Stimson room by Naomi Jiang '25
By Nguyễn Đặng Thiên An ’23
Staff Writer
Established by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month occurs in April and serves as an annual reminder of the integral roles poetry plays in culture. Additionally, March 21 is World Poetry Day, which honors linguistic diversity through poetry across different cultures and continents. This year at Mount Holyoke College, students and faculty are celebrating National Poetry Month across campus, including in the Stimson Room of Williston Memorial Library, which is home to a diverse range of recently-acquired poetry and journals, according to LITSInstalls Volume 13, Issue 7. This year, the Mount Holyoke News celebrates these two events by interviewing students about their favorite poems from around the world.
Thu Bui ’22, a senior from Vietnam majoring in geography, shared that her favorite poem is “Một mùa đông,” which transliterates to “A Winter,” by Lưu Trọng Lư, a renowned 20th century Vietnamese poet and playwright.
“It’s hard to articulate exactly why I like this poem, but my criteria for judging Vietnamese poems usually begin with the musicality of the verses,” Bui said. “Like music, it’s difficult to explain why a particular melody sounds better than another. I tend to attribute the musicality of a Vietnamese poem to the rhymes and the placement of accent marks.”
According to Prairie Schooner, Vietnamese is a tonal language, which means that in poetry, there are various tonal rules — including bằng and trắc tones, flat and sharp tonal groups, depending on the poetry’s form. The tone and rhyme stress the musicality of Vietnamese, as stated by Washington Post.
Drawing on her experience reading both Vietnamese and English poems, Bui remarked on their linguistic differences. “I am always fascinated by the placement of accent marks in verses that determine the musicality of the poems,” Bui said. “In contrast, English poems rely on syllable stress to enhance musicality, which is a system I’m admittedly unfamiliar with, and thus far I have been unable to fully appreciate English poems as much as I want to.”
Ilse Hill ’22 shared that her favorite poem is “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou. Her favorite line is “The caged bird sings/ with a fearful trill/of things unknown/ but longed for still.” Commenting on this line, Hill said,, “It speaks to the sense of hiraeth — the Welsh word for a deep longing for something, especially one’s home — that many feel, but cannot express. We are caged by so many things — family, duty, survival, fear, expectation — but we often ignore the feeling. This poem evokes that which is not always expressed, but so often felt.”
Hill loves poetry because it contains fewer words than a novel, but still conveys numerous ideas.
Emma Xue ’23, an English major, developed a love for “To the Tune of Pu Sa Man” by Wei Zhuang. “This poem illustrates the mixed feelings of the poet: even though Jiangnan is said to be fine, he still misses his hometown in the North. Yet, it’s at war. He couldn’t return because he would be in heartbreak after witnessing his hometown in ruins,” Xue explained. “I think that it perfectly shows the complicated feelings of migrants, immigrants and refugees.”
According to The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Wei Zhuang was a poet of the late Tang and early Five Dynasties period, which spanned from the late ninth to the early 10th centuries. His poems were widely celebrated for their simplicity and elegant style.
Xue also adores five lines from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The lines read, “Be now for ever taken from my sight,/Though nothing can bring back the hour/Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;/We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind.”
An avid fan of poetry, Xue shared that she also enjoyed reading the poems of Emily Dickinson and Audre Lorde, and would recommend them to Mount Holyoke students to celebrate National Poetry Month.