I grew up reading the classics.  Ma made sure of that.  Well, she had them on her bookshelf.  And thence I  trod.  But when poetry is twined with music or movies or both - then I really feel it.

Who can forget the end of Sophie's Choice?  That poem by the redoubtable Emily Dickinson (or Emile Dickens, as Sophie spoke it, to that clod at the library).  Stingo stands over the lifeless, waxen bodies of Sophie and Nat'an, and recites:

 Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair.

Be its mattress straight,
Be its pillow round;
Let no sunrise' yellow noise
Interrupt this ground.

-- Emily Dickinson

They are, they were, so Beautiful, my God, Sophie and Nathan, with the madness and regret rising up like twin sails of tragic inevitability.  And Stingo, dear, young Stingo, his heart riven; his vision forever altered.

I sob Every time.  When I was younger, I would just Wait for that part so I could sob.  Weird?  Maybe.  I compare it to listening to the Blues... when you really need to, you know what I'm saying?

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How's about Four Weddings and a Funeral?  Chick Flickie?  Probably.  Cutsie re realized version of The Big Chill?  Maybe.  But the Funeral.  Oh dear god, the Funeral.

Backstory:  The Funeral, noted in the title of the movie, is of Gareth (Simon Callow - an amazing actor), a larger than life, somewhat scots Englishman. 

His long-time lover is Matthew (John Hannah, in an early role).  At the wedding of Carrie (Andie McDowell), whilst roaring and dancing and flying about, truly the Life of the party, Gareth falls, like a stone, and Matthew is bereft.  At Gareth's funeral, he recites the following, which, until just today, I thought was entitled Stop All the Clocks:

                              Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

-- W.H. Auden

Gareth's elderly parents are there, embodying querulous weariness and, in his father's case, stammering and vague disapproval mixed with astonishment.  His "look", as much as anything else, stays with me (and I thought of it, that look,  in Brokeback Mountain,  in Jack Twist's father's look, though his delivered more hatred, nearly reptilian).

And oh, Matthew's (John's) recitation!  Would that someone would love me So Much, and So Well!

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There are many other notable Poems in Film.  More Emily, Hope is the Thing With Feathers from Quiz Show; Because I Could Not Stop for Death, from Crimes and Misdemeanors, among others.  Walt Whitman, Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allen Poe, Wm. Shakespeare, Longfellow, Dylan Thomas - but of course!  W.B. Yeats, oh, makes me Cry.  Marianne Williamson was in Coach Carter.  William Blake, in many movies, probably most notably Chariots of Fire (see Milton!); e.e. cummings - In Her Shoes and Hannah and her Sisters; Langston Hughes, A Raisin in the Sun; John Keats - over and over; Robert Frost (In Italian!) in Down By Law; Edna St. Vincent Millay; A.E. Houseman, To an Athlete, in Out of Africa; Dante Aligheri, from Hannibal, Vita Nuova III - the music to which left me quite undone.  That silly movie came out in 2001, when the Internet wasn't nearly so user-friendly, and I was out of my mind trying to find the provenance for the score - I Knew the provenance for the Dante, and was in my own little circle of hell trying to find out if the music was original, i.e., from Long, long ago, or made for the film.  Developed quite a little correspondence with an Expert on Dante from Chicago....

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When I read it, I can feel it, somewhat.  When I hear it read, I definitely feel it.  When I hear it with theater, with actions to complement the poesy, I begin to absorb it.  And when strapped on, wrapt 'round with the silken ribbons of music, it becomes me, and I it. 

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And all right, the following is not a poem -- it is a tonal assault, a verbal evisceration -- but it is Felt, nonetheless, goddammit!:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXlDmAzrPi8&feature=related

From The Lion in Winter, writ by James Goldman, ala Shakespeare; brilliantly wrought by a cast of endless genius. 

Peter O'Toole as Henry II - "My Life"

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