Son, stand and be a man, responsible
And virtuous and kind. You will not find
A man of worth who’s listless, cold, and cruel,
Who lives a life reptilian, not of mind.
Don’t live an anesthetic life; embrace
The senses, beauty of the world and life
And art; reject the bodiless and soulless,
The hatred of the world in strifeless strife.
A man of action is a man of words;
A man of words will always listen well;
The poetry of thought will see its source
To train you so that you can always tell
The wisest way to walk, traverse the waves,
And fly on falcon wings when you are sure
Your feathers formed, both soft and firm, for both
Are needed if life you will endure.
A man of wisdom is a man of worlds –
The worlds of simplest physics, chemistry –
The complex worlds of life, emergent systems –
All; cultures, art, and true economy.
A healthy man is one of healthy loves
And life; a life of beauty unifies
Diversity, transforms each soul it meets
To light, gives feathered wings so each one flies.
The opposite of manliness is not
The feminine. The feminine is truly
The complement of manliness. The boy,
So irresponsible, unkempt, unruly,
Is the true opposite of manliness.
Embrace the fullness of both sides of life,
The feminine and masculine, and you
Will have the truest virtue, not one rife
With hardness when you really need to show
You flow and bend and, flowing, show your strength,
Nor softness when you must stand firm and show
That you won’t always bend to any length.
Yes, son, to be a man you have to stand
For right and virtue, knowing when to bend
With strength and knowing when to love. Be true
And good, a soul of beauty to the end.
4 comments:
I'm honored that you think my opinion is worth having!
But I can be damned hard on poets and poetry.
Ask me some questions about your poetry. In other words, how would my opinions be helpful? What aspects of your poetry are you particularly interested in having an opinion on?
Any honest feedback from someone who knows what they're talking about it helpful to me as a poet. From what I can tell, you're an honest broker, sincerely love poetry, and share my poetic sensiblities.
ok.
If you want to see how a poem like this is done right (and I'm sure you know this poem) check out Yeats' Prayer for my Daughter.
And if you want to see it done wrong (but deliberately so and with a sense of humor) check out Polonius's advice to his son in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Suite 101 says of it:
"And Polonius is not exactly an exemplary character. He’s dull, pedantic, wields no real power at court and manages to get himself killed by hiding in the Queen’s bedroom. More to the point, having made this speech full of homely wisdom to Laertes, he is next seen talking to Reynaldo (Act 2, Scene i), a spy he is intending to set on his son. His sincere man-to-man conversation earlier is shown up as a sham, and we see that he neither trusts his son, nor believes that he will take any of the advice."
Unfortunately, your poem strikes me as having more in common with Polonius than with Yeats. A lovely phrase by Shakespeare, I think, tells us the secret to poetry (again from Hamlet):
"See you now-
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth;
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out."
And so it goes with poetry. All the best poetry is, in a sense, a falsehood (in the sense that the art of poetry is the art of indirection and only by assays of bias will the reader find directions out).
Frost had Shakespeare in mind when he said:
"[Readers ask me]'Why don't you say what you mean?' We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in *indirections* - whether from diffidence or from some other instinct."
The difference between your poem and Yeats is not in the greatness of its ideas (Yeats' ideas are no more elevated than yours). The difference is in indirection. Yeats talks about the things without talking about them. He alludes. He narrates. He draws comparisons. Study his poem very carefully.
You say what you mean.
And this knocks the poetry out of your poem.
The advice you give is all good advice, but it's also well-traveled stuff with all the burden and risk (of cliche and triteness) that comes with truisms, platitudes, dictums, precepts, adages...
If you want to turn this into poetry, here is what you must demand of yourself:
How do I make the same points by implication (indirection), rather than by spelling them out?
When Keats wanted to write about the sudective permanance of art and the impermanence and transience of life, he wrote "Ode to a Grecian Urn".
All poetry is like describing colors to a blind man.
It does no good to tell the poor man that the wheel barrow is red (see William carlos williams).
Well, I would hope that this poem is far more like Rudyard Kipling's If than Polonius' advice. :-)
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