Poetry Wednesday

Yes, I know. But "Poetry Wednesday" has such a nice ring to it.

One of the most important things to know about poetry is that when you read any given poem, YOU get to be its interpreter. Of course, this fact is often muddled by the fact that poetry is part of literature, an academic discipline, in which there are scholars with "authority" and many classic or well-known poems that have established "readings." It's certainly valuable to have these readings. For one thing, if you read a poem and are completely lost, it can help to have others' interpretations to help you enter the poem. And if you are a scholar, you need to know the established readings. But if you really want to become your own reader of poems, you can't let these other opinions and interpretations distract you TOO much. You have to allow yourself the freedom to re-interpret based on your own experience.

There are two "classic" and well-known poems I've wanted to write about in terms of pregnancy. It's safe to say that these poems, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas and John Keat's "Ode to a Nightingale," are NOT "about" pregnancy. But they are two poems I've thought of a lot since I've been pregnant, and my reading of both of them has been greatly influenced by my pregnancy. I figure I should write about them while I am still pregnant--as you can see, my little ticker is getting into some terrifyingly small numbers,

You can read "Do Not Go Gentle" here.

Now. You can tell by the links to other poems on the left side of that page that the poem is considered to be a "poem about aging" and a "poem about a father." I'm not going to argue with that: it's true. But the poem is also more generally a poem about fighting for life, or about resisting the urge to give in to overwhelming forces.

As you may have noticed from reading this blog, I have not found being pregnant to be the easiest thing in the world. It has come with some very overwhelming forces, such as exhaustion. I have often felt that it WOULD be the easiest thing in the world to descend into total pregnancy slothfulness. Just to sit down on the couch and not get up till it was time to go to the hospital. But it has also been important to me to NOT descend into inactivity, both for my own current happiness and my ability to maintain the strength and stamina to deliver a baby. I've bolstered my courage and resolve to make it through the last couple of blocks of the walk home, to get up and go to the pool, to wait for the Metro to come when there is no where to sit down, to walk up the escalator instead of standing, with the line, "Do not go gentle into that good night."

Related, and perhaps more seriously, I think there is a kind of depression that can accompany pregnancy. It's little mentioned or written about. In fact, I feel almost criminal for bringing it up. Most books discuss pregnancy as an overwhelming joy with a few minor and occasional drawbacks. I think the truth, at least for more, is more complicated.

Let me get out of the way these facts: I wanted to get pregnant, and I did, and it's a miracle. The fact that there was no baby, and then Dean and I made one, is astounding to me. Thinking about how the baby was just two cells, then a few more, then was the size of a lentil, is now apparently larger than a basketball, and is very soon going to exit my body and be a person in the world, is just as astounding. I am very aware that in most ways I have had an extremely blessed and successful pregnancy and I am very thankful that it has been so problem-free, and that the baby is so healthy.

But that doesn't mean the past nine months have always been easy. I have been overwhelmed. I have been scared to actually HAVE a baby. That's both the "having" as in the delivery and the "having" as in being a parent. I have been especially uncertain as to how having a baby is going to affect my writing life. I've been too tired and nauseous to write. The stuff I've written has not been stellar. And I have had to navigate the strange world of academia and pregnancy. My teachers were in general surprised at my pregnancy, and since they found out I was pregnant they have been distant. I have been asked if the pregnancy was "on purpose" and been told that "at least [I] waited till I had the degree." I went from being a student my teachers "expected great things from" to one they smile vaguely at in the hallway, saying as they pass, "You're getting big now!"

All this on top of the rest of life, the tiredness and the nausea, the tedious summer office job, the 2-hour commutes on the Red Line, the walking around in the heat, the uncertainty about the future, the loneliness of living so far away from most of my friends and family, sometimes added up to a feeling that felt a lot like depression. And I would think about the poem:

Do not go gentle into that good night--
rage, rage against the dying of the light.

It was helpful. I would think, this too shall pass. I would sit down and write SOMETHING, anything. I would call a friend. I would talk to Dean. I would think about the healthy baby wiggling around. All forms of raging against the dying of the light--the light being, in this case, a happy heart, a hopeful, thankful spirit.

Whew. Can we still tackle "Ode to a Nightingale?" Here is the poem. (It's long.)

This is a poem about which much has been said. (I am intimidated to write about the poem because one of my teachers is a Keats scholar. But here we go anyway.) Basically, the speaker (we'll call him Keats) is sitting in the woods listening to a nightingale sing. As he listens, he reflects on happiness and on life's brevity. I reread this poem last spring early in my pregnancy and was blown away by how much it spoke to my feelings at the time.

Let's go through stanza by stanza. I'll interrupt the poem to comment on what I see happening in it, and on how it relates or related to my feelings about pregnancy.

1.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

The speaker is tired. And sad. Sad's too simple a word, though--he's feeling complex emotion. It might help throughout the entire poem to know that Keats had tuberculosis and knew he was not going to live a long time.

"A drowsy numbness pains my sense" is a perfect description of my pregnancy exhaustion.

'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

He's talking to the bird, telling it that his emotion does not stem from being jealous that the bird is happy, but instead from a kind of overwhelm-ed-ness that the bird sings at all. On top of that the bird "sings of summer--" a happy, carefree time.

In the cold spring when I reread this I guess the baby was my bird. I was thinking of the sheer improbability of the baby's existence. Of the full, ripeness of late, late summer when she would be born.

2.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

"O, for a draught of vintage!" I believe I've written about this before. (Vintage refers to wine.) He's talking about the desire to "fade away," to escape the world of thought.

3.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.


The bird (and at this point, but not for much longer, the baby) have never known "the weariness, the fever, and the fret here...
where but to think is to be full of sorrow." This weariness and sorrow is what Keats wants to forget. At this point in my rereading I was chilled to the bone by the thought of bringing a baby into the world. where she is only going to face her own fever and fret.

4.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

He says he will reach the bird through poetry. Ah, the solace of art.

"The dull brain perplexes and retards" is another right-on description of pregnancy exhaustion.

5.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Stanza 4 ended with Keats saying it was dark. In this stanza he elaborates, saying he can't actually see what's around him, but that he can guess by scent and sound. Metaphorically, it's like pregnancy--you don't KNOW what's going to happen. You rely on body knowledge, on intuition.

"The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves"--beautiful.

6.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

In a way Keats is saying it would be a blessing and very easy to "go gentle into the good night"--

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

and he notes that if he were to die, the bird's song would go on anyway.

I was thinking about children (my child) living on after the parents (me) are gone.

7.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

In a way, the nightingale never dies. The particular bird Keats is listening to, like Keats himself, will of course die, but Keats notes that other nightingales have sung and will sing the same song for ages. (This thinking seems very Buddhist.)

I was wishing (in vain of course), "thou wast not born for death, immortal baby!" And thinking the baby is me, the baby is my mother, the baby is Dean, is his mother, is our grandmothers...

8.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toil me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

Keats is shaken from his poetry-thinking; the song fades away. But at the same time he wonders: is the music gone because he was woken up-- or because he "sleeps" (could be a real sleep or a metaphor--death)?

As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I was struck with the feeling that something had ended, that something else had begun. About my new life, and my old, I wondered "Was [Is] it a vision, or a waking dream?"