Walking Down the Hallway

Thursday was Poem in Your Pocket Day.

So, we went around reading poems to random people in our school, you know, just to make their day a little different than the previous one or the next one.

Here are the responses I got after I read my poem to different people:

"Wow!"

"Very deep, very meaningful."

"Good."

"OK..?"

My poem was Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

I met a traveler 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.

Yes, I read this beautiful poem and the answer I got was "OK..?". I guess people didn't really understand it because they could not read it over and over again, underline the rhyme scheme, dig out the connotations of the words, identifying literary tools, alliterations, symbols, like we usually do when we have a poem at hand. We plunge so deep into the stanzas, deep into the lines, deep into the words and deep into the letters, that we forget what the poet and the poem is really trying to say. We say that the capital M in the word "ye Mighty" reflects the poet's beliefs and puts an emphasis on the word, while, simply, it shows how the great Egyptian king, Ozymandias, lived his life trying to compete with a so-called divine being. It shows how desperate he is for power, it shows his ambitions - and how now "nothing beside remains"...

But that's what happens in real life. Unless we have a task we have accomplish using the piece of art, we simply glance at it, pass our eyes over it, hear it for a few seconds and return to our business. When I play the piano at my house, my family usually listens to me and compliments or criticizes my playing, but yesterday, I probably played a Chopin Nocturne the best I've ever had for the past 4 years I've been playing it, but when I finished the piece, with the two C-Sharps, 5 octaves apart, softly humming and slowly disappearing into the silence, no one said anything. They were busy playing games on their computers or cleaning up the kitchen.

We usually don't have to analyze a piece of music we hear in everyday life and determine its musical, structural and contextual features.

We usually don't need to write an essay on "how the poet conveys his thoughts and feelings..." when we come across a piece of literature; a sonnet, a Haiku, a slice of prose...

We usually don't need to publish a two-page review on an artwork we pass by when we walk around the hallways of our school.

So, we don't care about them.

But we should.

We should listen to that piece of music like it is the last thing we are going to hear, we should read that piece of literature like it is the first thing we ever read, we should "see" that paintings, not just look, but actually "see", like that is the last thing we will ever see. We should appreciate life's beauties, one of which is called art, at whenever possible, not when it is Poem in Your Pocket Day, not when you have to write a 350 word essay, not when you have to post a blog post by Friday night about it, not matter what. Because, life is walking down a hallway with paintings on the walls, music playing in the background and people talking to you, and if you don't stop and "hear", don't listen, and "look", don't see, you might as well be walking in a desert, with no food or water.