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I could never choose a favorite poem. Picking a favorite poem would be as difficult as picking a favorite emotion or feeling, favorite color or sound or a favorite insight into life. Too rich a realm. I offer up instead a passage from American drama, Tom Wingfield's closing remarks as the curtain falls on Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie. For sheer poetic prose quality and depth of sensitivity I know none better.
The setting: Tom exists throughout the play as a mid-twenties member of a dysfunctional family of three. His meager pay from a job in a shoe warehouse supports his erratic sometimes verbally abusive mother Amanda and younger sister Laura. Laura suffers from debilitating shyness and has withdrawn from the adult world entertaining herself mainly with a collection of glass animals (the menagerie). At the end, Tom leaves home, abandoning mother and sister, hopelessly left behind in their dingy depression-era St. Louis apartment. In anger Amanda pushes him out demanding "Go to the moon you selfish dreamer".
Tom's final words: "I didn't go to the moon, I went much further - for time is the longest distance between two places - Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe-box. I left Saint Louis. I descended the steps of this fire-escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father's footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space - l traveled around a great deal. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored - but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass - Perhaps 1 am walking along a street at night, in some strange city, before I have found companions. I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes ... Oh, Laura Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but l am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar. I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger - anything that can blow your candles out! - for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura - and so good-bye ...."
It was a performance of this play at the Booth Theater on Broadway in 2013 that first drew me to NYC. I have subsequently enjoyed numerous other visits and dozens of other performances. Thank you Mr. Williams.
I've dug up a poem by Tennessee Williams "Lament for the Moths" which plays upon some of the same emotions expressed at the end of The Glass Menagerie. The play was in part autobiographical. Williams had a sister who succumbed to the same type of mental illness that afflicts Laura in the play.
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The setting: Tom exists throughout the play as a mid-twenties member of a dysfunctional family of three. His meager pay from a job in a shoe warehouse supports his erratic sometimes verbally abusive mother Amanda and younger sister Laura. Laura suffers from debilitating shyness and has withdrawn from the adult world entertaining herself mainly with a collection of glass animals (the menagerie). At the end, Tom leaves home, abandoning mother and sister, hopelessly left behind in their dingy depression-era St. Louis apartment. In anger Amanda pushes him out demanding "Go to the moon you selfish dreamer".
Tom's final words: "I didn't go to the moon, I went much further - for time is the longest distance between two places - Not long after that I was fired for writing a poem on the lid of a shoe-box. I left Saint Louis. I descended the steps of this fire-escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father's footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space - l traveled around a great deal. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored - but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass - Perhaps 1 am walking along a street at night, in some strange city, before I have found companions. I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes ... Oh, Laura Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but l am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar. I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger - anything that can blow your candles out! - for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura - and so good-bye ...."
It was a performance of this play at the Booth Theater on Broadway in 2013 that first drew me to NYC. I have subsequently enjoyed numerous other visits and dozens of other performances. Thank you Mr. Williams.
I agree. And since I consider song lyrics to be poetry, I'd add that to soliloquies and traditional poetry.
Moving words, are moving in any context. Thanks for your contribution.
I've dug up a poem by Tennessee Williams "Lament for the Moths" which plays upon some of the same emotions expressed at the end of The Glass Menagerie. The play was in part autobiographical. Williams had a sister who succumbed to the same type of mental illness that afflicts Laura in the play.
https://byronsmuse.wordpress.com/2015/06/19/lament-for-the-moths-tennessee-williams/