Every lover of poetry remembers the poem that made them fall in love with the art.
It’s usually not even an entire poem that makes us fall in love. Often it’s just one line. Sometimes one phrase or word.
Stephen Fry, in the wonderful Ode Less Travelled cites an innocuous line from Keats’ ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’ as sweeping him up and starting him on his lifelong journey:
It was a line of Keats’s, an alexandrine as it happens, not that I knew that then, of a sensuousness and melodic perfection that hit me like a first lungful of cannabis, but without the great arcs of vomit, inane giggling and clammy paranoia attendant upon ingestion of that futile and overrated narcotic.
The line happened to be this one:
And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old
Fry continues:
It is very possible that you will see nothing remarkable in this line at all. I had been dizzily in love with it for months before I became consciously aware of its extraordinary consonantal symmetry. Moving inwards from each extremity, we see the letter D at either end, moving through a succession of Ls, Ss, Ps and Ns. D-L-N-S-L-P-N-L-P-L-N-D-S-L-D. This may be bollocks to you, but I thought it a miracle. I still think it remarkable. It has none of the embarrassing obviousness of over-alliterated lines, but its music is as perfectly achieved as any line of verse I know. It was not, however, the sonorous splendours of the words that had first captivated me, but the image evoked by them. I found the line as completely visual as anything I had ever read. I suppose that subconsciously diction had been as responsible as description, which is to say the nature and physical attributions of the words chosen had made the image vivid in my mind quite as much as their literal meanings. ‘It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it,’the song goes. It is both of course. And what had Keats said? That a girl was asleep in the lap of . . . not a person, but some old legends. It had never occurred to me before that you were allowed to do this. It was like a nonsense joke or a category mistake. You can sleep in a person’s lap, but not a legend’s. Legends don’t have laps any more than whales have shoulders. Yet straight into my head came a suffused and dreamy picture of a long-haired maiden, eyes closed, with armoured knights and dragons rising up from her sleeping head. An image, I was later to discover, that greatly influenced the works of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters. Music and painting in one twelve-syllable line, but something more than either and this ‘something more than either’ is what we mean, I suppose, by poetry.
The poem that so enraptured me, brought me to the joys of poetry, was ‘A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day’ by John Donne.
The poem’s entirety is a feast of words. And you could choose any one line to be your own personal conversion. Read it and relish each line like wine. But the line that struck me was this one:
For I am every dead thing
Reading this line for the first time made my heart speed up. It’s a cliché to say something took your breath away, but this line really did. And I paused. Stillness. Crystallisation. Meditative trance.
I then spent years chasing that high, trying to get the same heart-stopping feeling of total arrest, submission to a higher force, again.
Here’s me reading the great poem:
What poem or line of poetry brought you round to the power of the craft?
‘A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day’ by John Donne
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