Feeling down as a lawyer? Seeking transcendence? Needing a mindset transplant? Here’s a suggestion: read poetry. It’s an ideal partner: short, portable, accessible. And here’s the bonus room: read a poem dozens of times and come away with a new and fresh understanding each time. A gift that keeps on giving. Here are three lawyer dilemmas and three poems from Jack Gilbert to illuminate resolutions.
We absorb the sorrows and pains of our clients. The battered spouse in the shelter; the unjustly convicted in a prison cell; the wrongly terminated facing eviction from their home. In “A Brief for the Defense,” Gilbert argues persuasively that we must not crater to despair. The dilemma is put starkly: “Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere/If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else with flies in their nostrils.” But Gilbert asserts that we must, as Auden advised, “stagger onward rejoicing.” Why? Because that is what God wants “otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine/the Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well.”
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