What is Poetry for? 

By Amelia Freidline

What is poetry for? I’ve been writing poems regularly for more than 15 years, but I still wrestle with this question. What is the purpose of poetry — why write it in the first place? 

There are times when I deliberately sit down to write a poem — I have a yearly practice of writing pieces for each week of Advent, for example — but most of the time I find my work in the wild; a poem sneaks up on me in sunlight reflected on snowflakes, in delicate pink petals fallen on the cement of a sidewalk, in conversation with a stranger buying flowers, and demands to be written. Are quiet little thumbnail sketches of my particular corner of the universe worth anything when the world is rent by war, injustice, and all other kinds of evil? 

According to my good friend G.K. Chesterton, the answer is yes.

Chesterton, who died in 1936, was a prolific English journalist, philosopher, essayist, novelist and lay theologian, as well as a poet. His essay “The Poetic Quality in Liberalism,” published in 1905 in The Independent Review, starts out by imagining all the things a man would no longer be able to enjoy if he were suddenly turned into a mackerel fish. These might, Chesterton writes, be climbing the Alps, taking snuff, and visiting the library, but would certainly include the pleasures of swimming in the sea. 

For the sea creature knows nothing of the sea,” he says, “just as the earth-creature knows nothing of the earth. This forgetfulness of what we have is the real Fall of Man and the Fall of All Things. The evil which infects the immense goodness of existence does not embody itself in the fact that men are weary of woes and oppressions. It embodies itself in the shameful fact that they are often weary of joys and weary of generosities. Poetry, the highest form of literature, has here its immortal function; it is engaged continually in a desperate and divine battle against things being taken for granted. A fierce sense of the value of things lies at the heart [of literature].

Chesterton goes on to explain, essentially, that we tend to lose sight of the wonders of the world we live in because they are too close for us to see them as they truly are. For example, our life circumstances can lead us to forget or fail to appreciate the excellencies of a cow, he says, perhaps because we are timid and afraid of cows, or are a poor farmer whose only thought is how much the cow is worth in cold hard cash. We therefore can’t appreciate her soulful eyes, or the richness of her cream, or the wonders of her system of multiple stomachs. In order that we can actually see her again, rather than merely look at her, we must set her in a poem.

The more I thought about this, the more it reminded me of a work by Emily Dickinson, one of my favorite poets:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind

Poetry is a way of telling things “slant,” of exploring the mysteries and miracles of God and the world He has made without diminishing them or blinding us with the sheer unfiltered beauty of His truth. According to Leland Ryken, English professor emeritus at Wheaton College, at least a third of the Bible is written in poetry. Jesus Himself used poetic language many times to call attention to the beauty of the reality He was talking about: The kingdom of Heaven, He says in Matthew chapter 13, is like a fabulous treasure hidden in a field that prompts the finder to sell everything he has in order to buy the field and possess the treasure. It’s like a priceless pearl that a merchant will sell everything for — including all his other pearls — so he can buy that one. 

Jesus’s parables in no way diminish the spectacular worth and glory of God’s kingdom; instead, He lets His followers have a taste of this glory without blowing their minds by showing its full strength. After all, when Peter caught a glimpse of Jesus’s glory during the transfiguration, it caused him to babble like a fool. 

Similarly, the Apostle John takes a more lyrical approach in his gospel account than the immediate, action-packed narrative of Mark or the painstakingly detailed story of Luke, referring to Jesus as “the Word” and as light: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men,” he says in John 1. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” And then, in the book of Revelation, John employs a series of comparisons to describe the risen and reigning Christ with startling, awesome effect: “The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters.”

The language of poetry gives expression to things for which ordinary language is insufficient — fear, joy, wonder, the glorious heartache brought on by a brilliant blue summer sky — while also resurrecting the mystery of the everyday things we tend to take for granted. It doesn’t make ordinary things seem more wonderful than they are by turning them into abstractions; instead, it re-grounds us in reality by shaking us out of the ruts of disenchantment our thinking has fallen into. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins is a genius at this kind of shaking and re-grounding, often pairing close observation of the natural world with profound theological truth in a way that startles, and then makes the heart sing. Take his poem “Pied Beauty,” for example:

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

Sunsets are something we commonly exclaim in awe over, but when was the last time the sight of a spotted or brindled cow caused you to erupt in praise? And yet, with his list of “dappled things,” Hopkins calls us to pay attention to their unique beauties — and, more importantly, what they say about their Creator, who is Himself the “Beauty of all things beautiful,” as St. Augustine says. 

So, what is poetry for? To remind us of the value in every good thing we see, to reawaken us to the sacred wonders that crowd this world we live in — and to redirect us to God Himself, the source of every wonder there ever was.

march third

by Amelia Freidline

 

this could be the last spring, he said

with a wary look in the over-keen eyes

that peered out from beneath his ball cap brim

as he told me a tale of horrors in motion

that i knew had not, yet, come to fruition

let’s hope things will get better, i said

though his muttered departure declared

they wouldn’t

later i wondered what it must be like to live

without hope

in constant terror of the earth giving way

the mountains crumbling into the heart of the sea

what is it like to live as if Beauty is only transient

and not transcendent?

then i remembered how his alyssum rained

its delicate purple petals on my steel countertop

and how, after he had gone, its fragrance lingered