Last night my husband quoted a line from one of my favorite e.e. Cummings poems and when I tried to remember more about the poem there was nothing there in my brain. It was like opening up a book you've read a hundred times to find it inexplicably blank. This whole inner monologue of panic came about because the poem has entered my life on more than one occasion, so it seems impossible that I could ever forget it.
Years ago, I'd say when I was in my early teens, I was channel surfing one random Saturday afternoon (a typically short and unrewarding process without cable and only about 10 channels to choose from, 3 of them being PBS) and settled on a random movie where a rather familiar-looking man brought a woman into a bookstore and insisted on buying her a book of poetry. A scene or two later a poem was recited via a voice-over and it just devastated me. But, when I went to a bookstore to find the poem, I couldn't remember the author or the title, just the fact that the words "rain" and "hands" appeared in it - not a lot to go on.
Naturally, I never found it and eventually forgot about both the movie and the poem. About 8 or so years later, my college roommate brought home a copy of Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters to watch for a class. Not only was that THE movie from years before - I recognized it instantly and was amazed to learn it was a Woody Allen movie I'd had such a reaction towards and that the random actor was Michael Caine (!) - but, best of all, there was that poem again. It still ranks among my happiest discoveries and reignited my interest in poetry. Since then the movie has also become a top favorite of mine, among Woody Allen's body of work and movies in general.
A few years later a soon-to-be lover sent me this poem to explain his intentions - the relationship was ultimately unsuccessful, but it was a very effective form of communication. And now, my husband likes to quote the last line to me (and I love hearing it from him) and I feel as though the movie, the poem and I have a long, shared history, much like I have with people.
From time to time it's necessary to explain the function of poetry to people due to its inaccessible qualities. Unlike novels or short stories, there isn't room for explanation - the reader has to trust her own feelings and create personal meaning, as opposed to struggling with what the poet wants to convey. This makes people nervous, understandably. So, I suppose that this example is as good a way as any to demonstrate how a poem can embed itself in a person, connecting the words on the page to experience, freezing a moment beyond rote, empty memorization.
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
by E. E. Cummings
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
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