Well-versed in filmmaking

When events and emotions confuse us, we often turn to poetry. We write our own, or quote the greats to help make sense of troubling situations and to communicate our feelings about them to others.

So too, as it turns out, do filmmakers. Though critics rarely note it, screen characters are continually reading, quoting and reciting poems. Beyond the obvious uses -- Shakespeare quoted by Gwyneth Paltrow in “Shakespeare in Love” -- and “toast and eulogy” scenes that mimic real life -- Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” as Kevin Kline’s hilarious toast in “The Anniversary Party,” Auden’s “Funeral Blues” recited by John Hannah in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” -- they also appear in ways that go beyond the expected.

Recent releases give plenty of examples. Michael Petroni’s “Till Human Voices Wake Us” draws its title from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and snippets of the poem are quoted throughout by Helena Bonham Carter and Guy Pearce, who resembles the spiritually exhausted narrator of “Prufrock.” The poem provides the action (a drowning) and the imagery (water, “sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown”) that releases Pearce from his emotionally flat existence.

In “The Quiet American,” Michael Caine’s British journalist uses “Dipsychus” by A.H. Clough as a test of Brendan Fraser’s character. Fraser, the “quiet American” of the film’s title, fails the test when he recognizes the lines (“I drive through the street, and I care not a damn, / The people they stare, and they ask who I am, / And if I should chance to run over a cad / I can pay for damage, if ever so bad”) without grasping how they apply to his own actions in Vietnam. Coming at a pivotal moment in Caine’s struggle to maintain his journalist’s aloofness, the poem becomes an ironic comment on the treachery in unbridled political idealism.

A well-placed poem can have a profound effect on the audience’s experience of a movie. Poet Kenneth Koch writes that poetry is a language within a language, one in which “the sound of the words is raised to an importance equal to that of their meaning.” Even if movie viewers don’t immediately grasp what a poem is about, they’re likely to absorb the change in rhythm and syntax it brings, as if the characters briefly switched to speaking French, with words both familiar and strange. Those unfamiliar with poetry will experience the language viscerally, if not consciously, the way a child responds to a nursery rhyme because its rhythm matches the heartbeat.

A poem alerts viewers to a shift in story. And, along with other atmospheric details, it can help propel a movie forward.

Consider 2001’s award-winning “In the Bedroom,” in which lines from William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “My Lost Youth” bring to a close the two card-game scenes that frame the film’s central tragedy.

During the first game, W. Clapham Murray, as an otherwise minor character, quotes eight of Blake’s lines, including these, when Tom Wilkinson can’t decide whether to bid or fold:

The Beggar’s Dog and Widow’s Cat,

Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.

The Gnat that sings his Summer’s song,

Poison gets from Slander’s tongue.

The poetry elicits good-natured ribbing from around the table, which prompts Tom Wilkinson to bid his hand. It also creates a hum, like that of a tuning fork, that foreshadows the violence to come. For those unfamiliar with Blake, the lines taken out of context are not easily understood, yet as spoken by Murray they achieve a tone of prophesy, with the resonating words “Poison,” “Slander” and “Widow.”

Others might be reminded of Blake’s insistence on individual responsibility and the need to be aware that one’s actions have consequences. They’ll hear the lines as a warning to Wilkinson that goes unheeded at his peril.

The second card game follows a murder, and the atmosphere around the table is palpably different from the camaraderie of the earlier game. Wilkinson is reeling with grief; his friends treat him gingerly. This time, Murray quotes Longfellow:

There are things of which I may not speak;

There are dreams that cannot die;

There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak;

And bring a pallor into the cheek,

And a mist before the eye.

Here, in the quiet moment of the poem, Wilkinson inwardly moves toward the ugly act that condemns him to a joyless existence. Taken together, the scenes underscore how quickly happiness can turn to grief and how age brings the realization that both emotions must necessarily coexist.

Character clues

Poems make “the unsayable said,” writes poet Donald Hall. In a movie, they can add a thematic element or provide a concise way to reveal a character’s inner epiphany, saving minutes of valuable screen time. It’s no surprise that Woody Allen, one of our most sophisticated and literary filmmakers, has been slipping poetry into his screenplays all along.

In “Another Woman,” one of Allen’s most affecting dramas, Gena Rowlands plays a woman in middle age who realizes that she’s led an unexamined life, without passion. As she struggles with long-buried emotions, she turns to Rilke, her mother’s favorite German poet.

It’s as if Rowlands were trying to recapture the fullness of youth by returning to the literature that once gave her great pleasure. First she reads “The Panther,” with its depiction of a caged animal that lifts its gaze: “An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, / plunges into the heart and is gone.”

She’s about to close the book when she rereads “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Rilke’s poem about the transfixing presence he observes in a headless statue. This poem supplies Rowlands’ epiphany with its one-two punch of a final line: “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.”

There’s no hiding from Art. Just as we read a poem or look at a sculpture, it looks back at us. Art can be both a comfort and an irritant: It shakes us up and gives us what we need, like it or not.

Occasionally, a poem seems almost to be the reason for a movie’s very existence. It’s hard to imagine the indie comedy “The Daytrippers” succeeding without Andrew Marvell’s metaphysical verse.

Director Greg Mottola assembled an ultra-hip cast to populate his 1996 road trip story, which travels from suburban Long Island (past the Walt Whitman mall, in an opening shot), to the mysterious world of Manhattan publishing.

Yet their story would have been impossible without Mr. Marvell, whose poem is a riddle that needs solving.

On a morning after lovemaking, a languorous Hope Davis finds a note in husband Stanley Tucci’s pocket that’s composed of these lines from Marvell’s “Definition of Love”: “Therefore the love which us doth bind, / But fate so enviously debars, / is the conjunction of the mind, / and opposition of the stars.”

The puzzled Davis takes a trip -- destination SoHo -- to demand that Tucci explain the note. Along the way, she absorbs a full range of interpretations, none quite right, until she encounters Campbell Scott as an up-and-coming author camped out in Tucci’s office. Scott, in a performance that is an early glimpse of his tour-de-force as a misogynist in last year’s “Roger Dodger,” knows his seduction poems. As he gathers his charms to help Davis, he’s Marvell incarnate, using words to disarm.

It’s not until Davis spies Tucci cavorting with his homosexual lover that she appreciates the complexities of Marvell and why the poem, with its reference to a love that “though infinite / can never meet,” is appropriate to her husband’s situation.

These movies -- and dozens of others -- are part of a tradition that predates the talkies, when Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” (and short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”) inspired D.W. Griffith’s 1914 “Avenging Conscience.” And the mingling of these two art forms, one old, one new, has evolved to benefit both.

With so much great poetry coming off the big screen, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the poem’s titles and authors rolled by among the film’s credits? Viewers could leave the theater and head to the nearest bookstore. Or there could be product tie-ins, poetry books sold, as the late Joseph Brodsky recommended when he was the U.S. poet laureate, beside popcorn and soda at concession stands. And no situation would find us at a loss for words.