“Reduced to its simplest and most essential form, the poem is a song. Song is neither discourse nor explanation.”~Octavio Paz

The story is that Leigh Hunt had been ill. Upon his recovery, he made a visit to his friend, Thomas Carlyle, and Carlyle’s wife, Jenny, greeted Hunt with a kiss. Hunt was friends with almost all the great British literary figures of the nineteenth century. He introduced Keats and Shelley to one another. In 1828 he published a book called Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries, a sort of expose of the “real Byron.” His friendship with Carlyle came a little later, in the 1830’s, after Keats and Shelley had died, and Byron and his friends scorned the poverty-stricken Hunt.

Kelly Fineman on Rondeau by James Henry Leigh Hunt.

” I know ever so many pieces of poetry off by heart—’The Battle of Hohenlinden’ and ‘dinburgh after Flodden,’ and ‘Bingen of the Rhine,’ and most of the ‘Lady of the Lake’ and most of ‘The Seasons’ by James Thompson. Don’t you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?”~Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Cindy at Ordo Amoris recommends The Art of Poetry by Christine Perrin and John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean?, and I have yet to read either book in its entirety.

I did read enough of the Ciardi book to see that it would be a great text for a poetry class. If I ever manage to snag a job teaching such a class at our homeschool co-op, I will be sure to use one or both of these as a guide.

Here’s a sample poem by John Ciardi:

Before the children say goodnight,
Mother, Father, stop and think:
Have you screwed their heads on tight?
Have you washed their ears with ink?

Have you said and done and thought
All the earnest parents should?
Have you beaten them as you ought:
Have you begged them to be good?

And above all – when you start
Out the door and douse the light –
Think, be certain, search your heart:
Have you screwed their heads on tight?

If they sneeze when they’re asleep,
Will their little heads come off?
If they just breathe very deep?
If – especially – they cough?

Should – alas! – the little dears
Lose a little head or two,
Have you inked their little ears:
Girls’ ears pink and boys’ ears blue?

Children’s heads are very loose.
Mother, Father, screw them tight.
If you feel uncertain use
A monkey wrench, but do it right.

If a head should come unscrewed
You will know that you have failed.
Doubtful cases should be glued.
Stubborn cases should be nailed.

Then when all your darlings go
Sweetly screaming off to bed,
Mother, Father, you may know
Angels guard each little head.

Come the morning you will find
One by one each little head
Full of gentle thoughts and kind,
Sweetly screaming to be fed.

We use hands to tighten the head screws and no ink markings, and we haven’t lost a head yet.

“An essay is a glass of water. But if a few drops of that water fall on a hot frying pan and sizzle? Then you have a poem.”~The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

I could write an essay on the eagle, a textbook on the care and feeding of eagles, take a photograph of an eagle, write a novel about eagles and eagle-lovers, but would I really have said anything more worthy about The Eagle than this poem says? Tennyson called it a “a fragment” since he was used to writing much longer poems. It’s certainly a memorable fragment.

“I have lived all my chief joys, and indeed nearly all emotions that go warmly by that name and relate to myself personally, in poetry, and in poetry alone.”~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How’s this for a “homeschooled prodigy”?(from Victorian Web)

“Elizabeth, an accomplished child, had read a number of Shakespearian plays, parts of Pope’s Homeric translations, passages from Paradise Lost, and the histories of England, Greece, and Rome before the age of ten. She was self-taught in almost every respect. During her teen years she read the principal Greek and Latin authors and Dante’s Inferno–all texts in the original languages. Her voracious appetite for knowledge compelled her to learn enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament from beginning to end. Her enjoyment of the works and subject matter of Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft was later expressed by her concern for human rights in her own letters and poems. By the age of twelve she had written an “epic” poem about the Battle of Marathon, consisting of four books of rhyming couplets. Barrett later referred to her first literary attempt as, “Pope’s Homer done over again, or rather undone.”

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints!—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

More EBB trivia:
The Barretts had 12 children, and Mr. Barrett forbade all those who grew to adulthood to marry. Elizabeth had to elope to marry Robert Browning.
Elizabeth began taking opium for pain relief at age 15, and she remained addicted to it for the rest of her life.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning lived in Italy for most of their marriage–which was apparently very happy and mutually beneficial. They had one child, a son.
Romantically, Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Italy “in her husband’s arms.”

“Children were no longer made to learn poetry by heart. And so the deep rhythms of the language, its inner music, was lost to them, because they had never had it embedded in their minds.”~Love Over Scotland by Alexander McCall Smith

A project for April, Poetry Month: Make a Memory Poem Book.

Poems for your memory poem book:
All Things Bright and Beautiful by Cecil Frances Alexander.

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Daffodils by William Wordsworth.

The Children’s Hour by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Animal Crackers by Christopher Morley.

Time for Rabbits by Aileen Fisher.

Sea Fever by John Masefield.

A Prayer in Spring by Robert Frost.

Use any poem with vivid images that are easy for a child to draw and remember.

“A wounded poet bleeds poetry.”~Richard Jesse Watson

And an insane poet bleeds crazy poetry? This poem was my very favorite poem in all the world, until I read this post several years ago at the blog of English professor Amanda Witt. Now it’s still one of my favorite poems, with a little bit of crazy mixed into my appreciation for the poet and his poem. I like the sound and the content, and if that makes me a little off-the-wall, I’m content to own the adjective.

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;–
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee–
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me–
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of a cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we–
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea–
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Kelly Fineman has a more positive and down-to-earth interpretation of Poe’s famous love poem.

Edie Hemingway’s middle grade novel Road to Tater Hill features the poem Annabel Lee as a sort of touchstone for the novel’s protagonist, whose name is also Annabel.

Justin at A Bit of Randomness agrees with Ms. Witt that Annabel Lee “gets a little creepy” when the narrator lies down next to a corpse! Adrienne also says that Poe Becomes a Lot More Disturbing After You’ve Lost a Spouse.

More Poe stuff at Semicolon.

“Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words. “~Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s The Raven is Brown Bear Daughter’s favorite poem. She had most of it memorized at one time when she was about thirteen years old. It’s one of my favorites, too; Poe had such an ability to manipulate and massage words into memorable messages.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door —
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door —
Only this and nothing more.”

You can go to this website, called Knowing Poe, to hear John Astin reciting Poe’s most famous poem, The Raven.

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted — nevermore!

“I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, he said. That famous, terrible grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Maybe it only really exists in form. Form is everything, without it you’ve got nothing but a stub-toed cry, sincere maybe, for what its worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance, but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry.”Old School by Tobias Wolff

This poem by Tennyson features an aged Ulysses (Odysseus), who is still too restless and adventurous to stay put in Ithaca.

Read the entire poem. I’m getting older myself, and I can sympathize with this version of Odysseus, who wants “life piled on life.”