Yay, the Jabberwocky. Oh, children’s poems - there are just so many. It wasn't life changing but I always loved Walter de la Mare's
If I Were Lord of Tartary. Oh, and Kipling's
Smuggler's Song and
Way Through The Woods. So atmospheric.
I suppose in a way they were influential. We always had huge tomes of poetry in the house and I guess I progressed from a love of childhood poems to a love of adult ones.
Hmmm...something that was earth shattering though? Something that really left an impact? There are one or two novels that spring to mind in later life...*thinking hard*
Oh. I have a poem.
Hmmm. Not so much 'life changing' as a little bit spooky and transcendental - will that do?
When I was about 17, a friend of mine died. He was 23 at the time, and was working on a construction site near where I lived - only I had no idea he was there. He fell from the roof.
I don't know if you remember
Ballykissangel? It was a hugely popular British TV drama at the time. The main characters - a priest and a publican - fall in love, and he goes to renounce his priesthood to be with her. Only whilst he's off doing that, there's a terrible storm and an electrical fault, and the landlady he's given up everything to be with goes and dies.
At the time it was a big deal
So I'm watching the wake, where they read out the following poem:
Quote:
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Which I think is probably instantly recognisable to most people reading. Arguably amongst the most famous ever written.
But at seventeen, I hadn't a clue what it was or who wrote it. This was the final line before the phone rang and my mother explained to me what had happened to our friend. The shock sort of lodged it in my brain.
After the funeral I went on a secret mission. All I could remember was the final line. Believe it or not, Google was founded later the same year, and somehow I didn't really think to Excite it. There was something meditative about standing in bookshop after bookshop (anyone remember Dillons?) going through every poetry book I could find, wishing that they indexed verses by last line instead of first. Although, I didn't know that was the last line - it sounded terribly short to me and I was convinced it must be an excerpt from something longer.
Fast forward. Eventually I found it. Yeats:
He Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven. I remember feeling vaguely stunned that this was the poem in its entirety. Complete.
Then I felt a little bereft that I didn't have a reason to pop into a bookshop in my free time. It took me longer than it probably should have to find it, and became a sort of ritual I suppose. In finding it, it felt as though something were missing.
A few years later I was helping my mother to clear some space in her room. As daughters do, I was poking around her trinket boxes and I came across a very thin sliver of paper. It was so tiny, and so yellow at the edges, that I almost didn't open it in case it turned to dust.
Imagine my surprise when the only words upon it, in faded black newsprint, read:
Quote:
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
"What's this?" I asked, and she proceeded to tell me about a time in her youth when she had been in a place of meditation. The things in the box were mementos from that time, and she had felt a special connection to that poem.
It just struck me that one poem, centring on the same line, united both mother and daughter around the same age in their lives. The sort of thing that makes you question providence.
So the poem was a sort of coming of age in a number of ways. Firstly, it was the first loss of a friend. Secondly, it connected me to my mother - transcending the turbulent relationship that many young women have with theirs. And, finally, in searching for it, I received a crash-course in classical poetry, which I still enjoy to this day.
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