It's the holidays, and a book of poems is by my chair

 I was ganged up on — a convergence of four memories or thoughts, all on grief.

• When I was a newspaperman, my boss Dolph Tillotson used to write an annual column saying it was OK to be a little blue during the holidays. It’s natural. You can’t think of past holidays without thinking of loved ones who are gone. As you age, the list of the missing gets longer. You have friends who have become fragile and others who are battling threatening diseases.

• Wittgenstein, that astonishing thinker, asked about the effects art has on us: “You could select either of two poems to remind you of death, say. But suppose you had read a poem and admired it, could you say: ‘Oh read the other — it will do the same’?"

Of course, you wouldn’t say that. If a poem moved you, you would go back to it. And that gets to Wittgenstein’s point: we use poetry.

• One of the poems I have used is “When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Angelou. When great trees fall you can be stunned out of your senses. And so, too, when great souls die. I especially like these lines:

And when great souls die,

after a period peace blooms,

slowly and always

irregularly. 

When I first heard the lines — and I heard them spoken before I read them — I imagined they were from a prayer book that I didn’t know. I was, I thought, in the middle of a wonderful new rite.

• Robert Bly was a poet who spent years trying to show people, men especially, that they need poetry and need to learn how to use it. He died this week at 94.

• Sources: Wittgenstein’s comment comes from Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Maya Angelou’s poem can be found here: https://africa.si.edu/2014/05/when-great-trees-fall%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8-by-maya-angelou/