I went through a period of time where I didn’t appreciate poetry at all. I remember really enjoying it in my childhood–trying my hand at writing it, as well as attempting to tackle Milton while lounging in a plum tree. What happened?
Life, I suppose. And busyness.
Motherhood was overwhelming to me for a number of years. It was all I could do to keep up. As we added more children to the mix, I got better at managing the load of work, but I still found that my mind could only handle certain types of reading.
To be honest, poetry requires a certain quality of heart, one that busyness had crowded out of my soul.
{I’m not writing this to wallow in regret. I’m not sure there is a whole lot I could have done differently, and hindsight is always 20/20 anyhow.}
After listening to Cindy tell us over and over how poetry is the “highest form of thought and writing” enough times, I decided to quit avoiding it. This dovetailed nicely with our commencing with Ambleside Year 1 for the first time {four years ago now}.
For two years straight, I read a poem a day.
And I still didn’t feel the love.
I knew at that point, though, that this was about something lacking in me, not about something lacking in poetry.
I have mentioned before that I only began to love poetry when we finally began to memorize it. I don’t know why that is, but I have speculated that perhaps in order to love something in general, we must love something of its kind in particular. Can I really say I “love people” if I do not love the very real people living in my house? In the same way, how can I learn to “love poetry,” but never know one intimately?
In memorizing, I was forced to become intimate with a poem. Studying it over and over, letting the lines impress themselves upon my heart, I began to appreciate it on its own terms.
And then my children started quoting poetry in conversation.
One of the earliest poems we memorized was Whole Duty of Children by Robert Louis Stevenson:
A child must always say what’s true
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table;
At least as far as he is able.
If I was thinking about something, and didn’t hear my oldest daughter talking to me, she would chide me: “Mommy! Speak when you are spoken to!” Or when a certain preschooler went through a lying stage, certain older siblings would rejoin with reminders that “a child must always say what’s true!”
There’s something to this poetry thing, I would think to myself.
And so it goes.
We’ve been memorizing poetry for two years now, and we have almost two handfuls of poems under our belts. The more we learn, the more I like it.
No. I love it.
I can honestly say that I love poetry now, even though I will also admit I am still a bear of very little brain and do not always understand it all.
I was astounded the other day when I was thinking about Revelation being a poem. No one teaches it that way, you know. I googled the idea of the Bible as poetry, and found varying statistics, but it seems to be agreed upon that the Old Testament is about 40% poetry, while the New Testament is about 30%. Eugene Peterson is telling me that I’m doing Saint John a disservice if I ignore the fact that he wrote Revelation in poetic form, and then I realize that if the Revelation is, as is written, the revelation of Jesus Christ, then John isn’t the only poet.
Jesus is.
God is.
Now that is an interesting idea. When I knew, years ago, that my lack of poetry–my inability to read it and appreciate it and understand it and love it–signified a deficiency in my own character, I did not consider that I was made in the Divine Image, and the Divine is Himself a poet.
Think about it.
Adam is in the Garden, and God puts him into a deep sleep. He pulls out a rib and fashions a woman. Adam awakens, and what is the first thing he does? Adam, the unfallen divine image bearer, speaks in poetry. He called her bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. Adam, the first man, writes a poem at the dawn of time.
And Jesus, the Second Adam, who spent his ministry telling simple stories, reveals Himself to us in the final chapters of the Bible in a blaze of poetry.
At this point, it becomes simple logic.
God is a poet.
We bear His image.
Therefore, we are poets, too.
But not all of us. I once was not.
When we develop the poetic, we bear His image more fully.
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