Hi, friends.

I'm thinking about the difference between an academic view of poetry and a poet's view. The academic understands and admires the craft and the vision that went into creating the poem. The poet views it in a nuts and bolts fashion, expecting to do something of the sort himself. It's like an architect looking at a famous building, versus a scholar. I remember in grammar school we memorized poems and it was great. It stopped in junior high. If I ever got to teach poetry writing, I would want to start by looking at the classics, memorizing them, then imitating some of what they are doing. If we did that, and then went to a typical open mic, we'd know immediately that most of what we're hearing is not good. To be fair, there's a lot of garbage in every age. It just doesn't last.

When I did my artistic inventory a few years ago I talked about the influences on my writing. I want to share what I wrote about Keat's "Ode to a Nightingale."

Nightingale – one of my favorite poems in the whole world, tho much longer than I can usually appreciate. He maintains the high quality all through. Ababcdecde.

He’s not feeling well – drowsy numbness. He hears the joyful song of the nightingale and it makes him intensely, unbearably happy. He would like to be like this bird. He would like to drink some magical wine that would enable him to disappear and go with the bird into its happy world. Why is he so unhappy? He sees the misery of the human race – sickness, death, fever and fret, people groaning and you can’t do anything to help them. Though his brain is slow, he is determined to use poetry instead of wine in order to transcend the misery of life. He dreams of moonlit parties, but where he sits is dark and mossy. So he uses his sense of smell to imagine the various flowers, many of which are exotic and unknown to most people. They stand for spiritual realities and nuances.

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fig tree wild,

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine,

Fast fading violets covered up in leaves,

And mid-May’s eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.”

This is the point where if someone reads the poem out loud, I begin to weep. When we can’t see our way, we imagine what it would be like to be at home in the universe, to belong to our lives. So he listens to the bird, he smells the flowers, he thinks about how everything is integrated in nature. But there is no answer so he reflects on the easefulness of death.

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time,

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath.

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –

To thy high requiem become a sod.”

So it wouldn’t be any good to die, and not be able to hear the bird, but he’d like to become different – simpler, happier.

“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!” What’s he talking about? Birds have a very short life span. There’s nothing immortal about them, except what they may inspire in a complex, brilliant, unhappy man like John Keats. “No hungry generations tread thee down.” He’s oppressed by history, by all the folly of the human race. He thinks of the bird as a sort of Platonic absolute that appears in ancient Rome, and in Biblical times, to call people to higher realities.

Finally the bird falls silent and flies away, leaving him forlorn. He’s been so caught up that he’s not sure whether he’s waking up, or whether he truly awakened and now is falling asleep, back to the same dreary, limited, painful life.

As to form, the regular rhyme is compensated by varying the number of stresses to a line. 5555555355 He also reverses the foot a lot, adds unstressed syllables, but all in a smooth way – he writes iambics as others write prose.

Take a look at "Nightingale" some time.

Love, Barbara