La Femme Folle. (Translation) . Poem by Michael Walker

For the original English poem, see Poem Hunter/ Rajnish Manga/ Poems/ 119/289. (A Hindi Translation also) .
Gwendolyn Brooks expresses in three quatrains the personality and temperament of a true poet. She will not sing a song in May, which should be happy, but wait until November to sing a gray song. She will go out in the frosty darkness and sing most terribly. And all the small-minded people will stare at her and call her the crazy woman, who would not sing in May.
Brooks prefers to write of serious subjects, which may be sad also. She refuses artificial, light-hearted poems in favour of true, higher subjects that inspire. Thus she is following Aristotle's 'Poetics', which say that poetry should be about serious, elevated, and grand matters, much in the way that Homer wrote 'The Iliad'-about heroes, Helen of Troy, Ulysses, and the war between Greece and Troy.
Aristotle is still right about that, although humour is obviously part of poetry also. The English fashion of light verse, like limericks, is just childish most of the time.
So Gwendolyn Brooks, not afraid to be thought mad, has written a superb poem, in my opinion.