Orland Evangelical Free Church | Why Should Christians Read Poetry?

When answering the question of why Christians should read poetry I think I should first address this more immediate and general question: Why should anyone have to read poetry? I would guess that the average person, Christian or not, thinks that poetry is for the kind of individual who is not very adept socially, so she delves into volumes of Emily Dickenson or Robert Browning for the kind of emotional response she can not stimulate with fellow human beings. Or else this person is angry and feels victimized by ignorant people everywhere, so he reads long rants in free verse and finds a wealth of meaning in obtuse and maybe even unintelligible images with the kind of self-importance indulged by someone who is always willing to be offended.

But poetry is not an identity. Contrary to what you may learn from these stereotypes or from your professors in college who abuse the great poets by analyzing them out of relevance, poetry is an emotional and intellectual diversion. Sometimes it is more intellectual than emotional and sometimes the other way around, but either way it diverts you from the mundane and makes you consider life slowly and carefully. Though the poet, the form and the period may differ, the following essentials of poetry remain the same.

Poetry is music on the page. Consider the following poem, "Nurse's Song," taken from Songs of Experience by the late 18^th century English poet William Blake.

When the voices of children are heard on the green

And whisp'rings are in the dale,

The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,

My face turns green and pale.

Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,

And the dews of night arise;

Your spring and your day are wasted in play,

And your winter and night in disguise.

(The Poetical Works of William Blake, London: Oxford University Press, 1960, p 83.)

Think about the first line. When you read it you probably emphasized the first syllable in "voices", the first syllable in "children" and the words "heard" and "green":

"When the voices of children are heard on the green"

And in the second line you probably emphasized the first syllable in "whisp'ring's", and the words "in" and "dale":

"And whisp'rings are in the dale"

The construction of the poem (I mean the arrangement of words) is set to rigid rhythm that creates a kind of rise and fall in your voice when you read it. You emphasize the words a certain way because that is how you would normally pronounce them. It is Blake who put them together to give the poem that melodic kind of feel.

Poets take the natural, or sometimes even common, constructions of their language and turn them into music (and just as there are many different kinds of literal music, there are many different kinds of music on the page). This is especially important to remember concerning poets of different times, whose use of language may seem stilted.

In his time, for example, William Shakespeare was not a sadistic snob who tortured young people with his plays. He was popular entertainment, and the language that we find difficult to understand was the language that broke the hearts and opened the minds of his own generation. Shakespeare's works continue to do so today only now the burden is on the audience (though more lightly than they themselves believe) to rise to the occasion his use of the English language presents.

All poetry can appear challenging at times because poets are economists in the management of words and are able to convey a lot with a little. Look again at Blake's poem, at the word "green" in the first stanza. Green commonly describes how something looks, a place for example. But in the first line green is the place, a field where the children play, which also happens to be green. In other words, green is commonly an adjective that, in this case, functions as a noun without losing its literal meaning as an adjective. So in one word Blake gives us both a place and the look of that place.

In the fourth line "green" returns to its original function as an adjective describing the face of the nurse who is the speaker of the poem. But just because "green" is an adjective again doesn't mean that it refers to color. It is unlikely that a face can be two colors at once (green and pale), even in a poem. Rather "green" refers to innocence.

To derive this meaning we don't need to know that innocence is a possible definition of green because the context the poem creates around the word makes the meaning clear. First, the nurse is thinking of her childhood when her "face turns green and pale", but more strikingly the only other time the word green is used in this poem is as the place where children are. Her face doesn't turn a color, it becomes like that of a child's. So not only is Blake able to convey a place and the look of that place, but also the emotional implications that place has on the speaker of the poem. With one word.

Now here I have to be careful. When a writer starts using phrases like "emotional implications," it's usually assumed he's pumping with philosophical adrenaline and ready to lead you into his personal labyrinth of Interpretation. Don't worry. I'm not that writer.

I don't read poetry so much for what it makes me conclude as for what it makes me ask. To return to Blake, what do we know about the poem? The song is sung by a nurse (a nanny) and the subject is children (presumably the ones she's taking care of) and childhood. But why does her face become like a child's (innocent) and pale (fear) when she thinks of her own youth? What is the reason for her cynicism when she tells the children their day is "wasted in play"? And what is the meaning behind that mysterious word "disguise"?

There are answers to these questions, of course, but they are not immediate and not easily defined. You might say, for example, that Blake's poem is about the carefree life of youth versus the careworn life of adulthood. Well, yeah, ok, sure, what else can you tell me? Can you tell me what Blake says about the nature of this divide? Do you know, from the poem, how it comes about? And have you figured anything out about that word "disguise" that haunts the end of the poem?

A curious thing happens when you start answering questions about poems. You ask more questions. In other words poetry makes you think. Of course, you don't have to think if you don't want to. You can always write poetry off as too intellectual and too smug, but my guess is you're reacting to the stereotypical people surrounding poetry not the poetry itself. Let me ease your mind on this point. Thinking about poetry does not mean that you have to sit in group of people and nod your head at every statement uttered no matter how ridiculous and say "Hmmmm" and smile with contentment. It just means you have to think, and the more alone you are when you do it the better off you'll be.

This point has probably been made many times before, but it's always worth making again: our culture leaves little room for careful thinking. If it can't be condensed to a sound bite for the evening news, then it's not worth considering. Look around you and you'll see there's barely an institution left, organized or cultural, that allows time to think. But there is one person who encourages, even demands it. He is your God.

Grab a concordance and look up all the places in scripture where the word "meditate" is used. To point to just one example Psalm 1:2 says the righteous man meditates on the law day and night. The word meditate means to murmur and, by implication, to ponder. The idea, for me, is of someone so engrossed in thought that he talks to himself. God wants you to be a slow, careful thinker.

I'm not saying that poems are as good as scripture or that poetical-ness is next to godliness. But I am saying that reading poetry helps you develop the skill of thinking slowly, of meditating. Something happens when you consider a word and its meaning in the context in which someone else has placed it. You step outside of yourself. You're forced to consider not just the word itself but the person who put it there. You have to try and get inside that person's skull to understand why he or she put that word there and what he or she meant by it. And when you've truly come to an accurate account of what someone else is saying, you find you're a larger person for it. You can see the lives around you grow proportionately.