Perfect poems

[icepixie]

All right, gamesiplay wrote this epic post about "perfect" poems, and now I have to navel-gaze about that for a while. A perfect poem is different from a "favorite" or "best" poem, though for me there's significant overlap. The working definition that she came up with is that "it has to do with some kind of intersection between an idea that affects me viscerally and a structure/progression/formulation that mirrors the way my mind works." I'm defining it as a poem (or section of a poem, if it's long) that you get and understand down in your soul. Of all the possible ways to put whatever it is that the poet has written into words, this is the one that makes the most sense to you, and you can't imagine it working as well in any other formulation.

(I'm stealing the Alan Bennett quotation gamesiplay used as well: "The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.")

To be honest, any number of Millay poems could be included here, because I think of all the poets I've read, her verse works most similarly to the way my mind works--very odd since she so often wrote in sonnets and other forms and I hate writing like that, but I guess it speaks to a certain organization of thought that functions similarly to my own. In the interest of brevity, I will limit myself to four: "Recuerdo," "Journey," "Renascence," and "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why."

Others: "The Wild Swans at Coole" and perhaps "The Circus Animals' Desertion" (Yeats), "The More Loving One" (Auden), "Patchwork" (Boland), "Diving into the Wreck" (Rich), Sonnet 73/"That time of year thou mayst in me behold" (Shakespeare), "A Kite for Michael and Christopher" (Heaney), "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" (Wright), "Horses and Men in the Rain" (Sandburg), the untitled poem that begins In Search of England (Morton), the last twenty-one lines of "Little Gidding" and possibly also part I of "Burnt Norton" (Eliot), maybe "Nostalgia" (Collins), maybe "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (Gray), and perhaps "Church Going" (Larkin).

Yes, fully 75% of them were written between 1910 and 1963, WHAT OF IT. Modernism and its close successors ~speak to me~. And yeah, a few are cliches; I'm gonna say it just speaks to how perfect they are, how not a word is out of place, and so they're recognized as such by many people.

Major factors appear to include the following:

• A certain kind of giddiness, often coupled with exploration and/or a landscape (I suppose one could invoke Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" here):


• Recuerdo (perhaps the oddest choice on my list, and shockingly for me, the form has a lot to do with it—the galloping couplets full of trochees and dactyls really make this work in a way that any other way of writing it wouldn't)


• Journey ("But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach, / And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling, / The world is mine...")


• Renascence (...THE WHOLE THING, OKAY? The whole thing is an exercise in a scribbled rush of perception and understanding.)


• Horses and Men in the Rain (the glee with which the speaker and his friend are going to sit in a warm room and write about "olden, golden days and hunters of the / Holy Grail and men called 'knights' riding horses in the rain, in the cold frozen rain for ladies they loved" when the roustabout, milkman, etc. are out in the cold)


• Untitled [In Search of England] ("You will remember how we walked the Vale...And how we said: 'Time is an endless lane / And life a little mile without a bend... / Behind us what? Before us, if we ran, / Might we not be in time to see the Grail?'" *goosebumps*)


• Little Gidding ("We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.")



• Articulating human emotion via reference or comparison to the natural world , which I know is super broad, but these all have a specificity I like (...again I'm finding myself wanting to reference Wordsworth's and Coleridge's method of using landscapes as jumping-off points for personal meditations, and probably "Tintern Abbey" should be included here, but...it's just not, okay?):


• The Wild Swans at Coole


• What lips my lips have kissed ("Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree, / Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, / Yet know its boughs more silent than before")


• The More Loving One


• Sonnet 73


• A Kite for Michael and Christopher ("My friend says that the human soul / is about the weight of a snipe, / yet the soul at anchor there, / the string that sags and ascends, / weighs like a furrow assumed into the heavens.")



• Steps and/or directions. First I did this, then I did that, or commands for the reader to do various things. I think it has to do with a certain appreciation for linearity? Maybe a desire to see the process behind the revelation that inevitably comes at the end?


• Diving into the Wreck


• Patchwork


• Horses and Men in the Rain (no revelation, but a lot of "Let us sit by a hissing steam radiator," "Let us keep our feet in wool slippers")


• The Circus Animals' Desertion (revelation yes, steps only kind of)



• The poem either addresses a wide scope of time, or acknowledges that time exists before and after the poem (if that makes sense), or tries to look at time in an entirely new way:


• [In Search of England] (the second two stanzas in particular)


• Nostalgia


• Burnt Norton ("Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past")


• Church Going (most of it's set in the future)


• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ("For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn," indicating it will for others)

I think possibly I have a thing about epic topics being addressed in short lyric verse?


• Other/IT'S JUST PERFECT, OKAY?:


• Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio (Not a WORD is out of place. And the "Therefore" on its own line before "Their sons grow suicidally beautiful / At the beginning of October, / And gallop terribly against each other's bodies"—not to mention the last line itself, which is the most perfect of all.)


• The Circus Animals' Desertion (mostly for the last part, yes, but that part wouldn't be half as powerful without the first two, and the last part is PERFECT)


• The More Loving One ("How should we like it were stars to burn / With a passion for us we could not return? / If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me. / ... / Were all stars to disappear or die, / I should learn to look at an empty sky / And feel its total darkness sublime, / Though this might take me a little time." OMG.)


• Sonnet 73 (especially the couplet, but the whole thing could not be written otherwise)


• Renascence (this might be the choicest candidate for perfection, because despite its length, again, NOTHING IS OUT OF PLACE; it all works to the same ends, and it uses the copia to give us the highest highs and lowest lows along the way)


• "What lips my lips have kissed" (just...yes.)


• I kind of want to give Tennyson's "Ulysses" an honorable mention for "To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought" and the ending (..."To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield").

What are yours?

Comments

[icepixie]

Interesting! All of them except the O'Hara are new to me (and it's been a while for the O'Hara). I see what you mean about especially vivid wording and imagery.