The Power of Poetry

In addition to the power of poetry to create pleasure and appreciation (see previous posts), there is the power of poetry to motivate and inspire, to change consciousness, shape attitudes and even influence behavior.

Each of the haiku quoted in the June 13 post focuses the mind on an image and a vicarious experience which has the power to heighten our sensitivity to the world around us. Poetry can enhance our consciousness of what we observe on a daily basis.

Similarly the poem “Design” by Robert Frost (June 29) may make it impossible for us to look at a white flower, a spider or a moth in quite the same way again. Even more, though, Frost’s poem disrupts the popular view of nature’s innocence and challenges us to confront the predatory behavior at the heart of surviving and thriving in nature. Pretty sentiments about nature’s beauty are dramatically exposed as naïve and superficial. The darker truth that life feeds on life is conveyed with chilling effect. A sentimentalist about nature would be seriously challenged.

“The Woman Hanging from the 13th Floor Window" (July10), depending on how it’s read and by whom, can equally challenge the conservative who opposes government programs to help the poor and protect the environment and the liberal who supports them. Likewise, it can challenge the believer in a random universe, the believer in a universe governed by a grand plan, or the proponent of human free agency.

One of my graduate school professors used to love to quote the following lines from W.H. Auden as an example of unmatched beauty in poetic expression:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

The rhythm and sound effects, the elevated language, and the timeless images of human limitation and transcendence powerfully and poignantly convey the universal human dilemma of aspiration in perpetual tension with mortality.

As we appreciate the power of the poetic composition, as we are moved to identify and sympathize with this lofty expression of our shared human condition, however, all we need ask about to bring us into a change of consciousness is the sexuality of the lovers. Most readers will assume it is a heterosexual love poem, but Auden was a gay man, and in 1937 when the poem was written a homosexual relationship was predominantly associated with sexual deviance and perversion, not to be in any way confused with the emotional grandeur or the noble tragedy of romantic love.

Yet, out of his experience as a lover of men, Auden can write a poem that captures the universal human experience of love that is both transcendent and earth-bound.

Though Auden wrote in a time when his sexual orientation had to be disguised and hidden, his poem serves to raise the experience of same sex love to that of the legendary romantic love stories to be found in heterosexual literature. Such an effect might be powerful enough to move even a homophobic religious right conservative. Or else, such an effect might require an equally powerful resistance from such a reader.

Even if the reader does not know Auden’s sexuality and reads it as a heterosexual love poem, the words complicate idealized notions of romantic love, fidelity, “til death do us part,” and unspotted beauty. At the same time that it undercuts transcendent love, it celebrates love that transcends human imperfection.

Such complexity captured in such concentrated poetic form has the power to challenge both the gay rights advocate and heterosexual marriage proponent alike.

Thus ends this series on the uses, the pleasure, and the power of poetry.

The Sensory Pleasures of Poetry

There is no purer way to appreciate the sensory pleasures of poetry than through nonsense verse:

Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gymble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe. –Lewis Carroll

Regardless of the meaning, the repetition of sounds (“toves” and “borogoves,” “gyre and gymble,” “wabe” and “outgrabe”) provides pleasure to the ear. As do “brillig and “slithy,” repeating the liquid “l” and rhyming the two different “i” sounds.

The predominantly iambic (unstressed/stressed syllables) tetrameter (four stressed syllables to a line) broken by two strong spondees (two stressed syllables in a row) in the fourth line offers a combination of regular rhythm and unexpected variation, which avoids both a sleep-inducing sing-songy effect and the jarring cacophony of disordered sounds.

My favorite limerick growing up, partly because I was so skinny as a youth, offers an irresistible combination of mirthful imagery, delightful rhythms, and playful repetition:

There was a young lady from Lynn
Who was so exceedingly thin
That when she assayed
To drink lemonade
She slipped through the straw and fell in.—Anonymous

There’s something about that final “fell in” that is both natural and unexpected at the same time. It is quite a trick to combine both the satisfaction of expectation and the pleasure of surprise.

The image of the skinny lady falling through a straw is entertaining because it is both ridiculous and somehow logical. The lady and the straw have nothing logically in common, except that they are both thin, a comparison that takes a poetic imagination to see.

At the level of imagery, sensory pleasure overlaps with the fun of mental gymnastics.

No greater pleasure in imagery can be found than in Japanese haiku. The vicarious sensory experience, whether it be visual, auditory, or tactile, is characteristically concentrated and intense:

On a withered branch
A crow has settled--
Autumn nightfall.—Basho

A lightening-gleam
Into darkness travels
A night-heron’s scream.—Basho

What piercing cold I feel!
My dead wife’s comb in our bedroom,
Under my heel…--Buson

And each image suggests a story, whether it be of the rhythms of nature or of human drama. Stories provide pleasure by imitating life, expressing human emotion, and presenting them in such a way as to render order and beauty out of raw experience.

The dying branch, the settling crow, the closing year, and the falling night put the universal story of decline into parallel form. The flash of lightening in the dark similarly mirrors the heron’s scream breaking the silence of night, again imaging the universal story of sudden contrast and unexpected surprise. And the physical sensation of a cold comb under a widower’s heel captures the story of a cold marriage bed, as well as of the cold grave.

The chaos of actual experience is tamed and made, not only bearable, but beautiful.

Such are the sensory pleasures of poetry.