By Martin L. Smith
Sitting on my balcony the other day with a glass of beer, I found myself breaking into a smile at the memory of the slogan Heineken ran for several decades: “Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.” I have always felt this catchphrase cries out to be adapted to help us realize the power of poetry in developing a vital and imaginative inner life. Poetry is able to refresh the parts of our heart and soul that prose cannot reach! Poetry can penetrate and rouse the richest and deepest dimensions of our humanity. And maybe poetry is more important to us now than ever before as we are bombarded with information through the media, most of it utterly banal—clogging our heads, but not reaching the inner springs of feeling and action deep within.
Many of us have had the experience of responding to poems so viscerally that we are physically and emotionally shaken as they speak to us. We have a heightened sense that somehow the opposites of life – birth and death, connectedness and brokenness, love and fear – are being held together. We hold our breath on the brink of being suffused with meaning. Words glow on the page and like magnets seem to pull us out of our usual harried state into a place where we recognize our own right to be passionate, to be human beings on a divine quest.
Researchers have made some intriguing discoveries. The typical length of the line in poetry in cultures the world over is virtually identical, taking between 2.5 and 3.5 seconds to pronounce. There is a convincing theory that when words convey meaning to us in this short package, followed by a tiny pause before the next line, it allows the input to pass from one hemisphere of the brain to the other, and so our receptivity is fully opened and our consciousness unified. No wonder human culture and religion has placed such value on metred poetry and song in the sharing of meaning, and in ritual. No wonder that pages and pages of text or hours of speech seldom have a fraction of the effect that a short poem committed to memory can have as it lodges in our consciousness and continues to illuminate and challenge us from within.
I am sure I could write an entire spiritual biography by stringing together the poems that came to me unsought as visiting angels at the right time year after year. About 15 poems of Rilke that I learned 40 years ago shaped my whole way of feeling about God: “we feel round rage and desolation the finally enfolding tenderness.” I look through the pages, worn round the edges from use, where I have copied out the poems. Here’s the Tao Te Ching and Li Po. Here are the poems of David Whyte: “always this fire smolders inside. When it remains unlit, the body fills with dense smoke.” e.e. cummings: “all which isn’t singing is mere talking.” Rumi. Mirabai. Machado. W.H. Auden. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Peguy. None of them deliberately researched. We just come upon the poems when we are ready.
In a beautiful poem, Seamus Heaney remembers the counsel given in confession by a Spanish priest: simply, “Read poems as prayers.” Wise man. It sounds simple, but it is actually challenging. We often complain to ourselves that our prayer is dry, we aren’t motivated, we feel distracted. We rationalize our avoidance by telling ourselves that we are in a state of doubt, religion doesn’t feel very real to us at the moment etc. etc. But in fact we are simply refusing to take responsibility for nourishing and stimulating our imaginations, without which prayer is bound to shrivel up. We need to open ourselves to the kind of language that “refreshes the parts” that the prose of everyday working life and entertainment doesn’t reach, the poetry of holy scripture and the ecumenical scriptures given us by poets in the larger human family.
Poetry as source for prayer is not only a solitary practice. It cries out to be shared.
What a marvelous thing it would be if we opened the space in our lives to read and share poetry with one another, and made gifts to one another of the vibrant meaningfulness of the poems that have spoken to us personally. A rather subversive practice, actually, because it would probably have the effect of rendering us even more impatient with the church’s institutional addiction to cliché-ridden “church-speak” and the mind-numbing verbiage generated by its obsessive controversies.
Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is the senior associate rector at St. Columba’s, D.C.