Renovating Virtues

“After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” — Wallace Stevens (Opus Posthumous) There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence–depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations, and the round Of ordinary intercourse–our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired; A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced, That penetrates, enables us to mount, When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen. - William Wordsworth, (The Prelude)

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Expectant and waiting you muse On the great rare thing which alone To enhance your life you would choose: The awakening of the stone, The deeps where yourself you would lose. In the dusk of the shelves, embossed Shine the volumes in gold and browns, And you think of countries once crossed, Of pictures, of shimmering gowns Of the women that you have lost. And it comes to you then at last— And you rise for you are aware Of a year in the far off past With its wonder and fear and prayer.

REMEMBRANCE, by Rainer Maria Rilke

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You see, I want a lot. Perhaps I want everything the darkness that comes with every infinite fall and the shivering blaze of every step up. So many live on and want nothing And are raised to the rank of prince By the slippery ease of their light judgments But what you love to see are faces that do work and feel thirst. You love most of all those who need you as they need a crowbar or a hoe. You have not grown old, and it is not too late To dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret.

Rainer Maria Rilke

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My house is on fire, soul burning, Ablaze in every direction. Carpets and curtains threaded to dust. Within the smoke of this raging fire I sob, run to each corner Shout, scream, yelp With the voice of a sad howl and bitter laughter.

Iranian poet, Mehdi Akhavān-Sāles

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Who won't turn the page to a grave for the language, nor splinter the syntax to mimic explosion, nor dismember sense to appeal to sensation; who, knowing the cliff face, the handholds, the rope, reckless, swings out past the edge in a wide, daring arc - the wind there is howling, but her feet find the ledge.

Eleanor Wilner, in 'Don't Look so Scared! You're Alive!' (Poetry magazine, Oct 2003)

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At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness – Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails. The millhouses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness Still more in place when mirrored in canals. I can’t remember not ever having known The immanent hydraulics of a land Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone. My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind. Heaviness of being. And poetry Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens. Me waiting until I was nearly fifty To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten, Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

Fosterling, by Seamus Heaney

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The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

Love After Love, by Derek Walcott

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Who won't turn the page to a grave for the language, nor splinter the syntax to mimic explosion

Eleanor Wilner, in 'Don't Look so Scared! You're Alive!'

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Poems are handbooks for human decency and understanding. Poets hold water in their cupped hands and run back from the well because someone is parched and thirsting. The poem is a force field against despair

Elizabeth Alexander

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Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: memorable speech.

W. H. Auden,  in the Introduction to his 1935 anthology, The Poet's Tongue

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IF I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin          Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.

Emily Dickinson

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Unto a broken heart No other one may go Without the high prerogative Itself hath suffered too.

Emily Dickinson

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between here and here between hidden points in the soul between hidden points in the soul born from nothing between saying and said beyond what one has oneself done

Carolyn Forche, in ‘One Earth’

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Whenever I search for myself I find the others And when I search for them I only find my alien self So am I the individual- crowd?

Mahmoud Darwish, in Mural

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These were moments, years,   Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts,   But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day   When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering   Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning   Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned,   That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint None of us ever graduates from college, For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up   Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.

John Ashbery, in ‘Soonest Mended’

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Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Separation, by W. S. Merwin

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Rain through the morning and in the long pool an old toad singing happiness old as water

By the Front Door, by W. S. Merwin

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...so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.

Adrienne Rich, in What Kind of Times Are These