Breakfast Served Any Time All Day: Essays on Poetry New and Selected

The Unsayable Said
Poems are pleasure first: bodily pleasure, a deliciousness of the senses. Mostly, poems end by saying something (even the unsayable) but they start as the body’s joy, like making love. Sometimes a poem provides nothing for paraphrase, but gives pleasure:

Baa, baa,
black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
Three bags full.

Maybe these words once referred to taxation, but we hear them now without being tempted to explanation or translation. Instead, we chew on them, taste them, and dance to them. This banquet or ballet starts in the crib, before arithmetic or thought. Everyone was once an infant who took mouth-pleasure in gurgle and shriek, accompanied by muscle-joy as small limbs clenched and unclenched. Poetry starts from the crib. A thousand years later, John Donne makes lovers into compasses, T. S. Eliot contemplates the still point of the turning world, and Elizabeth Bishop remembers sitting as a child in the dentist’s waiting room; but if these poets did not retain the mouth-pleasure of a baby’s autistic utterance—pleasure in vowels on the tongue, pleasure in changes of volume and pause: Baa, baa, black sheep — we would not receive their meditations and urgencies.
The body is poetry’s door; the sounds of words—thrust of legs and arms, riches in the mouth—let us into the house.
Styles of architecture: In his spiritual grammar, Walt Whitman often wrote long complex sentences: The first sentence of “Out of the Cradle” is two hundred and eight words, arranged into twenty-two lines so that its subject, verb, and object wait until the last three lines. But the same poet could make a poem both brief and simple: This is “A Farm Picture”—all of it:

Through the ample open door of the peaceful
country barn,
A sunlit pasture field with cattle and horses feeding,
And haze and vista, and the far horizon fading away.