Poetry can make things happen

Today’s snow was wet and sticky. It piled up under my footwear as I walked the dogs. It almost felt like I was walking on stilts. This kind of experience is a major reason I gave up tromping across snow-covered fields to wade a winter trout stream. I wouldn’t wade or tromp well if I slipped off a "stilt" and broke an ankle.

Once again the driveway has been cleared of snow. It would be wonderful if the snow forecast for later this week magically turned into all rain but I’m doubtful that will happen.

I’ve been diverting myself from the irritation of this perpetually cloudy, never-ending winter, when the snow won’t stop, by reading, most recently, Thomas R. Smith’s Poetry on the Side of Nature. I’m about halfway through and he’s doing a great job of convincing me that Auden’s (in)famous line “For poetry makes nothing happen:” is almost entirely incorrect.

poet bios at poetry reading

Photo by J. Harrington

These days I relish the encouragement that writers like Smith offer. Our societies and governments are overdue to act responsibly on the increasingly evident evidence that we are undermining the very life support systems on which we depend. If that’s not terminal stupidity I don’t know what is. Alternatively, I’ve been growing concerned that reading and writing poems and stories won’t change enough hearts and minds quickly enough to make a difference in a population that seems hell-bent for self-destruction, which wouldn’t trouble me as much if that population weren’t taking the rest of us along as collateral damage.

Read all of Auden’s poem below to decide for yourself about his assessment of poetry. Then, ideally, read all of Smith’s book. If we can make things happen through poetry [and other arts], it’s preferable to using guns, bullets, and bombs, isn’t it?

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

W. H. Auden - 1907-1973

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

 

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

 

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

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