5 Fantastic Poems You’ll Fall in Love With
When I was a kid, I loved Dr. Seuss’s and Shel Silverstein’s poems and loved the playfulness of their words and, invariably, the beautiful life message waiting at the end. For many, children’s poems like Seuss and Silverstein are our first introduction to the world of rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter; we just didn’t know what to call them until high school. And if your teen schooling years were anything like mine, you were introduced to some of the world’s greatest poets, but you were just too damn young and dumb to realize how amazing these verses were. At least I was. I knew I liked the works of Silvia Plath and Shakespeare, but I couldn’t fathom the deeper inner meaning until college, and I had some time under my belt as an adult.
I didn’t get my BA in English Literature until I was almost twenty-six. By this time, I had traveled around Europe and Asia, had some pretty intense relationships and even bigger breakups, and supported myself for the better part of a decade. For most poetry, at least the really good stuff, we, as readers, need a certain amount of life experience to grok the magnitude of emotion the poet is expressing. That’s not to say that you can’t still enjoy the beauty that is poetry at any age. One most certainly can. It’s just the longer we live, the more we understand. That’s the plan, anyhow.
Below are five poems I think are amazing, and I hope you will too.
This is Just to Say by Williams Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Almost anything can become poetry. Even a simple note on the fridge says how sorry you are for your lack of self-control regarding chilled, ripe fruit.
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
The simplicity of Williams’s This Is Just To Say is what makes it great. There were yummy plums, I was hungry, and now those yummy plums are gone. But the kicker isn’t that he’s eaten the fruit. It’s that he has to describe how amazing they tasted. As If eating them wasn’t enough, he had to rub it in that they were “delicious/ so sweet and so cold.” What a jerk.
Speaking of forbidden fruit. . .
Poem 251, or Over the Fence by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
Emily Dickinson is one of my favorite poets, so picking just one of her pieces is no easy task. However, if I’m including a women poet trapped in an uber-patriarchal society, I will have to go with something that contains a subversive voice.
251 Over the Fence
Over the fence—
Strawberries—grow—
Over the fence—
I could climb—if I tried, I know—
Berries are nice!
But—if I stained my Apron—
God would certainly scold!
Oh, dear,—I guess if He were a Boy—
He’d—climb—if He could!
Over the Fence tells the short, sweet story of a woman who spys some sun-ripened strawberries on the other side of a fence. Since she’s a girl, climbing over the wall like a boy could eat the berries wouldn’t be right. Plus, if she were to stain her apron with berry juice, she’s be caught for sure. It’s easy to see that berries stand for sex or romance. The staining could be the sin of the act of love-making out of wedlock or, even more directly, the breaking of the hymen. Yet, we know the speaker has tried berries. Maybe not the ones over the fence, but she’s tasted berries and knows them to be good. Dickinson goes so far as to invoke God, saying that if he were a boy, he would climb the fence. Berries are that good.
Song of Myself from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Like Whitman’s untamed beard, Leaves of Grass is a free-verse poetry marvel. Yet, Song of Myself is the real gem for me. Initially published in 1855 and then republished five more times (with additions and edits) during Whitman’s lifetime (George Lucas wasn’t the first creator to edit their work ad nauseam), Song of Myself is comprised of 52 individual parts and remained untitled until 1881.
Song of Myself
11
Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the
sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.
I like to think that if Emily Dickinson were into finery instead of baking and lived by the sea, she would be the subject of Whitman’s poem. I see a reclusive Dickinson peeking through blinds to spy the bathers as they relax and play in the water. Perhaps they are Dickinson’s berries from Over the Fence. However, while Dickinson and Whitman were contemporaries, she was urged by family and friends to steer clear of the flamboyant Whitman with his unapologetic queer tendencies. Ironically, it is believed by more than a few scholars that Dickinson swam on occasion in the waters surrounding the Island of Lesbos. I like to think that she and Whitman might have been fast friends.
In section 11 of Song of Myself, we see an affluent woman bound by societal pressures to remain ladylike in her gilded cage. She can only enjoy the freedom of the male bathers from the seclusion of her house overlooking the beach. She would like to do more than watch, caressing them with her eyes, invisible hand touching them, but being a woman, she remains in her place, not naked in the water with the young man.
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
The complete works of Wilfred Owen consist of just over 20 poems. Hailed as one of the world’s greatest War poets, Owen lost his life at the ripe old age of 25 as he led his troops across the Sambre-Oise canal at Ors during the First World War. Yet, unlike other war poets of his generation, Owen didn’t glorify battle but lamented it with graphic depictions of what war did to individuals and countries.
Dulce et Decorum est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,|
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
I first ran into this poem during our World History unit on WWI in high school. Only 15 at the time, it was still easy to see the brilliance of Owen’s prose. It saddened me then, as it does now, to think about the war he wrote so intimately and truthfully about the was that would take his life weeks later.
Used prevalently during the first world war, mustard gas is a blister agent that causes burning of the skin, eyes, lungs, and digestive tract. In high doses, it can cause the lungs to hemorrhage and the skin to become permanently scarred. With the creation of the Geneva Protocol, chemical and biological agents like mustard gas were banned from use during wartime engagements.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: How sweet it is to die for one’s country. One can easily see the irony in the phrase Ownes uses to title and end his poem. Nothing about war is sweet.
You Fit Into Me by Margret Atwood (1939 – )
Margret Atwood is a powerhouse in the literary world and with good reason. She is the author of over 15 books of poetry, eight novels, five short fiction collections, and four non-fiction books and has a nice list of literary awards under her belt as well. Yet, for her long and fantastic bibliography, the poem that knocked my socks off consists of four simple lines.
You Fit Into Me
You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
Like with any good piece of short writing, the author has placed a twist at the end, taking the reader off guard. What at first appears to be cliché and trite is transformed into something completely unexpected. We imagine the sewing notions, hooks, and eyes commonly found at the top of zippers in women’s dresses and the back of bras. These two pieces of hardware belong to one another. One is meaningless without the other. But then, through a brilliant twist of wordplay, Atwood transforms what we expect. The blunt hook is now a fishing hook, sharp and barbed, hard to remove from what it has pierced. The eye is no longer the intricately folded piece of metal awaiting its counterpart but the fragile organ we use to see. In four short lines, Atwood has managed to make us “aw,” with a sappy appreciation for love poetry, and then ripped the rug from under us to show that love isn’t forever. It sometimes isn’t even nice. It’s messy, cruel, painful, and can cause blindness. Man, I love this poem.
If you have a favorite poem or poet, you want to share. Please leave a comment below.
