No.53 - January 2022
Poets as well as teachers tend to heave a weary sigh when novice readers insist on evaluating poems by whether or not they can “relate” to them. As if a poem’s value depends on whether or not you yourself have had similar experiences, feelings, thoughts. Clearly, that’s a rather limited and limiting yardstick for judgment. After all, you needn’t murder a king to understand Macbeth. Nor must you possess superpowers yourself to enjoy the latest superhero movie. Not only is it reductive, but most readers have no trouble relishing stories that are very alien to their own experience, as the great popularity of sci-fi and fantasy demonstrates. Why should poetry be any different from fiction or film?
In my teaching days I tried mightily to help students appreciate journeying into the minds of great poets, who can convey you to places you’ve never been, even places that never existed, such as Zanadu or the forest of Arden. Such glimpses into unfamiliar terrain and windows into the imaginations of writers different from ourselves remain among the great joys of reading. Poetry is the supreme fiction, Wallace Stevens declared; and whatever else he meant by that phrase, it points to the enduring power of great poems to convey you somewhere—imaginatively, spiritually, geographically—just as a novel or a play can.
For example, Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry collection Dien Cai Dau is one of the most powerful depictions of the Vietnam War that I know. I lived through those years, but did not serve in the military; my mental universe would be poorer had I not read Komunyakaa’s account. Likewise, I can’t imagine someone whose life was more different from my own than Emily Dickinson’s, but her poems have enriched my own mental universe immeasurably. Similarly, I’ve often said that Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is better than a history book at depicting the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of life in 19th Century Manhattan. It’s like a rich documentary film, supplying not just the facts but the feel of life in the largest city in our rapidly urbanizing country.
So I most definitely understand when fellow poets complain that saying “I can’t relate to it” reflects a naive understanding of what poetry can do. (Likewise that other rookie question, “Did that really happen?”) The fact is, to the extent that we downplay the fictive element of poetry (that supreme fiction), we sideline a lot of great poetry, from Gilgamesh on through works such as Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, a brilliant book-length sequence about Hurricane Katrina, which neither I nor Smith experienced at first hand.
All well and good. But let’s look at it from another angle. In my experience, it’s not just naive or beginning readers who yearn to “relate” to the poems they read. Frankly, it’s just about all of us. I can’t count the number of times when, at public readings, I’ve presented, say, a poem about my father’s dementia, only to wind up afterward in conversation with a fellow poet who has had a similar experience. Or perhaps I read a poem mentioning my spaniel, which will provoke someone to tell me about their own pet. It’s only natural to respond in this way, and, I would argue, it’s not merely naive. Looking for commonalities is how we begin to know each other. (“You love John Prine too?” “I’m also from the Mohawk Valley!”) Rather than being grumpy about readers relating to my poems, I should be profoundly grateful when anyone is moved by a poem of mine to talk about it, share their similar experiences, and so forth. In fact, writing a poem that someone can connect with in this way strikes me as no small thing.
I would go further. Of course we all understand that Milton’s Paradise Lost is not autobiography, but rather the author’s elaborate dramatization of a Biblical myth central to Christianity. Similarly, no one supposes Shakespeare’s Othello was a real person. Epic and dramatic poetry don’t elicit those naive responses alluded to above. But lyric poetry is different. One of the basic appeals of the lyric has always been the sensation of being admitted to the intimate feelings and thoughts of another individual, caught in a moment of passion or other intense emotion—even if these things are “made up.” Instinctively we connect such passion with our own memories of similar feelings. This isn’t naive per se. We fully understand that when Frost wrote “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he wasn’t actually out in a snowstorm scribbling in his notebook. (In fact, he wrote it on a hot summer night.) He may or may not have ever had any such experience. It could be pure fiction, a dream, or a story he heard. We all know this, at some level. But for the duration of the poem, because it is a great lyric, we savor the illusion of eavesdropping on the intimate thoughts of another at a significant moment. We suspend our disbelief, as they say; and that’s a great gift. It’s the same pleasure we get from immersion in a good novel or play, essentially.
The lyric is the king of poems-we-can-relate to. That’s one reason the lyric endures as a genre, and why even fellow poets and other sophisticated readers may wonder if your seemingly personal poem was drawn directly from experience. We’re curious. When someone asks “did that really happen?” of a poem you wrote, take it as a high compliment. It means they aren’t sure. Your poem has accomplished its fictive mission. Lyric success requires creating an illusion, even if the details are all true to life.
No one has ever adequately defined the lyric, of course. The usual efforts mention traits like brief, personal, intense, emotional, intimate, and often stipulate that the focus should be on a single moment. But as soon as you fence things in that way, poets get busy testing the boundaries. Thus we have well established items like the dramatic or the meditative lyric, or the hybrid lyric. Hybrids are nothing new. Two hundred years ago Wordsworth and his friend Coleridge, unsatisfied with the limitations of the lyric in their time, composed their “Lyrical Ballads.” And so forth, down to the present day. Recently trendy in poetry circles has been the erasure poem, which creates a personal lyric out of just about anything printable: diaries, advertising copy, Paradise Lost, Facebook posts, campaign speeches, The Constitution. . . .
Still, I remain a fan of the good old fashioned lyric, which luckily you can’t kill, though some have tried. Why can’t you knock it off? Because it fulfills a basic human need. Until people stop falling in love, suffering disappointments, worrying about death, feeling religious, and so on, we’ll still need love poems, laments, elegies, hymns, and more.
Like the blues in music, the lyric in poetry seems as much feeling as form. There’s an elusive quality we call “bluesy” even if it’s not the classic twelve-bar form with standard chord progressions. Likewise even prose gets termed “lyrical.” Whatever else it might be, the lyric is a feeling, a certain something. That sounds vague, because it is. And properly so, I would contend. As for defining the lyric, I am reminded of St. Augustine’s much-quoted remark about defining time: “What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.”
So don’t ask me what the lyric is, exactly, but plainly that certain something is widely recognized and beloved across many cultures. Whatever the lyric is, it travels rather well across both time and space. It’s often said that the great lyric poet and balladeer Anonymous was a woman, and I believe it. But to my delight I recently learned that the very first named author in history was verifiably a woman. According to Jon Knowles in his history of sexuality, How Sex Got Screwed Up, Enheduanna
Knowles then quotes her 4,600 year old hymn. The translation is printed as prose, but tell me this doesn’t sound very much like a lyric poem, and a beautiful one:
I have no idea how this hymn would have sounded in Sumerian, nor could I say how accurate the translation might be. I admit there’s much I don’t understand about those ancient gods and the culture that imagined them. There’s likely much I wouldn’t like if I did understand more fully. I know it was written within a warlike culture, a slave culture, a rigidly stratified class system: there’s a lot to dislike. Yet something does translate, doesn’t it? I’m moved by the imagery, the metaphors, the attempt to humanize a god by calling her Sister and imagining her “opening like a pale morning, swelling like a storm, clutching the torch of longing to [her] breast until [she feels] life at [her] throat, until [she’s] all dressed up in flames.”
While much of ancient Sumerian society may be repugnant to my 21st Century values, I have to admit I find real pleasure in reading this hymn, and it’s not simply that I can relate to what’s universal in it, the gorgeous imagery and pure passion of it, in both erotic and religious senses. I’m often struck by how lyrics from long ago and far away can create in me a little shiver, what the French call a frisson, when I find myself pulled into their different worlds.
It’s conventional to call this aspect of the lyric something like “universality,” under the assumption that there are aspects of human experience and understanding that span all cultures and time periods. That way of putting it is too simple, as plenty of critics down through the decades have argued. But I would also say that no lyric lasts far beyond its origins unless it contains at least some kernel of universality, offering some scrap or tidbit to, yes, relate to.
So I am tempted to say that the best lyrics often contain an interplay or tension between the familiar and the strange, exotic and close-to-home. I like a bit of the familiar to connect with, but when that frisson of strangeness is added, it provides further savor and stimulation. Again, I think of drama and narrative, and how they always work by balancing and negotiating such polarities; what else is a story’s arc of conflict to resolution but a push-pull between familiarity and surprise? Lyrics do not require conflict in the narrative sense, but they do need some sort of tension; and finding things to relate to in distant, unexpected, or even oppressive places is part of what I love in visiting various lyrical worlds, whether they’re located in Tang Dynasty China, ancient Greece, feudal Europe, antebellum America, or elsewhere.
Much closer to home than ancient Sumeria, the well known English lyric we call “Western Wind” might serve as a good example of what I mean. Let’s take a fresh look at it:
As I noted in my previous column in November, this anonymous lyric gives me a little shiver every time. But though I claim it as a powerful poem (and I’m far from alone in this), it likely wasn’t intended as any such thing. Harkening back to the original meaning of “lyric,” it was composed not as a poem to be spoken but as a song to be sung. We don’t know exactly when it was first written (or sung) or who composed it. Its first appearance in book form was in a partbook (a bound collection of manuscript pages) that dates from around 1500, though scholars believe the tune is much older. The words probably are at least three hundred years older than that, and what survives, historians have argued, is likely just a fragment of some longer medieval poem or song.
What appears above is thus a rude approximation of the original. For instance, as you can see in the image of the original page reproduced below, there was no title with the original, and the spelling is very different. Moreover, as part of a manuscript page, the quatrain in its earliest form contains no linebreaks, no punctuation. Handwritten in script under the musical notes, the original words, after conversion to modern typography, are these: “Westron wynde when wyll thow blow the smalle rayne downe can Rayne Cryst yf my love were in my Armys and I yn my bed Agayne.” Very strange indeed.
So. Not “really” a poem at all, but a fragmentary bit of sheet music, probably part of a longer song. Nor is it entirely clear what the lyric means, or exactly how old it is. I’ve seen suggested dates of composition ranging from around 1350 to early Sixteenth Century. What we do know for sure is that the surviving manuscript page dates back to about 1500, from the court of Henry VIII. That’s pretty old, I’d say, but folk singers still perform “Western Wind” today, along with "Greensleeves" and other ancient tunes. (Here’s one example, recorded by Maddy Prior and Tim Hart in 1971.) Down through the centuries “Westron Wynde” has been played on many instruments, incorporated into masses and 20th Century pop music. And as a tiny anonymous lyric it reliably appears in major anthologies of early English poetry.
As for what it means, well, if you go looking, you can find lively debate simmering among literary critics and scholars. Some have tried to see a religious meaning in these somewhat ambiguous words, with the wind being a spring wind, standing for Eastertime, and the exclamation “Christ!” intended as some sort of an address to the Savior. Such interpretations seem fairly fanciful to me, but what do I know? Well, what I know is that it works just fine as a universal plaint of love and longing—and most readers seem to agree. I think that’s why it’s lasted in our collective cultural memory. I agree with most contemporary readers in seeing it as a classic lover's lament at separation from his love.
One common interpretation takes the speaker to be a sailor awaiting the spring winds (gentle or "small") that will safely guide his ship homeward, where his mate lies alone in their bed. We'll never know the full story of this haunting anonymous plaint. But we can savor the songwriter's deft economy, suggesting a whole narrative in a few primal images: wind, rain, bed. And for that matter, by addressing the wind, perhaps he does speak to time, fate, even Christ, which could mean either a prayed-to deity or a fearful exclamation.
Accordingly, you could think of this song as simultaneously ancient and absolutely contemporary. For me, its ambiguities and fragmentary nature provide the frisson, while its classic theme of separation from one’s love is clearly something just about anyone can relate to. Personally, I find this lover’s plaint quite evocative, but just as apt to give me a shiver is the fact that, even in fragmentary, contested form, these words have remained alive for centuries. It’s a glimpse into the inner life of my distant ancestors. A standard definition of a great poem is simply: one that lasts. If people are still reading long after the author is dead, that’s classic. And it doesn’t matter if the poem is autobiographical or fictional, so long as it’s lasted.
Likewise with most poetry of the distant past. Every fresh reading reveals both things I can relate to and things that remain alien, or perhaps simply unknowable. Lyrics are human artifacts. Despite enormous changes over time in cultural practices, myths, religious ideals, etc., those ancient lyricists were indeed human. And finding moments of shared humanity as we read is not only natural, but instructive. This impulse to see traces of kinship with long dead poets is one of the most appealing parts of reading poetry, a counter-force to xenophobia and fear of difference.
In my teaching days I tried mightily to help students appreciate journeying into the minds of great poets, who can convey you to places you’ve never been, even places that never existed, such as Zanadu or the forest of Arden. Such glimpses into unfamiliar terrain and windows into the imaginations of writers different from ourselves remain among the great joys of reading. Poetry is the supreme fiction, Wallace Stevens declared; and whatever else he meant by that phrase, it points to the enduring power of great poems to convey you somewhere—imaginatively, spiritually, geographically—just as a novel or a play can.
For example, Yusef Komunyakaa’s poetry collection Dien Cai Dau is one of the most powerful depictions of the Vietnam War that I know. I lived through those years, but did not serve in the military; my mental universe would be poorer had I not read Komunyakaa’s account. Likewise, I can’t imagine someone whose life was more different from my own than Emily Dickinson’s, but her poems have enriched my own mental universe immeasurably. Similarly, I’ve often said that Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is better than a history book at depicting the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of life in 19th Century Manhattan. It’s like a rich documentary film, supplying not just the facts but the feel of life in the largest city in our rapidly urbanizing country.
So I most definitely understand when fellow poets complain that saying “I can’t relate to it” reflects a naive understanding of what poetry can do. (Likewise that other rookie question, “Did that really happen?”) The fact is, to the extent that we downplay the fictive element of poetry (that supreme fiction), we sideline a lot of great poetry, from Gilgamesh on through works such as Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, a brilliant book-length sequence about Hurricane Katrina, which neither I nor Smith experienced at first hand.
All well and good. But let’s look at it from another angle. In my experience, it’s not just naive or beginning readers who yearn to “relate” to the poems they read. Frankly, it’s just about all of us. I can’t count the number of times when, at public readings, I’ve presented, say, a poem about my father’s dementia, only to wind up afterward in conversation with a fellow poet who has had a similar experience. Or perhaps I read a poem mentioning my spaniel, which will provoke someone to tell me about their own pet. It’s only natural to respond in this way, and, I would argue, it’s not merely naive. Looking for commonalities is how we begin to know each other. (“You love John Prine too?” “I’m also from the Mohawk Valley!”) Rather than being grumpy about readers relating to my poems, I should be profoundly grateful when anyone is moved by a poem of mine to talk about it, share their similar experiences, and so forth. In fact, writing a poem that someone can connect with in this way strikes me as no small thing.
I would go further. Of course we all understand that Milton’s Paradise Lost is not autobiography, but rather the author’s elaborate dramatization of a Biblical myth central to Christianity. Similarly, no one supposes Shakespeare’s Othello was a real person. Epic and dramatic poetry don’t elicit those naive responses alluded to above. But lyric poetry is different. One of the basic appeals of the lyric has always been the sensation of being admitted to the intimate feelings and thoughts of another individual, caught in a moment of passion or other intense emotion—even if these things are “made up.” Instinctively we connect such passion with our own memories of similar feelings. This isn’t naive per se. We fully understand that when Frost wrote “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he wasn’t actually out in a snowstorm scribbling in his notebook. (In fact, he wrote it on a hot summer night.) He may or may not have ever had any such experience. It could be pure fiction, a dream, or a story he heard. We all know this, at some level. But for the duration of the poem, because it is a great lyric, we savor the illusion of eavesdropping on the intimate thoughts of another at a significant moment. We suspend our disbelief, as they say; and that’s a great gift. It’s the same pleasure we get from immersion in a good novel or play, essentially.
The lyric is the king of poems-we-can-relate to. That’s one reason the lyric endures as a genre, and why even fellow poets and other sophisticated readers may wonder if your seemingly personal poem was drawn directly from experience. We’re curious. When someone asks “did that really happen?” of a poem you wrote, take it as a high compliment. It means they aren’t sure. Your poem has accomplished its fictive mission. Lyric success requires creating an illusion, even if the details are all true to life.
No one has ever adequately defined the lyric, of course. The usual efforts mention traits like brief, personal, intense, emotional, intimate, and often stipulate that the focus should be on a single moment. But as soon as you fence things in that way, poets get busy testing the boundaries. Thus we have well established items like the dramatic or the meditative lyric, or the hybrid lyric. Hybrids are nothing new. Two hundred years ago Wordsworth and his friend Coleridge, unsatisfied with the limitations of the lyric in their time, composed their “Lyrical Ballads.” And so forth, down to the present day. Recently trendy in poetry circles has been the erasure poem, which creates a personal lyric out of just about anything printable: diaries, advertising copy, Paradise Lost, Facebook posts, campaign speeches, The Constitution. . . .
Still, I remain a fan of the good old fashioned lyric, which luckily you can’t kill, though some have tried. Why can’t you knock it off? Because it fulfills a basic human need. Until people stop falling in love, suffering disappointments, worrying about death, feeling religious, and so on, we’ll still need love poems, laments, elegies, hymns, and more.
Like the blues in music, the lyric in poetry seems as much feeling as form. There’s an elusive quality we call “bluesy” even if it’s not the classic twelve-bar form with standard chord progressions. Likewise even prose gets termed “lyrical.” Whatever else it might be, the lyric is a feeling, a certain something. That sounds vague, because it is. And properly so, I would contend. As for defining the lyric, I am reminded of St. Augustine’s much-quoted remark about defining time: “What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.”
So don’t ask me what the lyric is, exactly, but plainly that certain something is widely recognized and beloved across many cultures. Whatever the lyric is, it travels rather well across both time and space. It’s often said that the great lyric poet and balladeer Anonymous was a woman, and I believe it. But to my delight I recently learned that the very first named author in history was verifiably a woman. According to Jon Knowles in his history of sexuality, How Sex Got Screwed Up, Enheduanna
- . . . was the daughter of Sargon — the first king to build an empire. Enheduanna wrote in Sumerian — a language that had no gender. She wrote by pushing pictographs into soft clay that was hardened in the sun. As high priest of the female moon god Nanna, she wrote 42 hymns to temples in the empire, one of which bears her signature. It was the first signatured work in history. One of Enheduanna’s surviving poems is a sensual invocation to Inanna. She was the female god of sexual love, fertility, and war. She alone among gods and people had visited and returned from the Land of No Return. She alone knew the secrets of the universe . . . .
Knowles then quotes her 4,600 year old hymn. The translation is printed as prose, but tell me this doesn’t sound very much like a lyric poem, and a beautiful one:
-
Sometimes I think I ought to call you the Queen of the May — the way you toss light, like yellow dandelions out of a basket, here and there; or maybe I should call you god, the way you’ve wrapped the laws of heaven and earth around your waist like a belt, the way you skim over chaos like a quicksilver river.
But, I call you Sister, because you're like the rest of us, opening like a pale morning, swelling like a storm, clutching the torch of longing to your breast until you feel life at your throat, until you 're all dressed up in flames.
Sweet Sister, you know it all. A woman's desire is deep, and you’re the measure of it.
I have no idea how this hymn would have sounded in Sumerian, nor could I say how accurate the translation might be. I admit there’s much I don’t understand about those ancient gods and the culture that imagined them. There’s likely much I wouldn’t like if I did understand more fully. I know it was written within a warlike culture, a slave culture, a rigidly stratified class system: there’s a lot to dislike. Yet something does translate, doesn’t it? I’m moved by the imagery, the metaphors, the attempt to humanize a god by calling her Sister and imagining her “opening like a pale morning, swelling like a storm, clutching the torch of longing to [her] breast until [she feels] life at [her] throat, until [she’s] all dressed up in flames.”
While much of ancient Sumerian society may be repugnant to my 21st Century values, I have to admit I find real pleasure in reading this hymn, and it’s not simply that I can relate to what’s universal in it, the gorgeous imagery and pure passion of it, in both erotic and religious senses. I’m often struck by how lyrics from long ago and far away can create in me a little shiver, what the French call a frisson, when I find myself pulled into their different worlds.
It’s conventional to call this aspect of the lyric something like “universality,” under the assumption that there are aspects of human experience and understanding that span all cultures and time periods. That way of putting it is too simple, as plenty of critics down through the decades have argued. But I would also say that no lyric lasts far beyond its origins unless it contains at least some kernel of universality, offering some scrap or tidbit to, yes, relate to.
So I am tempted to say that the best lyrics often contain an interplay or tension between the familiar and the strange, exotic and close-to-home. I like a bit of the familiar to connect with, but when that frisson of strangeness is added, it provides further savor and stimulation. Again, I think of drama and narrative, and how they always work by balancing and negotiating such polarities; what else is a story’s arc of conflict to resolution but a push-pull between familiarity and surprise? Lyrics do not require conflict in the narrative sense, but they do need some sort of tension; and finding things to relate to in distant, unexpected, or even oppressive places is part of what I love in visiting various lyrical worlds, whether they’re located in Tang Dynasty China, ancient Greece, feudal Europe, antebellum America, or elsewhere.
Much closer to home than ancient Sumeria, the well known English lyric we call “Western Wind” might serve as a good example of what I mean. Let’s take a fresh look at it:
- Western Wind
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
As I noted in my previous column in November, this anonymous lyric gives me a little shiver every time. But though I claim it as a powerful poem (and I’m far from alone in this), it likely wasn’t intended as any such thing. Harkening back to the original meaning of “lyric,” it was composed not as a poem to be spoken but as a song to be sung. We don’t know exactly when it was first written (or sung) or who composed it. Its first appearance in book form was in a partbook (a bound collection of manuscript pages) that dates from around 1500, though scholars believe the tune is much older. The words probably are at least three hundred years older than that, and what survives, historians have argued, is likely just a fragment of some longer medieval poem or song.
What appears above is thus a rude approximation of the original. For instance, as you can see in the image of the original page reproduced below, there was no title with the original, and the spelling is very different. Moreover, as part of a manuscript page, the quatrain in its earliest form contains no linebreaks, no punctuation. Handwritten in script under the musical notes, the original words, after conversion to modern typography, are these: “Westron wynde when wyll thow blow the smalle rayne downe can Rayne Cryst yf my love were in my Armys and I yn my bed Agayne.” Very strange indeed.
So. Not “really” a poem at all, but a fragmentary bit of sheet music, probably part of a longer song. Nor is it entirely clear what the lyric means, or exactly how old it is. I’ve seen suggested dates of composition ranging from around 1350 to early Sixteenth Century. What we do know for sure is that the surviving manuscript page dates back to about 1500, from the court of Henry VIII. That’s pretty old, I’d say, but folk singers still perform “Western Wind” today, along with "Greensleeves" and other ancient tunes. (Here’s one example, recorded by Maddy Prior and Tim Hart in 1971.) Down through the centuries “Westron Wynde” has been played on many instruments, incorporated into masses and 20th Century pop music. And as a tiny anonymous lyric it reliably appears in major anthologies of early English poetry.
As for what it means, well, if you go looking, you can find lively debate simmering among literary critics and scholars. Some have tried to see a religious meaning in these somewhat ambiguous words, with the wind being a spring wind, standing for Eastertime, and the exclamation “Christ!” intended as some sort of an address to the Savior. Such interpretations seem fairly fanciful to me, but what do I know? Well, what I know is that it works just fine as a universal plaint of love and longing—and most readers seem to agree. I think that’s why it’s lasted in our collective cultural memory. I agree with most contemporary readers in seeing it as a classic lover's lament at separation from his love.
One common interpretation takes the speaker to be a sailor awaiting the spring winds (gentle or "small") that will safely guide his ship homeward, where his mate lies alone in their bed. We'll never know the full story of this haunting anonymous plaint. But we can savor the songwriter's deft economy, suggesting a whole narrative in a few primal images: wind, rain, bed. And for that matter, by addressing the wind, perhaps he does speak to time, fate, even Christ, which could mean either a prayed-to deity or a fearful exclamation.
Accordingly, you could think of this song as simultaneously ancient and absolutely contemporary. For me, its ambiguities and fragmentary nature provide the frisson, while its classic theme of separation from one’s love is clearly something just about anyone can relate to. Personally, I find this lover’s plaint quite evocative, but just as apt to give me a shiver is the fact that, even in fragmentary, contested form, these words have remained alive for centuries. It’s a glimpse into the inner life of my distant ancestors. A standard definition of a great poem is simply: one that lasts. If people are still reading long after the author is dead, that’s classic. And it doesn’t matter if the poem is autobiographical or fictional, so long as it’s lasted.
Likewise with most poetry of the distant past. Every fresh reading reveals both things I can relate to and things that remain alien, or perhaps simply unknowable. Lyrics are human artifacts. Despite enormous changes over time in cultural practices, myths, religious ideals, etc., those ancient lyricists were indeed human. And finding moments of shared humanity as we read is not only natural, but instructive. This impulse to see traces of kinship with long dead poets is one of the most appealing parts of reading poetry, a counter-force to xenophobia and fear of difference.
© 2022 David Graham
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