Sherry Chandler

In other catching up, I wanted to mention that Rebecca Clayton of Pocahontas County Fare did her four things meme back at the end of September, and rather cleverly I thought, she included in it the four poems she meant to memorize in September but will certainly memorize before the year is out.

I’ll have to admit that I didn’t manage to get four poems memorized either. The last week I didn’t even try. My head was too full of meetings and films and readings and other good things.

It was a wonderful exercise, however. I have a sort of grasshopper intelligence, leaping here and there, sampling this and that, and storing little away against the hard times. So it was good discipline for me to pay close attention to these old favorite poems that I thought I knew. Saying them to myself instead of listening to NPR news on my commute, noticing each comma, each rhyme and line break, I realized that I didn’t really know them all that well at all. I certainly had not internalized them.

This internalizing of poetry was the best part of the exercise. I read poetry daily but I don’t say it to myself like prayer. The attempt to memorize put poetry at the center of my day, displacing the constant droning disaster of current events. Mr. Williams’s lines from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” are overquoted because they are true:

My heart rouses
          thinking to bring you news
                    of something
that concerns you
          and concerns many men.  Look at
                    what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
          despised poems.
                    It is difficult
to get the news from poems
          yet men die miserably every day
                    for lack
of what is found there.
          Hear me out
                    for I too am concerned
and every man
          who wants to die at peace in his bed
                    besides.

Best of all, I began to write again. And writing is my joy.

I had a dry summer in more ways than one.

So, I owe September a poem. I think I’ll follow Rebecca’s lead and do a Shelley. I have loved Shelley in my youth. I know the hero is named for Byron but I loved him best in Prometheus Unbound.

And, leafing through my old Norton Anthology just now, I found this Shelley poem, that I don’t think I’ll memorize but which made me smile a bit sadly. The king here is George III:

England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,–
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,–mud from a muddy spring,–
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,–
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,–
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,–
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless–a book sealed;
A Senate,–Time’s worst statute unrepealed,–
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestous day.