This month's Trial magazine has an amazing quote from Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem, Dirge Without Music. I can't resist putting it up here.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Dirge Without Music, Edna St. Vincent Millay.
There's something about that poem that grabs at me, much like Tennyson's Ulysses grabs at me.
The other night, I was sitting in my corner of the Dublin House, basically doing my best to ignore everyone, scribbling away in my Moleskine. Laurel, a raven-haired regular at the bar who worked for a local theater, sat down next to me.
"Is that poetry?" She asked.
I looked up from my notebook, a little lost after being pulled away from writing. "Um, no... no, I really can't write poetry. It's, ah, well, it's..." I hesitated. "Well, I write stories."
"Oh that's right, I remember when we talked about --"
"Yeah," I interjected, "Right. Carver. The patron saint."
"I didn't realize that you weren't just into stories..." Laurel began.
"Yeah, well, you know." I took a swig of beer. "I need something to do when I'm not doing work."
"But not poetry?" Laurel had an impish grin. I shifted in my seat and reconsidered her.
"Oh, I did it in college. Terrible, overwrought shit. Not anymore."
"Were you published?"
I looked down and nodded slightly. "Yeah. Don't really even remember it. It was some sort of sardonic look at greatness. I had been reading a lot of Mary Shelley at the time."
"Same here."
"Really?"
"Yeah. It was cool."
"That's cool," I said. "You should bring it in some time."
"No...," Laurel laughed and shook her head. "I don't think so. So why did you stop writing poetry?"
"You're changing the subject." I smirked. Laurel pulled a cigarette from her indigo denim jacket.
"You bet your ass I am," she said.
"Okay, I won't press." I said. I lit her cigarette for her. "I stopped writing because of law school. I couldn't think poetically after that. I couldn't even read poetry for a while..." I looked off into space, thinking about the unread copy of Whitman that sat next to my bed for two years during law school. "It wasn't until I got out, I think, like, two or three months after the bar, that I was even able to read Frost or Eliot."
"Hm."
"Yeah. It's fine though. I like stories better. So how about you? Why'd you stop?"
Laurel laughed. "'Cause it was horrible. It was that girly... shit that every teenage girl writes..." She took on a throaty, dramatic voice. "Woe is me, it is all sorrow and dead flowers."
A recent conversation reminded me of the potential for legal education to change how I think. I never lost, as a result of law, that sense of enjoyment of the reckless and the beautiful, but I did lose a lot of my ability to think in a holistic, fuzzy sort of way. To think as I needed to in order to write poetry.
Some trades are necessary, and I suppose that was one of them. Odin gave up his eye; I gave up bad poetry. I don't think the world will miss it much. Still, it is nice to be able to be held breathless by verse, something I was not able to do for far too long.
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