The Soul: A Poem You Must Read

Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska offers some lovely thoughts on the Soul, that--while not entirely biblical--doesn't lack for thoughtfulness and power. I'm not a poetry guy, but this one's worth your time, for instance:

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

Appendix A: How to Read a Poem

Edward Hirsch has written a book along these lines.
I like the sound of it.

Image: Good Reads

For the reader who wants to like poetry

Confession

I didn't always like poetry. I hated it.

As a child, I thought poetry was dumb. I thought you had to pause at the end of each line and had to read it in a sing-song voice.

I started liking poetry because, like you and song lyrics, I liked the way the language itself sounds. I liked the way the words tasted when I said them. And it helped to realize the images and themes in poems snake from line to line. I found the more I read poetry aloud and heard poetry read by people who love it and appreciate the forms, the more my own appreciation grew.

Ways to read poetry

Some of the people who helped me love poetry were my college professors. We read poems together. We wrote poems. We read each others’ poems. We commented on what we liked about poems and what we hated. We explicated poems. (It sounds naughty, perhaps, and not to disappoint you, but it just means you take a poem apart, analyze it on various levels, and explain what it means, using lines from the poem to support your analysis.) We illustrated the imagery found in poems on with colored chalk on wall-to-wall chalkboards. We sat in the grass in the shade on sunny days and read poems. We used phony British accents when it seemed appropriate.

So my professors had a lot to do with my gaining a greater appreciation for poetry, but so did my classmates. Every month or so, we held a poetry circle, gathering to share our favorite poems or prose excerpts, often on related themes. In March, for instance, we called our evening, “March Hares and Mad-hatters” and read poems that pertained to madness. In October, we gathered around a bonfire in a sleepy hollow and read spooky stuff.

Recitations

But don't let poetry itself scare you off! One of the reasons I like Billy Collins, and why he appeals to a larger popular audience, is his approachability. His poems are just plain fun to read and he is always poking fun at poets who take themselves too seriously. One of my favorite poems is Collins’s “Litany,” which, as he explains, is a parody of a Western love poetry that compares the beloved to various objects. You can listen to Collins’ reading of the poem, but for a real treat, listen to this three year old recite the poem from memory. That kid knows what poetry is all about.

It’s about the way the words taste on your tongue.

Appendix A: More on Rossetti's Bleak Midwinter

Having recently considered Christina Rossetti's carol, "In the Bleak Midwinter," I was interested to read Sara's observations on the same over at Transpositions:

And while [Annie]Lennox might want to strip away the ‘religiosity’ of the hymns she covers, one cannot ignore the theological implications that Rosetti is addressing in this hymn and the resulting reminder of what the Christmas season prepares us to receive.

"In the Bleak Midwinter:" A Reading of Rossetti's Carol

"Winter in the Ozarks" by R. Newton, 2008

In one of Rossetti's best known poems* that is also a beloved Christmas carol, Rossetti imagines that it was against the backdrop of “the bleak midwinter” that the ultimate transcendent truth was displayed in the birth of Christ.

“In the Bleak Midwinter” seems indicative of Rossetti’s poetic vision on a whole, encompassing her ideas about art and faith. Here, she uses the physical setting of winter (supposing that Christ was indeed born in December) to correspond with the spiritual state of man in the fall from grace.

The world is bleak and dark and cold, and into this scene comes the Light of the world, illuminating mankind’s existence. In her rendering, Rossetti portrays the humble circumstances into which the King of Kings “comes to reign.” It is as if the material “stable place” and a “mangerful of hay” where Jesus is born are viewed as representations of His own earthly tabernacle.

In this context, it becomes easy to see the world as a whole as that “sacramental universe” to which Ruskin refers. Rossetti, in pointing out the significance of the physical setting for the Incarnation, does function in the role of prophet, giving readers a vision of God’s nature as a Servant of His people that helps us see the humility with which we should approach Him.

When the poet ponders what it is she can give the Christ child, she concludes that, poor as she is, the best gift will be her heart. Of course, this is what God desires of each and every one of His children: a place in our hearts.

And this place for the Truth in our hearts is something the poets-as-prophets such as Christina Rossetti help to evoke.


*To read the complete text of "In the Bleak Midwinter," see Poetry Foundation. To listen to an instrumental arrangement of the carol, try this one by Loreena McKennitt or this one by the Kings College Choir at Cambridge.

Works Cited

Harrison, Antony H. Christina Rossetti in Context. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Packer, Lona Mosk. Christina Rossetti. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963.
Christina Rossetti: An Overview. Victorian Web, 2009.

"That angelic demon of a Christina"

"A Christmas Carol" by D.G. Rossetti, 1867

In the spirit of Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, today is the 180th birthday of Christina Rossetti. A prominent member of the Victorian canon, Rossetti was born in England in 1830 to an Italian émigré and his wife. She began writing poetry at a young age but also displayed such a strong temper so as to provoke her father to call her “that angelic little demon of a Christina.”

Always grappling with the paradoxes of the human experience and Christian faith, Rossetti found in her poetry a place of meditation. For her, art, like faith was a matter of both beauty and truth. Even a cursory glance at Rossetti’s poetry will assure a reader of one thing: her personal faith does play a crucial role, not only in her poetic vision, but in her purpose for expressing that vision.

Rossetti is not merely concerned with didacticisms or self-expression but instead cares to explore both her world and her heart in intimate detail as she attempts to understand the ways of God. For her, as for Ruskin (19th century art critic) the physical world and personal experience do seem to afford glimpses of the divine nature.

When these glimpses are observed and portrayed by the artist or the poet, the renderings become the means of grace, conduits, as it were, through which truth may flow. And, as Antony Harrison points out with regards to Ruskin’s philosophy, the poet herself becomes something of a prophet.