The Poets We Return To is a Wednesday series on Ethical ELA, featuring writers reflecting on the poets whose words they return to and the ways those poems continue to work on their lives, teaching, and writing.

We continue today with Ann Burg’s essay.

My Mother Was a Poet

by Ann Burg

My mother was a poet, and though she had four children, the only one she wrote a poem for was me and I always took The Tenth of December as a mother’s writerly benediction since I’ve never known a time when I did not loved words.  Throughout my life, my mother and I often talked about poems I had written or discovered, and sometimes my mother would recite poems she had written or remembered.

I still recall my mother reciting Little Boy Blue by Eugene Field, a poem she had discovered when a nephew of hers died young. She also recited The Spires of Oxford, by Winifred M. Letts. My heart is with the Oxford men who went abroad to die, Letts wrote in a poem which rooted in me an awareness and appreciation of the tremendous sacrifice made by young soldiers. Poetry sculpted my soul.

When I was in grammar school, each year we received a slim volume of poetry eponymously entitled Seton Poetry, after St. Elizabeth Anne Seton, the founder of the Sisters of Charity who taught at my school. (We also received postcard art which we’d paste in personal plastic- ringed binders. But that’s the subject of another essay— or perhaps, one day a poem). 

In school we read and discussed each Seton poem one at a time but I always brought my poetry book home to read all at once. It’s not always easy to distinguish between poems I first read in a Seton volume and ones which I discovered for myself, but I do recall first reading the Glove and the Lion by Leigh Hunt in either the green or orange poetry book that I had received in grade school. Since then, I’ve often uttered the phrase, Not love, quoth he, but vanity sets love a task like that.  You have to read and love a poem a lot to have it’s wisdom follow you like Jiminy Cricket

I also remember discovering Countee Cullen in one of my Seton volumes and though I’m not sure which poem I read there and which I discovered on a subsequent search of his poetry, I am sure it was Countee Cullen’s words who long ago a chiseled in my heart a fierce abhorrence of bigotry. When I was eight and very small begins one of his poems. Cullens goes on to  paint a scene and reveal an ugly word I had never heard before from a world with which I was unacquainted. 

Robert Louis Stevenson gave me a firm belief in the beauty of a child’s imagination. I remember defending Stevenson in a college lit class that poked fun of Stevenson’s Garden of Verses. My own pop-up version often comforted me while I myself was sick and lay a-bed and had two pillows at my head.

Not at all bothered that the poetry we were studying in lit class had to be accompanied by zillions of footnotes, my fellow student labeled Robinson’s poetry simplistic and trite.  I was a quiet student, but I wasn’t going to toss away a childhood spent in The Land of Counterpane. There was a lesson in my defense of Stevenson, a realization that what I call poetry— from the simple to the most profound, stirs my heart and helps shape my thoughts. Throughout my  life poetry has given me the tools to understand the world and my place in it.

One of my most beloved poetry books had a blue, white and gold cover that eventually disintegrated, leaving me with a broken-spine volume of The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson, who happened to share my birthday. The pages are marked with miniature pencil-checks beside a great number of poems that touched my heart and often helped me wrap a wounded soul. 

While a A Child’s Garden of Verses was lovingly shelved, the Complete Works of Emily Dickinson, at the time still wrapped in its crisp paper coat, came with me to college. These days, like a a wizened old man, jacket-less and unsteady the book sits on the night table in the guest room.

To me poems are friends, the kinds of friends who let you ramble through their garden when you find yourself in need of beauty, of kindness, of distraction or understanding. There are just so many poets I’ve befriended, each with a line that returns to me like the discovery of a forgotten flower pressed in the pages of a book. The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter, by Ezra Pound, Patterns by Amy Lowell. Spring, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, (with a last line that seems to get repeated a lot lately), Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold.The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry, My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke, Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris. Obviously, there are too many poems crowding my brain for me to just pick one to honor or discuss. 

More recent friends are Grace, Mary, Lucille and Ada, though my mind sometimes struggles to remember the single line that introduced us (and sometimes keeps me awake all night trying to remember). No matter. 

The poems I love remain in my heart. One day or maybe one sleepless night, the line I am searching for will unexpectedly appear like a forgotten flower stolen from a beloved garden.

The Poets We Return To continues each Wednesday on Ethical ELA. Explore the series or write about a poet you return to.