I don't know, Tim. Sitting by the pond with your dad waiting for sunset ducks as dad recites glorious poetry seems like a pretty idyllic childhood scene worthy of Thomas or Wordsworth, but I catch your general point. Regardless of your personal experience, though, surely you can see that many children have access to a sort of pure joy and sense of wonder that adults so often lack.
I'm not sure where the line between poems of quiet despair, on the one hand, and noisier despair, on the other hand, is drawn. More than 90% of poems have some sort of unhappiness at their core, even if some of them manage to keep a stiff upper lip and find the silver lining. Almost no poems are thoroughly happy.
Jeff's point about compassion being at the heart of despairing poems is quite solid, though. The very act of writing a poem and putting it out there is somehow at odds with the idea that everything is meaningless, no genuine human connections are possible, we're all just passing shadows, etc.
|