Why do I Love Poetry?

A conversation with the closest friend of mine from my college days recently, made me reflect on this question: why do I love poetry? It led to some surprising discoveries. Nothing could be more surprising than the recollection that not long ago, if you had asked me, ' Hey, Jijnasa, who's poetry you love the most?', I'd have gone blank and said,' Urgh! I do not read any.'

But, then, when did I fell in love with it?
Hard to say. Because I do not remember falling, you know.

Once there was time when I thought poems were boring. I became fixated on the idea as
I began to devour more and more fiction. Poetry versus Fiction: I thought them as dichotomous, never realizing the potential of poetry and fiction to complement each other. During my school days I was averse to poem writing competitions; in periodicals and magazines, I skipped poems entirely, to look at colorful photos and, to read stories and other articles. Yet, on occasions I felt awed by soulful light music compositions in my regional language. Also, I remember a time when I couldn’t resist repeating to myself some lines of the English poems we were required to learn to recite.

‘Daffodils’ was one such. As I walked back from school, beneath the blue sky, with birds singing in the trees, it’s lines would play in my head.

“ Continuous as the stars that shine,

                Twinkling on the milky way

They stretched in never ending line.

Along the margin of the bay.”

And  then...

“ For oft when on my couch I lie,

                In vacant or in pensive mood;

Then my heart with pleasure fills

And dances with the daffodils.”

 (This, when I had no idea what daffodils looked like, and when I didn't  know meanings of many of the words in the poem!)

Also, I could never forget this stanza, of Robert Frost, even when exams where long past: it’s lines, dark and mysterious:

“ The woods are lovely dark and deep;
But I have promises to keep.
Miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.”

( As I became overly studious in my pre-university days, I actually wrote these lines in my diary, whenever I felt my attention wandering off from my textbooks.)

As it happens with many youngsters struggling to make sense of the big adult world, I too forgot to keep track of things I love as I thought them as distracters from ‘the more worthwhile things’. They kept coming back to me, though, nudging me to reconsider, asking me to love them, becoming one with me without my conscious knowledge. I believe, poetry was one among them. I do not remember falling in love with them. But now, here I am.

My love for poetry is intermittent and rather opportunistic. I do not pursue them actively. That doesn’t mean that it is any less passionate. When I and poetry cross paths, I lose myself to it, make it mine and move on. It remains with me forever, so much internalized that somebody else’s compositions are not much separable from my own.

Have you ever read these lines of Tagore? :

“Ah, but where is it?
Who can strain the blue from the sky?
I try to grasp the beauty;
it eludes me, leaving only the body in my hands.
Baffled and weary I come back.
How can the body touch the flower which only the spirit may touch?”

When I read them I cannot help but feel the sense of helplessness for all the beautiful things that can never be fully owned: like beauty, love, comradeship, compassion and life. Like tides of ocean, they come ashore, make you go to them, let you touch them, then, as you realize this salty water around your feet is not really tide if they remain there forever, they retreat.

I have thought over it, and have arrived at a transitional conclusion. This will hold true for me until I can better myself. It goes like this: Poems are not just some meaningful words aesthetically arranged. Poems can speak a language that words by themselves cannot. That is, the whole is more than sum of its parts. With poems we touch a soul that is beyond comprehension to superficial niceties and rational arguments. When you relate to a poetry that has flowed out of a poet’s soul in a rush of emotions, your heart finds a friend in him/her, whom you never knew you had; who is closer to you more than anyone else had been to you, closer than you permitted yourself to be to your inner life and who seems to be, for a passing fraction of moment, the master crafter of our beautiful universe. You find that love him, intensely and like never before. Whom? The answer is neither the poet, nor the poetry.

What about you? Why do you think you love poetry?

Or if you do not care for them much,why, in your opinion, some people do love poetry? Want to see it for yourself.....? Excellent, here's what you can do:

         Just let go of all the rules of grammer you once learned in school, read a bit about the life of the poet on whose work you would like to experiment, and off you go! (A small tip:  Feel it first before scrutinising the words.) 

And,forget it not, it would be wonderful if you can tell me about your views in comments below.

Keep questing!