David whyte feast on your life

I will knock at the widowed door of one of these villages where she will admit me like a broad meadow, like a blue space between mountains, and holding her arms at the broken elbows brush the dank hair from a forehead as warm as bread or as a homecoming.

The first stanza is deceptive. It reads like a typical modern narrative poem without a lot of tropes or lyrical movement but enough to keep it from being uninteresting — a risk of stripped-down anecdotal or narrative poems. And his words convey such a palpable sense of alienation. He hits a different stride in the second stanza.

Wonderful unexpected start. Its hollows sing the mines of Appalachia. What a lyrical expression of lost innocence. This takes my breath away. Now the poem switches, turns. A new feeling comes into the poem, perhaps indicated by the suggestive Sometimes I feel sometimes..!

His use of lyre conjures elegiac songs and the description of nightingales whose sorrow piles u the looming thunderhead would again suggest a sorrow-filled elegiac theme. But no. He gives us lovely spring images. Hills sun-freckled where did the coal mines go? Clear Images! And then he compares it so unexpectedly to his daughters — their chaste innocence perhaps?!

Where did that come from? Those images, like the looks of his daughters which he calls fatal and then amends to sensual, lead to his startling declaration — his utter turn around — I am falling in love with America. A poem that started with such feelings of alienation — a blade of cold air keeps prying , a bus full of strange strangers and a fallen landscape now becomes a love story. He sees the other side.

A marriage of opposites. And he enters the landscape boldly like lover. Such pleasure I receive from the first three lines of the last stanza:. And I notice the double-play on the spring.

This could be a fresh water spring as well as reference back to Spring the season. No matter what, he has transformed something outside of him and turned it into a life giving language inside him. He is no longer an alien in a strange land. He is suddenly, unexpectedly coming home. The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world.

There is no going back once this frontier has been reached; a new territory is visible and what has been said cannot be unsaid. Poetry is a break for freedom. In a sense, all poems are good; all poems are an emblem of courage and the attempt to say the unsayable; but only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time; to create a door through which others can walk into what previously seemed unobtainable realms, in the passage of a few short lines.

David Whyte makes the reading of poetry a matter of life and death. His books have moved me and changed me - Pat Conroy. We love the movement in a seeming stillness, the breath in the body of the loved one sleeping, the highest leaves in the silent wood, a great migration in the sky above: the waters of the earth, the blood in the body, the first, soft, stir in the silence beneath a strident voice, the internal hands of our mind, always searching for touch, thoughts seeking other thoughts, seeking other minds, the great arrival of form through all our hidden themes.

Our life like a breath, then, a give and a take, a bridge, a central movement, between singing a separate self and learning to be selfless. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,. Feast on your life. Name required. Email will not be published required. All rights reserved. World Literature at its finest. Sign at Buffalo bookstore in Ithaca.