December 2, 2014
Tuesday

The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters
Something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter;
While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters.

Further down the valley the clustered tombstones recede
Winding about their dimness the mist’s grey cerements, after
The street lamps in the darkness have suddenly started to bleed.

The leaves fly over the window and utter a word as they pass
To a face that leans from the darkness, intent, with two dark-filled eyes
That watch forever earnestly from behind the window glass.
— D. H. Lawrence, 1885-1930
English poet and novelist

I subscribe to the poem-a-day service sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. Every morning, around 6:30, an email arrives with the day’s selection. I am haphazard about opening the message and reading the poem. In recent days, however, following the impulse to rededicate myself to reading and writing that comes over me nearly every late fall, I have been reading with more regularity.

But although I have been reading with more regularity, I have not always experienced what Alan Heathcock meant when he said that a poem can “make you imagine beyond your means, make you feel the truths of lives that are not yours, and contemplate the life you have.” He’s been reading a poem a day for many years, as he explained in a 2011 essay for NPR.

It just seemed that many of the selections coming my way from the poem-a-day feed were incomprehensible to me. And remember, I am schooled in reading poems. I’ve taught poetry. I’ve written critical essays about poetry. (Want to read my 25-page analysis of what I think Emily Dickinson suffered in childhood? I’ve never heard anybody else advance this particular theory.) I’ve even written poetry. But the poems I was seeing just weren’t accessible. They were about moments in the poet’s life so unknown to me that I could not imagine a context. Or they addressed historical or political matters I had no frame of reference for. Or they used language that was harsh to deliver images that frightened or baffled me.

And then, Sunday morning, there was D.H. Lawrence, describing a scene very much like the one I look out on each day — pine trees, poplars, wind, two dark eyes watching forever. The poem sighs, the poem weeps. I looked up from my computer at the pin oaks along the front walk, their leaves brown and curled, and thought, yes, oh yes, it’s come to this, winter on its way, winter on its way.

The poem was first published in 1916, and it wears its era proudly. It’s an example of Romanticism, with trees and tombstones that can feel and think, that speak not in imagination but in actual words. As a poem, it is better than Joyce Kilmer’s much maligned “Trees,” but it relies too much on familiar poetic tropes, and it doesn’t really make me “imagine beyond my means.”

No, they don’t write ’em like that anymore. Contemporary American poet Mary Oliver, who will turn 80 next year and who has been writing about wild geese and flaming trees and longing and loss for more than half a century, has taken up the themes that poets like D.H. Lawrence addressed in their way. In fact, it was a Mary Oliver poem that started Alan Heathcock on his habit of reading a poem a day. In her work I find both the truth of a life that is not my own and the courage to contemplate the longing and the loss in the life I do have.

Tomorrow I’m going back to the contemporary poets I love, taking up again the challenge and the habit of reading a poem a day. D.H. Lawrence, even with his attentive pine trees and laughing poplars, has given me that.