Poetry Matters

by Fr Scott Adle

Fr Petersen is the poetry guru at Gottesdienst. He’s been pushing that stuff for years. And, whilst it is my preference to avoid froufrou stuff (not to mention not wanting to inflate Petersen’s ego), it is repeatedly made evident in a variety of ways that he may have a point.

 Let’s start here: how much of the Scriptures are in verse (and not only vers-es)? Leaf through any bible which nicely formats it so it is easy to tell prose from poetry, and there is (to the poetry-averse) an astonishing amount. Like, a lot. And, while I’d like to pretend it doesn’t matter, you get the nagging feeling that it might.

 An article recently made the same point:

 [H]ow should we react to Proverbs, in which wisdom itself is taught in a poetic form? Or to the prophetic books, where poetry is sovereign, where warnings of the greatest urgency, for us as well as for the writers’ contemporaries, come forth in verse?

 Indeed, how should we react? Could verse be divine in some way? The author of the article, Michael Edwards, goes on to point out:

 Adam welcomes the creation of woman in this way:

Here at last the bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.
This one shall be called woman, for she was drawn forth from man.

These are the very first human words reported; it is tempting and perhaps legitimate to draw some conclusions. . . . when Adam does speak for the first time, he is given an “Edenic” language, one which our fallen languages can still attain in certain moments: thus Adam literally draws woman, ’ishah, from man, ’ish. Hebrew, thanks to the pleasure it takes in wordplay—in the ludic and deeply serious harmonies between the sounds of words and the beings, objects, ideas, and emotions to which they open themselves—is a language particularly and providentially skillful at suggesting what would be a cordial relation between our language and our world, and a meaningful relation among the presences of the real. It is skillful in affirming the gravity of the lightest among the figures of rhetoric: the pun.

Most importantly, as soon as the first man opens his mouth, he speaks in verse. Did the author think that in the world of primitive wonder language was naturally poetic? Is this why Adam, immediately after eating the forbidden fruit, responds to God in prose: “I heard your steps in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10)? We cannot know, but that first brief, spontaneous poem of Adam, which we seem to hear from so far away and from so close, solicits our attention and calls for our thought. If language before the Fall was poetic, or produced poems at moments charged with meaning, does poetry represent for us the apogee of our fallen speaking—its beginning and its end, its nostalgia and its hope?

 The first words spoken by a man were in verse. (Adam speaks in prose after the Fall.) The prophets of old, who immediately relay the word of the Lord – they also often use verse. The seraphim speak in verse. In the opening chapters of Luke, when the Holy Spirit inspires people, they break out in verse. The Church Triumphant in Revelations sings quite a bit too. So, even if it makes Petersen feel good, I have to admit there might be something to this poetry stuff.

 This is not to equate modern English poetry with the poetry of the Scriptures (especially not modern modern poetry), but there is this commonality: playing with words. There is a joy there, even when describing that which is devastating. (Lamentations – also in verse.) It is an art. It is a joy of using language fittingly, of creating an image of some shape of reality that evokes more than a bare understanding of the basic facts, of finding a way to put things that somehow ends up being more meaningful, rather than less. Instead of defining something down to a single point (often at great length), verse gets more meaning (while using fewer words).

 This is not to say that prose is “worse.” Obviously, there is plenty of that in the Good Book as well. But even prose is at its best when it is playful, when it is tightly constructed, and you can hear echoes from other places. Chiasms abound, even in the prose parts of Scripture. We all love a good turn of phrase, and pastors love it when we construct one. We like it more than we like paragraphs of our other material.

 Verse is intentionally artful in a way that prose often is not. God is intentionally artful when He speaks to us, as we see with the quantity of verse, and as even the parables evidence – which are certainly more playful and deeper than they look for their size.

 Yet, given all that, I’m not sure it’s as mysterious or dire as the author attempts to cast it. Sure, reading poetry is harder than reading a novel, but “artful” doesn’t mean “indecipherable,” even to those who aren’t into poetry. I don’t know that prose-heads are reading it “wrong” when they read verse, if by that he means we’re completely ignorant as to what is being said. As with all things, when you don’t understand something, ask someone who does, or look it up. Most poems of some distinction have analysis somewhere to be found. The Scriptures certainly do. A lexicon will get you pretty far. Sure, you might not catch all the nuances, but you’ll get the gist.

 Anyway, I recommend the article.