Thursday, June 12, 2025
In Praise of Poetry
Poetry grows on us. Reading poems aloud can turn into an enjoyable exercise, but more importantly, it helps refine our thinking and enhances journaling. You may not want to become a poet but you learn to have a grasp on words and how they have power to stir deep feelings and emotions in you that you may not have experienced before.
Reading poetry is a private, intimate experience. It widens our emotional space by stirring self-examination. It helps us deal with paradoxical emotions we don’t understand. Poems have messages that speak directly to us. When a poem links with our heart, it feels like the poet has shared a secret. The relationship between the poet, the poem, and the listener inspires awe and delight.
Reading poems brings breath, blood and marrow of our body together. At the same time, it illumines the path we must take and turns we must make. Reading and writing poetry combines our doing and our being.
Poetry has its own way of knowing, conveying, communing with the world around us and within us. It can be our companion in solitude. It helps us chip away what we don’t need in our life and reveals treasures that lie at the bottom of the ocean of consciousness.
The craft of writing poems is deliberate, attentive, and it requires absolute concentration. It is simultaneously intuitive and inventive. Poetry emerges like the bursting of a bud. It grows and ripens like fruit.
The relationship between poet and reader is like that of a peach and someone eating the peach. The taste is neither in the peach nor in the taster, but in the simple act of eating. Similarly, the joy of reading a poem is not in the poem or the reader but in the act of reading, understanding, and feeling its power. Inert words come to life in the reader’s imagination. Like the majesty of nature, reading poetry inspires awe and wonder, sometimes mingled with surprise, and at other times with sheer delight.
It does not matter how slowly you go on poetry readers’ path as long as you do not stop!
*****
Poet Rabindranath Tagore’s collection of 103 poems, Geetanjali: Song Offerings, won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Originally written in Bengali, Tagore himself translated the poems into English. He did not title his poems but numbered them. My favorite poems from Geetanjali is # 50.
# 50
I had gone abegging from door to door in the village path, when thy golden chariot appeared in the distance like a gorgeous dream, and I wondered who was this King of all kings!
My hopes rose high and methought my evil days were at an end, and I stood waiting for alms to be given unasked and for wealth scattered on all sides in the dust.
The chariot stopped where I stood. Thy glance fell on me and thou cameth down with a smile. I felt that the luck of my life had come at last. Then of a sudden thou didst hold out thy right hand and say, “What hast thou to give to me?”
Ah, what a kingly jest was it to open thy palm to a beggar to beg? I was confused and stood undecided, and then from my bag I slowly took out the least little grain of corn and gave it to thee.
But how great my surprise when at the day’s end I emptied my bag on the floor to find a least little grain of gold among the poor heap. I bitterly wept and wished that I had had the heart to give thee my all.”
jennifer D. Diamond
Beautiful poem, Madhu! Thank you for sharing! I will never be a poet, but you and Kathie Shoop have sold me on the power of reading and writing poetry to enhance my prose writing. Thank you!
Madhu B. Wangu
Thank you, Jenn! I’ll be sharing more poems this month.
Delighted to hear that you read and write poetry! Many years ago I merely copied the poems I really enjoyed which led me to try writing my own. It is a pleasure to read a poem, first silently, then aloud and finally, reading aloud but slowly to try to understand its underlying meaning.
Lorraine
“…the power to stir deep feelings and emotions…” yes, journaling and poetry does that for me. I use poetry more for observation and awareness, rather than deep feeling, but I assume feelings will interject with time and practice. I want to share that I’m almost finished filling my 9th journal book. Nine!! I never thought I’d complete one. I keep them, reread them, and remember the times I’ve been through— and the progress I’ve made. I also wrote over 100 walking poems as part of the Kathie’s Kooser project. Mindful Writers has opened me to a new, deep, reflective, and creative world.
Madhu B. Wangu
Wow Lorraine–nine journals and 100 poems! That’s some achievement. I’m so impressed. As it has opened you to a deep, reflective and creative world it must be transformational. In what ways is this new world benefiting you? Are you calmer, more peaceful with less anxiety? Living more in the present?