What do you feel about poetry?


By Hong Seung-hee



The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.

Surprise?? Yes!!!
This is one of the tremendous poems written by one famous poet named 'Langston Hughes' What do you feel about this short and simple poem?

I am pretty sure about the fact that most of the people- unfortunately, I am not excepted from them-think poetry is something so profound and mysterious in the respect of interpreting the true meanings. Some of them even regard understanding poetry as decoding eccentric certain password.

But I can say with my confidence that you don't have to shrink whenever you encounter reading poetry. That's because, difficulty means unfamiliarity of that experience in which the writer tried to induce readers.

Poetry is about giving off their feelings and emotions towards anything. Poetry is the most creative way of expressing the writer's thoughts and one's mind.

Sometimes it should go through the aesthetic selection of words to express something, It is true that the poetry comes to every readers as one of those concealed puzzle in which the readers should find special meaning or discover the same sentiment as the author intended to be understood through the writing.

However, as I emphasized several times earlier, poetry is the easiest thing to understand in the way that there is no right answers for it. I personally think that poetry would be felt not that hard especially for those who have ever tasted the same spice added to our lives, or sipped a drop of purple grape-wine, like the same way that the author has done. And that's why poems also have no fixed answer, for the readers can have such a variety of feelings and conception toward the poem with each individual standards of viewing the situation.

For me, this simple and concise poem, even if most of others might think it's too short to perceive some feelings and to find profound meaning lurked there, is very much impressive because the writer comprehended exactly the same feelings that I had in my experiences with just couple of words. I am quite certain that most of the poeple who have not experienced yet, the impulse of jumping into the beautiful-looked river, wouldn't feel any provocative feelings and the poem just would just come to nothing but as a simple composition of several easy words.

Moreover, as you can see above, just one sentence of composition can be your excellent poem if it contains a little bit of your true feelings in relation to experience.

Additionally, if the poetry writer sublimes those true and so realistic feeling and emotions in more a imaginary, and compressed way, I assume that it would just like the ice on the cake.

To see the wide scope of types of poems, we don't have to struggle so much to compress the words. Many people are usually fail to compress the words they use and tend to think reading their poems ' Oh, no!! it's not a poem.. it shouldn't be this long..'

However, there are not only words limited poems but also poems like storytelling. As I observe, for instance, the writer of the poem above, Langston Hughes usaully writes so concise and simply short poems with strong feelings of words. Meanwhile, Emily Dickinson or Elizabeth Bishop's poems tend to be pretty long..In addition to that, especially, our hero of literature, William Shakespeare is so much known as to write poems that include surprisingly various amount of connotations and other kinds of method to decorate and sublime, as I said in advance, the meanings : simile, metaphor, personification apostrophe and so on. I think here is the reason why we conceive his poems like Sonnet, as so difficult perhaps.

When my love swears that she is made of truth

Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue;
On both sides thus is simple truth supprest.
But wherefore says she not I that I am old?

Nevertheless what I wanted to say is that it is our own individual characters that are important to be absorbed in each of our poems. Whoever writes difficult and longer ones does not matter in that we have our own way of expressing under the fundamental assumption that we have our own senses which make the various imagery: auditory imagery, olfactory imagery, gustatory imagery, tactile imagery etc.

Now then, I am wondering if you still have a reluctance of writing and reading a poem?

Where the blushed leaves stay

Where the azure sky washes away the grieving clouds,
The loneliness hidden at the bottom of my heart slips out
With cherished, amiable memories of Love along

Where the crops in their golden clothes
Seem as if they were dipped into melted golden crayon
Lie in the waves of field,

A boy wearing pure dirt on his face,
Below his nose,
Beneath his small fingernails,

Comes waving through my closed eyes
And then into my heart.

Where the cosmoses sway their thin bodies onto the
Breeze of autumn,
The fall makes all creatures in the whole world fully mature.

All creatures grow with the splendid fall as they infiltrate under our skins
A red apple which is blushed with a sudden visit of breeze,
An orange which is dyed yellow by prevailing Gingko leaves,
They are all prolific.

As we meet under the spotless, clear sky
And the other day, say good-bye under reddish, gloomy sky
Just about to blaze,

Those flowers and even the little plants
Trembling slightly in the cold ground
Start falling under the charm of autumn.

Everything
So quitely
Before you even noticed.

This is my poem.
Why don't you get ready to create your own poem and enjoy them as well?
Poetry is out there to promote our dried emotions and drift affluent feelings to the surface of our mind like the oasis in the desert. Voila~~ So why don't you sip oasis to break your thirst?


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