SMALL POEMS FOR WASHING UP WITH

There’s something special about small poems – the ones that slip into your head so you can take them round with you invisibly….       

I find washing up with a poem in my head particularly satisfying. Poems are also good for dusting, polishing, hoovering, and long walks over the hills.

If I’m cross, and don’t want to speak about it, a bit of a poem will do it for me. Usually the end.

For example  – ‘we should be careful of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.’ That’s Larkin, of course (the end of ‘Mowing’). 

Or ‘In Nature there’s no blemish but the mind. / None can be called deformed but the unkind’ from Twelfth Night.

But a whole small poem has a special something, like a little fish alive and wriggling.

This one has been following me around lately. It’s by Elinor Wylie (from Angels and Earthly Creatures, 1929) and full of grief, though doesn’t leave me feeling exactly sad. More moved by a sadness shared.

Perhaps, in fact, it’s a love poem, rather than a grief poem. Or perhaps they’re one and the same. Because whoever it was written for – there they are in the poem about their absence! 

In fact, there they are forever, or for as long as this little poem slips into people’s heads.

Little Elegy

Withouten you
No rose can grow;
No leaf be green
If never seen
Your sweetest face;
No bird have grace
Or power to sing;
Or anything
Be kind, or fair,
And you nowhere.