Regard the Sun

Was it fair to call the three words I recited at yesterday’s Armistice commemoration – the names of my three dead uncles – a poem?

I constantly compose micro-poems, reduced poems, of four lines or three or two or one.  That was the shortest so far.

The next day, the weather is still bipolar: cumulus clouds traveling northeastward with blue sky between them so that, seen southwestward, they have silver linings.  I happened to be in Axminster waiting for a bus; I backed into a shop doorway as a shower came over, stepped back out as the sun did, and stood looking up across the street at the Axminster tree: a huge hornbeam, presiding over the market square, churchyard, and Minster. Its branches, now mostly leafless, were silhouetted against one of these clouds.  When the sun showed through, I noticed afresh how small it appears when you can actually (briefly) look at it.  Yet the towering cloud is maybe a mile wide, the dot-like sun nearly a million.  While standing, I worked the thought into these words:

Regard the sun through cloud that’s not too dense.
How can a star be small, a cloud immense?
We live in present space and present tense.

Some groups of words are definitely verse, some are definitely non-verse, that is, prose, but some, whether verse or prose, can be considered poetry or non-poetry depending on how you feel about them.

My definition of poetry is, language that is intense, or, more carefully:  language whose parts have more than one intense motive for existence, at least one of the motives being semantic and at least one formal.

My three-line group about the sun is verse because it has scansion.  It also has rhyme, but that formal feature is not defining for verse; there is blank verse, and there is rhyming prose, such as the Arabic genre called saj`.

It is poetry in that it is intense: its intensity consists of having quite a lot of meaning packed into it, by dint of finding fewer and more multiple-functioning words (regard combining the French sense of “look at” and the English sense of “consider”); work had to be done to manipulate the words, work has to be done to excavate the meaning.  That’s one kind of intensity, a cerebral kind, which requires “composing,” rethinking of words and jostling them into place, though composing doesn’t have to be alongside the act of writing – I “composed” while standing, in the minutes allowed me before the bus arrived.  Intensity of other kinds can be without cerebration, it can be simple – “My love is like a red, red rose,” “The moving moon went up the sky,” “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine”; it can be more like a cry than a syllogism, poured out rather than composed.

My three-name group of words was not verse (or maybe it was, barely, since the names Vernon, Eric, Noel all happen to be trochees).  It was poetry for you if you happened to find it intense.  Some passages can be non-poetry when you encounter them one time, poetry another, or vice versa – rather as some can be funny one time, and, another, not.