The Narrative Poem, Eleven Years After

I have always subscribed to the theory that more people write poetry than people who read poetry. This may or may not be true. Whatever the case might be, we are surrounded by poetry everyday. We listen to pop songs that often have a lyricist writing words in the same way as a poet might. And if you're into hiphop, those rhymes are oftentimes iambic pentameter. Brilliant. We repeat phrases from poems, even if we don't know from where the phrase comes. We know Christmas tunes. We know advertising jingles. Poetry is all around us. It's on the bus. It's tucked away in collective memory. I can still recite “Fiddler's Green,” an epic Civil War Calvary poem, that I learned in basic training at Ft. Knox, Kentucky in 1990. On a good day, I can produce Edward Gorey's “The Gashleycrumb Tinies” from memory.

Perhaps worth mentioning here, I am not a poet. I read poetry. And I've been known to dabble in it. Never to the height of my own expectations, I have continued to try my hand at it for years. Several years ago, 1998 it was, I endeavored to read a book a day all year. By October of that year I became so strange that I couldn't stand my own company. It was a noble attempt at any rate.

I met Christina Rossetti sometime in the spring of 1998. “Goblin Market” meant something to me. I bring it up only because most folks haven't thought about “Goblin Market” since college. I suspect many haven't come by (come buy, come buy was still their cry) this narrative poem at all. The strength of the piece may well be the language, but what makes it compelling is its structure. Being a narrative poem, there is a beginning, a middle and an end. I find this appealing because of the nature of my writing, the writing of fiction. The themes in this poem may have an element to its endurance too. I suppose the last facet to this piece may well be the images that Rossetti conjures:

Not a bat flapped to and fro
Round their rest:
Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Locked together in one nest.

If you are unfamiliar with “Goblin Market,” this particular stanza comes fairly late on after Laura has partaken in the goblin fruit and fallen ill. Her sister, Lizzie, through love and understanding has revived her from certain death. All themes aside, and there are ample essays which deserve a reading, the poem invokes thought, emotion and memory.

Like “Goblin Market,” if it's permissible to raise another English poet, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge illustrates the second example. First, this is a narrative poem by which it tells a story with a beginning, middle and end structure. Through the exposition of the story, we learn second hand at a wedding party the recounted tale of an old man who was lost at sea in his youth. Again, this poem has structure, an exciting story wrought with conflict, elegant language and memorable phrases. You may have heard this one:

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Even if you're not familiar with the poem, you've probably heard someone refer to a burden as an albatross around the neck.

But what about these narrative poems? Who cares, right?

For me, especially reading these things all those years ago, it was only a matter of time. It was only a matter of time before I would attempt to write a long narrative poem of my own. I began writing “Winter Rapture” in October of 2000. I worked as a file clerk at an insurance company at the time. I probably put in an honest 20 minutes of work each day. The rest of the time, I spent writing in my notebook. There is no mystery behind “Winter Rapture.” I wanted to tell a story of a recovering opium addict, his sister and his dead Aunt Louise. I wanted to see if I could tell a story in the format of a poem. I spent the fall writing this Christmas story. I've spent a decade tinkering with it. Now, I'm immensely grateful to present it here, eleven years later, on December 1, 2011.