Poetry Month: Let's End with Favorites

I can recite my most un-favorite poem. It only takes a second, because it's really short. It is by William Carlos Willams, titled "The Red Wheel Barrow":

So much depends

upon

A red wheel

barrow

Glazed with rain

water

Beside the white

chickens

* * *

I won't go into my minor neurosis revolving around this poem -- it all stems back to high school, senior year. I want to go back farther, and a little farther yet, to share with you my favorites.

Senior year with Mr. Cserentsits was a hodgepodge of poetry, American authors, and these papers with red marks to make an A-student weep. Junior year was Brit lit, and I don't remember the name of the teacher. It was rather boring, even for me, but I remember when we reached the twentieth century writers he brought in a record player (yes, in 1993 they still existed outside of the Smithsonian) and vinyl recordings of "modern" poets reading their own works. We listened to T.S. Eliot reading his "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." His voice was rather dry and without inflection, but they poem has become one of my favorites.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon the table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question...

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.

* * *

The poem is long; I won't type it all here, but I encourage you to take a few moments to follow the above link and listen to it read. It is a poem of deep despair, and in my teenage years, I clung to it.

Farther back still, though, is a happier poem, one I had to memorize in middle school and can still remember. My students hated that. It lent so much more oomph to my requirement that they memorize this or that. "See, I did it, and it was good for me. It's good for you like lima beans!" The poem that still sticks with me? Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken":

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both,

And be one traveler, long I stood

I looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh,

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood and I --

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

* * *

He was, they say, talking about the choice to become a writer. As a writer myself, who didn't start out that way, I can say his third stanza shows less hope than I would wish. I didn't start out on the path I am on now -- "yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back" -- but I am where I want to be, and where, as a teen I dreamed I'd be.

It doesn't matter how old you are. If you have a dream, pursue it! Take the less traveled road. Ask the overwhelming questions. But leave the chickens at home, please.