It's Always the Time for Meter and Rhyme

"When my sister was in the sixth grade, she had to memorize the poem "Crossing the Bar" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It was the 1950s and my mother, quite modern, was dismayed. To her, rote memorization wasn't education. The poem was terribly old-fashioned, and it was about death. My mother's views back then are now standard.

In ancient times, poetry was part of ritual, not only to placate the gods but as to pass history along. Meter and rhyme made it easy to learn.

Now that we have books and electronics, we can remember without meter and rhyme. But they're still part of us. An echo of the early uses of poetry can be found in nursery rhymes and in such children's stories as "The Cat in the Hat." Parents quickly learn that toddlers love rhymes and can readily repeat them.

But poetry has mostly narrowed to small, constrained passages in intellectual magazines like the New Yorker or the Atlantic. It isn't for the masses. Shakespeare is mostly ignored. The beguiling rhythms of Amanda Gorman's poetry are available on special occasions only.

A valiant effort to bring back poetry was Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac." For many years he read a poem on National Public Radio each morning. Another current effort is Poetry Magazine's poem sent daily by email at no charge. The featured verse is by a contemporary writer on weekdays, a past one on weekends. The magazine has been especially valuable in bringing back little-known poetry by early-20th-century African-American poets.

But a poem sent by email that's not read aloud must have a small audience. And I don't know of any poetry clubs comparable to the book clubs that meet monthly around the country.

In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio, Mr. Keillor put some of the blame on T.S. Eliot -- perhaps as a stand-in for many modern poets: "Eliot was in a lousy marriage. He was so unhappy, so he took it out on the rest of us. But that doesn't give you an excuse to be dreary."

So what can help us when someone does cross the bar? Can poetry soothe? One attraction of funerals is that they are public rituals, and there is the poetic writing of the Bible along with sacred music.

Yet intimate lyrical poems are mostly lost to us. "After great pain a formal feeling comes -- / The Nerves sit ceremonious like Tombs -- " wrote Emily Dickinson, whose words resonate with those who have experienced loss. So do John Milton's in his ode to his "late espoused saint." In the poem, his wife appears to him in a dream, "But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin'd,/ I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night." [1]

1. It's Always the Time for Meter and Rhyme
Jane Shaw Stroup. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 14 June 2022: A.17.