Life & Wisdom Quote by Rita Dove

Rita Dove isn’t romanticizing poetry as a permanent state of transcendence; she’s making a smaller, tougher claim about survival. “The poetry that sustains me” frames art as nourishment, not ornament, and the sustaining comes in flashes, not doctrines. The key move is her insistence on duration: “for a minute.” Ecstasy is not a lifestyle brand here, it’s a break in weather, a brief clearance in an otherwise obstructed sky.

The clouds do a lot of subtextual work. They imply pressure, routine, grief, history, obligation - the thick conditions that keep the self from seeing clearly. Dove’s image doesn’t promise that the clouds vanish; it promises a gap. That’s a pragmatic spirituality: you don’t have to convert, you just have to keep going until the light hits right. The word “parted” also borrows the rhetoric of revelation without committing to a theology, which matters for a poet whose career has insisted on the intimacy of lived experience while remaining wary of grand pronouncements.

Context matters: Dove rose to prominence as a writer attentive to the ordinary textures of American life and the long shadow of race and memory. In that landscape, “ecstasy or something” is a brilliant deflation, a refusal to overclaim. She’s describing the moment art gives you access to more-than-ordinary feeling, then immediately checking her own metaphysics. Poetry sustains because it opens a window, briefly, and that briefness is precisely what makes it believable.