Criticism | Politics

The First Poet I Ever Read (In English)

By Rigoberto González

I’ve written about this a number of times before in other venues, and the story hasn’t changed: when I was straining to learn English as a recent immigrant at a U.S. elementary school, a well-meaning teacher gave me a book of poems to help me “get rid” of my accent. She thought that the shame of my poor pronunciation was the cause of my shyness. I followed her instructions nonetheless and read the pages of poetry out loud each afternoon. I still remember the first one: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”

I may not have understood the content (or the context, for that matter) but I knew it was music: “Half a league, half a league,/ Half a league onward,/ All in the valley of Death/ Rode the six hundred.” Since then I have come to terms that this poem, like many of Tennyson’s others, is a commemoration of the military and its celebrated heroics. But this is an artist of the 19th century and therefore a witness to the conflicts of his time, and there were many during that century of troubled British imperialism.
Over the years I acquired biographical tidbits on Tennyson: he wrote an epic by the time he was 15; he joined a Spanish revolutionary army at 21 but never fought in battle; and he spent a decade refusing to publish after a series of personal traumas: the death of his father, the death of his best friend, and the nasty critical reception of his second book of poems. His best work is considered to have been written during and after his fifties.
When I reveal to people that I read Tennyson for the sheer rhythms of his work, I get two reactions: disinterest or puzzlement. I usually get the same question: “Why?” My answer: “Because he was my first.” But seriously, it’s the music.
If you haven’t read Tennyson before, I pose the following challenge: read “The Revenge” or better yet “The Lady of Shallot.” Out loud. Absorb the music. Something I miss in many young poets. The only things flatter than most of the English I hear at poetry readings nowadays are my Mexican feet.
A sample Tennyson stanza:
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro’ the room,
She saw the water lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shallot.
Any surprising poetry loves on your end?

2007-09-07

Posted in Criticism, Group Blog, Poems, Politics on Friday, September 7th, 2007 by Rigoberto González.