Recently, Alyssa tweeted about having “a personal canon of poems” – a few lines or poems she depends upon to be “permanently in [her] head.” Of course, I immediately started thinking about my own essential poems – the ones that rise up to comfort me after a loss, or get me through a tough day.
I stumbled on most of them in college or thereabouts, studying them in classes or discovering them via friends. I’ve quoted some of them here during Poetry Fridays, but today I wanted to gather them up, like a bouquet of words, and share them all with you.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” I love Gerard Manley Hopkins’ words about “the dearest freshness deep down things.” In the face of deep and unrelenting darkness, the world is still heartbreakingly, powerfully lovely.
Since I came across it a few years ago, Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” has been saving my life, line by line. I read it aloud from the pulpit in church this summer, and it was as good as any biblical exhortation.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.”
And a few lines down: “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.” (This is hard but so necessary.)
I am a lifelong bookworm, and I love Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned” because it pushes me to get out of my head and into the beautiful world around me. The last lines are my favorites: “Come forth and bring with you a heart / That watches and receives.”
Marie Howe’s poem “What the Living Do” stopped me in my tracks the first time I read it, on Sarah’s blog. I later read it aloud to a roomful of college freshmen one Sept. 11, as a way of paying tribute to those who died. The last lines still choke me up: “I am living. I remember you.”
I first encountered W.S. Merwin’s “Thanks” as the epigraph to Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. It speaks powerfully to the beauty and the difficulty of life, and the continued impetus to keep saying thank you.
Mark Strand’s poem “The Coming of Light,” discovered years ago in a rickety cabin at a camp tucked deep in the hills of northern New Mexico, always reminds me how magic lives in the everyday.
“My work is loving the world.” Mary Oliver’s “Messenger” reminds me of this again and again.
These poems have worked on me in different ways through the years. Sometimes they comfort me; sometimes they wake me up, through rhyme and rambling meter and startling images. But they all do what Seamus Heaney talks about in the last line of his wonderful poem “Postscript“: they “catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”
What poems have made it into your personal canon? I’d love to hear.
cakes, tea and dreams 
I love this. I’ve shared similar posts and definitely have a personal canon, words that run through my head on a regular basis. I always think of Hopkins, particularly at this season. I often hear Wordsworth in my head, most especially “in this moment there is life and food for future years,” and also Wendell Berry’s The Real Work, which is on the bulletin board in front of my desk. I look at it all day long. xoxo
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
🙂
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
🙂
Sorry! Accidentally double clicked the post!
A beautiful bouquet. Thank you. I’d add at least a few from T. S. Eliot (stanzas if not whole poems) and Eavan Boland.
I wish I was better at memorization! This makes me want to write out a bunch of my favorites and tape them up around the house. Rilke and David Whyte and Mary Oliver and Emily Dickinson and so many from my college poetry class.
I love this post. Basically every poem in my cannon comes from you or Felicity. I am woefully unaware of it otherwise. Every line of it in this post is beautiful. So glad you shared!
[…] the suggestion so many times, I decided I should at least get started on my own poetry anthology (or canon, as Katie calls it). In my anthology, I’m re-typing each of these poems into my own Word documents. Typing them […]