I have often joked with people that in a zombie apocalypse or in some post-asteroid-impact apocalyptic world where we’re back to using sticks and stones and living a hunter-gatherer existence, English majors are probably the first to be booted out of the group—or worse (think Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket)! Farmers can grow food, hunters can catch game, artisans and metalsmiths can make clothes and cookware, carpenters can build shelter, mechanics can fix things, engineers can design and rig up machines, and doctors and nurses can heal. But does knowing Shakespeare or writing poetry have any practical purpose?
Maybe that’s a rhetorical question, and perhaps it can be either yes or no. But as someone who studied and appreciates literature, I’m going to say YES! The literary arts play an important role in communities and in human society as a whole. Since the first cave drawings, storytellers and bards have captured our imagination; they have brought people together and reminded us what it means to be human. Throughout history they have held prestigious positions in societies that understand their value and the value of the written and spoken word.
While the storyteller and bard presumably might not have many, if any, life-saving skills, their stories and woven words entertain, educate, and most importantly uphold morale, especially in times of crisis. In Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, stories keep a group of ten young Florentines amused and sane during the Black Death in 14th-century Italy. Taking refuge in a countryside villa, the seven women and three men each tell a tale so that at the end of nearly a fortnight 100 stories are told. The book’s premise and its collection of short stories convey the power of storytelling and that stories, whether in prose or verse, can bring us comfort and joy in times of hardship and distress.
Poetry, like stories and other literary works, enriches our lives with its creative use of language to express thoughts and feelings. In moments of joy or sorrow, love or heartbreak, peace or rage, poetry allows us to put words to feelings we cannot otherwise describe. It gives us new ways of seeing things by making the ordinary and the mundane splendid and novel. Poetry also offers us different ways to see and understand the world we live in, and in a Mad Max scenario where the law of the jungle rules, it reminds us of our humanity.
During National Poetry Month, we encourage you to read, write, or share a poem. It’s a way to celebrate poets and the value they have in society and cultural preservation. We asked library staff to share a poem they like, and here are their picks!
Tiffany
St. Crispin’s Day Speech (from Henry V, Act IV, Scene iii) by William Shakespeare
I love this piece because it’s all about connection and shared experience. The line “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers” really sticks with me. It’s about people coming together, standing side by side, and feeling like they belong to something bigger than themselves. It’s also one of those pieces I can quote anytime and it still hits. I also like how it builds. It starts reflective and then grows into something powerful. You can really feel the shift when it’s read out loud, and it makes the message hit even more.
AnnMarie
A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight by Herman Melville
When Melville wrote this poem, America was undergoing a cataclysmic shift. The Civil War had taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and then in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. In addition, the 1860s saw the world undergoing great shifts in politics, industry, the sciences, and philosophy, as the effects of the Industrial Revolution continued to be felt, and new ideas like the Theory of Evolution called previous worldviews and traditions into question. Into that chaos steps Melville with his pen, to write with journalistic precision about the Battle of Hampton Roads in the Civil War, and the first clash of two ironclad warships, a battle that ended in a kind of stalemate but nonetheless changed the course of naval warfare. Using a meter “more ponderous than nimble,” Melville describes the brutal, cold inorganic clangor of the new war machinery, the “blacksmith’s fray,” comparing it to the way “warriors” used to fight for glory in the classic epics of Homer and Virgil. Melville even evokes Virgil and Homer’s dactylic hexameter now and then, such as in the lines: “The anvil-din / Resounds this message from the Fates.” As though standing on the edge of a precipice, seeing the development of America’s military-industrial complex in the future, and looking back at the way wars used to be fought in the past, Melville seems elegiac as he writes of the way Americans have lost a sense of glory and honor: “War’s made / Less grand than Peace, / And a singe runs through lace and feather.”
There’s been a lot of talk about “warriors” in the national discourse today, and the United States is at war with Iran. Bombs have been dropped on schools. I wonder what Melville would think of all that. What would he think of how wars are fought today, and will be in the near future, driven by bombs and drones? What would he think of wars being fought by AI, of software that can turn a target’s cell phone into a bomb? Are these methods of war still courageous? Herman Melville would not think so.
Karla
Tesoro by Yesika Salgado
I chose this poem because it is about grief, death, and identity (Salvadoran American), it’s also about growing up, community, experience, and culture. It’s light and heavy, humorous, honest, and powerful, simple and bilingual. There are details that seem very specific and close to her, but they are very relatable to me, and I imagine lots of Salvadorans.
Her poetry books are available on Libby and Hoopla.
Joy
To a Mouse by Robert Burns
In celebration of Scottish American Heritage Month, I chose Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse” because it is one of his best‑known poems and is written in Scots, giving it a strong sense of Scottish identity and tradition. Burns turns the simple moment of disturbing a mouse’s nest into a thoughtful reflection on fear, survival, and the uncertainty of the future.
Adry
Life Itself Is Grace by Frederick Buechner
I don’t know that it counts as a poem—probably just more of a quote but frequently referred to as “Life Itself Is Grace”:
Listen to your life.
See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.
In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness:
touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it
because in the last analysis all moments are key moments,
and life itself is grace.
Otherwise for ACTUAL poems—the 2016 viral sensation “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith (not THAT Maggie Smith!) and “Go to the Limits of Your Longing” by Rainer Maria Rilke.
I don’t generally consider myself to be a big poetry fan, but I do like some that I run across, the ones I’ve suggested here being some that more quickly come to mind. I also like quite a few Mary Oliver poems but no specific one comes to mind and her collections sometimes read more like essays which I do quite enjoy. Another poetry collection I enjoy and have shared with others is Joan Chittister’s Between the Dark and the Daylight.
There’s a running theme here of most of the poetry and essays I enjoy being from Christian authors but I’m not a religious person, I’m definitely not a “spiritual” person—I just find that a lot of the writings from these folks do a good job at conveying a sense of longing, uncertainty, and the general ups and downs of the human condition/existence.
Rachel
In the Privacy of the Home by Mark Strand
You want to get a good look at yourself. You stand before a mirror, you take off your jacket, unbutton your shirt, open your belt, unzip your fly. The outer clothing falls from you. You take off your shoes and socks, baring your feet. You remove your underwear. At a loss, you examine the mirror. There you are, you are not there.
I think this is a really great example of how prose can be poetic. At first glance, this just looks like a block of text. Not the typical presentation of a poem. But when you read it, you can feel its subtle rhythm. Also, Strand pretty much distills the human condition here.
Kevin
With That Moon Language by Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky)
Thanks for the opportunity to share this cool poem from the 14th century!
Shauna
The Summer Day by Mary Oliver
For someone who does not consider myself “into” poetry, I have trouble sorting out my favorite poem, because there are many that I love and that speak (or sing, as I think poetry does more than speak) to my soul. I have some favorite poets, too, principally among them Philip Larkin (especially “Is It For Now Or For Always” and, in an opposite way, “This Be The Verse“) and Billy Collins (especially “Marginalia” and “The Lanyard“), but the poet and poem nestled close in my heart is the late Mary Oliver, and her poem “The Summer Day.” You may be quite familiar with the final two lines of this poem, because they are the bit that both elate me and take my breath away whenever I read it. Mary Oliver’s poetry is almost always about the natural world, and has some kind of universal spiritual feeling that appeals to me (somewhere between an atheist and an agnostic).
Suzanne
The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service
This poem was required reading in Canada…and in some cases needed to be memorized! It’s also best when read out loud.
Robert W. Service (1874–1958) was an immensely popular British-Canadian poet known as the “Bard of the Yukon,” famous for ballads like “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” both of which tell dramatic, often dark, stories of prospectors, gamblers, and saloon life. While not legally “required reading,” his vivid poems about the Klondike Gold Rush are staples of Canadian literature and widely read, often regarded as culturally significant.
Service’s poems focus on the harsh wilderness of the Canadian North, Yukon gold rush miners, adventure, and the everyday lives of common people. His work is characterized by rhythmic, narrative ballads, with famous themes covering grit, danger, and the supernatural allure of the Arctic.
Claire
Prayer Before Birth by Louis MacNeice
Many moons ago we did this poem at school in England. It was in no way controversial, and I loved it (still do). It is in the BBC 100 Collection, which was created by The Poetry Archive to mark the BBC’s centenary in 2022.
Young
Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare
April is also a month when we celebrate Shakespeare Day, and what’s National Poetry Month without mentioning the Bard. This is Shakespeare’s most celebrated sonnet, and it happens to be my favorite. I admit, I’m a sucker for mushy poetry. The beauty of this poem lies in its comparison of the beloved’s beauty to a summer day, a classic Petrarchan conceit that is as simple as it is elegant. Shakespeare has this natural gift as a poet for expanding our imaginative reach and bringing to our mind the image of the ideal through the seemingly trivial and mundane comparison of two dissimilar things. And in this sonnet we can see his poetic genius at work in which the beloved’s beauty is playfully compared to summer in the beginning, then toward the end the beloved becomes summer personified until at the end her beauty transcends the comparison to summer and she becomes the ideal beauty that will be made eternal in the poet’s verse. All this is accomplished in fourteen lines and without much elaboration, but the imaginative force of Shakespeare’s language pushes the limits of our thinking to see beyond the physical and temporal image of the sun and see the ideal and eternal beauty of the beloved. (Just a note, I use the feminine pronoun even though it is believed that the first 126 sonnets were addressed to a young man.)
On the topic of sentimental love poems, J’ai fait une promesse is quite the opposite of Sonnet 18. It’s a rather sad love song by the English band Anathema. Songs are very much poems, but just sung to music. I’ve always liked this song for how profoundly sad it is. It’s in French but here’s the English translation:
The way that the willow bows over the stream
like a mourner crying for their loved one
reminds me of last fall
when on one knee, I pledged myself to you.