“Poetry is the language that most truly reflects the life of the soul; it is the person of faith's native language. Both poetry and faith work to challenge the sleepwalking life ... Poetry and Faith reflect parts of each other... as they deepen and not resolve the meanings, mysteries and mayhem of the world.” – Mark Oakley
Mark Oakley is an Anglican priest and Dean of Southwark Cathedral in London. I recently became aware of his work and his 2016 book, “The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry.” It got me reflecting on the immense role various “poetic” expressions have played in my life; including poems I’ve read and even memorized, or written for myself, or sung in lyrical fashion.
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When we were young, we all presumably learned there was a difference between prose and poetry. But, in addition, prose can all too often become prosaic; defined as lacking in imagination, and dealing only with what is known or alleged to be factual. Hence, prose can often claim to provide the distinction between what might be deemed to be the fictional and non-fiction. But when prose fails to spark the human imagination -- that seems to ultimately resist domestication -- poetry can liberate both our mind and spirit. Hence, there is a spiritual path we might describe as the poetic one.
In similar fashion, along such a path, we may have learned there’s a difference between the language of codified beliefs and the literal; contrasted with the poetic that uses fewer words to infer and allude to that which one can only hope and affirm as ‘trust’ (Gr. πιστός ‘pistis,’); which is the synonym of course for the word ‘faith’.
The compendium of holy writ known as the Bible is full of both prose and poetry, of course; as well as the prophecies that forever point to that place as yet unreached, or unrealized. There are 150 psalms, for example, to recite or sing. But regrettably they’re all too often interpreted more literally than metaphorically (or, one might say, “spiritually”). The prologue to John’s gospel, for example, declares it all began with theWord (‘logos’) that “became flesh to dwell among us.” But the prose that then follows is too often left to become stultified in theological interpolation. The gospels portray the Jesus figure as “Son” of a living “God,”the one and only savior and redeemer, who’s the preferable “Lord” to follow among all other choices.
But at their best, the gospels also recount a Galilean sage who told fictional tales in a kind of true poetic fashion that rang more true than being merely factual when it came to, say, a prodigal son and his father, or a good Samaritan, or a sower of seeds, or an unnamed shepherd to a single lost sheep, or a woman upending her life to find one lost coin.
So, where is the poetic – as characterized by the distinction I’ve suggested -- to be most authentically found in your daily life, and mine?
In a Word (or Two), Versus “Nothingness in Many Words”
“Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words.” – Henry Higgins, “My Fair Lady”
If you were to recount your life’s journey up to this point along the path, how might poetry -- including the poet in you -- play a part to describe your various chapters; when, perhaps, simply a rhyming Hallmark greeting card was insufficient to express your most authentic thoughts and emotions?
I recall one year in boarding school when our English teacher would require students to memorize and recite a classic poem each week. There was, for example, the Shakespearean love sonnet,
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May … But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Ah … But then some of us witless students shortened the Bard’s verbiage to :
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? A bale of hay? A cheese souflé? …
Soon after that, however, real life got in the way; when I turned eighteen years old, and I was required to register for what was then a military draft. [Jump ahead five decades now, when the Memorial Day observance this year included a commemoration of the American War in Southeast Asia from a half-century ago.] To my own surprise, here’s one stanza of a poem I recently re-discovered in an old cardboard box of memorabilia that I’d written in 1966 that went like this:
Why can’t you hear my brother, oh, Why can’t you hear my cries? Resounding through this night of death, Throughout the empty the empty skies? You never took my warning, You never paid no heed, And now mankind must suffer Its self-destructive deed. (Complete transcript here.)
Was I simply another one of those peace-not-war protestors of my generation who’d seek “conscientious objector” status or flee across the Canadian border? Or was there a notion once previously instilled in my own upbring in my earlier years within a certain faith tradition by the teachings of a 1st century poet-sage in the Christian faith tradition? Was there a kind of living injunction in that youthful idealist rhyme about sheathing the sword (Mt. 26:52), or turning those swords into plough shares (Is. 2:4), and forever seeking to love your enemy (Lk 6:27-36), and persistently turning the other cheek (Mt. 5:39)?
Later, in young adulthood, I’d indulge and delight in some of the popular poets of that era, like James Kavanaugh and his slim volume, “There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves.” Or Rod McKuen, when I moved to San Franciso and experienced my own Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows. And, then there was E.E. Cummings’ poems, when I learned you didn’t have to capitalize every line, or construct a metered rhyme!
After numerous successive life chapters as a writer, preacher, speaker, and what I would occasionally and despairingly describe myself as a “word merchant,” probably the most gracious compliment I ever received was from an old colleague when he distinguished some of my own script-ure from what he otherwise deemed to all-too-often be “nothingness in many words.” It was also a word of caution -- and affirmation -- of that poet which is en-trusted in us all. In a word, we are entrusted in faith.
Finally, perhaps most formative for me were these words once written by T.S. Eliot:
What we call the beginning is often the end And to make and end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort dancing together Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, Every poem an epitaph. … We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. … A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.
Excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” The Four Quartets (1942)
Postscript
As a personal reflection and variation of Eliot’s recurrent journey awaiting completion, I’m sharing with my reader’s a poem I composed in 2012; written with whatever sparseness this word merchant could muster:
DAWN
Last night was so warm the house hung by its windows
The earth had cracked like a shell but now the air had cooled in the forgotten hours.
If only for a while I could capture an unspoiled moment to fill the still, dark room.
Crickets lulled me motionless and I had wandered down strange paths, now forgotten, as light began to push black shapes into old familiar forms.
I’ve woken before a cackling bird repeats its one monotonous note, while the hours roll over and crawl back to the other side.
Whatever is inevitable comes, and with it a roar of rubber wheels whining louder, nagging at the undone scraps that await completion.
The darker hours will come again and sooner next time.
And I’ll rummage for another way to speak, or write of something more.
August 10, 2012 - by John W. Bennison
Who is John Bennison? To learn more about this writer, click Here. To read more commentaries by John Bennison from the perspective of a Christian progressive go to the Archives Here.
Certainly worth a re-read and a re-re-read.