A Consideration of Poetry

I have always felt that much of the best poetry is funny. Who can read Hopkins’s “The Windhover,” for instance, and not feel welling up inside a kind of giddiness indistinguishable from the impulse to laugh? I suppose there has got to be some line where one might say about a poem, “That’s too much nonsense,” but I think it is a line worth tempting. I am sure that there is a giggly aquifer under poetry.

Right now I am thinking of something unlikely that I saw a few days ago, the morning after my town had experienced a major winter flood. In the middle of a residential street, a cast iron manhole cover was dancing in its iron collar, driven up three or four inches by such an excess of underground water that it balanced above the street, tipping and bobbing like a flower, producing an occasional bell-like chime as it touched against the metal ring. This has much to say about poetry.

For I do not want to suggest in any way that this aquifer under poetry is something silly or undangerous; it is great and a causer of every sort of damage. And I do not want to say either that the poem that prompts me to laughter is silly or light; no, it can be as heavy as a manhole cover, but it is forced up. You can see it would take an exquisite set of circumstances to ever get this right.

I would like to offer as an illustration a poem that has always elicited from me one of those involuntary ha!s that jump out when you’ve witnessed a wonderful magic trick. Maybe that ha! is the body’s natural response to perfection: a perfect trick (one has been utterly deceived) or a perfect poem (one has been utterly deceived). In any case, here is the poem, Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay:”

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Where is the laughter? Don’t ask yet. For now, please settle for a more generalized sense of amusement, of the high-toned T.S. Eliot variety:

Poetry is a superior amusement: I do not mean an amusement for superior people. I call it an amusement, an amusement pour distraire les honnêtes gens, not because that is a true definition, but because if you call it anything else you are likely to call it something still more false. If we think of the nature of amusement, then poetry is not amusing; but if we think of anything else that poetry may seem to be, we are led into far greater difficulties.

I love two things about Eliot’s definition. First, the bedrock, indefensible truth of it: that poetry is a superior amusement. Second, Eliot’s mess of an attempt to explain what he means. I am reminded by him that though we cannot be exactly precise or complete, that is no reason not to make gigantic statements, for there is great enjoyment in gigantic statements.

But to return to Frost’s poem. I have chosen it because it’s about as funny as the Farmer’s Almanac. Had I chosen “The Windhover,” there would be the obvious near gibberish that comes from Hopkins’s supersaturated rhyming and his strange bulging liberties with sense, but Frost’s poem couldn’t be less gibberishy or less apparently nonsensical.

What could be more straightforward? The title is repeated as the last line—as though this little stack of an eight-line poem were a bitter sandwich with a filling compounded of evidence that nothing gold can stay. The gold that precedes green in new plants? Pfft! The way little new leaf clusters on trees look like flowers? Again, pfft! And notice that by the second couplet we have already moved away from the literal “gold” that exists briefly before the “first green” and are beginning our relentless slide into metaphorical gold—in the sense of something precious—with the flower’s superiority to the later leaf. Now things speed up geometrically, as “leaf subsides to leaf.” There is no doubt of Frost’s meaning here: the early, the delicate, the golden—all go down, buried under the grosser, heartier, darker, more leathery giant repulsive leaves of maturity and stink.

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