I’m inspired to share some poems that I’ve found seem to speak to the present moment without being contemporary. These unexpected mind-melds are what I love most about literature. As a poet and a student of poetry, I feel that poetry is not widely enough read, and because it’s not widely read or taught, it feels intimidating. I encourage you to get what you can from these poems, much like you would from a painting in whose period or subject matter you are not an expert.
A tiny dip into the form if you’re interested: Tetrameter means 4 sets of a syllable pattern, which is assumed to be iambic (dah-DAH) because most sonnets in English are written in iambic pentameter, or 5 sets and the dah-DAH pattern. Sonnets have been around since the middle ages and were made popular again by the Romantics (Wordsworth and co.). If you are interested in learning more, leave a comment.
Here are the first two of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Three Sonnets in Tetrameter,” published in the lead-up to World War II:
I
See how these masses mill and swarm
And troop and muster and assail:
God!—We could keep this planet warm
By friction, if the sun should fail.
Mercury, Saturn, Venus, Mars:
If no prow cuts your arid seas,
Then in your weightless air no wars
Explode with such catastrophes
As rock our planet all but loose
From its frayed mooring to the sun.
Law will not sanction such abuse
Forever; when the mischief’s done,
Planets, rejoice, on which at night
Rains but the twelve-ton meteorite.
II
His stalk the dark delphinium
Unthorned into the tending hand
Releases…yet that hour will come…
And must, in such a spiny land.
The silky, powdery mignonette
Before these gathering dews are gone
May pierce me—does the rose regret
The day she did her armour on?
In that the foul supplants the fair,
The coarse defeats the twice-refined,
Is food for thought, but not despair:
All will be easier when the mind
To meet the brutal age has grown
An iron cortex of its own.
Cameron Scott 