The Peripatetic Preacher Visits the Land of Poetry

I have been thinking of the debasement of our language in quite appalling ways over my lifetime. Now that I live in Southern California, the word “like” has become in my ears as ubiquitous as the word “and” or “a”. Nothing here is actually ever spoken of being done; it is always “like” done, as in “I like went to the store to like buy some clothes, and the clerk like didn’t help me at like all!” The word “like” has become the place keeper in a sentence, replacing the formerly impotent “uhhh.” This is to say nothing of the truly maddening random use of the apostrophe, especially in the possessive “its” (where it is not needed or wanted) or in the possessive “John’s” (where it is both needed and wanted). And what about the use of “your” for “you’re”? I could go on, but that is enough of my pedantry for today.

Or is it merely pedantry, a kind of elitism that demonstrates a snobbishness more disgusting than the slaughtering of the language? Clearly, to some that is all too true. The current occupant of the White House has chosen his twitter feed as the primary way that he reveals his thoughts and feelings about all manner of policies as well as small-minded paybacks for his political enemies. These brief bursts of fury and outrage are riddled with misspellings and falsehoods that normally would make a reader blush, but appear for him to be all in a day’s work. This is English debased if ever that word might be used to describe the spoiling and rending of the fabric of language.

Because you and I swim in language, and because language is the chief tool of the preacher, as well as of any English speaker, I do not at all think of my horror at this tragedy as mere pedantry. Something terrible is happening to our speech and thus to our thought. We are, in many ways, what we say, and if what we say is imprecise gobbledegook, then it follows as the night the day that what we think is impoverished and well-nigh nonsense. Let me therefore suggest something radical—a return to the charms and delights of poetry. No, I do not mean Helen Steiner Rice on the inside of Hallmark cards. I mean Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, Eliot, Larkin, Oliver, or any of the more modern practitioners of this fading art who spend their days observing, thinking, and expressing their observations and thoughts in precise, well-honed, expertly chosen words and phrases that illuminate and delight the heart and mind of any who read them. I do not wish to tell you which of these persons to sample, though a day without Shakespeare is a day without sunshine. Still, you may have your favorites, poets who are not my cup if tea but wordsmiths who speak straight to you. I want to share a few of my poetic pleasures, those that a lifetime of reading have embossed on my brain. I can quote these from memory, not because I have a superior memory, but because the words have refused to slip away from me, suggesting their deep resonance in my life.

“Oh, that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew;

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ‘gainst self slaughter.”

These familiar lines from one of Hamlet’s soliloquies are clear enough in meaning; the melancholy Dane wishes he could either simply melt away or even kill himself to avoid the demands of his father’s angry ghost that he murder his brother, Claudius, who himself has murdered Hamlet’s father, and has usurped both the crown of Denmark and the queen, Hamlet’s mother. But his body is all too solid (though now “sullied” by the ghost’s demands), and the Christian proscription against suicide is very strong. But poetry is far more than an expression of a meaning by using too many words. Poets choose their words to enlighten, to delight, to fix feelings in the heart. The meaning is: “I wish I could disappear or kill myself,” but how much more than that is packed into Shakespeare’s prescient lines! Words like these contain memorable power; I will always remember them after having first read them perhaps sixty years ago.

“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, thou foster-child of silence and slow time; Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme.”

I first read this wonderful John Keats poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in high school, perhaps in my sophomore year, and I have never forgotten its opening gambit. Keats has looked at an ancient Greek urn, and has expressed his observed feelings with astonishing lucidity and playful anthropomorphism. The object takes on a nearly human visage under his poetic gaze, as the vase becomes “an unravish’d bride of quietness,” an unsullied beauty, dressed in quiet and solitude, a “foster-child” of the union of quiet and silence and “slow time.” Across the two millennia and more since its creation, the poet finds in his looking a focus on its silent witness both to the time of its creation and its gift of quiet to Keats’ own life and time. And, he quickly admits, that the urn itself tells the tale of its life “more sweetly than our rhyme,” in other words much better than the poet could ever express it. I admit to never having looked at an ancient piece of pottery without calling these lines to mind, a warning that the object has more power than any verbal expression can match.

“Let us go then you and I,
when the evening is spread out against the sky,

like a patient etherized upon a table.

These are the opening lines of one of the twentieth-century’s most famous poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot. It is one of the finest poetic portrayals of a sad aging, though it was written while the poet was barely in his twenties. The opening is devastating in its irony, beginning with a typical romantic walk under the evening sky. But suddenly the sky is described as one like an anesthetized patient, ready for surgery, and all romance drops away from the scene. We immediately know that we are in the hands of a poet who is ready to lead us a chase through our aging lives, and is likely to challenge our simple and overly romantic notions of that inevitable process. Later, he will say, “I grow old, I grow old; I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” an observation of old men, whose stomachs have grown large, and whose posture has become hunched, causing them to roll up their pants legs in compensation for these changes. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Better to have been a lobster without knowledge of the horrors of growing old, thus avoiding all this melancholy reflection. Since now I am nearly seventy-two years old, this haunting poem hoves up into my memory more regularly now as its images rather more closely describe the life I am now living. At least, it warns me not to make too simple this aging process, if I was ever inclined to do.

“Once I am sure there is nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut.”

Thus begins Philip Larkin’s poem, “Church Going.” The agnostic Larkin was not a church goer, but in the poem he rides his bicycle up to one, and steps in to observe the empty space. Is it not delicious how he begins? “Once I am sure nothing is going on” reflects his notion that in fact nothing ever goes on in a church! Still the poem ends with a rather different idea:

“A serious house on serious earth it is
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much can never be obsolete,
Since someone will ever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious
And gravitating with it to this ground….”

From the mouth of the nonbeliever comes this amazing idea that church still represents something serious, a place where compulsions continue to meet, especially that hunger to be more serious, finding her way to this ground, pulled there by the church’s gravity, both energy and central ground. I have long found this description of the essence of a church deeply compelling. And the fact that fewer and fewer people find their ways to any church may suggest as clearly as anything that seriousness is becoming increasingly hidden within us, and the foolishness of the tweet has consumed our longings for something more. I commend these serious thinkers and writers to you, you who seek seriousness, and you preachers who are always on the lookout for words that proclaim and hearten and challenge. Our poets have long been in that business, too.