A Poem for a Thursday #178

Howard Nemerov was an American poet who lived from 1920-1991. He served as the Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. He also won the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He said of his poetry: “When I was starting to write the great influence was T.S. Elliot and after that William Butler Yeats. I got, of course, the idea that what you were supposed to do was to be plenty morbid and predict the end of civilization many times but civilization has ended so many times during my brief time on earth that I got a little bored with the theme.”

The world is full of mostly invisible things,
And there is no way but putting the mind's eye,
Or its nose, in a book, to find them out,
Things like the square root of Everest
Or how many times Byron goes into Texas,
Or whether the law of the excluded middle
Applies west of the Rockies. For these
And the like reasons, you have to go to school
And study books and listen to what you are told,
And sometimes try to remember. Though I don't know
What you will do with the mean annual rainfall
On Plato's Republic, or the calorie content
Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be
Good for you, and you will have to learn them
In order to become one of the grown-ups
Who sees invisible things neither steadily nor whole,
But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world
Under his hat, which is where it belongs,
And teaches small children to do this in their turn.

To David, About His Education
Howard Nemerov