Nothing but In Between

I was recently encouraged to think about my favorite poem, and was horrified to find I couldn't quite remember any of it clearly. Nor could I remember more than the barest pieces of my second favorite, at which point I am left with fragments from French poets, but never enough of anything to make a whole.

I don't mind so much when I'm asked to try poking a chemistry equation, finding the solution to a geometry problem, or remembering which president liked national banks and which hated them. Those were all bits and pieces I learned for the purposes of a letter grade, happy to forget it all the very next day. But the poetry, the poetry, that required actual thought, consideration, challenge, effort. I earned that knowledge. I earned my appreciation.

I never liked poetry. I thought it was just a silly word game. Set your story up so that it rhymes. Ba dump, ba dump, ba dump, ba dum; ba dump ba dump, ba dump, da bum. And it is, or it can be, which is why it is so amazing when a poem manages to actually capture an emotion in such a way that I can see past the poem. I admit to a continuing lack of taste to really get the vast majority of poetry.

All of this, though, is just an excuse to post my two favorite parts from my two favorite poems, in hopes that I remember them a bit better. Or failing that, that reading this, you, dear reader, will someday remind me.

"To his Coy Mistress," Andrew Marvell:
"Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run. "

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," T.S. Elliot
"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

"I do not think that they will sing to me.

"I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."