The abandoned municipal parks of poetry

Just pulled in the garage from my daughter's tutorial place. It's forty miles one-way, and gives us time to and from her science and math courses for us to do some academic work of our own.

Biographer's note: my wife and I homeschool our at-home daughter (the older one is at Malone). I was not happy with the religious views fomented by the state in the public school. Neither was I happy that "history" had been eclipsed by a chimera called "social studies," and English had become an enterprise for the promotion of adolescent self-expression, a thing I think should be suppressed.

Today, I drove (which is customary), and my 14-year-old read out loud (a practice I am recommending more often). We turned our attention to a little gem by John Hollander, entitled Rhyme's Reason. Pick it up at Amazon. You will not find it at the Monroeville Barnes and Noble.

My girl read this paragraph from the introduction:

Some day we will all be reading Blue Guides and Baedekers to what once were our own, familiar public places. In former times, the region of verse was like an inviting, safe municipal park, in which one could play and wander at will. Today, only a narrow border of that park is frequently used (and vandalized), out of fear that there is safety only in that crowded strip -- even as the users' grandparents would cling to walks that went by statues -- and out of ignorance of landscape. The beauties of the rest of that park are there, unexplored save by some scholars and often abandoned even by them.

Of course, I had to explain what Blue Guides and Baedekers were. I didn't have to explain the sense of the passage, though, as she understood already that she lives in a non-poetic age. Hollander first wrote this passage in 1981. I can only think that he would wonder, now, if even the strip were used.

I continue to believe, even more incorrigibly, that all real prayer is poetic, and all true poetry is prayer. Poetry is the spirit of language, the structure that makes the mind of man amenable to wisdom and to the cultural memory of beauty. The Trinity can only be sung about, never defined or proposed: the witness can only be carried in song (that is why Orthodoxy can never rest as propositional, only liturgical). Moreover, I believe that all deep poetry points, inexorably, to the Resurrection of the Son of Man.

Bury the Resurrection and there is no poetry. Kill poetry and the Resurrection won't be heard.

Forget poetry and songs will be forgotten, language will shrivel, and will become a technocratic matrix of information exchange.

Teach your children poetry. Forget memorizing for now, but go ahead and get Hollander's Committed to Memory. Return to the sound and magic of reading aloud words and phrases you don't even understand: revel, skip and rejoice in your ignorance -- reading hard poems is the best way to force yourself back into that childhood Our Lord recommends.

Throw away your NIV Psalms: read it in the original King James instead. Read Shakespeare aloud: don't just listen to it on CD in the car. Sing out loud your own melodies for Tolkien's songs when you read it to your wife at night: you will be amazed at how powerfully the words command the tune.

Amass seven hundred and ninety nine pennies, and purchase your own copy of Oscar Williams' Immortal Poems of the English Language. Get it here, or try your bad luck at a box store. In any case, it is a cheap paperback that can stand being stuffed in a glove compartment, shoved in a backpack, baptized in the sea, left out in the sun. It is predestined for doggyearedness.

Then, once you've received your Oscar in the mail (because your luck will have turned out to be bad), pack yourself a lunch: hard crusty palate-steadying bread you bake, still yeasty and weeping earth; a merlot you've decided all on your own, not from lists or highbrow recommendations, but from your own reveries; a cheese that should be, I've been told, unpasteurized; and a fruit in due season. No blanket (I sleep on these, and one cannot read and recline at the same time): find a sitting-stone instead and think for once, in the quiet. And pack your new book that needs to be beaten into oldness as soon as possible. The Orthodox people at the end of the world will be those who can walk in the woods with old shabby books.

Then, take and read. Out loud to the trees (don't be shy, they've heard it all before). Turn to page 458 and read Fr. Hopkins' Pied Beauty. Or page 101 for Herbert's Paradise. If you've the world and time enough, be Smart on page 195 with A Song to David. Read Auden and Eliot if you're in a darkling mood. Read Donne and Traherne if you're theological. Read Shakespeare if you want to learn English and study the subject that was slummed by Freud and actuarialized by everyone today. Read Dante if you want deep civilization and high romance. Explore the old sidewalks, venture into the arbors, set out, at night, into the wildlands of the old municipal park, if you're brave and English enough.

Take a little wine for your stomach and a glad heart, and a poem for your head. Human nature is on the run, and only poets remember it.

Prayerful poetry and poetic prayer (moreso than mythpoeia) are the best defense for whatever's looming next.

Comments

[Theodora Elizabeth]

"Sing out loud your own melodies for Tolkien's songs..."

I came up with a rollicking melody to "Over the Misty Mountains..." from The Hobbit and over 20 years later, I still remembered it when reading this sentence.

I loved poetry when in high school and college and have recently returned to it. I bought The Penguin Book of English Verse (all British) and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. I was saddened when the Penguin book didn't have Byron's "She walks in beauty like the night," but I found it online. Will have to get the Williams volume you recommend.

My reading is a steady diet of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens (just finished A Christmas Carol today), with large doses of Shakespeare, history of various sorts, and the King James Bible (note to self: don't read the latter when tired, as it makes little sense).

[Grumpy Old Man]

We used Immortal Poems in English almost 50 years ago. It was a boys' school so of course we called it "Immoral Poems."

But still, a good anthology.

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

[Catherine K.]

Your praise for "Immortal Poems of the English Language" has made me remember that I have not read poetry in many years, (outside of the poetry found in our hymns, that is :)

Considering the low price of this book - I bought it - and am looking forward to opening it.

Thanks for posting about this.

[Discipulus]

We homeschool our boys. I have been looking for a good collection of poetry to explore with them. Thanks for the recommendations.

You're writings are very helpful and encouraging. Thanks again.