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F.S. Flint

There has been no sound of guns,
no roar of exploding bombs;
but the darkness has an edge
that grits the nerves of the sleeper.


He awakens;
nothing disturbs the stillness,
save perhaps the light, slow flap,
once only, of the curtain
dim in the darkness.


Yet there is something else
that drags him from his bed;
and he stands in the darkness
with his feet cold against the floor
and the cold air round his ankles.
He does not know why,
but he goes to the window and sees
a beam of light, miles high,
dividing the night into two before him,
still, stark and throbbing.


The houses and gardens beneath
lie under the snow
quiet and tinged with purple.

There has been no sound of guns,

no roar of exploding bombs;

only that watchfulness hidden among the snow-covered houses,

and that great beam thrusting back into heaven

the light taken from it.

I found this in a book of Imagist poetry, a movement in the early 20th century that was one of the first signs of what we might call "modernist" literature. Pretty soon it fell into its own conventions, like any movement does, hardening and solidifying its revolution into a credo that stifled any heterodoxy. But it definitely had its reasons and its high points.

I started thinking about books tonight, about how much a book is worth. The Dover Thrift edition I found this in had a list price of $2. It doesn't seem like much, but this kind of stuff is free on the Internet. A quick Google search will show you the entire text of the book.

So is the book worth two bucks? Is this poem alone worth it? Especially when the web and e-readers seem to be all the rage, what is the point of an inefficient, wasteful, and worst of all, physical book? 

Kindles, Nooks and now the iPad get a lot of ink. It's digital ink, of course, I wouldn't purchase a newspaper if it had a brand-new "Calvin & Hobbes" Sunday comic. (That's what Digg is for.) But I can't see myself curling up with electronics or taking a device outside to fiddle with on a crisp February night. 

I'm a huge technology fan - it's my day job as well as a hobby. And I'm pretty intrigued by the iPad - if anything could make me forsake my love of paper and ink and glue and spine that's probably the ticket.

But what is poetry worth? 

For me, it's not just the individual poems. It can't be quantity - if that's all I cared about, then just grab the thickest Norton anthology you can find and be done with it. It's not even really quality - plenty of sites offer indexed, searchable databases of some of the finest verse the English language has ever produced. 

I appreciate the process of making a decision. An editor or author or compiler has to pick and choose a selection of poems to include in this limited physical space. Something always has to get left out, abridged, there may be alternate versions or revisions, inconsistencies between texts must be resolved, there's a context of other poems to both complement and offer contrast to whatever is being read. 

Sometimes a good introduction or biographical note gives that, other times it's as simple as the dust jacket giving you a sense of why this book is good or important or worth your money and time and interest. Once freed from a physical medium, the temptation to throw in everything and the kitchen sink becomes too great.

But with a book somebody has to be selective, be proactive and give a kind of larger meaning for their offering. At least until iBooks come out with a software upgrade that includes instant contextualization and a link to the Wikipedia entry.