell, Christ Church Meadow

When true appreciation is developed, does the love of poetry ever die? Or does it hold into its long-term potential to reach you differently next time you read it? It kind of comes naturally to insert a poem as a revealing or mysterious sounding collection of words, usually set in shorter phrases and lines that don't reach the end of the page. 

The poem is usually trying to communicate some deep insight into something significant to the story being told through the neighboring lines. Something is needed to develop the progress to a proper conclusion. Nothing can quite sum up an overall feeling or transition to something meaning-drenched like a poem. It comes along in my own creative spirit or from another poet. We all have a sense of poetry in us - we just tend to ignore it because it often speaks of something we don't yet understand and can't grasp. We like to let those kinds of things go, rather than explore them. Poems invite us to explore. 

The depth of poems requires more of us than simply reading a straight-forward sentence. Often, a simple sentence, or even a long sentence, cannot convey the proper emotion or idea like a few carefully selected words in a line of poetry can convey. Yes, poems can be long and meandering, too, sometimes that is how the poet works, but often there are short and concise lines like: 

If we should forget you,
foul our shame.

- Dorothy L. Sayers

I love that about poetry. It's a unique way of expression that has existed since the written form of communication has existed, and likely before all that through verbal storytelling. Sometimes poetry is exactly what we need, but we don't know it yet. 

We should endeavor to grasp what the poetry is aiming to be; one might say - though it is long since I have employed such terms with any assurance - endeavoring to grasp its entelechy. 

- T.S. Eliot

Your word of the day is entelechy. It's a philosophy term that means "the realization of potential" (noun). So T.S. Eliot is saying that poetry has potential, but it takes some effort to endeavor to grasp it. So even the great modern poet is saying that the goal or reading poetry is to grasp what it is aiming to be. We can ask ourselves that as we read. We can come back to it another time. That usually means re-reading it, reading it out loud, paying attention to lines for enjambment, and just reading it slowly. Linger over lines. Read them in multiple locations. That's what I did with this book of sixteenth century poets, I picked up the little green clothbound Everyman's Library Edition in the Oxfam shop on one of my first days in Oxford, and read some of the same lines of Sir John Davies and Sir Philip Sidney in various locations - coffee shops, my flat, down by the Cherwell river. Sometimes it takes an atmosphere to help pull you into a poem.

We seek to know the moving of each sphere,
And the strange cause of the ebbs and floods of Nile:
But of that clock within our breasts we bear,
The subtle motions we forget the while.

We that acquaint ourselves with every Zone
And pass both Tropics and behold the Poles,
When we come home are to ourselves unknown,
And unacquainted still with our own Souls.

- Sir John Davies, from "Nosce Teipsum"