Accents
Poetry: beyond classroom memorization
Part Two
Two other columns cut into the continuity of this topic on poetry: the hazing casualty at UP and grandmother thoughts for Grandparents' Day. Timeliness and the impact of an event supplant poetic thoughts in column-writing because one has to seize the day, so to speak. As for poetry, it's always there especially when one lacks for subjects to talk about. So universal and omnipresent—a never-ending fountain from whence spring ideas to suit the moment, any moment you're in. So comforting like a cherished friend.
Take these lines from Beowulf to calm down anxiety: For if a man be only bold of heart/And if his time to die has not yet come/Fate will often spare him thus/And lead him safely out of the hardest strife. I recited the whole stanza to my Aunt Excelsa who was waiting for her son who failed to call up from an extended business trip. My aunt had been my English teacher in high school, and the lines she told us to memorize came back to her. Thanks to the anonymous author of this epic, she felt quite comforted.
Talk of the perfect plan that turned out to be imperfect? The precision buttons refused to budge and you're back to square one. Robert Burns, Scotland's beloved bard, rationalizes the failure of the supposedly guaranteed outcome: The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry/And leave us naught but pain and grief for promised joy. From these lines came the title of John Steinbeck's famous novel, Of Mice and Men, when personhood stands tall, apart from the mice among men.
Lines from poetry are immortalized in many a writer's masterpiece. From Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard came Thomas Hardy's novel Far from the Madding Crowd. English poet Gray preceded Hardy by a century. Several times I myself have used his phrase to express sweet solitude away from the rat-race of the madding crowd. Like burying oneself in a book in the silent nooks of libraries or communing with one's Creator in the emptiness of a church or finding peace in the silent chambers of one's own heart—far, far away from the madding crowd.
Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls is taken from John Donne of the legendary "No man is an island entire of itself…therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." I recall this very well because the novel was made into a movie starring my favorites, Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper, both now residing across the Great Divide. The bookworm of my age, 60-70 or thereabouts, will most likely recall this, too.
Think of the lovelorn who walks alone on a moonlit night. The setting is ripe for romance, and from England's Elizabethan Period, Sir Philip Sidney fleshes out his/her thoughts: "O Moon, tell me, Do they above love to be loved, and yet/Those lovers scorn those whom love doth possess?" Young lovers like Shakespeare's Juliet may tell her Romeo to refrain from swearing by the moon: "O swear not by the inconstant moon that monthly changes." You doubt the swearing Romeo? True love can pass the litmus test as Shakespeare tells you in one of his sonnets: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds."
My previous column on the uses of poetry beyond the classroom opened with a quote from Percy Bysshe Shelley about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. Shelley's contention is affirmed by an elder, Sir Philip Sidney, who claims in The Defence of Poesie that "by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical forces of philosophy, [poetry] is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue. Be roused to virtue then, any hour of the day or night, by following a father's advice to his son, i.e., Polonious to Laertes, from Shakespeare's Hamlet: "This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man." Stark food-for-thought for one Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, pseudo-statesmen, and a coterie of politicians.
Someday, somewhere, whether here in the US continent where I am now or in the motherland, I'll pan for gold, yes, golden thoughts in poetry's vast, enriching and edifying mining ground. Pan I will for insightful lines that have steered humankind toward positive action. For now let me just say, to be continued. (Comments to lagoc@hargray.com)