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?
What you remind me of here is that the art attracted me, early on, for reasons more visceral than intellectual. Those who reacted to his love of Tennyson perhaps don’t get that part: that poets, regardless of their backgrounds, are first and foremost, seduced by sound and not sense—at the least the ones, in my view, that go on to write interesting things.
My Tennyson (in English) was the Robert Duncan I read when I was 20. Spanish is another story…
When I was 10, I didn’t know that the song “Guantanamera” was taken from the poetry of Jose Marti, and I didn’t know the lyrics could be improvised. All I knew was that there was this old song sung by a Cuban dude in white polyester pants posing on one of my dad’s 33’s.
When I found the poem, I just had to sing the verses. I love the second stanza the best. Arte soy entre las artes,/ En los montes, monte soy. On my better days, I feel that way too.
From Marti’s VERSOS SENCILLOS:
Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece la palma,
Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma.
Yo vengo de todas partes,
Y hacia todas partes voy:
Arte soy entre las artes,
En los montes, monte soy.
Yo sé los nombres extraños
De las yerbas y las flores,
Y de mortales engaños,
Y de sublimes dolores…
Crazy, but I just don’t have the same relationship with English.