RCG-I Seasonal Salon Fall Equinox 2005

When words fail, we turn to poetry

There are times when words fail. This has been one of those times, these last weeks of summer and early weeks of fall, as we have watched disbelievingly the drowning of so many, the displacement of so many, the physical and psychic torment of so many. The oceanic flood was followed by a flood of words, as journalists struggled to express the day’s events, to convey the depth of human suffering, to examine the sources of the catastrophe. But even that ocean of words seemed ineffective in containing the grief and horror that followed in Katrina’s wake.

There are times when people turn to poetry. Love is one of those times; death, another. When emotion overflows the heart, even the finest prose seems inadequate. At such times, even non-poets turn to the condensed language of poetry for solace.

I have, these weeks, found myself repeating the disturbing line of Dylan Thomas, from his poem “The Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”: “After the first death, there is no other.” It is a distressing poem, one that can seem heartless at first reading. Refusal to mourn? But this refusal is more truly mournful than any sentimental lament would be. Dylan Thomas captures how it feels to be moved by the death of someone we did not and now can never know:

I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.

I have gone back to that poem many times over these past weeks, welcoming its bitter honesty, its lack of pretended intimacy. While the news gives us story after story—the couples who wed in the Astrodome, the little boy separated from his dog Snowball—that tried to get us to feel what the survivors feel, Thomas expresses the sense of violation that such public attention brings.

I have turned as well to the frightening poem by William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” that describes how it feels when the world seems to be coming apart, when “the center does not hold”:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

The Irish poet’s phrase, “the blood-dimmed tide” and his oceanic images have never seemed more appropriate to me. I have heard them over and over in my mind, these last weeks, and they seem to capture my frightened sense that this was not merely a storm but a warning of deeper disturbance.

There has recently been a revival of the old educational tradition of having pupils learn poems by memory. Some object to the practice, claming that training by rote is useless. But I count myself lucky in having grown up with poems recited from memory by others, and in having learned many poems by memory myself. At times like these, the redolent words of great poets come back to comfort me. Making a habit of learning a poem a month, even a few a year, is like filling your pantry with good canned foods against an emergency.

Writing poetry, too, offers its own comfort. Google “Katrina poetry” and you will see that around the nation, people have been pouring out their hearts in poetry. When the heart overflows, poetry is a lifeboat, whether we read it or write it.