Every day Garrison Keillor personally sends me a copy of his newsletter, and today was Robert Pinsky's birthday. He was quoted expressing his belief that a poem's most important component is the physical response, and the breath, that it elicits from a reader's body. So naturally he's interested in the poem as something that's recited out loud, and I think he's been working on anthologies with this in mind.



This idea appealed to me, as I'd just been reading Thomas Hardy's depressing novel Jude the Obscure for an essay about tragedy. I have a few theories. And I was looking at his poetry as well, though it figured into my tragedy concoction the merest bit. What struck me, though, is how I remembered some of the poems very vividly, though I had not looked at them in twenty years. The poem I most remember I pretty much nailed when it came to the recitation of it. I had all the words exactly right.



Now how can this be? I'll type the poem out: it's grounded in a heavy Da-dum-dum rhythm (dactyllic, for your scholars.) Is that enough to lock it in the brain? Maybe it also has something to do with certain sexual fantasies I had about the professor of the class, a woman. But I think not. Truly, it's the rhythm that locked the poem in (the way seal-a-meal locks in freshness.) Otherwise it's your typical subject matter of love and death. The only thing I couldn't remember was the title.



The Voice



Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.



Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!



Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?



Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.





I read in the intro to Jude that Hardy wasn't even considered all that good a poet, though it does startle me that not only this poem but many in his Collected are still quite familiar. How does memorability touch on merit?