Poetry Will Save Your Life

by Jill Bialosky

  * * *

  Reading the Frost poem as an adult, I experience its meaning differently. Frost might have intended for the tone of the last stanza to be ironic (“I shall be telling this with a sigh”). Perhaps the implication is that the two roads were in actuality “really about the same,” that they “equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black,” and that choosing one rather than the other was an impulsive, casual decision made simply because the road taken had “perhaps the better claim.”

  I attend a lecture where a poet references “The Road Not Taken.” He reads it as a poem about depression and mental illness, and in the lines “leaves no step had trodden black” and the doubtful “if I should ever come back,” he infers the fear that Frost, or the poem’s speaker, might never emerge from his depressive state. And Frost can be darkly droll. An undercurrent runs through his seemingly wholesome verse, and juxtaposing the dark undercurrent with accessible, everyday language gives his work potency. In “Death of the Hired Man” he writes, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”

  A poem’s meaning alters by the associations, insights, and experience we bring to it. We may respond to the poem for meaning, or because we fall under the spell of its musicality and end rhymes, or because we are drawn to the poem’s sense of irony and wit, or its visual imagery. A poem can do many things at once. Like “The Road Not Taken,” it can challenge the reader intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally. It can validate our experiences or cause us to question our beliefs. Robert Frost wrote that “poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”

  DANGER

  WE REAL COOL

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  RICHARD CORY

  Edwin Arlington Robinson

  One day, a new girl moves into the house behind mine. I’ll call her Marie. She has blond hair and dark-brown, sensitive eyes. She hears me in the backyard bouncing my rubber ball against the tarred pavement of our driveway and wanders over. We become best friends. Every day after school, she comes to my house or I go to hers. In the summer we draw hopscotch boards on the pavement with chalk or jump rope to playground jingles. “Miss Mary Mack” is our favorite. In the winter we huddle in her bedroom or mine and play with our Barbie dolls, imitating the seductive world of adults. Sometimes we go into the clubhouse behind her house and show each other our flat chests wondering when we’ll get bumps.

  Years before, her mother suffered a stroke and became paralyzed on one side of her body and ever since has been in a wheelchair. When I go over to Marie’s house, her mother greets us warmly and with her one useful arm prepares peanut butter sandwiches and glasses of cold milk for us in the kitchen. It is as if she has waited all day for her daughter to come home and she wheels her chair up to the table and sits with us while we eat our sandwiches. We tell her about our day at school while their rambunctious dog yaps at our heels. Her father is rarely home.

  We are in sixth grade when the curtain of our innocence drops. Marie’s mother dies suddenly. Before we have a chance to process the loss, her father remarries (how can this happen so fast—yet it does) and they move miles away to another suburb, forty-five minutes from mine. One day Marie calls and invites me for a sleepover. I haven’t seen her in over a year, an interval in which both of us have grown from young girls to adolescents. My mother pulls up on the driveway of Marie’s new house to drop me off, and I have butterflies in my stomach. Marie runs out of the house to greet me. In the year since I have seen her, she has grown beautiful, and her face has taken on complexity. Her hair is long down her back and she wears a peasant blouse, blue jean cut-offs, and hippie lace-up sandals. To me, who is uncomfortable with her own body, she seems the most perfect being, her golden skin glowing in the hot sun, and I am enchanted by her all over again. She grabs my hand and within minutes it is as if no time has passed.

  Her father and stepmother are out for dinner, and we have the entire house to ourselves. She doesn’t like her stepmother. She puts her finger in her mouth and makes gagging noises. She asks if I want a cigarette, opens a drawer in the kitchen, takes out a pack of her stepmother’s Virginia Slims from the carton there, and lights one. I have never smoked a cigarette. Just as we’re getting settled, three boys from her new town come over. We trail down to the basement—turned into a playroom—and listen to music. One of the boys has brought a bottle of tequila. We do a shot or two and quickly the room falls out of kilter. The three boys stare at Marie with open lust and I can’t blame them. She is magnificent. I look down at myself and see that I haven’t quite developed yet. My hair has thankfully grown out and is long and wavy, but it can’t hide my flat chest. Will I always look like this?

  Eventually, one boy takes Marie’s hand and brings her to the laundry room off the playroom to make out. It seems like forever that she’s gone. I awkwardly try to make conversation with the two other boys, who I know each wish they had taken Marie’s hand. To my relief, Marie’s father and stepmother come home, and her tall, military-like father, whom I studied when we were children, fascinated by fathers, commands the boys to leave. We go upstairs to Marie’s new bedroom and talk late into the night, analyzing aspects of each of the three boys until we fall asleep.

  When my mother comes to pick me up the next morning and I say goodbye to Marie, I am consumed by dread and worry. I don’t want to leave her alone in that big, cold, airy house. Over time, because of the long distance between our neighborhoods, we grow apart and eventually lose touch. I hear that she hangs out with a wild crowd who smoke pot and take drugs, and the thought fills me with a strange emotion I have no name for. I feel excluded and protective at the same time. I can’t imagine how her father will tolerate this behavior. More years pass. Then one terrible day, when I am in my late teens, we learn she has shot herself in the head with a pistol her father kept hidden in the house. Her funeral is the darkest day I can remember. How did this happen? I am frightened by all I know and don’t know.

  WE REAL COOL

  Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000)

  The Pool Players.

  Seven at the Golden Shovel.

  We real cool. We

  Left school. We

  Lurk late. We

  Strike straight. We

  Sing sin. We

  Thin gin. We

  Jazz June. We

  Die soon.

  * * *

  Many years later, when I come across this searing poem by Gwendolyn Brooks with its nod to the rhythm of the streets, I am struck by how it turns the familiar playground jingle on its head. Suddenly I’m brought back to the memory of jumping rope with Marie to “Miss Mary Mack,” with little knowledge of all the perils and vulnerability that growing up held. Though the poem isn’t directly about suicide, the last line evokes its dark hue.

  Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize, grew up in Chicago, and her poems document the everyday lives of black Chicagoans. Of Brooks’s poems, the poet Sonia Sanchez writes, “Each time I revisit her poems, they climb up on my knees and sit in tight contentment. They speak to me of form and color, patterns and dawns. They talk of myths; they tell me where the flesh lives. . . .” The poem uses vernacular language to show us the dangers of being “cool.” Rhyme, rhythm, syntax and repetition achieve memorability. A poem’s music and rhythm can become embedded in our consciousness like a haunting jazz tune or a schoolyard chant. The use of irony—we real cool, we left school—sears the poem into our minds. The poem gives us a warning. It calls attention to that thin line between “being cool,” and the slide into darkness and danger. It asks what is in us that turns away from the dance? It both lulls and disturbs; a cautionary tale of what can happen when we cross over the line. “We Real Cool” should be taped on the refrigerator of every house with a teenager.

  RICHARD CORY

  Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

  Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

  We people on the pavement lo
oked at him:

  He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

  Clean favored, and imperially slim.

  And he was always quietly arrayed,

  And he was always human when he talked;

  But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

  “Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

  And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

  And admirably schooled in every grace:

  In fine, we thought that he was everything

  To make us wish that we were in his place.

  So on we worked, and waited for the light,

  And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

  And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

  Went home and put a bullet through his head.

  This ballad describes a wealthy, educated gentleman who is admired by his community. Walking through town, dressed in fine clothes, no one suspects that he will take his own life. Though it is about a man and written during the Great Depression, a time when people survived on day-old bread, anyone past or present who has been blindsided by a suicide can connect with it. Richard Cory becomes a stand-in for every man and woman. Reading it, I’m reminded of how deceptive outer appearances can be. Just as I never imagined that beneath Marie’s lovely veneer she suffered so deeply, and at one particular cataclysmic moment, a confluence of forces came together and life proved untenable. It is no wonder the poem endures nearly a century after it first appeared, adapted into a song by Paul Simon, and that its maker, Edwin Arlington Robinson—himself a quiet, introverted, reclusive man—was considered one of the greatest poets in America at the time of his death.

  WONDER

  THE STAR

  Jane Taylor and Ann Taylor

  We’re driving in our gray sedan in the dark. I am in the passenger seat next to my mother, my bare thighs, in shorts, sticking to the fake leather. Whenever the car comes to a sudden halt, her hand flies out to protect me from going into the windshield. It is a coveted spot. As one of three girl siblings, we fight fiercely to obtain it. It’s late—way past our bedtime—and the sky is filled with hundreds of stars. It is moments like this, in the car with my mother, where my worries about our well-being usually vanish.

  But on this night we are searching for Poggy, our black, frisky miniature poodle, who ran out of the house early that morning and has still not come home. He was a present from one of my mother’s dates, a football player for the Cleveland Browns. My mother looks into the rearview mirror every now and then to check on my two sisters in the backseat. Tears are bubbling in my younger sister’s eyes. The eldest is pressed against her window, twirling a strand of her long hair with her finger. I look back at my mother and then out my own window, which is filled with swirls of stars. I begin to recite the nursery rhyme “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in my head, a trick I’ve learned to help me keep calm. Later I will discover that the well-known verses from the nursery rhyme evolved from this poem.

  THE STAR

  Jane Taylor (1783–1824) and Ann Taylor (1782-1866)

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

  How I wonder what you are!

  Up above the world so high,

  Like a diamond in the sky.

  When the blazing sun is gone,

  When he nothing shines upon,

  Then you show your little light,

  Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.

  Then the trav’ller in the dark

  Thanks you for your tiny spark,

  He could not see which way to go,

  If you did not twinkle so.

  In the dark blue sky you keep,

  Often thro’ my curtains peep,

  For you never shut your eye,

  Till the sun is in the sky.

  ’Tis your bright and tiny spark

  Lights the trav’ller in the dark:

  Tho’ I know not what you are,

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

  At night, when I can’t sleep, I go downstairs into the little hallway where Poggy sleeps and cuddle with him. I like the touch of the little rubbery pads on his feet and the beating of his restless heart. In the mornings, he scratches at the door, anxious for one of us to come and take him for a walk. Sometimes, locked in some kind of white heat, he scurries around our living room, dashing in and out of rooms as if he’s suddenly lost his mind, which sends us girls into wails of laughter. What if we never find him?

  We drive through the streets of our neighborhood for what seems like hours until we finally resign ourselves and go home. The next day, we go to the local kennel and call the Animal Protective League. Nothing. Days pass. At night, after the news, we watch a short program where lost dogs—beagles, golden retrievers, the occasional collie—appear on the screen, hoping we might see our black poodle. We never find him. I pray that he didn’t get run over and found a better home for himself, but I’m puzzled all the same. Every day, I rush home from school hoping he’s returned until, gradually, I learn to accept that he’s not coming back.

  * * *

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star, / How I wonder what you are. A child looks up at the sky and sees a star as the personification of a being and wonders not so much what it is but, “what you are.” The twinkling star comes to represent the miracle and mystery of the universe. The use of rhyme and repeated verse give the poem its childlike simplicity. The words sky, star, wonder, and diamond form a constellation of possibilities. A poem can open a window into the wonder and mystery of the galaxy and coax a child away from fear.

  SELFHOOD

  MY SHADOW and THE SWING

  Robert Lewis Stevenson

  Books are my secret companions. I sit in my bedroom and turn the pages of The Lonely Doll, a book about a girl named Edith who has no one to play with but her doll. I read Little House on the Prairie, The Red Pony, The Red Badge of Courage, and The Yearling. I like reading the poems from A Child’s Garden of Verse. Sometimes I read them over without really knowing what they mean, simply liking the way the words sound. But when I leave my secret menagerie and am forced outside the comforts of my home, I don’t quite know who I am or where I belong. After my father dies, we three sisters do everything together, while mom’s still sleeping off a late night, or just not wanting to get up quite yet and face another day without her darling husband whose diamond ring she still wears on her finger, though she is wed now to the grave. We slip Pop-Tarts into the toaster for breakfast and later build card castles on the living room floor. We’re always together. It’s like we’re one person, as if we’re literally stitched together at the hip. While I’m shy and reserved, sister number three—the youngest—is fearless. She’s not afraid to climb trees and explore the scary field at the end of our block. Though it is only a plot of abandoned land, it feels like a forest. Together, we get into mischief. Once we decide to run away from home, packing a jar of peanut butter and a sleeve of Saltines and hiding behind our house for an entire afternoon.

  I am scared of birds, and on the way to school if a flock lands on the sidewalk in front of us, she shoos them away before we pass. Later, this fearless girl will go on to work on a landscape crew pulling out weeds and pushing mowers, nail a job pumping gas at our corner Sohio station, and ride a motorbike. But as a child she’s disorganized and unable to sit still. My mother used to say she’d have to sit on her to change her diaper. Once, her teacher came into my classroom at the end of school and asked if I would help sister number three clean out her desk. Both of us were mortified.

  Sister number one is the beauty, with long dark hair in braids and clear, fragile blue eyes. She has this way about her that makes her hard to refuse. At night, when my mother goes out, she convinces us to watch horror movies with her. My dreams become nightmares.

  Every night I fall asleep to my sisters’ sleep breathing in the beds across from mine. Though I feel as if I inhabit their being, as if they are me, sometimes I long to break free of them. I notice that on our way to school, our shadows on the p
avement intertwine as we walk. I study them. If I walk ahead my shadow is my own. The meaning behind a poem I know by heart comes to life.

  MY SHADOW

  Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)

  I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,

  And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

  He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;

  And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

  The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—

  Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;

  For he sometimes shoots up taller like an India-rubber ball,

  And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.

  He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play,

  And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.

  He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward you can see;

  I’d think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

  One morning, very early, before the sun was up,

  I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;

  But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,

  Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

  * * *

  “My Shadow” celebrates a child’s world of independence and her own uniqueness. It is easy to memorize and perhaps that is why this poem is often the first a child learns. When the speaker of the poem jumps into his bed, he can see his shadow on the wall jump in bed next to him. His shadow provides comfort and companionship. He owns it completely. The child finds pleasure in mocking his shadow for being lazy and not knowing how to play, and the mocking gives him power. While the poem shows the changing nature of a shadow on a wall, it also reveals the transformation of a child discovering his own power and individuality.