The sister of prayer: Why Catholics shouldn’t give up on poetry

One night in September I gave a talk to an audience of one hundred in a parish of Saskatoon, Canada. The next day I went on to teach eighty of those parishioners on the same theme. My topic, given the numbers involved and their enthusiasm, might surprise you: it was poetry.

People think that poetry has fallen out of fashion. In an age of social media, all art forms are evolving with the reduced attention spans of their audience. For poetry, this presents a particular problem. You see, poetry is slow. It is often about stillness. It requires very pure attention.

Good poetry holds mystery – it shouldn’t, as John Keats pointed out, rush after easy conclusions. All of these characteristics may remind you of something else. That’s right – poetry’s sister is prayer. Both require a surrender to something that often seems out of our reach.

But why should we, as Catholics, bother with poetry?

I know why I bothered with it, in my atheist days. As a psychiatric nurse in London, it was reading poetry that calmed me. It was writing poetry that was my almost obsessive way of finding coherence in chaos.

I wanted to find form and truth in situations so brutal – the washing of corpses, forced injections, the catalogue of self-harming – that the natural response was to look away. But as a budding poet I felt that my job was to look so hard at those situations that I stumbled on beauty.

There is a line by Dodie Smith in her wise novel I Capture the Castle which made me see, in the spring of my conversion to the Catholic Faith, how religion and art (specifically, for me, poetry) share the same goal:

“Religion is an art,” she writes, “the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.”

It was these lines which made me understand that poetry was actually about communicating with God.

My search for the right word, the right metaphor, was about trying to see with God’s eyes. God, I realised, is the uber-Poet. He had already done what I had been forever trying to do: He knows every connection (which is what poets are searching for through metaphor).

He knows the world – and me – like nothing and no one else, and it is that knowing that artists, all artists, even the irreligious, are essentially striving for. Poetry was reaching out to Him who already knew the truth. In my writing I was attempting to join my words to God’s poem.

As I told my audience in Saskatoon that night, there is no doubt that poetry – above all the arts – is God’s privileged way of speaking to us. That’s not to say that music (like Beethoven’s late quartets or Bach’s St Matthew Passion) can’t also speak of the divine.

Art, like Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew, can express something of the supernatural too. But it is clear that God uses poetry specifically, and its methods, to reveal himself. In the Old Testament (the Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Job, Wisdom, etc.) poetry is often the divine choice for teaching. Even Jesus’ use of parables relies on poetic constructs.

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Through the poetry of Scripture and mystical experience, God is expressing to us what is fundamentally inexpressible. Think of the prologue to St John’s Gospel (which many scholars believe began life as a poetic hymn). It dares to speak of concepts which no human can fully understand: it seeks to communicate the ineffable through image and the cadences of poetry.

This art of conveying what is impossible to convey is something that all poets – in an infinitesimally smaller manner – are always striving to do.

Once I became Catholic, I stumbled on poetry everywhere. Like most poets I was drawn to the mystics, and read St Teresa of Avila, St John of the Cross and St Thérèse of Lisieux. I studied Aquinas and gobbled up Merton. All of these writers wrote poetry.

I prayed the Psalms with their sublime metaphors, and noted each symbol of the Mass (the purple for penance, the lilies for purity, the “dewfall” of the Spirit…). Catholicism’s prayers are, likewise, highly poetic. We live in a “valley of tears” and are “inebriated” by Christ’s blood.

It seemed a daunting but delightful thing when Word on Fire, the US-based Catholic media organisation founded by Bishop Robert Barron, approached me to edit an anthology of Great Catholic Poems. What I discovered, as I trawled 2,000 years and many countries, was that Catholic poets have used their craft in diverse ways, and the genre has evolved with broader literary fashions.

Apart from the Virgin Mary – who was the first Catholic poet – with her Magnificat, our oldest anthologised poet is Saint Ephrem. He, like Sts Gregory of Nazianzus and Ambrose, used poetry to fight heresies and establish theological truths.

But the poetic expression of faith spread quickly to include the vivid awareness of God-in-nature of the early Irish poets (St Columba, for example, hears the waves of the sea “chant(ing) music to their Father”), and the lucid voicing of mystical experience by Hadewijch, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Hildegard of Bingen and St Symeon (“We awaken in Christ’s body,” Symeon writes, “as Christ awakens our bodies…”).

Ancient poems like the eighth-century The Dream of the Rood speak of a very Catholic attitude to holy objects (“I trembled,” the Cross says, “as His arms went round me.” And Richard Crashawe, St John of the Cross and Vittoria Colonna, among many others, give luminous voice to the sensuality of the faith (“the holy nails,” writes Colonna, “will be my pens,/ my ink will be his precious/ Blood”).

What also astounded me, as the poems came together, was how the anthology showed the history of the Faith in poetic terms. We discover the remedy for early heresy, yes, but we also witness the Reformation martyrs’ fate through St Henry Walpole and St Robert Southwell.

We see post Reformation poets like John Dryden and Alexander Pope vehemently defend the faith, and discover the aching desire of the “Tragic Generation” – Oscar Wilde, Lionel Johnson and Earnest Dowson –for a life of peace and sanctity.

We recognise the seeds of literary modernism in our greatest English language poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. We discover that even the secularity of high modernism does not quell fervent religious poetry –see Edith Sitwell’s Still Falls the Rain or David Jones’s A, a, a, Domine Deus. The late 20th-century Scottish poet George Mackay Brown concludes the anthology’s extraordinary journey with his pared down thoughts on eternity.

“But poetry is difficult,” people down the centuries have complained. Still, it is more than worth our while to engage with its language. The 100 Great Catholic Poems anthology comes with a commentary designed to make each poem accessible to the most poetry-averse reader. But perhaps it is even more important to bear in mind that the mystery of any poem can never be entirely resolved.

And living with mystery is essential for any Catholic.

“It blew my mind,” said an elderly Saskatoon parishioner after our day reading St John of the Cross, Francis Thompson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. “I don’t know how else to say it.”

Sometimes, metaphor is the only way.

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Sally Read is an award-winning author and editor of 100 Great Catholic Poems. Her latest book, The Mary Pages, a literary memoir, is available from Word on Fire this Autumn. Her website is sallyread.net.

Photo: ‘Annunciation’ fresco by Fra Angelico; image from museitoscana.cultura.gov.it.

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