Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, 
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? 
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, 
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

– “Among School Children” by W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats has influenced many poets. Anne Stevenson writes of his strong pull for her younger self and other very different poets in her essay, The Unified Dance. As she says, “…poetry written for the ear speaks to the ear before it appeals to the mind or asks for an interpretation.”

I also  like her definition of great poetry and her warning to modern poets from that essay:

The best poetry—great poetry—happens when sound, rhythm, and image bring about a mysterious feeling of wholeness that somehow draws mind, body, and spirit together into what both Yeats and Eliot envisioned as a unified dance. What we call “the power of the word” is really a pattern of words in a rhythm originating in heartbeat and footfall. Language, like the human mind, consists of a conscious and an unconscious element, and what “real” poetry can do, even when it looks like prose on the page, is to reproduce the hidden music we are all born hearing but lose as we grow up. The danger today lies in pursuing novelty beyond a point of no return, of technically “making it new” until we no longer hear anything but the virtual pulse of a spoiled, over-mechanized civilization that is destroying its childhood as it ages, boasting the while of its progress.

____________________________________

Anne Stevenson (1933 – ) was born to American parents in Cambridge, England, where her father, C.L. Stevenson, was studying philosophy under I. A. Richards and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The family returned to America when she was six months old. She grew up in New England, while her father taught at Harvard and Yale.

Stevenson played cello and piano, destined to be a professional musician. But while studying music and languages at the University of Michigan, at the age of 19 she began to lose her hearing, so she shifted to writing instead.

On Going Deaf

I’ve lost a sense. Why should I care?
Searching myself, I find a spare.
I keep that sixth sense in repair,
And set it deftly, like a snare.

____________________________________

Continue reading →