Why be interested in poetry

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Why involve yourself with poetry …

First and foremost poetry deals with words and like it or not words will always be part of your life.

We use words in many ways but primarily to communicate with others and so too with poetry. So one reason for looking at poetry is simply to see how words have been used by others to say something about their lives and thoughts and experiences and perhaps the things they want to share that are particularly important to them. Poetry only comes alive when a reader takes those first steps into the word-world of the poet and when this happens chances are the reader will broaden his or her own life.

By looking at the words of others … especially poetry where words are constructed into a concentrated form of expression … we can expand the way we use words ourselves and how we communicate with others … apart from having an insight into the life of another.

And of course poetry can entertain, educate.

The first poem I can remember hearing was from my primary school days. This was …

Silver

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in silver feathered slee
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws, and silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.
 
By Walter de la Mare

It was the first time that I thought of an inanimate object as a person. The moon became a person beaming silver into everything she saw as she looked at the countryside. The shadowy onomatopoeia feeling invoked by the teacher when she read the poem was captivitating.

Note ... And moveless fish - should it be motionless fish - or is moveless intended because of the lack of light ... moveless is not in the dictionary - does this matter?