One hot summer afternoon when I was maybe six years old, I lay in a ditch filled with dry leaves because it offered a world for me. The ditch was in the woods. The place was quiet. It was one of those summer days when everything was silent. I fell asleep in my Rip Van Winkle nest. When I woke I heard a crinkling in the leaves and I felt a toad timidly placing his feet on my outstretched arm. He walked along my wrist and disappeared into the further recesses of the ditch. I was sorry he was gone. Funny how I can remember that. At six I felt the departure of a toad as a personal loss. Ridiculous!
All emotional responses to the things of this world are laughable. If you’re lucky you grow sufficiently to know it.
When I think about the poems I like, I generally find there’s a commonality to them–not a sameness, not a generalized theme or subject–but a discordance or disconnect between primary emotion and whatever we may call something wiser. By this I mean sensibility. And also a hint of the absurd that must come with strong emotion. Here are lines by Yeats that I’ve always admired:
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
Planet of the Blind 