Brooks And Warren’s Understanding Poetry*

These pages are a river
down which a young girl watches
her lover disappear,

and someone meditates upon
crude rhythms of a city street
and finds a suffering God.

The seasons change
and change again,
a pear tree reaches high,
a cock crows, and the chickens sit
beside a red wheelbarrow.

All the seasons of the soul
are ripened and transmuted here,
and I, the reader, disappear,
as well, into the flow.
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*UNDERSTANDING POETRY, by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, has been a premier poetry textbook in high schools and colleges, in revised editions, for 6 decades. The book is basically a luxuriously rich anthology, with commentary on poems organized into chapters to illustrate the various facets of poetics.