Reading Walt Whitman on a Park Bench on a Beautiful Summer Day

“It isn’t enough for poems to be things of beauty: Let them stun the hearer and lead his heart where they will”-- Horace


Whenever I read poetry to my students or to myself I feel like I should be reading it outside among daffodils or on an English countryside in the rain (perhaps afterwards whispering Willoughby over and over) or looking over the white cliffs of Dover. No matter the poem, no matter the era in which it was written, no matter the author’s descent, no matter the tone or images, I feel I must be outside, reading the poem aloud enthusiastically. (This could be due to the fact that I study a lot of English romantic poetry).

This morning Melville and I grabbed a park bench in the beautiful California sunshine and read aloud a few lines from Whitman (Since it was her birthday, we read an American). Although we only recited a few poems before we were distracted by another conversation on the various existential crises that have been plaguing our lives the past few months, the poetry lightened my mood and reminded me of the special power of poetry. Because (usually) poems are shorter, they have a precise control of language and image as well as an emotional intensity that exceeds many forms of writing. Select poems read aloud can work on me like a good glass of wine: I feel refreshed, relaxed and fuzzy.

This week I started teaching my unit on poetry and I always find my students’ opposition to this literary form disheartening. Although I know it can be quite intimidating, they also do not seem to know why at the very least it’s beautiful and important. They can appreciate why they must read Frankenstein and Shakespeare and Dickens, but they do not get the importance of poetry. I wonder why it is lost to the younger generations—or just most people today in general. Mostly it seems that they know no adults who appreciate it besides a few eccentric English teachers, but it also is even less appealing to them then any book. Is it too hard because the story is not narrated for them and they have to work out the “plot” on their own? Is it too metaphorical? Is it a lost art? Is beautiful writing no longer appreciated? Or has it always only been a small group of people who truly appreciate poetry for what it can do?

In Fahrenheit 451, Montag reads aloud “Dover Beach” to his fatuous wife and friends. When he finishes, one woman begins to cry, not knowing exactly what stirred her pain. The last lines read:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The women get angry, claiming that poetry is horrible because it hurts. She hates that the poem forced her to feel, that it forced her to confront an inner pain that she did not want to see; it forced the women to look at themselves. (Not that all poetry is painful of course, but the good stuff does offer a thrilling sort of Catharsis).

I think poetry (and appreciating it) is important because of most of the same reasons I think literature is important: it is part of our intellectual history and philosophy, and it is art (and we still need art for its own sake!). When I first decided to write a post on poetry I reached for Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” to help me verbalize the magic of poetry, which I couldn’t put into my own words as effectively as I wanted to. But all that he says that “A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth”; that “poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls, open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight”; that “poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were familiar”; and that “poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge”—all of that does not really explain why poetry should still be read aloud with others enthusiastically.

Really all I keep coming back to is that it simply makes a beautiful day on a park bench even better.

Here is a gem from our random reading today:

Part 1 of “Passage to India”

Singing my days,
Singing the great achievements of the present,
Singing the strong light works of engineers,
Our modern wonders, (the antique ponderous Seven outvied,)
In the Old World the east the Suez canal,
The New by its mighty railroad spann'd,
The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires;
Yet first to sound, and ever sound, the cry with thee O soul,
The Past! the Past! the Past!

The Past--the dark unfathom'd retrospect!
The teeming gulf--the sleepers and the shadows!
The past--the infinite greatness of the past!
For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?
(As a projectile form'd, impell'd, passing a certain line, still keeps on,
So the present, utterly form'd, impell'd by the past.)

~Walt Whitman

[I want to point out that not ALL my students have refused to be touched by poetry. My favorite student said to me after we had been studying “Dover Beach” for a few weeks that the last few lines would often “get stuck in her head” and together we recited the last lines from our memories. And, I thought, “ah, my job is done here.”]