I love this simple mysterious poem by the American poet Wallace Stevens – one of the best poets ever, and a deep favourite of mine.
This is one those poems that you can learn off by heart quite quickly – read it outloud, slowly, ten times over, and on the eleventh, you will know it. Then repeat it for a week every morning, and you will know it forever.
Here’s a tip – and a mystery of its own – if you learn a poem, and then repeat it outloud in front of a mirror, watching yourself, you will discover something more about the poem, and something unexpected about yourself.
THE BLUE GUITAR
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You cannot play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’
And they said then, ‘But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.’
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