What is poetry?

There it goes again,
again and again and again,
that mysterious light
in the middle of the night
lurking in the shadows.

If only I knew
and could see it too:
by the bees,
under the trees,
Someone watches,
Someone sees.

I was so pleased with this when I wrote it, aged nine or ten, that I still remember it. The pleasure did not last long as my English teacher, Sister Mary Gabriel, suggested snidely that Walter de la Mare might have had some influence on its composition. I was consumed with righteous indignation, but what was it about this early effort that gave me such pleasure?

Partly it was the repetition at the beginning and end of the poem; it needed to be read out loud, to be declaimed. The dominant rhyme, another form of repetition together with the sibilance in the second stanza also offered strong dramatic possibilities. This was echoed by the double stress chiming in all but three of the lines.  I was particularly pleased with ‘lurking’.  I enjoyed the sound of it and the way the ‘ur’ could become a growl in my Bristolian accent. I also liked its sinister, threatening connotations. Finally it was the unresolved mystery of the light and the secret watcher that appealed. A few years later when I came across Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ for the first time, I was entranced in the same way.

‘Is there anyone there?’ said the Traveller
knocking on the moonlit door…
But only a host of phantom listeners   
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight  
To that voice from the world of men…

To my child’s ear, a poem needed to tell a story, preferably a mysterious or other-worldly one, and should have qualities such as rhyme, repetition and rhythm which called for it to be read out loud, to be performed. This is a good enough definition of a ballad though I did not know it then.

The poet Robert Hass argues that ‘rhythm has direct access to the unconscious, because it can hypnotise us, enter our bodies and make us move, it is a power and power is political.’ Also that: ‘New rhythms are new perceptions’ and ‘Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free,’