Mental Furniture and Necessary Poetry

I’ve been feeling starved for poetry, so I’ve decided to post one poem a week on Facebook.  Don’t worry, not my own!  Real poetry.  Different people find different things necessary in their lives – art, music, kitten videos.  I’ve found that I need really good poetry to chew on mentally.  I feel very sorry for the children growing up today who don’t have to memorize poetry.  The poems and Bible verses I had to memorize as a child are part of my mental furniture.  And how often do you replace your furniture?  I don’t know what a plane ride would be like without John Donne, Swinburne or T. S. Eliot.  I used to know a whole lot more poetry than I can remember now, which is why I’m posting poetry.  Maybe somebody else would like to refresh an arid memory. 

Until I was 17, I shared a bedroom with my sister.  As long as I can remember, my sister and I both loved poetry.  When we were very small and neither of us could fall asleep, she would demand from her bed in the dark "Say a poem!"  One of the first ones I remember "saying" (this was before we could read) was Wee Willie Winkie:

Wee Willie Winkie

running through the town

Upstairs and downstairs

in his nightgown

Crying at the windows

Crying at the locks

"Are all the children in their beds?

It's now  8 o'clock!"

Years later, just before her first child was born, my sister handwrote out her favorite poems on index cards in her beautiful handwriting so that she could read them to the baby while she was breastfeeding.  Eight years later before my first child was born, she gave the index cards to me so that I could read them to my baby, too.  One of the poems was "Innisfree” by Yeats, which I have always loved.  I always associated Yeats' love of Innisfree with my wanting to go "home" to our childhood summer home in Ephraim.  When my sister was in the hospital, shortly before she died, she was having a bad time.  She felt physically awful; her son hadn't arrived yet from the airport, she was restless and uneasy.  "Say a poem!"  she said, too exhausted almost to speak.  I "said" Innisfree.

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.”

"That sounds like Wee Willie Winkie!" she said indignantly, and fell mercifully asleep. 

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