Unambiguously Ours

Saturday, November 20, 2021

I have never subscribed to the popular understanding of poetry as always “something personal,” its meaning unknown to others. (If so, then why share it, frustrating readers? Just my take.) Besides, we Baby Boomers should especially have learned by now that ambiguity and depth are not the same thing, just as wisdom and age are not necessarily synonymous. Poetry (or Verse) is another genre or type of writing, though likely the most succinct and efficient. A good poet can make his main point in eight lines which may take a novelist eight hundred pages, though novels usually have more than one point to make. Nineteenth century poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins’ most popular poem could be “God’s Grandeur,” but my personal favorite is “Spring and Fall.” The reader can picture Hopkins sitting in the rectory study on an autumn day, resting his thoughts. He glances out the window and notices a young girl strolling aimlessly in an adjoining park named Goldengrove. Hopkins ponders, “Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove ‘unleaving’?” Some may infer an invoking of Psalm 8’s questioning of God, “What is man that you are mindful of Him?”

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