Poetry Corner

“He said, "Dance for me," and he said,
"You are too beautiful for the wind
To pick at, or the sun to burn." He said,
"I'm a poor tattered thing, but not unkind
To the sad dancer and the dancing dead.”

― from Four Postures of Death by Sidney Keyes

Yes, that is from a poem that has been collected in a book of poems at least once, but the reason I know it is Watership Down, where it starts off Chapter 16.

I read Watchmen in August, somewhere in the middle of writing the comic book. Each chapter ended with a little quote or some lyrics or something, and I kind of liked that.  I also like when novels have quotes at the beginning of chapters, obviously. This fragment of a poem has come back to me many times.

I believe both of these works, and others, were influences on my decision to end each chapter with a quote once I started posting the chapters. I might have done it anyway; some of the poems were just screaming at me to be included because they were so connected to the emotions of the scenes.

The strongest of these was “Part One: Life XCVI” by Emily Dickinson. It kind of encapsulates Gerard’s journey of learning to deal with loss. Even at that point, he does have a third loss coming, though he does not know it yet. The other thing that made it seem appropriate, though, is that I know about the poem from an X-Men cartoon. It was from the animated series, when Jean Grey sacrificed herself, which led to her coming back as Dark Phoenix and many other things, but for that episode there was just grief, and Beast quoted the end:

“Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.”

It stayed with me, and later I found the whole poem. When I wrote of a different sacrifice, and mourning (and yes, an unexpected return), it fit.

Actually, a lot of the poems came from other works. I know “Nothing Gold Can Stay” because of The Outsiders, and that section of “The Faerie Queen” because of the movie version of Sense and Sensibility, and the part that I took from “The Hollow Men” I not only know from On the Beach, but I used exactly the same arrangement Nevil Shute used.

“There Will Come Soft Rains”, to me, was first a Ray Bradbury short story that contained that poem. However, the poem, by Sara Teasdale, came first. And while the short story takes place after a nuclear blast, the poem was written before nuclear weapons were even a thing, but where WWI had shown that we could be really thorough in annihilating each other.

Initially I thought it would go at the end of Chapter 3, but lines from Yeats’ “The Second Coming” (which I know about because those lines were used at the beginning of Things Fall Apart, by the recently deceased Chinua Achebe, and my roommate read it in my sophomore year of college.) I thought I would not use “There Will Come Soft Rains” at all, and then, after Frank’s flashback in Chapter 13, it fit. Mikey’s back-story is all about anger and alienation. With Frank’s, the most horrible part right then is the solitude – the world does not know or care that he has been left alone, and that’s where it fit.

So, like the rest of the comic book, the poetry fragments pulled from all of my experience, and often it wasn’t as conscious as I thought it would be, possibly because I did not know my poetry as well as I should. A line would come to me, and I would think it was from one poem, and I would look up that poem, and it was not it, and it was not the phrase I needed, but it led me to where I needed to be.

“The Second Coming” was like that. I kept thinking “Slouching towards Bethlehem”, which I thought was from “Howl”, probably because of an essay, but then when I did find it, I found the lines that I did need. I kept thinking of “Splendor in the Grass”, and so I read Leaves of Grass, which was not helpful, except that I’d been meaning to do it one of these days, and now I have. At the same time, I kept thinking of “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting”, from “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” by William Wordsworth. I love that stanza, but the poem is too long (much like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene). However, the line about “splendor in the grass”, which led to the title of a play, was in there, and it’s section was exactly what I needed.

Therefore, one important result of all of this is that I am reading more poetry. I kind of knew Whitman wasn’t going to give me what I wanted, but still, now I know. As I start my black history reading for the year, I’m going to read a compilation of Langston Hughes poems. Three of his poems have a strong hold on me (I nearly used “America”), so perhaps I should see what else he has. I love the bits of Pablo Neruda I have seen; doesn’t it make sense to seek out more?

All right, often it is only the fragments that work, and that is why it’s the fragments that keep popping up, but there’s value in that. With “Ad Finem”, I cannot agree with the overall sentiments there. She would be making a mistake, and yet the feeling is so relatable, and there’s something to that—and the way I use it is not what that poem is about, but it works for the mood.

I have been writing about how narrative and music can both be healing, and they do it in different ways. Poetry straddles this strange middle ground, sometimes evoking like music, sometimes explaining like prose, and sometimes doing both at once.

With everything about this project, I don’t know if I will ever do anything like it again, but every part has been valuable. Every part has changed me.

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