Poetry Will Save Your Life

by Jill Bialosky

  Then there’s a pair of us!

  Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!

  How dreary—to be—Somebody!

  How public—like a Frog —

  To tell one’s name—the Livelong June —

  To an admiring Bog!

  Brenda Wineapple, in her prize-winning work of nonfiction, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, writes of Dickinson’s verse: “And when we turn to her poems, we find that they too, like her life, stop the narrative. Lyric outbursts, they tell no tales about who did what to whom in the habitable world. Rather, they whisper their wisdom from deep, very deep, within ourselves. And perhaps these poems plunge down so far—perhaps they unsettle us so—because Dickinson writes of experiences that we, who live in time, can hardly name.”

  Dickinson said in a letter to her friends Elizabeth and Josiah Holland: “Perhaps you laugh at me! Perhaps the whole United States are laughing at me too! . . . I can’t stop for that! My business is to love. I found a bird this morning down—down on a little bush at the foot of the garden and wherefore sing, I said, since nobody hears? One sob in the throat, one flutter of bosom—‘My business is to sing—and away she rose!’ ”

  “HOPE” IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS (254)

  Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

  “Hope” is the thing with feathers —

  That perches in the soul —

  And sings the tune without the words —

  And never stops—at all —

  And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard —

  And sore must be the storm —

  That could abash the little Bird

  That kept so many warm —

  I’ve heard it in the chillest land —

  And on the strangest Sea —

  Yet,—never,—in Extremity,

  It asked a crumb—of Me.

  Hope is like a bird that perches inside us. It keeps us warm. It never asks anything of us. No one can fully destroy it. It sings a tune without words. In Dickinson’s eccentric hands, it becomes ordinary, intimate, familiar as a crumb from a slice of bread. Perhaps that is why Dickinson’s poems are relatable. They express sentiments of inadequacy, loss, feelings of despair. Even though Dickinson lived much of her life in seclusion, at her very heart she was a dreamer and many of her poems echo promise and possibility. “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” acknowledges the enduring human capability for hope. And hope she did that her verse would meet the approval of Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

  MR. HIGGINSON,

  —Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?

  The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly—and I have none to ask.

  Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude.

  If I make the mistake, that you dared to tell me would give me sincerer honor toward you.

  I inclose my name, asking you, if you please, sir, to tell me what is true?

  That you will not betray me it is needless to ask, since honor is its own pawn.

  FOREBODING

  MY PAPA’S WALTZ

  Theodore Roethke

  Hope arrives with my mother’s pregnancy, her fourth, and the arrival of our new baby sister. Hope not only for my parents’ marriage but also for a new future for all of us, and in my baby sister’s early infancy, our house comes to life again. Our new baby is like Dickinson’s little bird, “sweetest—in the Gale,” offering a new chance at happiness. We fight over who gets to feed her a bottle or change her diaper. She has my stepfather’s blond hair, blue eyes, fair complexion, and warm and cheery disposition. But nevertheless, everything is topsy-turvy. For one, our house with three bedrooms upstairs is suddenly too small. We turn the downstairs den into a bedroom so that the baby has her own nursery upstairs. My mother buys her a wooden cradle from an antique shop because she reads that babies need a closed space to mimic the womb. She buys an antique rocking chair, and at night when we rock the baby to sleep and feed her a bottle she puts a record of lullabies on the turntable.

  “Bye, bye baby bunting, daddies gone a hunting,” resonates throughout the house. And it makes sense because now that we have a new baby at home, my stepfather seems to be traveling more, and there is tension in the house when he returns. Now my sisters and I secretly hope that he’ll stay away to avoid their fighting. When he returns, he goes straight to the liquor cabinet and makes himself a scotch on the rocks and then turns on the stereo. He sweeps his baby daughter in his arms and dances with her to Frank Sinatra or Burt Bacharach as we look on. She clings to his neck and when he twirls in circles faster and faster she begins to laugh. I look at my mother, arms crossed against her chest, and watch her face slowly soften even in apprehension. How can this man, dancing gleefully with his daughter, cause so much pain?

  MY PAPA’S WALTZ

  Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)

  The whiskey on your breath

  Could make a small boy dizzy;

  But I hung on like death:

  Such waltzing was not easy.

  We romped until the pans

  Slid from the kitchen shelf;

  My mother’s countenance

  Could not unfrown itself.

  The hand that held my wrist

  Was battered on one knuckle;

  At every step you missed

  My right ear scraped a buckle.

  You beat time on my head

  With a palm caked hard by dirt,

  Then waltzed me off to bed

  Still clinging to your shirt.

  * * *

  When I discover Theodore Roethke’s poem “My Papa’s Waltz” I am reminded of those moments in our house with my stepfather. Did I love this man? I think in my child’s soul I did. Was he mine to have? I’m not sure. This poem captures all that I felt and sensed of him. Told from the perspective of a son waltzing with his father, the poem portrays a father’s love and rage, and a son’s need to hold on at all costs. Though its cadences and use of rhyme mimic the quality of a playful waltz, the poem’s undertones foretell fear and danger.

  The poem takes as its subject the relationship between a father and a son, and even in absence, the lifelong command a father wields. A poem begins by setting a mood so that “men can experience other people’s experience,” Roethke said. In spite of its misleading title, the mood of “My Papa’s Waltz” is ominous and foreboding: the contrast of waltzing with its happy associations against the dangers of whiskey, of a hand “battered on one knuckle,” pans leaving the shelf as the dance intensifies and the poem sashays down the page.

  DEPRESSION

  POPPIES IN OCTOBER

  Sylvia Plath

  Three years after our baby sister is born, my mother’s failing marriage becomes irreparable after the revelation that my stepfather has been unfaithful. They eventually divorce. I am thirteen. An ethereal, powerful presence moves into our house, consuming lightness and joy. Later I learn its name: depression. Its symptoms of lethargy and despondency overtake my mother’s body and mind. Once it penetrates the atmosphere, it becomes contagious. Ennui hunkers inside me like a weight if I stay too long at home.

  In the late sixties there is no language to talk about this form of melancholy, where one can barely function or get out of bed. There are times when I want to shake my mother out of her depression. Bearing witness provides its own strange strength. I know I cannot fall too. My mother needs me. When my mother is in this state, my sisters and I trade off looking after the baby. We take her for walks in her stroller or to the playground. Fix her a bowl of soup and sandwich for lunch. Watch her fill her coloring books. My mother says our baby sister has four mothers.

  I sit at the edge of my mother’s bed and will her to get up. Sometimes her body is limp as a rag doll. Other times she has crushing migraines and can’t lift her head or let any light creep into her room. Melancholy trails her. For years, it seems, she falls in and out of this sta
te where the lifeblood and will are seemingly washed out of her. Why can’t she be like the other mothers of my friends in the neighborhood who are busy and happy when I go over to one of their houses for lunch during our break from school? Lisa’s mother makes us peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches that make me gag on the first bite, but I get used to the strange taste. It’s only lunchtime but she’s in the kitchen cutting up vegetables for a roast she’s planning to make for dinner. I don’t like to think about my own mother, most likely back in bed now that we are off to school, with the blinds pulled down to block out the light.

  In spite of everything, she does her best to be a good mother. She finds the finest Montessori school for her youngest daughter and makes friends with the new mothers. Even though we are Jewish and light the menorah on Hanukkah, once my mother married our Irish Catholic stepfather, we celebrated Christmas. A freshly cut pine tree nearly as tall as our ceiling filled our living room and along with it, the rituals of stringing popcorn and cranberries, hanging shiny red and green bulbs and ornaments, and anointing the treetop with a gold star or a white angel. Even though a part of me feels it’s wrong to celebrate a Christian holiday, I like coming down the stairs on Christmas morning to be greeted by fattened stockings and a room full of wrapped presents. But once my mother’s marriage begins to sour, I can’t help but think that we are being punished for my mother marrying outside the faith.

  Nevertheless, the Christmas tradition of giving gifts lingers on, as if my mother doesn’t want to disappoint us. For Christmas, my mother saves money all year, sometimes going into debt, to buy us all presents she meticulously wraps with cutouts from magazines. When we are sick, she makes us tomato and butter sandwiches. Slowly she finds her footing again, a single woman in a world made of couples, but it’s as if the black cloud of depression lives just outside our door waiting to consume us; we do everything to keep it at bay. I don’t quite understand why my mother can’t snap herself out of it, and I’m angry that she can’t; but I also know that when she falls into this state, it’s as if she’s been snatched away from us and what has overtaken her is beyond our control, as if she’s living in a foreign country, and yet we all live in the same house. “Why can’t you make yourself happy?” my baby sister asks.

  POPPIES IN OCTOBER

  Sylvia Plath

  Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.

  Nor the woman in the ambulance

  Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly—

  A gift, a love gift

  Utterly unasked for

  By a sky

  Palely and flamily

  Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes

  Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

  O my God, what am I

  That these late mouths should cry open

  In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

  * * *

  I don’t remember when I first discovered the poetry of Sylvia Plath. My first encounter with Plath’s work might have been reading her popular novel, The Bell Jar—a touchstone for many introspective girls about a breakdown and recovery—when I was in high school. I am still amazed at the way in which it captures the inner state of a young woman struggling with her own ambitions and desires in the 1950s. It seems to ask whether it is possible to be a great writer and a kind, good person. I wonder if men think this way. I discover Plath’s poetry later, in college. It employs powerful images like “tulips that open and close,” mythological figures like Medusa, mirrors, faces, fetuses, images that evoke inner states and capture powerful feelings and unspoken emotions. “Poppies in October” articulates the wash of blackness that inhabits an individual and distorts her worldview. Plath’s poems, in spite of their darkness, offer strange comfort and companionship. She has an eye that, even in despair, searches for beauty, like the bright image of red poppies in the stalls at the greengrocer on a dark day in October.

  The critic Helen Vendler describes “Poppies in October” as faultless, a “binocular vision of life and death.” It conjures the mind in a melancholic state. “Oh my God, / what am I?” she asks, aware that depression has altered her. Under a wintery sky, she finds herself on a street where poppies are for sale and businessmen wearing bowler hats and an ambulance carrying a bleeding woman pass by. The imagery is reminiscent of suicide, the carbon monoxide in the flowers, the bleeding woman, the flowers crying open. “Even the sun-clouds cannot manage such skirts,” she writes of the petals of the poppies, an image so beautiful and womanly that it obliterates all else and lifts the speaker momentarily out of her despair. “It is to the ravishing beauty of the flowers the poet responds to first; . . . the ambulance seems forgotten as the senses carry Plath in gratitude for the unexpected beauty of the flowers so late in the year; they are . . . ‘a love gift,’ ” writes Helen Vendler. “They take the poet outside her desperate melancholy state, the chill of death momentarily warded off.” As Vendler affirms of Plath, “death was always before her eyes.” But I wonder, is it death, or more the fear of living in a depressive state without the ability to make it lift?

  ENVY

  SONNET 29: “WHEN, IN DISGRACE WITH FORTUNE AND MEN’S EYES”

  William Shakespeare

  CONFESSION

  Louise Glück

  I feel its burn when I look at my older sister and long for her pure white skin dotted with light freckles and the way a trail of boys comes to our house seeking her attention. I experience it when I watch sister number three consume the same plate of French fries and hamburgers I ate and not gain a pound. My sisters and I go to my cousins’ house before Hebrew school. When we arrive, my aunt is in the kitchen making breakfast. Our two girl cousins are seated around the kitchen table spreading toast with an orange coat of Cheez Whiz, while their older brothers shoot baskets with my uncle in the driveway. Our house is messy and disorganized. I’m ashamed of the frayed and faded slipcovers on the furniture in our living room. Our sagging roof and clapboard frame in need of a fresh coat of paint. In my cousin’s house, everything is brand new and touched by the hand of an orderly and ordinary existence. But it is more than the superficial; there is an aura of lightheartedness and well-being in their home. I wish my mother would pull out of her melancholy state and make breakfast for us every morning, but wishing it won’t will her dark mood away.

  I feel it when at school. I wish for one friend’s long straight mane of hair and another’s easy social grace. Why am I so locked inside myself? I do not expect that anyone will ever be envious of me.

  SONNET 29: “WHEN, IN DISGRACE WITH FORTUNE AND MEN’S EYES”

  William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

  When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

  And look upon myself and curse my fate,

  Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

  Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,

  Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,

  With what I most enjoy contented least;

  Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

  Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

  (Like to the lark at break of day arising

  From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

  For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings

  That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

  After school, my sisters and I waste time at the strip mall a few blocks away from our home. We stop at Campus Drug Store to buy strands of red licorice or Draeger’s ice cream shop for a sugar cone. Some days we slip onto a stool at Mawby’s coffee shop for a chocolate milk shake and a plate of fries and turn our stools to the big window to watch men with their briefcases unload from the rapid transit across the street, returning from their jobs downtown. Occasionally a young wife and her small children are on the platform waiting for one of them. Sometimes we wan
der into My Darling Daughter, an upscale clothing store. We run our hands through the piles of soft cashmere sweaters and flip through the rack of mini dresses. Inside the store, everything is tinged with glamour and beauty. I imagine if I owned even one item from My Darling Daughter it might brush off on me too. Sometimes we dare each other to go into the dressing room to try on a sweater or dress just for the thrill of it.

  One Saturday I go shopping with my friends. I have saved up enough money from babysitting, but with so many choices, it’s hard to decide which sweater to buy. Finally, I decide on a pale-pink angora. When I try it on, I feel as if I have been transformed from an ordinary girl into someone special. All the way home as I hold the shopping bag with the My Darling Daughter logo embossed on it, my new sweater neatly folded between sheets of light blue tissue paper, I carry that feeling with me. But once I say goodbye to my friends, and open the door to my house, my mood turns. I think about my sisters and feel first a prickle of superiority and then quickly its underside, shame. It’s complicated. If I wear my new sweater it will be like throwing it in the face of my sisters. I don’t want to feel the sting of envy or scorn. And sharing it will make it less important. Instead I keep it hidden and unworn in my drawer, like a talisman.

  CONFESSION

  Louise Glück (1943–)

  To say I’m without fear—

  it wouldn’t be true.

  I’m afraid of sickness, humiliation.

  Like anyone, I have my dreams.

  But I’ve learned to hide them,

  to protect myself

  from fulfillment: all happiness

  attracts the Fates’ anger.

  They are sisters, savages—

  in the end they have

  no emotion but envy.