Review
I Hate Poetry!
By Barbara Branden
Jun 4, 2008

Well... it’s not true that I hate poetry.

In fact, it’s false. I love poetry — but I got you reading, didn’t I?

I hope this discussion will pique your interest sufficiently so that those of you who have found little of personal value in poetry, will give it another chance.

I hope to convince you to read poetry — including Walter Donway’s fine volume Touched By Its Rays, which is the subject of this review, and many more of the superb works that are our heritage.

There are good reasons to conclude that poetry, today, is a dying art, devoted to doggerel, to unintelligibility, to mercilessly crude propaganda, or to undiluted despair.

Touched By Its Rays by Walter Donway

Many of you have probably been soured on the whole endeavor because of what you have been exposed to — and haven’t been exposed to.

For many years, most of the contemporary poetry I’ve found has saddened and often sickened me.

I have discovered some small amount of wit, some cleverness, some interesting turns of phrase, but l have found little hint of the majesty, the beauty, the achingly glorious music of Yeats, of Tennyson, of Swinburne, of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Oscar Wilde and Matthew Arnold and Kipling and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a host of others.

Searching among today’s poets, one reads:

Acts of Love
By Pam Rehm

If endear is earned
and is meant to identify
two halves
then it composes
one meaning

Or:

Art Versus Trade
By James Weldon Johnson

Trade, Trade versus Art,
Brain, Brain versus Heart;
Oh, the earthiness of these hard-hearted times,
When clinking dollars, and jingling dimes,
Drown all the finer music of the soul.

Or:

Integer
By Rae Armantroutl

1, One what?
One grasp?
No hands.
No collection
Of stars. Something dark
Pervades it.

And:

First Do No Harm
By Bob Hicok

While trying to extract a fly from a spider web,
I pulled one of its legs off.
There is the thought of small prosthetics, image
of a tiny hospital, tiny being too big a word
for the nano-this and micro-that, calipers
and scalpels and whats-its.

Fortunately, that’s not the whole story.

Beauty of language, combined with originality and clarity of thought, that I had feared were lost to poetry, have been found in at least one poet writing today. Walter Donway’s Touched By Its Rays gives me heart to continue my search for poetry I can love.

Donway is a man of the present; he writes about the events, the conflicts, the dreams and loves, the struggles and disappointments and triumphs of a man of today, but he writes in the great tradition of his illustrious predecessors.

In his Atlasphere column “The Struggle for Poetry’s Soul,” Donway wrote:

“Like prose, poetry conveys meaning by using words to recreate reality, but what distinguishes poetry is that it establishes a meter, a consistent underlying beat, and then creates feeling, and meaning, by varying that meter in specific ways that have specific emotional effects. The possibilities are endless.

“To take an example from my own book, here is the opening of a poem “Red Rover”:

O where you have gone, Red Rover?
And do you recall how we bent
To charge the ranks of old idols?
As to a trumpet’s cry, we went!

We thought to topple every foe:
The labyrinth of faith, the spell
Of antique sin — all the prisons
Of humility where men dwell.

“I believe that, quite apart from the meaning of the words, the underlying meter, and the rhythm imposed on it, help to convey a sense of longing, and of appeal, in these lines.”

Donway practices what he preaches. His rivetingly beautiful poems are powerfully emotionally evocative. He understands the music of the English language — his work sings. He is a musician of language.

At its best, poetry is music, the special music of words. Reading it can be like listening to a exquisite concerto, a majestic symphony, a simple, nostalgic ballad, or a soul-stirring anthem.

Don’t just read the following excerpts from a variety of poets; listen to their music. Let them sing to you.

Kipling’s Mandalay:

There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
“Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can’t you ‘ear their paddles chunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!”

Imagine that I expressed the line: “An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay” in (admittedly leaden) prose: “When the sun rose in the morning, it seemed as if it appeared with a loud noise, rather like thunder, coming from across the bay in China.” No one would have noticed or remembered the thought, except, possibly, with a shudder. How one expresses a thought matters!

Or:

Walter Donway’s Invitation to a Dog

You used to dive at brambles,
And when the job was done,
You’d sport a badge of burrs.
Your nature was to run.

You’d fire muddy bullets
In dashes through the foam
And never catch a fish.
Your nature was to roam.

Where ever did you go
Those moon-mad nights in May?
You’d scratch my door at dawn
And sleep away the day.

Then late one yellow fall
It seemed you’d gone for good,
But first frost saw you home,
Your muzzle flecked with blood.

So come and lie awhile;
There’s gray about your eyes.
You think I never notice
Your struggle when you rise?

You’re welcome on the porch
Beside my rocking chair.
You’ll find the goodly sun
Is kind to stiff hips there.

You think I never ran?
Or dived into a fight?
Or loosed a lusty howl
Or stalked the restless night?

I don’t have anyone
To say “good dog” to me,
Explain the day has come
And what must be, must be.

I say you’ve earned your place.
And damn-all how it seems.
The moon is on the roads
We’re roaming in our dreams.

In the rhythms and language of this poem, do you hear the gruff, fond, half-humorous sounds of a man speaking to his old dog the very lessons in resignation, ultimate satisfaction, and closure that he himself is struggling to accept?

Listen to the slow accelerating thunder of the angry poet in Donway’s Above Tiananmen Square:

At first, we wonder why the square
Appears deserted, knowing that scores
Or more had fought and fallen there,
And guess the camera has not shown
The panicked face glancing back
To where one man now stands alone.

The crowd may clamor with voices
Of warning, but perhaps for him
The moment passed for making choices.
He stands like one arrayed in ranks
To blunt the insensate lunge
Of those preposterous tanks.

Seeing but thin shoulders, askew
With his incongruous bundles,
Who can tell us if he knew
That great deeds irritate our age,
Which inters them in pearls of glory
To spare us inconvenient rage?

And hear the defiant lyricism of Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of Peace
Count many a year of strife well lost
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

Listen to the vast, distant sound of church bells ringing through the Biblical cadence of Yeats’s melody:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Do you hear the deep sobbing of a cello breaking through the bittersweet nostalgia of Tennyson’s Tears, Idle Tears?

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more....

Dear as remember’d kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign’d
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
Death in Life, the days that are no more!

Hear the drumbeats of the tortured Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And Shelley’s exquisite elegy, Adonais:

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy, and calumny and hate and pain
And that unrest which men miscall delight
Can touch him not, and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain.

In one of my favorites among his poems, Walter Donway portrays a man in Ancient Greece who, despite his age, sets out, with all the fire and idealism of youth, to become a discus thrower — a love he could not pursue as a young man.

Note how the other arts can converge in poetry, as you hear the song of A Prelude and see its vivid imagery and sway to its rhythms:

A Prelude

Begin with only this: desire — desire
To do this thing that snatched away my gaze,
When young, and spun it skyward to the fire
They say is great Apollo’s gift of days.

I raise my arms, but there is none to see
A man, too old for games, who lofts the bronze
Against the pale Corinthian sky when he
Is all alone, the hour before day dawns...

Now, all I am must flow into these hands;
I gaze as from some inner eye and see
Not cliffs, nor waves below, not salt-white sands,
But just that moment when the disc flies free.

Perhaps one day this discus could be hurled
From those great cliffs that rise above the beach,
And fly the ceaseless winds that whip the world
To seas and shores that I will never reach.

Though none recall the man, the deed, the time,
A boy, just glancing up in future days,
To read the hour in the sun’s slow climb,
May see my discus, flashing in its rays.