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Theoretically, I have lots of time on my hands right now yet, somehow, never enough. I have more ideas than the time to write about/enact them. Thinking and discussing poetry was not on the agenda for this week, but the loss of Eavan Boland and the realisation today is Poetry Day in Ireland catapulted it to the fore.
Reflecting on some of the poems I love and that have stayed with me over the years, as well as some of those I love to teach, has been such a pleasant meander through time that I urge you to try it too. I was surprised with the number of poems that came to mind. Below are a few that resonate with me, have shaped me, or constitute meaningful memories (mostly from my schooldays). To avoid this post being far too long, I am not including poems I love to teach. That list may well come another day!
I feel poetry played more of a role in my childhood than it perhaps does for children today. Certainly, there was a weekly expectation to learn poems by rote that is no longer popular. Who else recalls having to learn an English poem, Irish poem, scéal (Irish story) and English and Irish spellings each week?
Most of those are long forgotten but several linger on. One of those is ‘Whether the Weather.’ I think I loved it for the challenge involved in saying it.
Much more meaningful is ‘Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney’ – the poignancy, loss, and grief rendering it unforgettable. I feel this may have been in a 4th class religion book but can’t be certain as to that detail.
In secondary school, learning poems ‘off by heart’ largely went by the wayside, but I recall a challenge in 1st year to learn ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ by Robert W. Serviceand duly I did. I had a no-nonsense English teacher I found inspirational so I suppose I was trying to impress. Although long, the rhyming scheme makes it very easy to learn and it introduces vocabulary not typically used – one of the joys of poetry for me. Never before had I heard the word moil.
I discovered one of my favourite poems, ‘The Piano’ by D.H. Lawrence, in a Junior Cert exam paper. I am not quite sure why it resonated so deeply with me. Certainly “sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings” was not something I had experienced, yet the musicality of the poem, the beauty of the language, the manner in which it builds to a crescendo captivated me. Some 25 years later, I still love it.
Studying poems for exams can suck the pleasure out of many of them (thinking of Kavanagh’s ‘Stony Grey Soil’). Surviving that fate, possibly due to its brevity and simplicity is ‘Subh Milis’ by Seamús Ó’Neill. To explain the poem to non-Irish speakers it talks about a child who left sticky jam prints on the jamb of the door, but the parent, pondering a time when the child would be grown and gone, stifled their annoyance and let it go. Another is ‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ by W.B. Yeats.
As I reflect on numerous other poems on my list, pathos springs to mind. One is Eavan Boland’s ‘Quarantine, ’ a poem recounting the loss of a couple during the Famine and honouring their love. It is easy to write romantic love poems. Boland tells of sacrifice made in the name of love. She is hard-hitting when it comes to the cause of their death,
“In the morning they were both found dead. Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.”
Perhaps it is because such senseless loss echoes through our history that poems of loss and sadness resonate and echo so much and why ‘Funeral Blues’ by W.H. Auden is also on my list. Mary Elizabeth Frye offers a more hopeful take in Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep – one that offers much comfort.
Suffering and hardship characterised the life of the next poet I have chosen, namely Antoine Ó Raifteirí. Several of his poems could be on this list but that which is most meaningful is when he talks of his return to Mayo (where I am from) in ‘Anois Teacht an Earraigh.’
To choose just one war poem and war poet is incredibly difficult, but I have selected ‘Does it Matter?’ By Siegfred Sassoon for it speaks to me of the futility of war.
Similarly, to select just one Maya Angelou poem is an almost impossible task, but I love the spirit in ‘Still I Rise.’ Echoing this spirit are the words of Langston Hughes in ‘I, Too’. And who can forget the spirit of liberation in ‘The Penitent’ by Edna St. Vincent Millayas she casts off the shame and guilt she is supposed to feel? A more modern poet but no less feisty is Wendy Cope. Here is the brilliant ‘Differences of Opinion.’
Some poems uplift by the power of the words and message; others uplift with their humour as in ‘A Boy Named Sue’ by Shel Silverstein – doubtless rendered all the more memorable for being sung by Johnny Cash. Another poem put to music and one that redeems Patrick Kavanagh for me is ‘Raglan Road.’
There are so many poems I have left out and, doubtless, many more forgotten as I reminisce today. Reflecting the curriculum I studied, I am aware this list is not very balanced and is heavily Irish-centric. I would love to read some of your lists. What poems continue to linger in your memory long after you first heard them? What poems is my life less rich for not having been exposed to? Please do share.
Some lists and activities I found that readers may enjoy are to be found at the following links:
