Ten memorable works to understand poetry

1

Farai un vers de dreit nien
(I will make a poem about absolutely nothing)

GUILHEM DE PEITIEU

(ca. 1100)

“Moderns imitating the ancient is not too difficult; ancient imitating the moderns is almost impossible, but when that happens, it is a prodigy”. This is the case in this poem by Guilhem de Peitieu, the gateway to chivalric lyricism, the origin of modern poetry, according to some, and he does so under the sign of negation: about nothing, not even himself, not about anybody, not about love, and concludes that “the poem is already done”, that is, a pure poem, without references, only phonemes, words, words.

2

Negawakuwa / hana no shita nite
(I’d like to die / in spring)

SAIGYO

(ca. 1180)

The poem belongs to the Chants of the Hermitage by this 12th century Japanese monk. Its beauty comes from its extreme simplicity. Even when it is read from a translation, the reader guesses that each and every word that make up the poem occupy its right place, that none of them could find a synonym, that nothing could be added, that nothing could be deleted. One may be tempted to repeat it over and over again, in the belief of invocating something essential and absolute.

3

Chant of chants

(4th-5th centuries B.C.)

Every poem is an explosion of senses. Its reading travels through the most varied aromas, from myrrh and incense to tuberoses; several flavours, wine, honey, milk; textures of lips, skins; images of bodies, animals like gazelles, fawns; all this wealth of the external world, this intense sensualism and eroticism, we know it can be turned inside and, reversible, open us up to another invisible world; the world of the soul.

4

Hymnen an die Nacht
(Hymns to the night)

NOVALIS

(1799-1800)

Darkness, gloom, clouds: an entire Christian mystical tradition worked on these negative images with a positive sense. It is in this tradition that the Hymns can be located, although they mean a re-elaboration of contents: the feeling of pleasure sinks here with negativeness. The third hymn, when the poet stands before Sophie’s tomb, his lover, the vision and the sleep transfigure the landscape, that will be an unavoidable reference for the other great hymn at night, i.e. the second act of Wagner’s Tristan.

5

Can vei la lauzeta mover
(When I see the lark moving)

BERNAT DE VENTADORN

(ca. 1150-60)

The beginning of the chivalric song like the prodigious image of a lark moving towards the sunrays, forgetting itself, falling, falling. In the first stanza, everything conspires to construct a sound (lauzeta / chazer / ses /oblid.es / laissa /) that reproduces the feeling of melting, close to melting of the soul that mystical poets refer to. In this case, it is the heart that melts into desire.

6

One Art

ELIZABET BISHOP

(1976)

The art that the poem alludes to is the art of loss, a concept that must be understood as an exercise. One must be trained for losing, from the smallest to the biggest thing, that is from the keys to your door or the los of cities and entire kingdoms, and she keeps saying in her last lines of several stanzas, this is no disaster. The will of the practiser crumbles in the last stanza, as the only thing that one really must admit is disaster. Brilliant is Bishop’s irony in this poem.

7

Lanquand li jorn son lonc en mai
(When the days are long in May)

JAUFRÉ RUDEL

(ca. 1120-40)

This poem by Prince Blaia, from the second generation of trobadours, is constructed from the sonority of the term lonh (far), which appears as mot refranh (rhyming in the second and fourth lines of each stanza). Amor de lonh (love from far away) is the expression to refer to unseen love. This is, therefore, love in dreams. Rudel is the poet of unreality of love.

8

La quête de Bronwyn

JUAN EDUARDO CIRLOT

(1971)

The forest of Arthurian novel, where not one tree has ever been described, reaches here verbal texture: we are entering a universo made of alliterations (“Un ruido me ha dejado entre las ruinas” [A noise has left me in ruins] is the first line in the poem) and the images of absolute unreality (“Castillos transparentes que no existen” [Transparent castles that do not exist]). The wandering bumps constantly into the impossibility to conquer the object searched, of the quête: too many dimensions and reality planes or unreality that compete against it. However, the poem concludes with some verses that cause a feeling of ecstasy reached by combining words: alas, olas, almas [wings, waves, souls].

9

A tant s’an va chascuns par lui
vv. 710-724 del Chevalier de  la Charrete
(In this each one goes by him)

CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES

(1179)

Considered as a roman (novel), although some hold the term “poem” because it is written in octosyllabic verses of rhymed couplets. This work by this 12th century writer from La Champagne contains some paragraphs that clearly constitute a lyrical arrest within the narrative flow. The 14 lines chosen draw a perfectly geometric figure, that of the courteous lover: solitary wanderer, pensive, lost of himself, of his name, of his weapons, absorbed in one only thought: his lady.

10

Diario bizantino

CRISTINA CAMPO

(1977)

“Due mondi –e io vengo dall’altro” (Two worlds –and I’m from the other): this is the line that opens up the poem, and is repeated two more times, and that I always hear resounding inside with a sudden feeling of strangeness. The author, who would have preferred to have written less than what she wrote, wrote essays that probably constitute the best Italian prose of the 20th century, as well as some poems like this one, where she experiences contact with the sacred. The gateway does not separate body and soul, but rather soul and spirit, and all this happens before the thousand eyes of the cherub angel.