In my uni days, the politics of literature held the greatest appeal for me. Rhyme, meter, rhythm – they just got in the way of cool postmodern readings of poems. Of course, I matured eventually and this poem was the one that brought me back to the roots of literature. Shelley gives us the perfect confluence of form and content. This poem is intensely political, but its meaning cannot be divorced from its control of form and language. The use of caesura in the final lines of the poem create the sense of emptiness that the empire of Ozymandias now occupies.

For me, the Romantics are the forebears of the modern rock star: without Blake there would be no Bono; without Byron, no Jim Morrison. This poem in particular signals how Literature can achieve a timeless quality, one that allows it to speak to a modern audience with as much clarity as it did to its own.

The origins of this poem go back to 1818 when Shelley published it in competition with Horace Smith, although the latter’s does not quite compare.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

“We Real Cool”

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Some of the greatest poems are incredibly simple at first glance. This poem, in my view, really needs to be heard in the voice of the poet. The poem, as read by Brooks, has a rhythm that echoes the music of the youth about whom she is writing.

The poem’s tone throughout seems light-hearted, in the manner of a disapproving adult mocking the absurdity of the sense of cool that exists among youth. The final line of the poem disrupts this upbeat tone. The message of the poem is simple yet profound. The choice that these boys are making, the street over school, will lead to an inevitable death. The poem thus becomes part of the discourse of African American masculinity.

The subtitle acquires its significance in the final line of the poem: “THE POOL PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL”. The imagery is positive in one sense – the number seven and the golden image of the shovel are ostensibly images of good fortune. Where golden or otherwise, the shovel points to the boys’ inevitable deaths as a result of their choice to seek immediate gratification. They “lurk late”, “sing sin”, drink and party. The choice to live a life of immediate gratification instead of a life of education and responsibility is for Brooks at the core of the social problems facing inner-city male youth in America.

Again, the apparent simplicity of the poem belies a sombre lament for the young men the poet sees in the street.

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Adding video of this poem will cheapen it, but here goes anyway:

As a teacher, I love the opening of this novel because it shows students that the second person point of view can be used in a sophisticated way without falling into the “Choose Your Own Adventure” of their childhood.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dis­pel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always, on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—”I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your, back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.

Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find. In the old days they used to read standing up, at, a lectern. People were accustomed to standing on their feet, without moving. They rested like that when they were tired of horseback riding. Nobody ever thought of reading on horseback; and yet now, the idea of sitting in the saddle, the book propped against the horse’s mane, or maybe tied to the horse’s ear with a special harness, seems attractive to you. With your feet in the stirrups, you should feel quite comfortable for read­ing; having your feet up is the first condition for enjoying a read.

Well what are you waiting for? Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion, on two cushions, on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first. If you want to, put your feet up; if not, put them back. Now don’t stand there with your shoes in one hand and the book in the other.

Adjust the light so you won’t strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you’re absorbed in reading there will be no budging you. Make sure the page isn’t in shadow, a clotting of black letters on a gray background, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that the light cast on it isn’t too strong, doesn’t glare on the cruel white of the paper, gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday. Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You’re the sort of person who, on prin­ciple, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what to­morrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclu­sion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappoint­ment isn’t serious.

So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a win­ter’s night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn’t published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages,

the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment,

the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

The novel as a whole is moving, but it is the opening pages that have stayed with me. Greene’s narrator, Bendrix, a jilted lover, is flawed to the point of being reprehensible, yet there is something about him that I identified with. Perhaps it was his flaws with which I connected. I often wonder if women read the novel in the same way, or do they connect with plight of Sarah, the wife stuck in an unhappy middle-class marriage?

The opening of this novel represents for me what storytelling is about. Well, here it is:

A STORY has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say ‘one chooses’ with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who —when he has been seriously noted at all — has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is con­venient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also ‘have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a sug­gestion, ‘Speak to him: he hasn’t seen you yet’

For why should I have spoken to him? If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry — I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me: as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to be­lieve. So this is a record of hate far more than of love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate.

It was strange to see Henry out on such a night: be liked his comfort and after all — or so I thought — he had Sarah. To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discom­fort. There was too much comfort even in the bed sitting-room I had at the wrong — the south — side of the Com­mon, in the relics of other people’s furniture. I thought I would go for a walk through the rain and have a drink at the local The little crowded hall was full of strangers’ hats and coats and I took somebody else’s umbrella by ac­cident — the man on the second floor had friends in. Then I closed the stained-glass door behind me and made my way carefully down the steps that had been blasted in 1944 and never repaired. I had reason to remember the oc­casion and how the stained glass, tough and ugly and Victorian, stood up to the shock as our grandfathers them­selves would have done.