Connections and contemplation in poetry and prayer
There are essentially two kinds of poems about prayer. There are poems addressed to God, which are prayer-poems and also poems about prayer and how we pray.
David Yezzi states that: “Prayers and poems share an uncanny family resemblance. In fact, they look so much alike at times they could be thought of as identical twins separated in childhood.” He notes that, “The common origins of poetry and prayer date back at least to the second millennium B.C., when the two functioned seamlessly as one expression.”
Similarly, Derek Rotty has written that the: “idea of making poetry into prayer has ancient roots, as far back as the choral chants of Greek theater. Yet, it was in the Hebraic tradition that poetry became prayer in a specific way. The Psalms, ancient Hebrew poems mostly attributed to King David, became the prayer book for the worship of the Jewish people. These Psalms contain the gamut of human emotions: from love to despair; from joy to sorry; from cries for protection to cries for mercy after grave sin.”
Roughly 33% of the Bible is poetry, including songs, reflective poetry, and the passionate, politically resistant poetry of the prophets. Six books in the Bible are known as books of poetry: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, and Lamentations. Job is a story about an innocent man who loses everything but who concedes that God’s wisdom operates at a scale that sometimes we can’t see. Proverbs is a collection of wise sayings from the ancient near east, many of which are associated with the wise King Solomon. Ecclesiastes explores the unpredictability of life. The book of Psalms is a five-volume collection of poems that the Jews used to worship and understand God. The Song of Songs is a romance poem that paints a picture of paradise found in human love. Lamentations is a collection of five dirges, each of which mourns the fall of Jerusalem.
Poet Gideon Heugh notes that: “The Bible brims with the poetic …
When the prophets are speaking out the voice of God, the text switches from prose to poetry. It’s as though the divine utterance is simply too holy, too awesome to be expressed in normal terms.
Words have immense power. In Genesis 1, God speaks creation into being. It isn’t forged or constructed or simply zapped into place. Words create worlds.
Poetry harnesses the creative potency of language. The fullness of words are brought to bear on a single idea, feeling or moment – helping open our eyes and hearts to the depths of life. It can also help us to see life from another person’s perspective … Poetry builds empathy.”
Yezzi goes on to note Jacques and Raïssa Maritain as writing that “very often saintly souls who have had the experience of spiritual things have also received the graceful gift of speaking of it in a beautiful, persuasive and luminous way” and says that “many poems—by Hopkins, Herbert, Donne, Eliot, and others—either take the form of prayers or have [a] prayer-like effect.”
Similarly, Jahan Ramazani argues that “Whether atheist, agnostic, or of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other heritage, poets frequently both mimic and interrogate prayer. From Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and James Weldon Johnson, to George Oppen, Louise Glück, Agha Shahid Ali, A. K. Ramanujan, and Charles Wright, poets interlace poetry with prayer, drawing on its apostrophe, intimate address, awed colloquy, solemn petition, musical recursiveness, and other features.”
Why is this so? A conference on ‘Poetry and Prayer’ put it like this: “The analogy and continuity between poetry and prayer, the poetical and the mystical, has often been discussed. The psychological mechanism used by grace to raise us to prayer is, Henry Bremond wrote, the same as that set in motion in poetic experience. Both poetry and prayer are rooted in an inner experience of concrete and fundamental values so that both invite, using the language of John Henry Newman, a real rather than a notional assent. Reading a poem can be perceived as a prayerful experience. W.H. Auden wrote: ‘to pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention — on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God — that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.’”
Ellen McGrath Smith notes that many poets: “invoke the spiritual writing of Simone Weil, including her assertion that ‘absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’ This … broadens the possibility for poetry as prayer, regardless of content, since writing poetry is an act of acute mindfulness.” Weil herself wrote that: “Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry.”
Additionally, Abigail Carroll notes that: “Prayer has often been compared to poetry, and with good reason. Like poetry, prayer emphasizes careful choice of words. Because of the careful, deliberated choices each word represents, the language of prayer, like the language of poetry, carries a greater amount of meaning than casual conversation or mere prose. The words of a prayer are thick with significance, pregnant with possibility. Like poetry, prayer contains pause. In both modes of expression, the silence surrounding words is as important as the words themselves. And in their own ways, both poetry and prayer engage the spirit. They are not merely a fanciful description of beauty on the one hand, and on the other hand, a functional request for the divine provision of needs, but occasions for deeply engaging the soul.”
Gregory Orr says that: “Writing a poem can save your life, and reading a poem can show you that you are not alone. Someone else felt this. Someone else went through what you are going through and they survived, even triumphed. The poem is the proof of that survival and triumph.”
He also suggests that: “The making of poems is the making of meanings. To write a lyric poem is to take the confusion and chaos inside you and translate it into words. When you suffer trauma, you mostly do that passively, as a victim. But when you translate that experience into words and shape it, you become active. You are no longer a passive endurer of experience, but an active shaper of it. You’ve redeemed something from that chaos.”
Finally, Malcolm Guite argues that what we commonly find in poetry are moments of transfiguration; “those moments when the mirror a poem holds up becomes a window into the Divine.” His argument is that poetry often, perhaps because of its very nature and form, goes beyond the comparatively modest task, which Shakespeare ascribed to it in Hamlet, of ‘holding a mirror up to nature,’ by becoming “a window into the mystery which is both in and beyond nature” and that “from that window sometimes shines a more than earthly light that suddenly transforms, transfigures all the earthly things it falls upon.”
Finally, given the links we have explored between poetry and prayer, how can we read poetry in a prayerful manner? Heugh writes about praying through poems suggesting that: “You cannot rush when reading a poem; it forces you to slow down, to dwell, to be present. Because poetry so wonderfully and effectively focuses our attention, it can be a powerful medium through which we can pray.”
Two spiritual exercises involving the reading of poetry incorporate several of these insights and approaches:
Spiritual exercise 1
Choose a poem that focuses on an issue that you think God might be placing on your heart.
Step one – once you have chosen your poem, say a brief and simple prayer inviting the Holy Spirit to speak to you through it.
Step two – read the poem, slowly, and out loud if you can. Once you have finished, note down a particular line or phrase that you find particularly moving or interesting.
Step three – read the poem a second time. Once you have, think of a story or a moment from your own life that this reminds you of. How can you relate the poem to your own experience?
Step four – read the poem for a third and final time. Think of an action that the Holy Spirit might be asking you to take, or change it is asking you to make through the poem.
Step five – pray. Thank God for the poem and for what it has been telling you. Ask God to help you take the action that you considered in the previous step.”
Spiritual exercise 2
- Quiet yourself and imagine dropping down into the dark abundant well of your soul.
- Silently read the poem completely through once.
- Read the poem out loud.
- Slowly read the poem again silently, savouring the phrases, the words, the feel, the taste of it.
- On a blank piece of paper or on a page in your journal, complete the following:
- The first image that arose in me as I read this poem was…
- My immediate feelings after reading this poem are…
- The reality that has been unearthed for me by reading this poem is…
- If I were to paint a picture about this poem I would include my work of art…
- If I were to add a line of my own somewhere in this poem it would be…
- Read the poem out loud again, but this time as a prayer to God.
- Sit in silence to see if God has a response to make to you.
- End with your own prayer or poem of thanksgiving.
Poems about prayer include:
- ‘Prayer (I)’ – George Herbert;
- ‘Prayer’ – Carol Ann Duffy;
- ‘Poem 133: The Summer Day’ – Mary Oliver;
- ‘Praying’ – Mary Oliver;
- ‘Prayer is like watching for the kingfisher’ – Ann Lewin.
Prayer-poems include:
- ‘Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person’d God’ – John Donne;
- ‘Eleven Addresses to the Lord: 3’ – John Berryman;
- ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend’ – Gerard Manley Hopkins;
- ‘Conversations: 2’ – Tasos Leivaditis;
- ‘Conversations: 3’ – Tasos Leivaditis.
Jonathan Evens is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell and Area Dean of Basildon. Previously Associate Vicar for HeartEdge at St Martin-in-the-Fields, he was involved in developing HeartEdge as an international and ecumenical network of churches engaging congregations with culture, compassion and commerce. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief, and writes regularly on the visual arts and The Arts more generally for national arts and church media including Artlyst, ArtWay and Church Times. He blogs at joninbetween.blogspot.com.
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