Reading Poetry

My New Year's Resolution for 2009 is to read more poetry. I have always loved poetry, but somehow recently I find that I always have my head in a thick volume of the medieval history or a biography of a 19^th century statesmen or something of that sort. I must do better.

People are always saying that poetry is "difficult" - and sometimes it can be. Certainly, if you are reading poetry in your second language, it is not always easy to get all the different meanings of a particular word or of a whole poem. But that ignores positive side of poetry.

Take a medieval ballad like Sir Patrick Spens. Perhaps there are one or two words that you might not understand but the whole thing rattles along at a tremendous pace - and it's a really good story. At the other extreme, takes a poem like W.B.Yeats' The Collarbone of a Hare. It's a fascinating piece. I first read it over thirty years ago and I must have read it a hundred times since.  I am still not entirely sure what it's all about, but it sounds wonderful. The words seem to echo inside your head and the images (whatever they mean) stay with you forever.

And in between those two extremes are poems based on historical events - like G.K.Chesterton's Lepanto, which conjures up the politics and the costumes and the noise and smoke of battle. Or poems about nature like Edward Thomas' The Combe or D.H.Lawrence's Eagle in New Mexico, which make you look at the world in a new way. Or poems about love and hate and birth and death. Poems about almost anything.

I think anthologies are the best way of reading poetry if you are not an expert. They allow to sample the range of different types of poetry and decide what you like and then, perhaps, specialise. All the poems mentioned in this article can be found in an anthology called The Rattle Bag, edited by the English Poet Laureate Ted Hughes and the Nobel prize-winner Seamus Heaney. It first appeared way back in 1982. My copy is old and broken-backed but I still use it. And The Rattle Bag is still available. It has never been out of print because it contains such a wonderful selection.

Poetry is the perfect travelling companion, so next time you are going to be on a plane or a train, take an anthology with you. Read a few lines, then look out of the window and think about, think about they mean. You might end up seeing the world in a slightly different way.

Laurence Bristow-Smith

British Consul General