National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month, and being a fan of poetry despite what people say. I’m going to share why I like it, and share one of my favorite poems. I like poetry because it gives a short burst of a scene, or a feeling without the long winded prose of a story. It gives a glimpse so to speak into the authors mind. Sometimes its fractured and chaotic, sometimes coherent and story like.

The first poem I read, and loved was Edgar Allen Poe “The Raven”, it just seemed gloomy and foreboding. I wanted more, I also learned to enjoy writing it myself when I was younger. Though my earlier work was quite….horrific to say the least.

Some say Poetry is dead, I say it’s just taking on different forms, like Rap is just poetry set to music like the old beatniks. It is my hope that it gets revitalized and it takes it’s place in prominence as it should.

One of my favorite poems is yet again by Edgar Allen Poe, and I put a bit of it on my Facebook Status today. It’s called the Conqueror Worm.

Lo! ’tis a gala night
         Within the lonesome latter years!
       An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
         In veils, and drowned in tears,
       Sit in a theatre, to see
         A play of hopes and fears,
       While the orchestra breathes fitfully
         The music of the spheres.

       Mimes, in the form of God on high,
         Mutter and mumble low,
       And hither and thither fly-
         Mere puppets they, who come and go
       At bidding of vast formless things
         That shift the scenery to and fro,
       Flapping from out their Condor wings
         Invisible Woe!

       That motley drama- oh, be sure
         It shall not be forgot!
       With its Phantom chased for evermore,
         By a crowd that seize it not,
       Through a circle that ever returneth in
         To the self-same spot,
       And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
         And Horror the soul of the plot.

       But see, amid the mimic rout
         A crawling shape intrude!
       A blood-red thing that writhes from out
         The scenic solitude!
       It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs
         The mimes become its food,
       And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
         In human gore imbued.

       Out- out are the lights- out all!
         And, over each quivering form,
       The curtain, a funeral pall,
         Comes down with the rush of a storm,
       While the angels, all pallid and wan,
         Uprising, unveiling, affirm
       That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”
         And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

 

 

-  I like this poem because it shows the mad folly of man. This poem echoed my feelings of a younger age that no matter what I did, it was all for naught.