History and Influences

My poetic past (ha) is littered with huge projects I was going to complete. The title of this post is/was the title of one of those big projects. I was going to reread (or, to be more truthful, read in full for the first time) the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry. And, on this long, long roll of paper I had purchased, I was going to illustrate a timeline of my poetic influences, including excerpts from my favorite poems.

First I was going to complete this project before Amelia was born. Then during her first year. I did get started, beautifully illustrating (if I do say so myself) some Anglo-Saxon riddles. For those of you who don't have the Norton Anthology of Poetry in front of you at the moment, that got me through maybe the first 4 millimeters of the giant book. When we moved to Denver, I just decided to throw the whole project out, both figuratively and literally.

Anyway, every time I have tried to decide what I am going to post about poetry during this month, I kept going back to that project. Apparently it is something I need to do. So I thought I could try a version of it here, writing a series of posts about some of my more memorable poetic influences. Today's post will be the first of that series.

My life as a poet began when I read a poem I loved. It was in an elementary school literature text book--I don't remember what grade I was in, maybe 5th. Before I read this poem (and, to be honest, for a long time after) I was more of a fiction fan. I loved reading stories but I found poems rather tiring. That day, however, I was bored in class and I had probably already secretly read all of the stories in the book. So I decided to tackle a poem. I choose one with an intriguing illustration of a man on horseback in a mysterious looking forest, one with a compelling first line.

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveler--

It was Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners," and it was the first poem I ever really read, on my own, in full. I think part of my problem with reading poetry, both then and now, was the way I read. I am not sure how to describe it but when I read prose my eyes or brain seem to take in chunks of text at once. It let (and still lets) me be a fast reader, but it's a sloppy way to read. It made me good at reading a lot of stories in a short amount of time, but impatient with reading poetry, probably because it is a terrible way to read poetry. (And I'm not saying it's a great way to read anything.) When you read poems too fast, you miss the whole point of reading a poem in the first place.

So when I decided to really read, not just absorb, this unknown poem in my literature book, I made myself be patient and read it slowly, line by line, word by word.

You can do the same now and read the poem here.

There, in whatever little classroom I was sitting in, secretly reading a poem while the teacher taught math or something, I was enthralled. It probably helped that it was narrative--it had a story--but what drew me in was more than that. It was the sound of things, the rhythm of the language, and the mystery.

I love the poem's rhythms. If I were teaching, I would point out all the anapests, which create a feeling of movement or motion in the poem.

Uh oh, now I have to be a teacher for a minute:

A "foot" in poetry means a metrical unit. Usually it is a group of two or three syllables. We (by we I mean teachers and poets, mostly) talk about the two or three syllables in a foot in terms of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, the stressed syllable in Amelia is the second one: AMELia. The stressed syllable in Kimberly is the fisrt: KIMberly.

An anapest is a foot of poetry that contains two unstressed syllable followed by a stressed foot.

So the line

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

kind of sounds like this if you read it aloud

And his HORSE/ in the SIL/ ence CHAMPED/ the GRASS/ es

The last two feet up there--I have divided the feet by the slash marks /-- are called iambs. They are one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Some say they sound like a heartbeat: da DUM, da DUM. Iambs are considered the norm as far as meter in poetry. In other words, it is argued, and I think it is true, that English as a language contains a lot of iambs, so we tend to hear them as a norm or a base line for rhythm.

When you start to vary from iambs, you can create different feelings or moods through sound. The first two feet up there are the anapests, and they are quicker than the iambs because they pack an extra syllable into the foot: da da DUM. It kind of sounds like a horse galloping, which fits this poem well, doesn't it?

"The Listeners" tends to vary between anapests and iambs, which creates an interesting soundscape. I couldn't have explained any of this at the time, but looking back, the poem's meter definitely had a lot to do with my enchantment.

Okay, I think my teacher moment is over. The test will be next week; I hope you took notes.

Besides all rhythm, the poem contains a lot of nice alliteration (which is repetition of the same consonant sounds):

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
of the forest's ferny floor

Hear all the "s" sounds? Not just at the beginning but also within many of the words. And the "f" sounds?

That kind of thing is all through the poem. Plus, it rhymes.

And, besides all that, it is a poem you can make sense, of, story-wise, which I, for one, enjoy. This traveler is here, fulfilling some kind of promise. But no one is in the house.

Or are they?

During a web search for the poem I came across a snippet of an essay arguing that the readers of the poem are the listeners. Interesting. But I had never thought of that before today, and I don't think that kind of analysis is necessary in enjoying the poem. It's a mystery, a paradox even, these listeners. And that's part of what makes it a poem.