Change of Pace: Three Great Lyric Poems

The State of the Union Address has come and gone, its total mendacity beyond belief; the mass media’s unwillingness to call a lie a lie equally so. Enough! For a brief moment on this blog at least, none of our imbecilic politics and media culture. Instead, poetry–lyric poetry.

Lyric poetry makes a great change from all that, because it’s poetry that doesn’t tell a story, but rather directly evokes the feelings, thoughts, and perceptions of the poet. For me, as I think for most readers, there’s something special about the pleasure of reading great lyric poetry, its “utter unconsciousness of a listener,” as John Stuart Mill wrote; “feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude,” so that it unites you immediately with the poet’s voice, and ever after lingers in the mind. Here, then, are three short lyric poems to read and contemplate; they’re in the world but also take us out of it.

1. A “lyric poem”? Yes, in that it doesn’t tell the story of an airman, but evokes his life and death in the instant. A life and death that have become almost mythical to we who have only American television to show us the real world that the rest of the world sees every day: the world of (in Richard Falk’s chilling phrase) war as torture; “shock and awe” as a spectacle outdrawing even the Super Bowl, and after that, a blank screen...So here’s the real thing; not our daily lies. In five lines of poetry.

“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”
by Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

2. Cutting right to the heart of the meaning of what it is to be over....well, I won’t specify. If you’re of that age, you know; if you’re under thirty, no one can tell you; and if you’re in-between...just wait, some day this poem will be there for you.

“Politics”
by William Butler Yeats

'In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.' -Thomas Mann

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a traveled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

3. There are some poems (and novels too) that seem forever to carry the stigma that “I had to read this in high school, so it must be a high school poem.” As resolutely apolitical and apparently private as the first two poems are in some large sense public and political, this one is easily read as a sort of under-realized narrative; a minor story. And more, when anything is as over-quoted as the last three lines of this poem are, it’s pretty likely to be undervalued as well.

But I read into it something beyond those lines, concentrating on the first stanza and especially the first line–after all, first lines aren’t first lines by accident–which tells me that there is a mystery at the heart of this poem: perhaps the greatest mystery of all. Not a thought that I have much patience with when it’s expressed overtly, being a resolute atheist–but still, Frost feels it; and somehow it reaches me. And stays with me.

“Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening”
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.