Things Worth Remembering: W. H. Auden’s Poignant Embrace
One stanza of poetry captures the pleasure of holding another person.
One of the odd things about poetry is that people head to it in times of crisis or unusually heightened emotion.
Poetry is not especially useful when describing the state of the traffic heading downtown. It is not required for summing up the pleasures of shopping. But there are moments when only poetry will do—as the most distilled form of communication possible. Consider how people not just read but often try to write poetry upon the death of someone they love. Or when they are falling in love—especially for the first time.
There seems something important about the fact that even people who don’t know they care for poetry instinctively know it is somewhere they can go to in extremis. Other art forms—music, in particular—may do similar work, but sometimes only poetry will do.
Which brings me to the only other person, apart from Eliot and Shakespeare, who will crop up here more than once over the next year: W. H. Auden.