photo courtesy of Miss Porter's School, Farmington, CT

IN THE PALE, SINKING LIGHT of a late-winter afternoon, I read Jane Kenyon’s February: Thinking of Flowers, and wondered if the biting wind, the endless, colorless sky and unforgiving frozen ground would ever allow the small, tender shoots of early spring another season, another chance. As spring arrives, tentatively and without great fanfare, slipping softly into being and rousing us from dreamless sleep, we see the promise of the eternal return, know the fecund scent of possibility and the slow waking to our own renewal. Isn’t this the mirror of the natural world in our own human experience: the length of dim light that provides a stark contrast in reflection to our own yearnings and desires? “A single green sprouting thing/would restore me…” writes Kenyon.

Across the field, small, tight buds of forsythia form on supple branches spilling onto the ground in ways yet to be revealed. Tiny white snowdrops emerge from the darkness of hard soil: a whisper; a raised eyebrow, an indication, a small but persistent voice—here! look! watch!— against the loosening hold of winter. So today when the sun extended itself into the invitation of evening and the evening takes on its own Eliot-like poetic resonance, I think of what I wrote to my friend after a particularly challenging stretch of days:  “I believe poetry can save the world.” I do. Poetry can save the world.

We are both healed and healing when we read poetry. It is in the elemental structure of language where we try to find our place, where word gives way to a reaching out into the larger world. As much as that process is what defines as humans, it is perhaps what we struggle with most resolutely to make ourselves fully human. The inexpressible nature of human experience that challenges us to come into being transcends language, yet the limited and limitless experience of being in a poem is one that expands and often confronts our understanding of what it means to be human. A poem demands an imaginative capacity to see the world differently, to experience “the world imagined” and envision—even for brief moments—another way to see ourselves and navigate a place on the face of the deep.

Poetry steers us into the world beyond object and category; it guides our eyes, our ears, and imagination toward the space around the object, the experience, and into the experience itself. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about poetry—about any art—is the empty space it creates for discovery, history, and vision.  Like painting or architecture, poetry asks us to explore the space around the poem, and in this construct, we are required to write ourselves, imagined, into the world as it might be. It is in our pursuit of the unknown that we discover what we know, or at least what we think we know. And poetry does that for us: it allows us to think about what we know, and it dares us to consider what we think we know in new or unencumbered ways.

I believe poetry can save the world because it has anchored us to our shared human experience since time began. Within the function and elasticity of time and history, poetry comes to meet us as an honored guest, the remote villager at the gate, an occasional tourist, an old friend holding a place at the hearth. Poetry is that thing to which we return to feed our dire human needs beyond food and water, aside from warmth and shelter; it is poetry that houses and harbors our human experience. Poetry dares us to do more, to be more. In poetry, we find possibility.

—Kate Doemland

Led by Chair Kate Doemland, the Miss Porter’s School English Department issues a Call for Papers to independent school teachers of high school English. Topics of interest include Modern Poetry, American Literature, British Literature, and Multicultural Literature. Papers will be shared at an academic conference held at Miss Porter’s School on May 13, 2010. For more information, including conference schedule, please visit www.porters.org/academics .