In recent years poetry has slowly become a source of respite for me. It’s taken awhile for me to learn the ways I best engage with it. (The methods of Charlotte Mason have been a great help to me in this.)
I tend to prefer older poetry, finding the rhyming rhythm a quieting thing for the mind.
Reading a poem aloud is always helpful.
I’ve also found that I have to read a poem all the way through at least twice before I start to really grasp the meaning within it.
The more I have approached poetry reading in this way, the more I have grown to love it. It is a unique expression of what makes up life, and often creates a picture that gives a healing or strengthening perspective.
The following poem is one I encountered recently, and it has brought light and encouragement to an often weary heart.
Sun and Shadow
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
As I look from the isle, o’er its billows of green,
To the billows of foam-crested blue,
Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen,
Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue:
Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray
As the chaff in the stroke of the flail;
Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way,
The sun gleaming bright on her sail.
Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun, —
Of breakers that whiten and roar;
How little he cares, if in shadow or sun
They see him who gaze from the shore!
He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef,
To the rock that is under his lee,
As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf,
O’er the gulfs of the desolate sea.
Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves
Where life and its ventures are laid,
The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves
May see us in sunshine or shade;
Yet true to our course, though the shadows grow dark,
We’ll trim our broad sail as before,
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,
Nor ask how we look from the shore!
