The 19th Century British essayist and critic Walter Pater once wrote that – quote – "all art aspires to the condition of music." Indeed, music enters our unconscious and expresses its distinctive beauty and meaning without our having to think about it.
Poetry is also an essential form, with its spare elegance, distinct rhythms, and open-endedness. Fine poetry, like the best painting, film, dance, theater, and music, invites us to discover personal meanings.
Maybe that’s why I was stuck, trying to find prose to articulate my thoughts and feelings in the wake of the resonant moment of our recent presidential election. Then a friend sent me a poem that spoke to me very directly. It allowed me to connect to the new and collective sense of possibility, undiminished by what are bound to be difficult days ahead. But poetry urges us to do this, to take flight from our mundane realities and soar on the wings of the poet’s spontaneous imagination.
So, at a time when I was trying to make literal my thoughts and feelings, a friend’s kind gift of a poem allowed me to find clarity and significance. I don’t have much more to say, except to share the poem by a Norwegian writer who died in 1994 and never would have imagined that his words would find meaning in this particular circumstance. That’s the wonder of a poem, which can remain fresh and shed unanticipated light, years after its creation.
The poem is: "It Is That Dream" by Olav Hauge – translated by Robert Bly and included in The Dreams We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav Hauge. Used with permission from Copper Canyon Press.
It Is That Dream
It’s that dream we carry with us
That something wonderful will happen,
That it has to happen,
That time will open,
That the heart will open,
That the mountains will open,
That wells will leap up,
That the dream will open,
That one morning we’ll slip in
To a harbor that we’ve never known