An auspicious start--Friday I got on the city bus to go to work and saw an ad that just had the final stanza of an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem on it. Someone paid money so that we poor of Milwaukee can ride downtown and back with a placard about two feet over our heads that describes the sun as a bucket dripping gold. There's something beautiful about this gesture, but I'm not totally sure what it is. It reminds me of this alley wall in Cleveland, TN, where someone has hand-painted about half of a Shakespeare sonnet. It's in an alley, I imagine that few people see it. I doubt that many more people see this Millay poem. So I wonder, what is this poem doing on this bus? I mean that literally--what function is it performing up there?
Well, feel free to comment, but I just remembered the answer, from Auden:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
. . . it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
No comments:
Post a Comment