So my endless January to-do list included memorizing poetry, as a sort of tool for getting it back into my blood as well as an attempt to improve my memory, since the little compositions that I make on the fly each day while I'm doing other things hardly ever make it to paper. Yesterday, the first day of this resolution, I flipped open my Norton anthology (incidentally, try typing anthology when your fingers are REALLY used to typing anthropology... it doesn't go well) and found myself on the page with the beginning of Eliot's "Little Gidding". I remembered going over it in class once, though I didn't remember it particularly clearly, so I haphazardly chose the second stanza as the day's lesson, and read it over a few times, in my head and then aloud. Then I left the book open to the page so I could come back to it later.

When I came back later and read it again it began to seem very, very familiar, and not just because I'd been reading it over and over. It sounded suspiciously like something I'd written -- not that I'd used the same words, but the same format, in a sense: If you came to a place by such-and-such route, description of place, if you came to a place by any route, overarching statements about place. It was uncannily similar, but so unlikely -- "Little Gidding" had played such a small role in my poetry education, and I had paid it so little attention -- in fact I remember reading it for the first time in class as we went over it, and never again afterwards. But I looked at the date that I created the poem on my computer, and it was the semester I took that class, and late enough that it could have been after we did Eliot.

Of course it terrifies me a little that such parallels could occur without my knowledge, a bit like Helen Keller's "Frost King", though admittedly a different sort of thing, since poets make these little nods to each other all the time, it seems. All the same I wish I were aware when I was doing it. I wonder if poets are often surprised by these parallels so heavily footnoted in anthologies. I always suspected poets to be a skeptical bunch, endlessly amused by the connections drawn by critics with too much time on their hands, knowing perfectly well that they had intended no such thing in their writing. But now I wonder if sometimes they open these anthologies and note these connections and think "Wow, I guess I was making a reference to Yeats, though I hadn't really thought about it before."

In another sense, though, it is just another example of how difficult truly creative thought is. Everything has been said before, done before, tried before -- there are just too many generations of human history standing before us and too many daily influences on our lives for anything to be really original, as Mark Twain said himself with reference to that whole Helen Keller fiasco. That is why I called this blog Age-Old Songs, after all. Still I'm here and still I'm singing these same old age-old songs...