How I Fell in Love With Poetry

“Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it,” Emily Dickinson once said. One reason I like staying up to read long after everyone else has gone to sleep is that in the middle of the night, not much conspires to break that spell. I like the hushed hour when the secular world recedes--the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us, the world of our daily cares and concerns, our usual responsibilities--and the mind is loosened for poetic reverie. I term the poem a soul in action through words because I want to suggest that lyric poetry provides us with a particular means of spiritual transport. It carries us away.

Poetry speaks out of a solitude to a solitude; it begins and ends in silence. We are not in truth conversing by the side of the road. Rather, something has been written; something is being read. Language has become strange in this urgent and oddly self-conscious way of speaking across time. The poem has been (silently) en route--sometimes for centuries--and now it has signaled me precisely because I am willing to call upon and listen to it. Reading poetry is an act of reciprocity, and one of the great tasks of the lyric is to bring us into right relationship to each other. The relationship between writer and reader is by definition removed and mediated through a text, a body of words. It is a particular kind of exchange between two people not physically present to each other.

The lyric poem is a highly concentrated and passionate form of communication between strangers--an immediate, intense and unsettling form of literary discourse. Reading poetry is a way of connecting--through the medium of language--more deeply with yourself even as you connect more deeply with another. The poem delivers on our spiritual lives precisely because it simultaneously gives us the gift of intimacy and interiority, privacy and participation.

“To understand poetry,” the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote, “we need four white walls and a silence where the poet’s voice can weep and sing.” Lorca evokes the four white walls as an emblem of pure space, an enclosure that separates us from the social realm and allows us the solitude to respond to the poet’s grief and praise. The room is an image of primary shelter where one can experience a central simplicity. It must be a silent space because only in such silence can we listen to the words and daydream our way back into a private place within ourselves.

Wallace Stevens meant something similar when he noted, “Poetry is like prayer in that it is most effective in solitude and in the times of solitude as, for example, in the earliest morning.” Poetry tries to get at something elemental by coming out of a silence and returning us--restoring us--to that silence. It is one of the soul’s natural habitats. The poem of high spiritual attainment has the power, the almost magical potential, to release something that dwells deeply within us. It taps into something we otherwise experience haphazardly or at unlikely, decisive moments in our lives. The poem surprises us in words by formally delivering a sense of spiritual immensity. When I read a poem fully, I enter a world of threshold and engagement that still bears traces of the holy. I am taking a path that vibrates with a sacred air.

I was initiated into the poetry of trance, one form of the sublime, on a rainy Saturday afternoon in mid-October 1958 (baseball season was over for the year) when I wandered down to the basement of our house to pick through some of my grandfather’s forgotten books. I was 8 years old. I vaguely remembered that my grandfather had copied poems on the inside covers of his favorite volumes, and I had decided to try to find one. (I didn’t yet know that after his death, his books had been given to a local Jewish charity and that his poems were thereby lost forever.) I opened a musty anthology of poetry to a section called “Night” and read a poem that immediately arrested me:

The night is darkening round me,

The wild winds coldly blow,

But a tyrant spell has bound me

And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending

Their bare boughs weighed with snow,

And the storm is fast descending

And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,

Wastes beyond wastes below;

But nothing drear can move me;

I will not, cannot go.

There was no title or author’s name attached to this song-like poem, and I somehow imagined that my grandfather must have written it. I read it right straight through, and its simple incremental rhythm seized me. I read it again slowly, pronouncing every word to myself, and suddenly I was in two places at once: I was standing next to a bookshelf in a small one-windowed room in my parents’ basement, and I was lost in the middle of a field somewhere in southern Latvia with a storm wildly brewing around me. I felt as though the words of the poem, like the storm itself, had cast a “tyrant spell” upon me. I couldn’t move.

I can still feel the terrible immediacy of this poem written in the present tense. I couldn’t tell if the poem was a charm inviting the storm into the world or a spell warding it off. I read the first stanza and felt the dusk purpling around me, an icy wind blowing out of control, invisible hands holding me by the shoulders. I said, “And I cannot, cannot go.” The repetitive stresses were like two blows to my chest.

I recited the second stanza and felt the enormous weight of winter coming down. I could feel the giant trees giving way, their limbs burdened with snow. I was far from home. The storm was coming after me, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I stubbornly repeated the refrain, “And yet I cannot go.” The word “go,” which rhymes with “snow,” was like a door slamming in my head.

I said the third stanza aloud and felt that I was standing in the middle of the world. I saw clouds stretching beyond clouds above me. They were layered all the way to heaven. I saw barren spaces stretching out endlessly below--the blasted country of hell. But I was firmly planted on the ground, a tree rooted to the Earth. I took heart from the line, “But nothing drear can move me.” I recognized the word drear from Poe’s “The Raven”: “Once upon a midnight dreary. . . . “ I knew the double meaning of the word move. So the gloomy storm couldn’t affect me or make me give way. I wouldn’t budge. I asserted: “I will not, cannot go.”

I felt a deep resolve, and for a moment when I said it, I remembered how I had stood on the hood of a car in the parking lot across the street from the hospital where my grandfather had gone to die. I started waving wildly, furiously, when I saw him standing at the window on the seventh floor. I remembered how he had pressed his lips to the glass and then touched the spot with his hand; it was the same way he used to kiss me on the upper arm at night and then seal the kiss with his fingertips. A gesture of unworldly tenderness.

And then I remembered how I had stood by the side of my grandfather’s grave when they lowered him into the ground. I threw a shovel of dirt onto the coffin, like the other men. Some kindness had passed out of the world, but I wouldn’t move away, I would never give him up. The storm was coming right for me, but suddenly I had the words for what I had felt then. I was determined by what I could not resist. I said, “I will not, cannot go.”

I don’t know how long I stood there on that rainy Saturday afternoon, lost in a book in the basement of my childhood house, in a cluttered Jewish cemetery on the south side of Chicago, in the middle of a field somewhere in Latvia, on an English moor. It would be years before I discovered I had been reading a lyric by Emily Bronte. I recognized the style as soon as I encountered “No Coward Soul Is Mine.” I suppose that in some sense I never really shut that worn anthology of poetry again because it had opened up an unembarrassed space in me that would never be closed. I had stumbled into the sublime. I had been initiated into the poetry of awe.

I don’t think we should underestimate the childlike capacity for wonder that poetry reopens within us. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll read “A Clear Midnight” by Walt Whitman and feel something within me beginning to stir.

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, grazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death and the stars.

The rich soulfulness in Whitman’s poem is like a magical or imaginary bird: opaque by day, transparent by night. The true or essential self is unleashed in this poem, which has so much spaciousness that I have to remind myself it is only one sentence and four lines long. Whitman’s poem exemplifies the correspondence between our inner and outer worlds. It is about the imagination in cooperation and harmony with the universe. Whitman seems to address his soul to achieve that harmony. This is a dramatic utterance, but it is also a conjuration. Whitman is playing the magician to his own soul on our behalf. The real addressee of this incantation is the reader, who exists on the distant horizon of the poem. I can’t help but feel that one part of the poem’s meaning is that the reader, too, has an imperishable soul. The poem wants to trigger that soul to dwell on the eternal. It would release something wordless and equivalent in any of us who read it.

Whitman’s words spur me in the direction of the Mysteries. I recite the poem over to myself like a prayer and feel its themes inhabiting me. I put down my book. For a moment I pause in the doorway to listen to the sound of others sleeping near me. I breathe deeply. Then I go outside and ponder the stars.