Whenever I've used a poem in one of my stories, I've broken it up, interspersed a few lines of it, or a verse or so with dialogue or narrative. That always makes it more palatable than simply shoving it in there all in one lump, so to speak.
I'd give you an example, but I'm ashamed to admit that I can't for the life of me remember which story I used High Flight in...
:rolleyes:
Oh, hang on...I'd credited it at the bottom of the file for some reason, not the top. This is how I did it in Are You Lonesome Tonight:
"What's it like?" she voiced the sudden, curious thought. "Being you? I've wondered so often what it must be like to be able to do the things you can. I've...envied you, even."
That drew his gaze onto her again. His brow puckered. "I don't know. I'm just...me." He regarded her quizzically. "Envied?"
"Sure! Clark, all those things you can do! I mean, think about it! You can...you can *fly*!" she breathed. "Hasn't that ever seemed wonderful to you? Tell me..." she urged him, resting her head comfortably on his chest and closing her eyes. "Tell me what it's like to fly. Up there...apart from the earth, from everything...and yet connected to it...watching the whole world pass by below...all those people...all those lives..."
Clark smiled. "Yeah, I guess that is how I feel about it. It's so...you feel so small up there, with all that glory spread below you. The green and the blue and the cities too...at night, with all the lights sparkling below you and the stars blazing above..." his words trailed in a soft sigh, inadequate to encompass the emotions he wanted to express.
"High Flight..."
Clark raised his eyebrows at the murmured interruption as she lifted her head. Lois flushed.
"Sorry, I just...listening to you talk about what you can do...flying...it just seemed...it's a poem, I learned it at school. I'd forgotten about it until I was watching Super...you...on the news one evening, just after you arrived in Metropolis and it just seemed to...well, fit somehow..."
She trailed off, feeling like a prize idiot now, but Clark was nodding. "Yeah, I know it." His voice lowered, becoming a quiet whisper that held her spellbound, caught within the dark intensity of his eyes on hers, as he quoted softly:
"Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth. And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth. Of sun-split clouds --- "
"' - and done a hundred things, you have not dreamed of'," Lois interrupted, her own breath reverent on the words, as though they came from deep within an envious heart. She tossed him a rueful smile and then continued, before he could speak:
"Wheeled and soared and swung. High in the sun-lit silence. Hovering there I've chased the shouted wind along..."
Her voice dropped away as he overtook her again, seeming to put a personal resonance on the words, sharing that long ago airman and poet's joy in flight, in the ecstasy of wings.
"...Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace, Where never lark nor even eagle flew..."
He stopped, looking slightly embarrassed now by the intensity with which the words had taken on and then shrugged. He had first read High Flight when in his late teens: a sudden gem of discovery in a sun-filled college library. Inevitably, he had felt an immediate kinship with that long-dead poet and his serenade to flight, able and uniquely as no other to understand the intense joy in soaring among the clouds that his fellow aviator had conveyed.
Alternatively, if it's not vital to the plot at all, but you want more than just a reference to it in the narrative, you can always include it in full as an endnote at the bottom of the story.
LabRat
