Much has been made of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s famous words following the first successful explosion of the atomic bomb, which happened 65 years ago: he supposedly quoted the Bhagavad Gita, “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one,” and “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” But actually, after it exploded, he commented, “It worked.” For some reason these reactions made me think about the ways one can react to a poem, particularly the thought that sometimes the proper inquiry is not, “is it good?” but, “does it work?” Surely this is easier with some poems than others, but some poems produce the reaction, “It worked.” Others require the reach to metaphor, as in the Bhagavad Gita quotation. And we can make the explanation for WHY a poem works as verbose and high-falutin’ as we want, of course.
Here’s a poem by a guy who re-wrote and revised as much as anybody, but still, once in a while, produced poems that speak in an uncluttered voice, seemingly springing from a moment’s thought, and that work.
HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
-William Butler Yeats
