Yesterday when I was walking my dog Pip on a back road here in Santa Fe at that moment when the afternoon fades into a lavender evening, I heard a man singing. He was working behind a coyote fence, and his song was in Spanish, one of those ancient songs that are a hymn to loss and longing. He started his noisy machinery and the song was lost, but he had reminded me—this unknown woman from another tribe, passing along the fence—of what life gives us for comfort.
We all need comfort, especially now with the pandemic raging across the nation. I was reminded of my all-time comfort sources: an open log fire, a line of poetry, and a beautiful overblown pink rose.
Old fashioned English poetry anthologies list in the back AN INDEX OF FIRST LINES. There was a time when many people knew the first lines of a handful of poems and could think or recite them in time of need. Poetry has escaped us now, into the universities and the small presses which, thank God, keep it alive, but removed by that very success from the lives of most people. Yet William Wordsworth, quoting old wisdom, believed in an inherent connection between working men and poetry, and although he meant the rhythm of fieldwork, the harrowing, hand-ploughing and scything, there is a lot of buried rhythm in our ordinary indoor daily lives that might connect us to poetry.
Here are some first lines that mean a great deal to me. Perhaps one of my readers will look up the whole poem and find some comfort there.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud”
—William Wordsworth
“This is no country for old men”
—William Butler Yeats
“They shut the road through the woods”
—Rudyard Kipling
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master”
—Elizabeth Bishop
“You do not do, you do not do”
—Sylvia Plath
“I came to explore the wreck”
—Adrienne Rich
“Razors pain you”
—Dorothy Parker
How rich we are in comforts if we chose to break old habits and look for them.
Bonnie Lee Black says
Dear Sallie — Thank you for this post and for sharing the first lines of poems by poets who have felt like old (and comforting) friends.