Whenever I begin a unit on poetry, I remark on the virtual impossibility of defining it.  For example, compare this sentence:

Just be tender, just be true,

Just be glad the whole day through,

Just be merciful, just be mild,

Just to be trustful as a child,

Just to be gentle and kind and sweet,

Just to be helpful with willing feet,

Just to be cheery when things go wrong,

Just to drive sadness away with a song,

Whether the hour is dark or bright,

Just to be loyal to God and right,

Just to believe that God knows best,

Just in his promises ever to rest –

Just to let love be our daily key,

That is God’s will for you and me.

With this sentence:

The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die; over us dead they bend.

Even though the first sentence is written in rhymed couplets that fall into repetitive metrical patterns, it should not be mistaken for poetry.

After all,

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit,

 

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

 

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds.

In other words, a poem shouldn’t be a series of non-compressed sing-songy platitudes, nor, I would argue, can it be.  Imagine, answering that Nigerian email’s promise of riches “trustful as a child” or approaching a bereaved spouse after a funeral with the advice “just be cheery when things go wrong.”  Although jauntily rendered and upbeat in message, the first sentence is life-cheapening because it is false and hollow. What we have is verse, not poetry.

The second example is, literally speaking, prose, a sentence from Joyce’s novel Ulysses when Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom visit a maternity ward where Mina Purefoy has been in labor for three days struggling to give birth to her son. The “aged sisters” are midwives, sisters of mercy, ushering us onto the stage for our hour of joy and sorrow.

Joyce reduces Shakespeare’s “seven ages of man” to eight verbs: wail, batten, sport, clip, cleave, sunder, dwindle, die.  And there they are again, a different set of aged sisters, nurses, ushering us out.[1]

Pure poetry, truth compressed, ringing like a bell.

I quoted Joyce’s sentence to two of my colleagues sitting next to each other this morning, one who had lost her aunt last weekend and the other who is about to give birth in a month or so.

“Sorry about your loss,” I said to Megan. “Happy about your gain” I said to Jen.  Then I quoted Joyce’s sentence.  They both smiled.

I didn’t add, “Just be tender, just be true,/ Just be happy the whole day through.”

[1] In Ireland, perhaps nuns.

Frankenstein: Universal Studios; Trump: Matt Rourke/AP

I have divorced myself from politics, not out of despair, but with the clear-eyed recognition that the number of my days has dwindled into a quantity imminently recognizable as finite.  Of course, my days have always been numbered, but with 80% or more of those rotations having disappeared in the rearview mirror, why squander precious unlabored respiration lamenting what you can’t control when you could be watching a Marx Brothers movie or listening to Rashaan Roland Kirk or holding hands while exchanging anecdotes?

“Boogie boogie boogie!”

That said, I do glance at headlines in the Times, often proclamations from a pathologically insecure man incapable of self-deprecation, a man who extolls self-proclaimed virtues like his “genius” or “sanity.” He boasts of his “top tier education” or his takes credit for the fact that under his watch no one has died in a commercial air crash.  Recently, he has become aweary, aweary of the First Amendment of the Constitution of a republic he would rather rule than govern.  To say that he is an egregious ass is to understate his odium.

Yet a third of the country approves of him and more than that voted for him despite his garish, cartoonish appearance, despite the bankruptcies, despite his impoverished vocabulary, despite his taking pride in grabbing the genitalia of women he has just met.  Evangelical Christians are particularly devoted to him for reasons that defy rational explanation.

Of course, there is no easy explanation how a promoter of professional wrestling has come into the possession of the nuclear codes.  Pundits posit emotions like “resentment” or suggest nativist xenophobia as possible factors.  Then there’s that whipping girl Hillary Clinton whom many people simply abhor.  Recently I’ve read (in passing) that no one, including Trump, thought he could win (which, along with sloth, would explain why there was no transition plan).  So why not throw away your vote on Jill Stein or write in “Oprah Winfrey” since there is no way that Donald Trump could win?

Anyway, I’m contradicting myself by going on like this when I need to be rereading Frankenstein, which is due next Tuesday, the day after we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I’ll let Mary Shelley have the last word.

 [I]f no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.

Mary Shelly, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.