Though I’ve made it obvious in previous posts that I am not a poet, that doesn’t diminish my love of verse. In fact, I asked one of my daughter’s friends about a book she was reading last year, and she responded, “It’s written in verse.” My heart melted. I loved hearing those words from a then 6th grader.
From Emily Dickinson to Nikki Giovanni, I’ve rarely met a poem I didn’t love let alone love. Ok, maybe The Rime of the Ancient Mariner isn’t my jam, but I can’t rule out other works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
I’m working my way through the Bible while also listening to the Quran. While the sentiment is beautiful, the writing in both of those books doesn’t captivate me the way that Dante’s Inferno does.
More than reading poems, I loved teaching poetry, particularly ,“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats.
Every year I experimented with different ways to make the visual depictions described on the urn come to life. Most often, I propped the trash barrel onto a desk at the front of the room and slowly walked around the imaginary artifact studying the stories.
“Still can’t see it?” I asked. Then I turned on the Smartboard and did a quick Google image search so that they had a visual of a real Grecian urn.
Photo by Cuong Duyen Ceramics on Unsplash
I walked back over to the prop on the table and pulled two chairs in front of the desk, then asked for a boy and a girl to volunteer. In one 10th grade class, I knew a boy and a girl were dating, so I called on them to each take a seat.
“Look what we have here!” I exclaimed as I stood behind them, extending my arms like branches. Then I recited the lines.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
“What’s happening with these two?” I asked. Probing with more questions.
“They are a good looking couple,” someone said.
“It’s either Spring or Summer because the leaves are still on the trees.”
Then came the fun part. Fabio and Aimee, my students, willingly played along and leaned in close to each other. “Can you feel the tingling in their bellies? They are just about to smack their lips for the first time,” I said. But!
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
They held their positions as the class discussed why Keats would tell Fabio not to grieve.
“Because she’s never going to get old and ugly,” someone said.
“Exactly! And for all eternity the two of them will be there together with those butterflies in their stomach longing for that moment when their lips will touch.”
With that class, I even added a cursory joke, “She’s never going to bite his tongue by accident and get dumped,” to help contextualize all the events–good and bad–that will never play out for this couple.
They burst into laughter, we all applauded the fair youth beneath the trees, and we continued on with the next stanza celebrating “Happy, happy love.”
It’s a memory I cling to, but these past several months, the loose panting iambic pentameter of Percy B. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” has been haunting my mind.
The imagery is Shelley’s poem is equally as vivid but much more foreboding. Part reflection of history, part harbinger of what will inevitably come again, the two vast and trunkless legs of the enormous statue of King Ozymandias stand alone is a vast, lifeless desert. The head, half buried in the sand, still wears the “sneer of cold command.” The irony of the inscription on the pedastal invites the reader to “look in my works, ye mighty, and despair!” What, though, are we to fear?
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
These Romantic period poems both depict incredibly descriptive images that tell deeply beautiful and disastrously human stories: The tragedy of life and the catastrophic decline of hubris.
Where the poems differ is in how they make the reader feel. Like the colossal wreck, I feel completely alone and hopeless reading the experiences of this traveler in an antique land. In lionizing youth and beauty, though, Keats turns the tragic into something magical, almost desirable. With Keats, I feel light, uplifted by the unheard melodies of the happy melodist who, “pipes to the spirit ditties of no tone.”
But if, for you, the heard melodies are sweeter, there is a song for you. While Dante follows the river Styx as it descends through Hades, Don Moen’s “River of Love,” teaches that a river of love is constantly flowing. I choose the river of happy, happy love.