These pages are a river <br />down which a young girl watches <br />her lover disappear, <br /> <br />and someone meditates upon <br />crude rhythms of a city street <br />and finds a suffering God. <br /> <br />The seasons change <br />and change again, <br />a pear tree reaches high, <br />a cock crows, and the chickens sit <br />beside a red wheelbarrow. <br /> <br />All the seasons of the soul <br />are ripened and transmuted here, <br />and I, the reader, disappear, <br />as well, into the flow. <br />___ <br />*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.<br /><br />Max Reif<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/brooks-and-warren-s-understanding-poetry/
