A Bit of an Introduction to Highlight Poetry
For a little while now I've been itching to start a meme but everytime I set about thinking up a theme or a name for it, I'd inevitably end up with an idea that somebody else had already come up with. Eventually I decided that I wanted to focus on something that is important to me and not recognized nearly enough; poetry. And bingo! Highlight Poetry crossed my mind as a good self-explanatory name for a meme that focused on highlighting (acknowledging) poetry. So when I searched "Highligh Poetry" in both the regular google search engine and google's blog search engine and could not find any results for a meme name "Highlight Poetry" I knew I had found the name for my meme!
The First Poem of Highlight Poetry
Embarking at Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1920
"We leave to-night...
Silent, we filled the still,
deserted street,
A column of dim gray,
And ghosts rose startled at the
muffled beat
Along the moonless way;
The shadowy shipyards echoed to
the feet
That turned from night and
day.
And so we linger on the
windless decks,
See on the spectre shore
Shades of a thousand days, poor
gray-ribbed wrecks...
Oh, shall we then deplore
Those futile years!
See how the sea is
white!
The clouds have broken and the
heavens burn
To hollow highways, paved
with gravelled light
The churning of the waves about
the stern
Rises to one voluminous
nocturne,
...We leave
to-night."
A Brief Commentary Providing a Bit of Context
I discovered this poem a couple of days ago while reading F. Scott Fitgerald's This Side of Paradise. For those of you who are not familiar with Fitzgerald's works, This Side of Paradise is a ficitonal novel about a rather egotistical young man named Amory. Though the novel itself is not a book of poetry, through the character Amory, Fitzgerald writes several poems of which Embarking at Night was one . At the point in the novel when this poem is included, Amory is heading off to fight in the first world war and is presumably writing the poem about his emotions while he waits to embark in the night on the journey of a soldier. I absolutley love this poem, I think it is beautifully written, providing haunting imagery of a soldier's restless wait before he heads off to war. Through this poem Fitzgerald allows the reader to feel as if they themselves are mourning the futile years ahead and the "poor gray-ribbed wrecks" that will fall during the war. I felt as if I was truly transported to another time, while reading this poem, like I could hear the waves breaking upon far off shores and the feel the soldier's fear as he prepared to embark.
What are your thoughts? What struck you most about Emarking at Night?
To learn more about how you can get involved in Highlight Poetry click here.
