“April,” poet T.S. Eliot once wrote, “is the cruelest month.” Certainly his words apply to April 2020.
Though we are slowly winning the fight against the pandemic, the struggle has brought hardship and dire changes to all. Untold numbers of businesses have closed, and some are likely to remain so once the pandemic passes. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, millions more are locked inside their homes under “shelter-in-place” orders, the stock market gyrates up and down, and we are in the meantime beset by a maelstrom of faulty models, misinformation, and biased reporting by many in the mainstream media seeking to point fingers for this disaster.
In such a dark time, we can take comfort and hope from the heroic efforts of some of the people around us: our health care providers, our truck drivers and grocery store clerks who have kept our system running as best they can, even the loan officer I know who is working 12-hour days seven days a week at her bank to help thousands of customers with their mortgages and the loans pouring out of the Small Business Administration.
Some of us gather strength from our religious faith, some from the presence of family and friends, some from the examples of our ancestors who themselves endured terrible calamities.
Candles in the Darkness
April is National Poetry Month. It is the month when libraries and bookstores typically set up displays of poetry books, offer readings from the works of poets both living and dead, and celebrate the place of verse in literature and in our lives.Those stores and libraries are mostly shuttered now, locked down for the duration of the pandemic, but we Americans can still salute poets and their verse by means of the internet. Even more importantly, we can avail ourselves of poems that will inspire us, boost our spirits, quell our fears, and push away despair.
Reading Tips
Poetry is best read aloud and to others. If you are quarantined with family or friends, and particularly with children, now is the time to cut loose and take some fun from these readings. If you’re delivering Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” for example, give rein to your inner actor, match your gestures to the poem’s actions, and roar out the words until you arrive at the last stanza, discarding that roar for a whisper.Even if you live alone, I encourage you to read poetry aloud. If you’re like me, you’re talking to yourself anyway, and the read-aloud approach not only enhances the meaning of the poem but also fills your silence.
Listening
If you want a change of pace, go to YouTube, where you can enjoy thousands of read-alouds by those who love poetry. Some of these presentations are amateurish, but you’ll also find recitations by men and women whose voices can break your heart or bring shouts of laughter.Words of Courage and Hope
To help you get started, below are eight inspirational poems, all of them available online in print, as an audio, or both.RedFrost Motivation offers a beautiful recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s classic poem “If.” Though aimed at the younger set, all of us can draw strength from these wise reminders of what it means to be a mature adult.
Henry Newbolt’s “Vitai Lampada” reminds us to “Play up! play up! and play the game!” Life is a battlefield, and Newbolt urges us to join the action.
Elsie Robinson’s “Beauty as a Shield” was new to me before I began this article—I stumbled across it in the book “The Best Loved Poems of the American People”—but it is a fine piece of verse recommending beauty as a guard against despair.
Lanta Wilson Smith is another poet I’d never read, but her “This, Too, Shall Pass Away” reminds us that troubles may be always with us but that all of them, including our pandemic, eventually end.
R.L. Sharpe’s “A Bag of Tools” asks whether we will be “a stumbling block or a steppingstone.” Because of the poem’s brevity and its powerful message, I used to ask my students to learn it by heart.
John James Ingalls’s “Opportunity” tells us that when opportunity knocks, we have but one chance to answer. “Opportunity” was Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite poem, and an autographed copy of it hung from the wall of his office in the White House.
In “Worth While,” once-renowned poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, whose most famous line was “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone,” writes “the man worth while is the one who will smile, /When everything goes dead wrong.” One line in the poem really hit home with me: “the sorrow that hides in a smile.” Often, like some of my readers, my smile has hidden my sorrow.
Renewing Our Hearts and Minds
All of these poets have gone to the grave. Nearly all of them are little read these days, which is one reason I sought them out. Like all human beings, they endured and suffered personal tragedies, which are echoed in their words. If we have the ears to listen and the eyes to see, these writers of verse have lessons to teach us.Great poetry, as is true in all classical arts, summons us to look to the stars, to know we are not alone in misfortune, to find the courage when we are on a walk through hell to keep on walking.