POETRY
Simply, we meet to read poems. This is not a performance or an intellectual study. We focus on self-study and are looking at the three centres within ourselves - the mind, body and emotions - in our reading.
We are not experts. We struggle with this study. We try to connect with what the person who wrote the poem intended and to be with the poem.
Part of our work is to overcome the wanting to do it well or the fear of reading it badly. We try to be sensitive to the people listening and to convey what is essential in the words and rhythm.
Our poetry study usually has themes - for example; time, choices, opposites and the elements. We have discovered that poetry is a practical help. It wakes us up.
"I read a poem partly to try to find something inside myself. This ‘sensing something’ is difficult. I can say that I ‘think’ about a poem, that I understand the words. But what is it, this 'thinking'? The words of a poem touch me inside. I am moved and a ripple of emotion comes. Sometimes, if I am sensitive, attentive enough, I can feel my body. Then my reading of a poem can lift the seemingly ordinary words to a higher meaning."
Octave
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Extract from William Wordsworth’s Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
"Sometimes a huge well of feeling flows and tears pour out – as when I first heard a certain stanza from Wordsworth’s “Ode – Intimations of Immortally” and Yeats’ “Lake Isle of Innisfree”. The surprise of this emotion – it simply arrives and something in me is alive, pulsing."
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
from The Lake Isle of Innisfree
W B Yeates
"Trying to speak the poem, or let it speak through me, not performing it.
Speaking a poem from memory, like Fern Hill, with it’s complicated near repetitions and beautiful, subtle structures: finding, one moment, the comforting flow of a familiar passage and then the shiver of awe, no matter how many times I’ve read or said it, at a line like ..."
....the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise."
Extract from Fern Hill
by Dylan Thomas
"....a sense then of 'standing under' the poem: and also contacting something in myself, something I know and recognise and yet which isn’t there for me until words like this awaken it."
Octave
Study of Poetry - Themes
The themes we chose for our study of poetry reflected the deeper interests of a Gurdjieff Group: life and death, war and peace, time, the stars, the sun, the moon, youth and old age, choices, hope, faith and charity, regeneration and renewal, the seasons, as well as humorous poems, long narrative poems (i.e. “The Ancient Mariner”) and poems with strong rhythms.
Poems in dialect and those in languages other than English were read by those familiar with the language, and the latter were usually read later in translation.
Themes emerged from discussion, quite often arising naturally from the previous theme - as in the case of the seasons or the sun followed by the moon. The theme was chosen several weeks in advance of a meeting to allow time to search for poems that evoke the theme to the individual reader.
One such theme was: A Journey Shared
"I find many favourite poems are revisited because they speak on more than one theme and resonate on several levels. The current theme of “a journey shared” immediately evokes for me the shared experience of the long distance bus passengers in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Moose”, in those few moments when they are each suddenly and unexpectedly confronted by the moose halting their journey."
Octave
…Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.
A moose has come out
of the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless...…"
Extract from The Moose
by Elizabeth Bishop
Our Poetry
Several of our members write poems. Here is a selection.