“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”
I’ve always had a bit of an affinity with poetry...I can’t remember when it really started...I presume it was at school but I remember no specific poem that stands out...or that started the ball rolling...not really. I recall the likes of Wordsworths Daffodils of course and the wandering lonely as a cloud...but that wasn’t what made the connection...in fact it is probably one of my least remembered pieces...perhaps a bit twee and lacking any punch...to me anyway. A bit too pleasantly anodyne for my tastes. If I did have to pin it down to a poet then i’d probably say Wilfred Owen...the visceral rawness of his work appealed to me...not just the gore (which was why he was popular at school) but the starkness of it...I remember that one of the earliest emmotional gut punches I got from a poem was the line in Strange Meeting...”I am the enemy you killed, my friend/I knew you in this dark for so you frowned/yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed/I parried but my hands were loath and cold”. Perhaps that was indeed it...the moment when I grasped the essential nature of poetry...it’s capacity to engage the intellect and the emmotions as one...and to impact both in a way that was ...and is...difficult to define. You just feel it. As when something takes the breath from you ...or roots you to the spot. Of course the whole point is that you cannot explain it...if you have to explain it it tends to invalidate it to some degree...or at the very least diminish it. So while I enjoyed reading poetry I was not a particular fan of studying it formally...taking it apart and dismantling it. I just wanted it to touch me...to reach in and grip tightly...even painfully. I was not that keen on rhyming poetry either...I preferred prose every time...as with art I was no expert but I knew what I liked...even if I was not entirely sure why. William Blake ...Yeats...TS Elliot...Dylan Thomas...Emily Dickenson... more recently Auden and Ted Hughes ...a select bunch. The more red in tooth and claw the better...that word visceral crops up again. Some poetry really does it for me...some leaves me completely cold. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that I like certain poets rather than poetry as such...if there is a difference. One that comes to mind in particular ...and he’s more novelist than poet is Thomas Hardy. For some reason these lines from Ode to an Unborn Pauper Child lodged itself in my brain almost immediately after I read it...leaving such an immediate imprint that I did not even need to repeat it over...to this day I can call it forth without effort..
“Had I the ear of wombed souls
Ere their terrestrial chart unrolls
And thou wert free to cease or be
Then would I tell thee all I know
And put it to thee
Wilt thou take life so?”
I remember nothing else of his ...though I do recall my admiration for his writing. There’s a scene in Under the Greenwood Tree where the main character and the object of his affections are washing their hands together in a basin of water...it’s an innocent scene but incredibly sensuous as he describes the interlocking of their fingers in the water...the image did more for my appreciation of the opposite sex than anything more directly explicit ...funny how these things stick with you but I digress.
The quotation at the top from Hughes...a poet who provokes some controversy in certain quarters...is one of those ones that says something fairly familiar and unrevelatory but does so with a bit of linguistic panache thus elevating it beyond merely stating the obvious. As with many such things I find myself in two minds about the sentiment expressed. It would be churlish to suggest that he is overstating the case....and that it is all very well in theory...or in the pages of a book. And yet despite the force and singlemindedness of what’s expressed one can’t help but feel it’s a bit lacking in nuance...that life is perhaps a little more complicated. Or perhaps I’m just overthinking it too much...and i’d be better simply to allow myself to be caught up in the momentum of the quotation and go where it leads.
So it is with poets and their work.
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