The possibilities of poetry

It’s said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, the written word can be as magical and inspiring as a thousand pictures, and just as versatile. In fact, words are simply pictures or images in another form. They can do anything: inform us, make us laugh or cry, warm our hearts with love and kindness or chill us to the bone.

Words and pictures are seldom mutually exclusive. Have you ever wondered what images inspired William Blake’s words?

‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand
Or a Heaven in a Wild Flower.
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.’

 From ‘Auguries of Innocence‘ By William Blake

And what prompted Alfred Lord Tennyson to tell us the story of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ in verse?

‘On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro’ the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
Four grey walls, and four grey towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The Lady of Shalott.’

From ‘The Lady of Shalott’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Of course, it was nature’s simple beauty which must have inspired Wordsworth’s famous and timeless words:

‘I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.’

From ‘The Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth

 

Then there’s music – something which often expresses what words and pictures appear to be unable to do. If you enjoy and listen to music, then you’ll appreciate its form and structure, its rhythm and pulse, its highs and lows, its louds and softs, its power, passion, drama, story telling, its humour and its heart:- you’ll find all of the same ingredients in poetry, lighting up each page like shooting stars. You’ll find poetry in the lyrics of every kind of song and musical. As the Pirate King sings in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Pirates of Penzance’, we all need a touch of poetry:

KING: Although our dark career
Sometimes involves the crime of stealing,
We rather think that we’re
Not altogether void of feeling.
Although we live by strife,
We’re always sorry to begin it,
For what, we ask, is life
Without a touch of Poetry in it?
(all kneel)

ALL: Hail, Poetry, thou heav’n-born maid!
Thou gildest e’en the pirate’s trade.
Hail, flowing fount of sentiment!
All hail, all hail, divine emollient!
(all rise)

From The Pirates of Penzance
By Sir William S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan

 

Over the years, many people have said many things about poetry:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge said poetry was ‘the best words in the best order.’

Edgar Allan Poe said it was ‘the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.’

A wise, though unknown, author wrote ‘The desert attracts the nomad, the ocean the sailor, the infinite the poet.’

For me, poetry is all of these things and, most importantly, its possibilities are endless.