Secret Stirrings

I sit surrounded by volumes of old and contemporary literature, journals of varied styles and file cabinets of papers wondering when in my life poetry first became a voice. What poet contributed an image or word that lingered in my mind long after the page was closed? And why the poem over story that spoke with equal honesty to the questions of living?

I saw in lines of the poets, things I could learn about life at a time when I knew nothing. And there were covert messages, secret stirrings that hinted at ideas beyond the literal. I delighted in decoding them. Nothing in life seemed literal to me; the echo of similar stirrings within myself pointed to what I later discovered to be the voice of truth.

Here, a few samples of those who spoke earliest to me:

. . .

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

. . .

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

. . .

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

. . .

from Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

~ ~ ~

. . .

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

. . .

from And Did Those Feet by William Blake

~ ~ ~

. . .

A fearful hope was all the world contained;

. . .

The brows of men by the despairing light

Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits

The flashes fell upon them; some lay down

And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest

Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;

. . .

And War, which for a moment was no more,

Did glut himself again—a meal was bought

With blood, and each sate sullenly apart

Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;

All earth was but one thought—and that was death

. . .but two

Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies: they met beside

The dying embers of an altar place,

. . .

And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands

The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other’s aspects—saw, and shrieked, and died—

Even of their mutual hideousness they died,

Unknowing who he was upon whose brow

Famine had written Fiend. . . .

The populous and the powerful was a lump

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.

. . .

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;

The winds were withered in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perished; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe.

from Darkness by George Gordon, Lord Byron

~ ~ ~

. . .

With all the numberless goings-on of life,

Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame

Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.

Methinks its motion in this hush of nature

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

Making it a companionable form,

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit

By its own moods interprets, everywhere

Echo or mirror seeking of itself,

And makes a toy of Thought.

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

Fill up the interspersed vacancies

And momentary pauses of the thought!

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

And in far other scenes! For I was reared

In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

But thou my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

Of that eternal language, which thy God

Utters, who from eternity doth teach

Himself in all, and all things in himself.

Great universal Teacher! he shall mold

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

. . .

from Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All photos courtesy of Vengiletti