What is poetry?

If there’s one thing the Chikkerur family is known for it’s their collection of over a thousand books that they own, collected over decades. Many of them gifted by friends, some unreturned library books and others carefully chosen pieces of literature that the wonderful and doting patriarchal head of the family presented to his three daughters. Some of these books have been around even longer than my two older sisters and I have been in the family. So it’s no doubt an understatement to say that we find immense pleasure and joy in reading.In fact, I don’t think that there’s a single day that passes when I don’t interrupt my parents in the midst of being lost in their tranquil spaces located around the apartment, going through pages and pages of knowledge, art, culture and history.

I grew up reading a lot of books. Sometimes I would spend hours and hours in the library at Bangalore Club reading murder mysteries, novels, teen dramas and whatever else caught my eye. Over the years though my love and passion for reading faded rapidly. I’m more of a visual person now, as I like to put it. Given the choice between reading a book and watching an adapted version of it on DVD, I would most likely go with the movie.

For some reason though this morning when I was walking past my bookshelf, this brown book with gold lettering on the cover caught my eye. It’s been there for ages, but it suddenly seemed prominent. I pulled it out, read the title, strolled around the house for a few minutes gathering some essentials like my laptop and charger and headed for my room, but not before placing an order for a cup of coffee with my cook of course.

Must have caffeine in the morning.

So I scanned through the pages at first and then decided I should read it.

The book is titled “A Treasury of the Worlds Best Loved Poems.” And what a treasure it truly is.

I’m going to share the five best and shortest poems that were among my favorite in the entire collection.Before I get to the poems, here is an excerpt of a rather longish but well written introduction to the book.

WHAT IS POETRY? And, if that question can be answered, what is a good, and what is a bad, poem? And who, among those who have written rhyming lines with clearly marked rhythms, or lines, which do not rhyme, and with rhythms that may be discernible only to the author, may be called distinguished poets? How does one choose when going about the business of making a collection of “great” poems?

There have been many attempts at definition. Poetry is “the music of the soul” – Voltaire, “the art of uniting pleasure with truth” – Samuel Johnson, “the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself” – William Hazlitt, “the record of the best and happiest moments of the best minds” – Shelley. It is that which “makes my body so cold no fire can warm me”, and makes me “feel as if the top of my head were taken off” – Emily Dickinson. “Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits… a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanation” – Carl Sandburg.

Yet all these definitions, and there are many more, do not answer the question, “What makes a great poem and what an insignificant one?”

Perhaps, as Albert Einstein said of truth, great poetry is “that which stands the test of experience.”

When We Two Parted

When we two parted

 In silence and tears,

Half broken-hearted

To sever for years,

Pale grew thy cheek and cold,

Colder thy kiss;

Truly that hour foretold

Sorrow to this.

The dew of the morning

Sunk chill on my brow –

It felt like the warning

Of what I feel now.

Thy vows are all broken,

And light is thy fame;

I hear thy name spoken,

And share in its shame.

They name thee before me,

A knell to mines ear;

A shudder comes o’er me –

Why wert thou so dear?

They know not I knew thee,

Who knew thee too well –

Long, long shall I rue thee,

Too deeply to tell.

In secret we met –

In silence I grieve

That thy heart could forget,

Thy spirit deceive.

If I should meet thee

After long years,

How should I greet thee?

With silence and tears.

-       - George Gordon, Lord Byron

Music

Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory –

Odors, when sweet violets sicken,

Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

Love itself shall slumber on.

-       - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

-       - William Ernest Henley

Chartless

I never saw a moor,

I never saw the sea;

Yet I know how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,

Nor visited in heaven;

Yet certain am I of the spot

As if the chart were given.

-       - Emily Dickinson

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

-       - Robert Louis Stevenson