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Poets and the Unseen World
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i still recall the verses to many, many poems, i can recite for you, on request, abou ben adam (may his tribe increase), etc., the highway man came riding,…and of course, beloved frost, who famously wrote on his epitath, ‘i had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” …
alas for the child of today who receives this american education where no poem is memorized so that their natural soul’s function as poets cannot so easily be fulfilled.
~ Marlowe Rafelle
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For all of their analogies, poems differ from mirrors in their ability to go beyond, or rather pierce through, appearances to get at the reality that lies unseen inside them.
In his poem, “Personal Helicon, ” Seamus Heaney creates an alternate version of the Narcissus myth, describing his childhood compulsion to look down wells in search of his own reflection. The wells, however, are dark, so the young poet-in-the-making has to find another way of seeing what truths they may hold.
…The man becomes his childish self again, in the act of discovering who he is and what his vocation will be, and confesses at the end of the poem, “I rhyme / to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”
…Undistracted by the eye, the ear lets us hear what we most need to know. And though it’s true…
