Poetry and prayer: Parallels of invocation

Spiritual Life, Spring 2000 by Goodwin, Rufus

Like prayers, we can memorize poems and repeat them, learning them like an inner landscape to offset the evil, trouble, and turmoil of everyday life. They awake the I of the beseecher and the Thou of life. This mood of invocation wakes up the inner dependence we have on beauty, truth, and goodness, and helps us actually create it:

0 Attic shape! Fair attitude! With brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought ....

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

--John Keats (1787-1856)

Keats prays to the Grecian Urn here. We are between a prayer and a meditation. The attitude of the soul, the poem, enlivens the moment. This is the kind of waking up of the inner life that the vocative relation, whether addressed to God or no, can bring.

Other poems are even more like prayers, such as St. Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Sun, where he addresses Brother Sun and Sister Moon as live persons. Or take the modern e. e. cumming's verse:

i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any-lifted from the no

of all nothing-human merely being

doubt unimaginable you?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

This is a poem of thanksgiving. The meaning is fresh each time we repeat it.

Invoking Meaning

Meaning, indeed, is the interface between prayer and meditation. In meaning we make an effort not just with the heart but also with the mind to awaken the sense of words so that as we repeat the formula or poem, we are discovering thought afresh.

Take this poem by the Spanish poet Ramon Jimenez. Saying it over and over again can make us ponder the deepest conundrums of our existence and waken in us a sense of our angel:

I am not I,

I am the one

Who walks at my side

Without seeing him

Whom I often visit,

And whom I often forget.

The one who is silent when I speak,

Who gently forgives when I hate,

Who roams about, where I am not,

Who will remain upright when I die.

The inner and incremental effect of both prayer and poetry depend on memorization and repetition. The force of this cannot be overstressed. With the modern loss of both prayer and poetry, we have lost memory and comfort, an anchor in the internal life. Memory and repetition are building blocks of the inward life, just the opposite of the ceaseless change of surfing TV images and external stimuli.

Remember: the days change, a prayer stays the same. This is why words and holiness-wholeness-can be rocks of ages, a fortress in the heart.

The outward world changes. Days change. But the word Grace, constantly repeated, can measure all vicissitudes. It is the same with poems that we have internalized, making life ours in an inward song that no outer circumstances can change. This is that inward landscape of the relaxation response that can be such a great relief against stress, effecting even musculoskeletal, fight-or-flight, and psycho-immunological symptoms.