Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building . . .
Toward the end of National Poetry Month, I heard the Irish poet Michael Longley read on NPR and, in answer to a question, he said that if prose was a river, poetry was a plant, which is a poetic idea in itself. During the last month I’ve been asked “What is poetry?” and “What’s the value of poetry?” dozens of times, and found myself giving different answers. There are pat and famous ones: “Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty” (Poe), or “Poetry makes nothing happen” (Auden); “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility” (Wordsworth); “what gets lost in translation” (Frost), and my favorite, “the best words in the best order” — Coleridge. This last works well in class, but the trouble with it is that people seldom agree what is actually the “best.” Still, it’s a good idea for a writer, settling down to begin, to hold in his or her head.
Poetry as a plant is very suggestive. It does seem at first to make nothing happen, like a plant; but also like a plant it has a certain effect that can be felt. Our azaleas make us feel better every morning; they send us (and others) into action, writing, drawing, photographing, beautifying the neighborhood, making suggestions to outside organizations, even voting for someone who might help beautify the city (remember Mayor David Fischer, who planted thousands of trees and ornamental bushes, and was recently appointed St. Pete’s “tree czar,” now trying to get $500,000 from BP’s oil spill penalty? That would be a wonderful “action”).
In March, the Parkland students held a large poetry reading on the one-month anniversary of the massacre at the school. Americans as a group aren’t avid poetry readers, but we know enough to turn to poetry at our most important moments: birth, death, love, tragedy, war. Prose won’t do; we need at these times the best words in the best order. At Parkland’s “Poetry for Peace,” youngsters from middle school, mature and talented high school students, fathers and siblings of the victims read poems; a tall black student named Butterfly sang with enormous emotion. Poetry for them wasn’t something soppy to make them “happy.” It was cathartic, making them more able to handle disaster. These deaths had meaning. This was a call for action, and the world has watched in amazement at what they’ve already accomplished.
Another definition of poetry that comes to mind is “news that stays news.” Longley’s poem “Ceasefire,” quoted here, retells the story of Achilles, the Greek hero of Homer’s Iliad, killing Hector, the Trojan hero. Because Hector had killed Achilles’ friend Patroclus, Achilles desecrated Hector’s body by dragging it around the walls of Troy, driving Hector’s father Priam, the king of Troy, into despair. Atrocious as all this was, the cruelty wasn’t worse than what was happening in the “Troubles,” the civil war fought until 1998 in Northern Ireland. In “Ceasefire” (and the Iliad) Priam comes to Achilles to beg for his beloved son’s body. Achilles, thinking of his own father, relents, washes Hector’s body and returns it to Priam.
Longley’s poem, a sonnet which looks both backwards to ancient Greece and forward to contemporary Ireland, came out toward the end of the Troubles. It was widely interpreted as a cry for unity, mercy and empathy — and apparently influential in creating the necessary forgiving to end the decades-long war. I believe poetry can be fun, but it also has the power to help our better selves.
I’ll give the great English poet William Blake the last shot at a definition of poetry: There’s a crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in.
I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.
—Both quotes from “Ceasefire” in Selected Poems by Michael Longley, Jonathan Cape (London, 1998)
This article appears in Apr 26 – May 3, 2018.
