Poetry Has Many Facets

H.D. was an amazing experience for me. I had never read poetry like hers before, and I loved delving in and exploring her writing more. Even though I had had many “ah-ha!” moments with many other poets I have read, H.D. was the first poet that I read her poetry and literally had to take a minute to absorb what I just read because it was so beautifully mind-blowing. I love the simple-complex paradox in her poetry, and how her simple writing causes so much uproar because we as impatient poetry readers want to beat meanings out of poems like they owe us something. Reading H.D. was a beautiful experience for me, and I cannot wait to explore more of her writing.

With all of that said, in a conversation with a good friend of mine about poetry and why it is important for us to read poetry as believers, she told me something I will never forget: poetry teaches us about people. I know that does not seem very profound, but let me flesh this out a little more. When we read different poets, we read through and feel many different emotions that are common to all people. All of these emotions are displayed through different types of poets with different writing styles, and through poetry we learn different facets of the human being. Let’s take for example writers such as Claude McKay and Jean Toomer. Through their poetry we see themes of injustice, anger, desperation for life, nostalgia and a longing for the way things used to be, feelings of inadequacy, grief, desire for peace, and the list could go on and on; but these are all feelings and emotions all people of the human race can relate to in someway. McKay wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, which was a crucial time in America. Considering the time period in which he wrote, and through the language of his poems, we see McKay speaking about the feelings of being black in a place and time where being black was looked down upon and seen as the lesser of races. For example, McKay’s poem “To the White Fiends,” seems almost like a speech out of anger, and defiance. McKay writes:

Think you I am not fiend and savage too? Think you I could not arm me with a gun And shoot down ten of you for every one Of my black brothers murdered, burnt by you? Be not deceived, for every deed you do         5 I could match—out-match: am I not Africa’s son, Black of that black land where black deeds are done? But the Almighty from the darkness drew My soul and said: Even thou shaft be a light Awhile to burn on the benighted earth,         10 Thy dusky face I set among the white For thee to prove thyself of highest worth; Before the world is swallowed up in night, To show thy little lamp: go forth, go forth!
When I read this poem, all I could think of was McKay or whoever the speaker of this poem saying: “I have worth and I am not a nobody!!” in an outburst of anger—or maybe even a calm, frightening kind of anger. This poem seems to me like an outcry for justice, a demand to not be over looked, and a sly warning for the “white fiends.” This poem by McKay and his “The Negro’s Tragedy” took me back to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask.” In “The Negro’s Tragedy,” McKay writes: It is the Negro’s tragedy I feel Which binds me like a heavy iron chain, It is the Negro’s wounds I want to heal Because I know the keenness of his pain. Only a thorn-crowned Negro and no white Can penetrate into the Negro’s ken, Or feel the thickness of the shroud of night Which hides and buries him from other men. So what I write is urged out of my blood. There is no white man who could write my book, Though many think their story should be told Of what the Negro people ought to brook. Our statesmen roam the world to set things right. This Negro laughs and prays to God for light. This poem connected me back to the second stanza of “We Wear the Mask,” where Dunbar says: Why should the world be overwise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. The whites, the world, all people besides the blacks in this particular setting “could not write the black’s book” or actually be able to sympathize with “all their tears and sighs,” because they did not go through or experience the same things they did throughout history (this is not to speak rudely towards white people, this is just what I gathered from the context of the poems). This is what I meant when I said that poetry helps us to understand people. Poetry helps us to understand history and tradition, and feelings and emotions we ourselves have not felt, but others have deeply felt them, and when we read their poetry, even though we cannot fully identify we learn about the people around us and the people of our history. This helps us to connect with people, and travel outside of ourselves for a little while. Also See: “Outcast” “Tiger” “The Lynching”  “The White City”

          In my search for similar poetry, I came across “Parsley,” by Rita Dove. I have read this poem before in relation to How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alveraz. The background of this poem is General Rafael Trujillo ordered that 20,000 black people be killed because they could not pronounce the letter “r.” The themes of this poem are oppression, fear, death, desperation for peace, and discrimination. Even though this poem displays a tragedy, this poem reveals an experience and emotions we are unable to sympathize with. This poem reveals to us the hearts of these people who are being oppressed and killed for not being able to pronounce a single letter in a word. The word perejil, Spanish for parsley, rolls around in the minds of the workers. Over and over they practice the rolling of the “r,” because their fate rests in the work of their tongues.

            The poem seems to tell a story and gives two different scenes. First, the cane fields where the workers cut down sugar cane. Perejil haunts them while they cut the cane, they quietly call for the mountain, Katalina, almost like they are searching for a savior. While all of this is going on, there is a “parrot imitating spring in the palace.” This parrot seems like a symbol, yet also like a true entity in the poem. When you reach part two of the poem, The Palace, the scenes change to the palace where the general resides. There he thinks of his deceased mother, and her death. It is almost as if her untimely death caused in him a hunger to kill others. Here there is a real parrot from Australia, and the parrot is brought pastries, like a ceremony for his mother. The general has a flashback to his time at battle, and reminisces on his mother’s ability to roll her “r’s.” And at the end of the poem he decides that: "He will order many this time to be killed for a single beautiful word." This story is full of death, anguish, oppression, and fear. And unfortunately this story is true. I honestly do not have enough time to delve into this poem as much as I want to, but I love reading poetry because it teaches us not just that things can be written in a different format, or through an artistic avenue, but it teaches us about people. It teaches us about the world which we live in, and it connects us to each other.