Tiny Poem Tuesday, Resilience
Let's gather and read these tiny poems by William J. Harris, Sara Teasdale, and Dorothy Parker
Happy Tiny Poem Tuesday readers! I’ve gathered three tiny poems that deal with the theme of resilience, meaning the ability to recover from hardship. Resilience is a difficult topic to write about without becoming cliché and sentimental. An example of this would be a poet writing a piece that is a slightly more lyrical version of “fall down seven times, stand up eight.” We’ve all heard the phrase, and while it is helpful in a pinch, it does not carry significant emotional or poetic weight.
All three of these poems tackle resilience through wildly different approaches, but they are all poems of only a few words. Which one is your favorite? Why?
This poem consists of two stanzas with five lines each. There are only 23 words. While these stats may suggest that this poem is simple, Harris masterfully crafted this tiny poem. The two stanzas mirror each other. Both start with the word “why” and continue to the challenge of accomplishing tasks during the day. In the first stanza, Harris laments that it took the entire day to accomplish nothing. The enjambment in this stanza creates a sing-song rhythm that makes it seem like he could not care less about getting nothing done:
take all / day / to get nothing
The second stanza mirrors the sentiment and form of the first stanza while incorporating slight adjustments to expand the poem’s meaning. Harris writes, “Why, I could,” which stuns the reader at first. He wanted to do something? But he seemed okay with accomplishing nothing! The second stanza continues. Harris laments that he could have started nothing at noon and saved a lot of time.
You may read this poem and be surprised that I grouped it with poems of resilience. But I think an important type of resilience is accepting doing nothing in a day. It’s a challenge to do nothing and be okay with it. Harris takes it like a champ. His only regret is that he didn’t start later, and save some time.
Teasdale’s poem is composed of two stanzas with six lines each. The rhyme scheme pulls me in immediately. Those first two lines are enchanting: “Day you have bruised and beaten me, / As rain beats down the bright, proud sea.” Teasdale uses alliteration and rhyming in tandem to create a lovely rhythm that draws the reader in and makes them sway to movement of the tides. She uses all of these techniques to explain to the reader that the speaker is beaten down and tired. She speaks to the day as if it is the person responsible for all of her pain.
The speaker’s resilience allows her to look towards the day and say, “Yet I have wrested a gift from you.” She looks up in the sky to see a moon which shines beautifully over a “world as hard and gray as stone.” The end of this poem brings everything home when the speaker asks a question to anyone listening:
Oh who could be bitter and want to die
When a maiden moon wakes up in the sky?
There is always something to be thankful for, even if it is just beauty in the sky. There’s always a reason to keep going.
Parker’s poem is a list of arguments. She writes directly to the reader and explains how all methods of harming or ending yourself are fallible. Each of the eight lines is a simple phrase. They rhyme in an A B A B C D C D scheme. There is something childlike about this poem–or maybe I’m conflating the childlike simplicity of the lines with plain directness. There is no flowery language, no adjectives you need to look up in the dictionary to understand. There are just the plain facts: “Razors pain you; / Rivers are damp; / Acids stain you.” All of these direct, clear arguments lead to one logical conclusion: “You might as well live.”
This poem is a resumé. Perhaps the speaker of this poem has tried all of these methods and has come to the conclusion that living is the best option, that resilience yields better results than any of the options that came before. Perhaps the speaker of this poem only conjured the resumé from their imagination. Whatever the reason to call this a resumé, this poem shows a history of resilience and choosing to live no matter what.
I hope you have enjoyed this Tiny Poem Tuesday, and happy National Poetry Month!
If you enjoyed these poems… you can read more from William J. Harris, Sara Teasdale, and Dorothy Parker here.
If you are excited about the emerging spring… read this poem “Sonnet to the Month of April” by Eliza Wolcott.
If you want to try writing poetry… write about the changing season. What is different now than it was this winter? What affects you the most? Write about that.