Is This a Poem?

In the musical play Carousel, a spruiker called Bill, and Julie, who works in a mill, try to tell each other how they feel. They don’t have the words to be true to such feelings so they sing it to make it real: what “if I loved you?” The scene needs the music to supply the emotion and for the would-be-lovers to be who they are, not for writers to give them words they would never use. Songs in musicals happen when words are not enough. Poetry happens when prose in not enough. To describe a spectacular tree, you can try to write it realistically as best you can but if it is truly spectacular you will get to a stage where you have to forget what you see and write what you feel; what it reminds you of; what the words are for: sense, surprise, and metaphor. When Auden wrote “As I walked out one evening, walking down Bristol Street” he described what he did, and then what he saw, but what he saw was so such more and he had no words that did justice to the scenery “The crowds upon the pavement” so he slipped into poetry, “were fields of harvest wheat.” And this adds meaning and insight; yes, and there’s rhyme and rhythm of course, a tune if you like.  What confuses poetics for the readers of verse is that so often with the text, it’s so personal, perverse, and has no meaning, no revelation; but like masturbation, it may satisfy the writer, and, no one else! I’m going to stop beating up on myself, for being a fool since it isn’t a test, so I’ll read more poetry, treasure those words that light something up, and dismiss those that maybe a gas for the poet, but hot air for the rest of us.