John Keats's Birthday

I'm doing nothing, as has been my practice for the last few years. It used to be a big event. Bars are really fun on Halloween, but since I've stopped photographing it just hasn't seemed like a big deal.

But there has been a shift in my thinking, and I've found a new reason to celebrate Halloween. It's John Keats's birthday. For those who have difficulty appreciating poetry, here's a suggestion: read it aloud. It's music really, the sound of the words has as much importance as their sense. And there isn't any automatic reason to insert a pause after a line break. Read the lines like they are sentences, and it's just like prose— only the sound makes it special. Otherwise, it's just like words on a page.

WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink

John Keats (of course)

Poetry is about sound and sense- and sense is more about sensuality than meaning. Sort of like music. Take for example, the first assertion of this sonnet regarding the nature of words. Clever pun, that books would hold "charact'ry," but I digress— think about the meaning and sound of the word hold and notice the simile: like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain. Can you say that fast? I doubt it. The R-G alliteration slows you down, as does the stress pattern, which is only apparent if you read it OUT LOUD damn it, it's not prose. So, this line, well, holds you and it's rich.

My attraction to poetry is probably laziness. It gives you the most intense language experience with the least amount of effort. Sort of like music. Only, you do have to SAY IT!