A Poem to Carry in the Blood

Photo by Trust "Tru" Katsande on Unsplash

I came late to poetry. For twenty-five years after I fell in love with books, I thought I didn’t like poetry. As a child I was embarrassed by the poems adults read to children—all those short lines and cutesy rhymes. If I’d known the word, I’d have called it patronizing. I felt talked down to. I hated those poems. I was ready to be a grown-up.

Yes, sigh. At age four, and ten, and twelve, I had a hard time enjoying kid stuff.

You might expect that once I grew up and went to college, poetry would finally get through to me. But it didn’t happen then either. That was the seventies, and the course requirements at my school were so loose you could graduate with barely an English class. Or at least I did.

During those years poetry seemed inscrutable. Mysterious. So full of itself. Too much work. So I ignored it. And I still disliked rhymes.

But then, seven years out of college, I hit a crisis. I’d applied to a doctoral program I really really wanted to get into—and seemed like a shoe-in for because I had already taken, and done well in, its opening seminars. But the admissions committee had other ideas and turned my application down.

I was devastated. So I went on a pilgrimage. I spent that summer crossing the country on trains and buses and planes, visiting friends and trying to figure out my life. And in my backpack I carried a thin folder, its pockets stuffed with poems I was just beginning to appreciate.

A friend had introduced me to some of the poems. Others I’d found on my own, mostly English poets, nineteenth century—A. E. Housman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti. I cracked the twentieth century with Yeats and even a few Americans like Roethke.

I’d printed the poems out to take along because I wanted their company on my journey. No, I craved their company. They pointed toward something I could just barely glimpse. Some richness of spirit that I wanted more of. Certain doors inside of me were creaking open, and somehow these poems were related to it. I needed them to oil those hinges, to keep those doors from ever closing again.

That summer on the road I read my printed-out poems so often that whole stanzas of them crept inside and took up residence. As the years pass, I appreciate Roethke even more:

I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

I can’t say the lines gave me peace, but they did provide companionship. Someone else had been there, likely facing way harder things than I was facing. I could keep moving forward, even if I had no idea where.

And some lines spoke of a kind of love that, given the state of my marriage at the time, I could only dream of. Such a twist of longing I felt inside when I read these lines from Yeats!

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

I longed for that kind of connection. And had no idea that it was actually possible.

But of that whole sheaf of pages with their printed-out dot-matrix poems, and all the memorizing I did at the time, only one poem stuck in my mind forever. In its entirety.

That poem was “Loveliest of Trees,” by A. E. Housman (1896):

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

And isn’t it ironic—it’s a poem with simple lines and little rhymes and all those things I hated as a child!

Which only goes to show how rhyme and meter work their way into the blood as easy as anything and keep a poem flowing there for decades.

I recited the poem for you and am posting it here because, thanks to

Tara Penry

, we have a Substack community poetry event happening right now! Actually, it happened a few days ago, but I somehow missed the invitation and just learned about it. So this is my late ticket to the party.

Tara asked us to recite for the community a poem we are glad to carry in our blood. Here is the first one I ever memorized, long before I had any idea just how many hours of my life I would spend hiking in forests and enjoying spring blooms.

Be sure to check Tara’s always-beautiful, always-welcoming page at Quiet Reading on Friday, November 1, when she’ll do a roundup of everyone’s poetry readings.

Poetry blessings to you, and may you enjoy many more springs with wildflowers and fruit trees and all the magic of our blooming friends!