I chose this poem because I felt like it went best with the chapter, Hirshfield says in Mnemosyne’s world the oral world who’s in men’s shadow we can see in the works of homer and which lives on in virtually every characteristic by which we recognize poetry as poetry all the qualities that work to hold language in place in time. I felt like these couple sentences brought language back in time as well with the shadows
This, I think, is my favorite poem in this anthology, and reading this chapter of Nine Gates helped me to further understand why.
The chapter talked about how the timbre of poetry has shifted from a more collectivist to individualist work...but those moments of private, small-scale particularity have always been there, since the earliest love-poems of the Egyptians. That's why I love this poem, I think. For its quietude, for its intimacy. It's gentle and small and loving, and it's about nothing more than looking at and loving the people and the world around you.