It’s Saturday. I have little to do, so I took the luxury of staying in bed an extra hour, letting my thoughts roam, and lines of poetry, many favorites over the many decades since my youth came to mind. A few brought a tear to my eye.

It was a sad, melancholy tear and seemed to have no rhyme or reason. This made me wonder: Why should the wealth of great poetry I’ve read and which so enriched my life, sometimes in a few lines impossible to forget, break my heart each time I recall them.

I thought of the phrase “a double edged sword”. But that makes no sense. What is more precise is a sword without a handle. You take it up and it’s a powerful tool. But it cuts your own hands as you wield it. And the irony is that the sharper it is, the more it cuts into you.

This is our condition, our human state. The more we feel, and the more sensitized and empathetic we become, the more we’re likely to be hurt. The deeper our consciousness, the sharper the pain when distressing images and piteous lines rise up from a page of poetry.

And that’s what fine poetry is, the most concise expression of human emotion, all emotions in all their complex twists and colors.

Here are a few outside the common range of reading I wish to share.

“See Levet to the grave descend,

Of every friendless name, the friend”.

Samuel Johnson ‘On the death of Robert Levet’. He was an impoverished practitioner of medicine with no degree, who walked the slums of London each day, helping the sick for no money. S.J. put him up in his house for twenty years. He was ugly, uncouth and sometimes surly. But his actions in life were the very opposite, and S.J. admired this and maintained him.

Here’s the beginning of an anonymous poem called ‘Apology for vagrants’

“Cold on Canadian hills or Minden’s plains,

Perhaps that parent mourned her soldier slain;

Bent over her babe, her eye dissolved in dew,

The big drops mingling with the milk he drew

Gave the sad presage of his future years,

The child of misery, baptized in tears”.

The image of a young widow in a cold, dim cottage all alone with her babe, without a life, only poverty and misery ahead, crying and nursing the helpless infant is moving enough. But the tears, dripping down her cheeks, then onto her breasts, sliding to her nipples and into the babe’s mouth, diluting the milk, spoiling it with the taste of the salt of the tears, is truly an unforgettable image, ‘sad presage of his future years'.

Poetry envisions feats of imagination so powerful it puts most of Hollywood to shame. Screen writers, visit your libraries!

One more stanza from a cleric, Richard Gifford, who only wrote one poem. It’s less heart-piercing but it is melancholic and memorable:

Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound.

All at her work the village maiden sings.

Nor while she turns the giddy wheel around,

Revolves the sad vicissitude of things.

Samuel Johnson changed the second line as he was recalling it from having read it once forty years earlier. But whenever he changed a line he improved it. Check out the alternate version.

There are gems in poetry as valuable to us as the rarest diamonds, even more so, as they are not baubles, but concise ideas that define humanity.

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