Reading Poetry Novels & Stories

Vess's laughed, and yeah I also laughed with her After all that name was given by me. It's like all the tension has suddenly flown away. But who knows? Maybe this is silence before the storm? Or maybe it is nothing and I'm overreacting like I always do. *** "Where the hell is Cole?" Dylan muttered under his breath in literature class. We all are here in the English literature class listening to whatever Mrs Bitwick was explaining about the depth of words and how we execute them with one particular feeling in poetry. "Poetry is like an art, as an emotion, like energy given by the words to the soul of body------" she was explaining all this with her hand movements.

“For something. I don’t know what yet.” “You’re welcome to it.” They moved along the shelf. The city outside had settled into its late evening quiet. At one point a group passed on the pavement, laughing, audible through the glass before the sound faded. At the poetry section Delphine stopped. “Do you read poetry?” she said. “I live in a bookshop,” Sera said. “That’s not an answer.” “I read it the way I listen to music. Not to extract meaning. To be inside the sound of it.”

His heartbeat transfers through his chest into my palm, one steady knock after another. I notice the book on his desk. Half-open, a page marked with a folded corner. "What are you reading?" His chest shifts as he reaches for it. "A poem," he says. "Let me read you the part I've been thinking about." He reads it quietly, voice low enough that it doesn't carry past the room. "Put out my eyes: and I shall see you, too, seal up my ears: and I shall hear you still, and without feet I yet can go to you,

"Now back to study." Celeste nods, understanding Ms. Anne in more ways than the other clueless students could. I look down at my book and read the poem without a sound. For oft when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. The rest of the period passes by smoothly and when the bell rings for the lunch break, I stop Ryder before he could walk away. He has some explanation to give.

“Do you?” “Yes. I think poetry is essential. I think beauty is essential. I think when you’ve lost someone, when you’re holding your daughter while she cries… that’s when you need poetry the most. Not as an escape, but as a… a way to make sense of the pain. To give it shape.” He was silent, watching her. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes were intent.

Eros said. Sam read the poems one by one and sighed heavily. "That's why I want them to at least live well even though they don't have a father and mother," Sam said quietly. Eros nodded in agreement. Sam was sitting quietly when Eros asked one of the children to read a poem. Eros has taken several references from the internet about reading poetry that is good and right, and he trains children to do that. Sam smiled proudly hearing the innocent voices of the children that sounded so touching to the core of his heart.

Few minutes later, nineteenth-century Romantic poetry class had begun. Professor Dylan’s deep, commanding voice rolled through the room as he paced slowly in front of the projector screen. “Wordsworth believed that poetry should capture the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” he said, gesturing to the lines displayed behind him. “But notice how he tempers that emotion with memory and reflection. Take this stanza from ‘Tintern Abbey’…” The words coming out of his mouth thinned, and all I could hear was the bass from his voice sending ripples of pleasure to my bare aching pussy. My hands drifted beneath the desk, hidden by my notebook and the low edge of the table.

My pen hits the small desk surface with a clatter that is somehow audible in the academic quiet. My face is burning. The rest of the lecture moves past me like scenery from a train window. Students discuss meter and metaphor and historical context and all the ordinary architecture of an academic morning. My focus keeps returning to the memory of his voice finding the rhythm inside Donne's lines, to the specific quality of hearing someone read like they actually thought about what they were reading before they opened their mouth. I tell myself it is the poetry. That Leona's call left me emotionally raw and anything read well this morning would have landed the same way.

"Would you like to take a walk in the garden? The greenhouse is nice, but the outdoor paths are open to us today." "I’d love to," I said, closing my book. We walked out into the sun-drenched gardens. The air was crisp, but the sun was warm on my shoulders. As we walked, Darian began to talk about Southern poetry. "In the South, we believe that words have their own scent," he explained as we passed a row of blooming lilies. "We have poets who spend their entire lives trying to capture the feeling of the first rain after a drought. They use a structure called 'The Golden Verse'. It’s patterned, like a heartbeat."

I looked at the door handle and then at him. "The door," I said, "was locked." He looked up. "Was it?" I set my bag on the desk, pulled out the poetry anthology, and told myself this was just a classroom. That was a student. This was work. "We're doing close reading today," I said. "Pick a text. Anything from the unit." "I already picked," he replied, sliding his notebook across to me. I looked down. He had written out the entire Stanza Five from Lady Lazarus by hand. Beneath it were clean, annotated lines that revealed a reading so precise and unexpectedly personal that I stood there, reading it twice before I could speak.