Whenever the luminaries gather to hold forth on the glorious things I feel like Coleridge’s bright-eyed and wild-bearded Ancient Mariner accosting guests at a wedding feast. To be clear, I was invited, but my qualities put me quite out of place among such company. Nonetheless, you must listen to my tale.
I have two small comments to contribute to Mr. Higgins’s fine piece. The first point, obliquely admitted but in need of some harping, is that the entire Bible is poetry. Every word a golden apple, fitly spoken, set in silver. Certainly there are discreet poems within, collections of poems, book length poems, but the Bible is richly woven together, poetry through and through. In light of Mr. Esolen’s excellent piece on narrative, I won’t belabor this but only make one small point.
The Bible’s poetry begins with the tidy composition of Genesis 1:1, which is composed of seven words, twenty-eight letters (7×4), and is written in irregular word order so that Elohim, God, is in the middle of the verse: “In the beginning created God the heavens and the earth.” God right in the midst, I wonder if it foreshadows anything…
My second comment is a mild niggle, perhaps not even a full niggle, perhaps just a leaf of a niggle, but I have to express my dissatisfaction with the idea of hiddenness as the chief attribute of poetry. It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, yes, but that isn’t the sole glory. Poetry can hide, but the greater attribute of poetry, the reason that it has been the prime mode of written pursuits for most of human history, is that it reveals.
Compression, too, gives this impression. If something is compressed then it is the glory of readers to decompress, to unpack, to analyze. I’m uncomfortable with vivisection being the primary act for poetry readers. It makes the reading of poetry primarily a chore, with the chief value in the decoding. Mr. Higgins admits this, stating, “the tools of compression make comprehension more difficult, or perhaps more accurately, more delightful.” Yes, “delightful” is more accurate, for the soul of poetry is found less in labor and more in leisure. Poetry is more like scaling a mountain than strip-mining. That’s not to say that there’s no digging into things, no analysis.
I keep going back to the land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good. The gold of that land is useful, but God didn’t say that. The gold of that land is valuable, but he didn’t say that either. The gold of that land requires hard work, but that’s not what he notes. What he said was, the gold of that land is good. The light is good, the sun, moon, and stars are good, man in community is good, and so also the gold of that land. A definition that emphasizes hiddenness or compression focuses too closely on the “concentrated” and less on the “excess.” All the fun’s in how you say a thing. All work and no play makes us all dull boys. More on this anon, but first, a greater mystery must be pondered.
Anytime the definition of poetry is discussed and her nature and powers parsed, I get lost amidst the forest of meter and meaning and find myself wondering, “What actually is this strange creature called prose?” The word comes from the Latin prosa oratio, which means straightforward or direct speech and seems to be understood as the foundational language upon which poetry builds her spires. But if poetry is repetition and compression, then what doesn’t qualify?
Ideographic scripts have been sculpted, transliterated, and set in the gardens of our time as a symbol of sound. Phonemes assigned to these runes are inspirated by the flexible seashells of our mouths and abracadabra all things. Strings of words are incanted and the enchanted seed of meaning springs up, beanstalking to the heavens.
So, is there ever pure literal language, dead, cut, and dried? Is there any language that isn’t built with the magic of metaphor upon the fertile soil of sound? Is it possible to have empty letters arranged in rows without at least some compression, without any repetition? Namely, is it possible for prose to actually exist?
I have my doubts. A mundane note, because it is mundane, yet it holds some remnant of the music of spheres. Is there anything so compressed as quiddity? The most boring sentence I’ve encountered, tendentiously stupid, is “This page intentionally left blank.”And yet—what thrilling metrics! What cheekiness! What in the world? The dullest of phonebooks is an epic, a literal epoch, a mix of ephemera and eternality, with innumerable connections, some of which are long distance!
My intent is not to lower the tennis net of poetry so that any phonetics that bounce qualify as a poem. My move is secondarily to highlight that something is missing if poetry is only repetition and compression at a greater level than prose, and (primarily) I want to deny prose the status of the fundament. If poetry is the mere gussying up of prose, the elitist version of language, or a sheen of esoterica to disguise plain truth—if there is such a thing as “plain truth”—then poetry deserves its place in the dusty attic of the ivory tower. Even worse, if poetry evolved out of primordial prose, from imago dust to imago Dei through some process of selection, then surely some heterodoxy is at hand, surely some Norm Chomsky is at hand.
If God’s essence is essentially poetic, as was argued, and God is Trinity, which is reflected in man’s body, soul, and spirit, then the essence of poetry must also be tripartite (1 Thess 5:23; Heb 4:12). There seems to be some third component that is missing. Returning to the previous mystery might help us uncover it.
My definition of prose is a text that is focused on a singular dimension of meaning in service to a particular point in simple form in order to reduce the investment of time required in learning. The further it widens its focus and/or complicates its form, the richer its poetry. This leads me to suspect that the key difference between poetry and prose is time.
Poetry resists summary. It is more than a sum of its parts; analyzed and atomized, something is lost. Poetry is an experience in a way that prose is not. Poetry must be passed through like music. There are no CliffsNotes for cantatas. Poetry lives in the breath, the Spirit, whereas prose resides in the mind. Poetry is patient, requires patience, is comfortable in mystery, comfortable turning in a widening gyre, while prose wants only succinct clarity and focus. Prose puffs up, but poetry requires humility.
God wrote in poetry rather than prose, because poetry requires meditation; it demands us entirely because all we have is our time. Reading the Word of God enlightens, strengthens, and delights day and night. Meaning and glory are heavy, and there is no shortcut to acquiring them. Certainly some truths are more immediate than others, particularly if sound, meter, image, and allusions have been reduced or eliminated for the sake of time, but simple does not equal immediate, nor does easy mean effective, for beauty is plain to see and yet there’s a power to it that is immediate, weighty, and beyond reason.
Reality is Trinitarian. We are not souls with bodies as if the flesh is a mere husk and the inner self (the content) is all that matters, but we are embodied souls or besouled bodies united and made alive by the Spirit. In the same way, poetry is not a husk hiding the kernel of content that must be stripped to get at the timeless truth within. Poetry is form and content mediated in time.
I am sorry—like the Ancient Mariner, I can feel myself getting carried away. I did not encounter Death and his consort playing dice for my soul, but I did recently reread “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats. In that poem he describes a scene frozen in time on an urn. It is more glorious to him than reality because “When old age shall this generation waste, / Thou shalt remain.” The tune played by the piper on the urn cannot be heard and thus cannot fade. Spring on the urn lasts forever. The Lover’s love and the Beloved’s beauty will endure. For Keats, the material world cannot compete with timelessness.
But I am not convinced by his unkissed lips of eternal springtime. I’ll take all the “breathing human passion” that Keats bemoans.[1] Everybody wants timeless truth, the unadorned, unmediated prose, but that is impossible, for we live and move and have our being in the Word, the Spirited Word of the Father (Ac 17:28).
God, the Ancient of Days, has spoken, and the Word was made flesh. I cannot give up on a world wherein God has anchored himself; therefore, Keats can take his “unheard melodies” and his timelessness and (ahem) place them gently in his urn. Give me sound passing through air in sequence to mark the vellum of my ear. Give me the age after age, the dust to dust, and the encore of resurrection. Give me poetry, for eternity is written on our bloody beating hearts, and the Spirit is in our lungs, and how can we keep from singing?
Remy Wilkins teaches at Geneva Academy in Monroe, Louisiana and the author of two middle grade novels, Strays (Canon Press, 2017) and Hush-Hush.
[1] Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked that Poetry “presupposes a more continuous state of passion.” I like this more, presuming he did not mean some incorporeal passion.
Whenever the luminaries gather to hold forth on the glorious things I feel like Coleridge’s bright-eyed and wild-bearded Ancient Mariner accosting guests at a wedding feast. To be clear, I was invited, but my qualities put me quite out of place among such company. Nonetheless, you must listen to my tale.
I have two small comments to contribute to Mr. Higgins’s fine piece. The first point, obliquely admitted but in need of some harping, is that the entire Bible is poetry. Every word a golden apple, fitly spoken, set in silver. Certainly there are discreet poems within, collections of poems, book length poems, but the Bible is richly woven together, poetry through and through. In light of Mr. Esolen’s excellent piece on narrative, I won’t belabor this but only make one small point.
The Bible’s poetry begins with the tidy composition of Genesis 1:1, which is composed of seven words, twenty-eight letters (7x4), and is written in irregular word order so that Elohim, God, is in the middle of the verse: “In the beginning created God the heavens and the earth.” God right in the midst, I wonder if it foreshadows anything…
My second comment is a mild niggle, perhaps not even a full niggle, perhaps just a leaf of a niggle, but I have to express my dissatisfaction with the idea of hiddenness as the chief attribute of poetry. It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, yes, but that isn’t the sole glory. Poetry can hide, but the greater attribute of poetry, the reason that it has been the prime mode of written pursuits for most of human history, is that it reveals.
Compression, too, gives this impression. If something is compressed then it is the glory of readers to decompress, to unpack, to analyze. I’m uncomfortable with vivisection being the primary act for poetry readers. It makes the reading of poetry primarily a chore, with the chief value in the decoding. Mr. Higgins admits this, stating, “the tools of compression make comprehension more difficult, or perhaps more accurately, more delightful.” Yes, “delightful” is more accurate, for the soul of poetry is found less in labor and more in leisure. Poetry is more like scaling a mountain than strip-mining. That’s not to say that there’s no digging into things, no analysis.
I keep going back to the land of Havilah, where there is gold, and the gold of that land is good. The gold of that land is useful, but God didn’t say that. The gold of that land is valuable, but he didn’t say that either. The gold of that land requires hard work, but that’s not what he notes. What he said was, the gold of that land is good. The light is good, the sun, moon, and stars are good, man in community is good, and so also the gold of that land. A definition that emphasizes hiddenness or compression focuses too closely on the “concentrated” and less on the “excess.” All the fun’s in how you say a thing. All work and no play makes us all dull boys. More on this anon, but first, a greater mystery must be pondered.
Anytime the definition of poetry is discussed and her nature and powers parsed, I get lost amidst the forest of meter and meaning and find myself wondering, “What actually is this strange creature called prose?” The word comes from the Latin prosa oratio, which means straightforward or direct speech and seems to be understood as the foundational language upon which poetry builds her spires. But if poetry is repetition and compression, then what doesn’t qualify?
Ideographic scripts have been sculpted, transliterated, and set in the gardens of our time as a symbol of sound. Phonemes assigned to these runes are inspirated by the flexible seashells of our mouths and abracadabra all things. Strings of words are incanted and the enchanted seed of meaning springs up, beanstalking to the heavens.
So, is there ever pure literal language, dead, cut, and dried? Is there any language that isn’t built with the magic of metaphor upon the fertile soil of sound? Is it possible to have empty letters arranged in rows without at least some compression, without any repetition? Namely, is it possible for prose to actually exist?
I have my doubts. A mundane note, because it is mundane, yet it holds some remnant of the music of spheres. Is there anything so compressed as quiddity? The most boring sentence I’ve encountered, tendentiously stupid, is “This page intentionally left blank.”And yet—what thrilling metrics! What cheekiness! What in the world? The dullest of phonebooks is an epic, a literal epoch, a mix of ephemera and eternality, with innumerable connections, some of which are long distance!
My intent is not to lower the tennis net of poetry so that any phonetics that bounce qualify as a poem. My move is secondarily to highlight that something is missing if poetry is only repetition and compression at a greater level than prose, and (primarily) I want to deny prose the status of the fundament. If poetry is the mere gussying up of prose, the elitist version of language, or a sheen of esoterica to disguise plain truth—if there is such a thing as “plain truth”—then poetry deserves its place in the dusty attic of the ivory tower. Even worse, if poetry evolved out of primordial prose, from imago dust to imago Dei through some process of selection, then surely some heterodoxy is at hand, surely some Norm Chomsky is at hand.
If God’s essence is essentially poetic, as was argued, and God is Trinity, which is reflected in man’s body, soul, and spirit, then the essence of poetry must also be tripartite (1 Thess 5:23; Heb 4:12). There seems to be some third component that is missing. Returning to the previous mystery might help us uncover it.
My definition of prose is a text that is focused on a singular dimension of meaning in service to a particular point in simple form in order to reduce the investment of time required in learning. The further it widens its focus and/or complicates its form, the richer its poetry. This leads me to suspect that the key difference between poetry and prose is time.
Poetry resists summary. It is more than a sum of its parts; analyzed and atomized, something is lost. Poetry is an experience in a way that prose is not. Poetry must be passed through like music. There are no CliffsNotes for cantatas. Poetry lives in the breath, the Spirit, whereas prose resides in the mind. Poetry is patient, requires patience, is comfortable in mystery, comfortable turning in a widening gyre, while prose wants only succinct clarity and focus. Prose puffs up, but poetry requires humility.
God wrote in poetry rather than prose, because poetry requires meditation; it demands us entirely because all we have is our time. Reading the Word of God enlightens, strengthens, and delights day and night. Meaning and glory are heavy, and there is no shortcut to acquiring them. Certainly some truths are more immediate than others, particularly if sound, meter, image, and allusions have been reduced or eliminated for the sake of time, but simple does not equal immediate, nor does easy mean effective, for beauty is plain to see and yet there’s a power to it that is immediate, weighty, and beyond reason.
Reality is Trinitarian. We are not souls with bodies as if the flesh is a mere husk and the inner self (the content) is all that matters, but we are embodied souls or besouled bodies united and made alive by the Spirit. In the same way, poetry is not a husk hiding the kernel of content that must be stripped to get at the timeless truth within. Poetry is form and content mediated in time.
I am sorry—like the Ancient Mariner, I can feel myself getting carried away. I did not encounter Death and his consort playing dice for my soul, but I did recently reread “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats. In that poem he describes a scene frozen in time on an urn. It is more glorious to him than reality because “When old age shall this generation waste, / Thou shalt remain.” The tune played by the piper on the urn cannot be heard and thus cannot fade. Spring on the urn lasts forever. The Lover’s love and the Beloved’s beauty will endure. For Keats, the material world cannot compete with timelessness.
But I am not convinced by his unkissed lips of eternal springtime. I’ll take all the “breathing human passion” that Keats bemoans.[1] Everybody wants timeless truth, the unadorned, unmediated prose, but that is impossible, for we live and move and have our being in the Word, the Spirited Word of the Father (Ac 17:28).
God, the Ancient of Days, has spoken, and the Word was made flesh. I cannot give up on a world wherein God has anchored himself; therefore, Keats can take his “unheard melodies” and his timelessness and (ahem) place them gently in his urn. Give me sound passing through air in sequence to mark the vellum of my ear. Give me the age after age, the dust to dust, and the encore of resurrection. Give me poetry, for eternity is written on our bloody beating hearts, and the Spirit is in our lungs, and how can we keep from singing?
Remy Wilkins teaches at Geneva Academy in Monroe, Louisiana and the author of two middle grade novels, Strays (Canon Press, 2017) and Hush-Hush.
[1] Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked that Poetry “presupposes a more continuous state of passion.” I like this more, presuming he did not mean some incorporeal passion.
-->