I love short poems. I like to read them, savor them,write them; and would like to see editors publish more of them. There isn’t any room for a weak line, word, rhyme or even syllable when you’ve so little space to work with. Writing and exploring the short poem is an especially productive way to nurture what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the habit of perfection” that serves poets well when they attempt longer works.

1.

 Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes 

  Adam 
Had ’em.

I begin with a tiny, anonymous poem often attributed to the late 19th/ early 20th century light versifier, Gillian Strickland.

This 2 ½ word, 4 syllable treat was long hailed as the shortest poem in English. Its title, however, is way longer than the poem itself. Editors would later try to make the poem shorter and funnier by changing its title (and subject) to Fleas ; but in doing so, dehydrated both its wit and meaning.

Our author expects us to remember that his title begins with the same word as two of the most famous poems of the Romantic period— Wordsworth’s 159-line, 1210 word “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ” and Thomas Gray’s128 line, 870 word “ Lines Written in a Country Churchyard.” Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron also had titles that began with Lines written or on.

It's a cherry on top of the humor if we are aware of how long such serious meditative poem can be, but we don’t need to know that for the contrast between Strickland’s title and the poetry it introduces to be hilarious.

Our expectations are delightfully dashed as we transition from verbiage with Latinate diction suitable for a scientific article in a learned journal to the poem’s jaunty, colloquial, brevity-is-the-soul-of-wit style. No ten syllable iambic pentameter here! The poet’s 3½ word couplet simply has two feet on the ground, each of them a single trochee: Adam / Had’em (“them” being ruled too wordy, so reduced 50% via contraction).

Is this poem merely a joke? It uses the joke’s typical long set-up and short punchline structure, and we do chuckle at the rapidly delivered punchline.

But if this tiny masterpiece has outer humor it also has what Robert Frost called inner seriousness. Our poet’s weighty title and tiny couplet remind us that humankind has been struggling with miniscule viruses and bacteria since the beginning of time. The symbiotic relationship it points to is fundamental, and the stretch of time it presents is enormous. Bacteria can keep us going by assisting with digestion, but we need not be reminded today that viruses can be deadly.

                     2.

Western wind, when will thou blow,  

The small rain down can rain?                

Christ, if my love were in my arms          

And I in my bed again!

Most editors entitle this poem “Western Wind.” In England, western winds blow in from the Atlantic ocean and usually bring gentle rain and
mild weather, as opposed to the cold, harsher easterly winds from the continent. To the anonymous late medieval poet who wrote the poem such weather would have symbolized the return of springtime’s warmth, renewal, fertility, and love.

Western winds are also associated with the sea. The speaker is probably on a ship in the middle of a violent, life-threatening gale that has been going on for some time. His almost prayerful opening lines make us feel his keen longing for a change of weather. He is pleading with the western wind to return with its benign waves and gentle rain, so his ship can sail safely back to port.

His second two lines explode with a powerful oath that captures his fear that he may not survive and his longing to be safe at home in the warmth of
his bed, with his beloved in his arms.

I’ve imagined the speaker as a sailor. This poem, however, speaks just as well to soldiers under fire in a trench in WWI or to anyone longing to be anywhere but whatever perilous situation they find themselves in. The vehemence of the appeal to his savior delivers anguish so heart-rending that it feels too large for two lines to bear. The poem almost spills out of itself.

3.

When the bells justle in the tower

The hollow night amid,

Then on my tongue the taste is sour

Of all I ever did.

 

Some of you may know James Wright’s poem, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm” which concludes with his realization: “I have wasted my life.” Long before Wright, A.E. Housman made us feel the horror of someone lamenting a wasted life with just 4 lines. Composer Lukas Foss has set this piece to music sung by Adele Addison that makes Housman’s poem spine chilling.

The lonely reverberation in the hollow night is the perfect setup for the speaker’s bitter realization that reverberates with the bells, outdoing them in intensity. Why does their sound affect the speaker so? Perhaps he’s read the last three lines of a John Donne poem: “Therefore send not to know / For whom the bell tolls / It tolls for thee”—for his wasted life. Notice that he feels this way every time he hears the bells when walking out at night.

4.

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed by this;

I accosted the man.

“It is futile,” I said

“You can never—”

 

“You lie,” he cried,

And ran on.

 

“It is futile,” I said.

Stephen Crane is best known as a novelist, but he also published two volumes of mostly short, epigrammatic poems in free verse, and this 8-liner is one of my favorites. If I were to entitle it I’d call it “Folly.” In his vision of a man trying to overtake the horizon, Crane has found the perfect metaphorical action for an obsessed, delusional mind. The very earth the man runs along keeps spinning around on its axis, forever keeping the horizon he longs for out of reach.  

There are older poems that feel “dated” when we read them today, but not Crane’s. Published 129 years ago, his poem speaks to our own time, as every day we hear and witness too many men and women passionately pursuing the horizon. When it’s pointed out that they are victims of misinformation, they answer: “I’ve made up my mind. “Don’t confuse me with the facts!”

5.

 The Secret Sits

 We dance around in a ring and suppose,

                             But the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Robert Frost’s metaphysical rhymed couplet is his shortest poem, and one of his most famous and frequently discussed works. We are all confronted by the mystery of our existence that prophets, philosophers, artists, and physicists have been trying to solve unsuccessfully for centuries. The speaker in most Frost poems is an “I,” but the subject here is “We,” meaning You and I, poet and reader, and every human being on earth.

Frost loves to supercharge the simplest words with complex meaning. Sits is brilliantly chosen for both title and poem to personify Frost’s Secret . Kings and Queens,Czars and Emperors Sit in state on thrones from which they issue edicts to control their subjects. Too often, they are as imperious as they are inscrutable.

Notice that by forcing us to “dance around in a ring” Frost’s enigmatic Monarch personifies us as submissive circus beasts pointlessly led around in a circle that never ends by an animal tamer.

Emotionally, our speaker is both frustrated and amused by our inalterable, frustrating befuddlement in the presence of The Secret.

6.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Emily Dickinson is remarkably fond of the short poem; more than half of her  1775 poems are 8 lines or less. I suspect that her user-friendly preference for brevity did much to inculcate the “habit of perfection” that has led to her enduring popularity.

A Prairie is a huge expanse of grassland that can be miles long. All it takes to make one, the poet claims, is a clover and a bee. But she realizes that the prairie they make does not really exist without human consciousness to perceive it and name it, so she adds one more word: revery.

Dickinson is anticipating C.G. Jung, who argues that “Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us as it is consciously reflected by a psyche.” Clover and bees are tiny. But the mind of someone dreaming or imagining is boundless. Notice that revery is the only three syllable word in the poem, and perfect for expressing the limitless flow and grandeur of the imagination. Clover. Bee. Revery. We might scratch our heads, reminding ourselves that this poem is merely five lines long.

7.

Period Piece
.

Through much of the 20th century poets tried to create a poem that would be even shorter than “Adam / Had ’em.” None of the attempts struck me as successful until I came across the light verse poet Conti’s “Period Piece.” Conti ends the quest forever, not with a word or syllable but with the punctuation mark we use to bring the curtain down on sentences and on lines of poetry. His tiny spot of ink—his poem—cannot be spoken! It explicitly refers back to a missing sentence. Metaphorically it refers to the end of all the thoughts and emotions that humans have expressed since we began walking the earth.

The poem’s title refers to any work of art—painting, poem, play, novel—that captures a particular historical “period” in detail. Wrap all period pieces together and the “Many” becomes the “One,” snowballing into all human history, into the past itself. With two words and a dot Conti is meditating on finality. We are, as Kay Ryan points out, floating along “The Niagara River” towards our individual periods, aware that there are also periods lying in wait for the human race and our star. (I hear Hamlet, just before his period ends, uttering, “The rest is silence.”)

*

Robert Frost said his aim was to “lodge a few poems where they would be hard to get rid of.”  Great short poems need only be read once or twice to enter the brain and become part of our biology. All poems aspire to do that, but memorability is partial to brevity; the shorter the poem, the more likely it is to leap off the page into your memory.