'Poetry Is a Sort of Truancy'

A reader in England reminds me of a post from 2014 in which I mention “In Flanders Fields,” the Great War rondeau written by Lt. Col. John McCrae, a physician who joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force as a gunner and medical officer. It’s a poem I heard at school every Nov. 11, when my mother pinned a paper poppy to my shirt. Her generation grew up hearing World War I stories.

My reader sent me a link to a photo of poppies growing in a wheat field not in Flanders but in Gloucestershire. The overlap of the domestic and wild is rich in metaphor. The King James Bible overflows with allusions to wheat, as in Job 31:40: “Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley. The words of Job are ended.” And in the Song of Solomon 7:2, wheat and flowers are juxtaposed: “Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.”

But a more recent pairing of flowers and wheat also comes to mind. Here is the final sentence in Michael Oakeshott’s “Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962): “Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.”

Oakeshott ranks conversation among the supreme human activities, which makes its scarcity today even sadder. We’re likelier to have dueling soliloquies. “Having an ear ready for the voice of poetry," he writes, "is to be disposed to choose delight [a Blakean word] rather than pleasure or virtue or knowledge, a disposition which will reflect itself in practical life in an affection for its intimation of poetry.”