In reading descriptions like these, we look along a writer’s words into his or her view of the world so that sometimes what is familiar to us becomes wondrously strange. L. M. Montgomery, the author of the Anne books, once wrote that “it has always seemed to me, ever since early childhood, that, amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty.”[2] She took that sense and wove it into her description of Anne’s world so that her readers could look through her words and see not just an apple tree in blossom or the sun glinting off a pond but a living mystery, something whose beauty could reawaken a reader to the presence of love at the back of the universe. To see in such a way is to wonder, and to wonder is to have a mind and eyes awake and engaged with the world in its mystery and splendor.
We need our vision rekindled by writers like Lucy Maud or C. S. Lewis or Elizabeth Goudge (whose books are, I think, the slightly more grown-up and very English older sisters of the Anne series), people who looked at the world and understood that it has something to tell us about ultimate reality. We need words to reenchant the world, partly because we have inherited a disenchanted way of seeing. We live in a culture shaped by materialism, by the belief that the physical world has no spiritual meaning and can be entirely explained by the language of science. Even if we believe that God is the creator of the cosmos, we tend more and more to describe it in terms of atoms and inches and measurements rather than in the language of mystery. Like Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the character who embodies what C. S. Lewis considered the worst habits of the modern world, we could easily describe a star just as “a huge ball of flaming gas.”
Like Eustace, we need the sparkle-eyed correction of the much wiser Koriakin, who quickly replies, “That is not what a star is but only what it is made of.”
An encounter with someone like Koriakin in a story or a reading of Psalm 19, with its claim that the heavens actually “declare the glory of God” (verse 1), or the discovery of a few lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem with its enthusiastic burst—“Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! / O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!”—heals our dulled eyes and brightens them to perceive that our world is a realm of startling and daily wonder. We look afresh on stars and trees, on the stuff of home and garden, and even on the ordinary people who bother and bug us every day as beings of mystery, whose freedom and beauty speak to us of the Creator whose image they bear. For as C. S. Lewis wrote in his splendid sermon “The Weight of Glory,” “The dullest, most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.”
Ruth Moon Mari
Ruth is the friend I turn to for poetry, the reader whose insight and good taste are a source of constant enrichment in my reading life. She’s also a dear, kindred-spirited friend whose list of poems I’m delighted to include here.
Poems I Love
“There Are Birds Here” by Jamaal May. I love this poem for the way it captures the feeling of frustration when people refuse to acknowledge the real complexity, including beauty, that is present even in tragic or sad or depressing situations. It reminds me of Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk on the danger of a single story (which I also love but is not poetry).
“Disgraceland” by Mary Karr. A real-feeling poem about how someone stumbles across faith.
“Fairy-tale Logic” by A. E. Stallings. I like the imagery and how the twist at the end links the Christian faith with a fairy tale—it gives me a fresh perspective on the reality of how weird and marvelous our faith tradition is.
“Thanks” by W. S. Merwin. This poem captures for me the feeling of holding in tension the world’s brokenness and beauty, and seeking to be thankful for the beautiful while not ignoring the terrible.
“Thanks” by W. S. Merwin. This poem captures for me the feeling of holding in tension the world’s brokenness and beauty, and seeking to be thankful for the beautiful while not ignoring the terrible.
“Patience” by Kay Ryan. I like the revelation of this poem—“Who would have guessed it is possible that waiting is sustainable”—and that there are so many lessons to be found there.
“Hopeful Angel” by Keith Ratzlaff. I like this for the artistic element (it’s an ekphrastic poem based on a fairly abstract drawing/painting set by Paul Klee) and the embodiment of imperfection—trying hard, not quite getting it right, and trying again.
Two poets I like in general are Christian Wiman and Robert Bringhurst.
We also need good, strong words to liven our wonder because, let’s be honest, we’re just a bit too busy and distracted to notice the gift that existence really is. We live in an age of screens that blink and beep at us unceasingly. We live increasingly in the patterns of an online world that never sleeps. We live with so many distractions—so many things to buy, so many places to go—that we barely have time to sleep, let alone stop long enough to recognize that the smallest moments of the everyday are rich in beauty, steeped in God’s creative presence.
We need to have our attention restored, that holy capacity to be fully present to the moment in which we find ourselves. We need to be summoned back from the many tasks we have yet to do, the endless scroll of the online world, the frantic pace that nips at our heels like a pesky dog. We need to be halted in our frenzied steps and called back to this moment in its possibility, to this day in its shifting seasonal beauty, to this person, irreplaceably precious. The written word, the great works of literature and essay—if we will only engage them for a few moments—have the power to arrest us in this way, to demand our attention, to set us back down in the present with a quieter mind and more attentive eyes.
I learned this afresh at Christmas during the final six months of my three-year degree. My first year in Oxford I had walked the streets in a daze of grateful exultation. There I was, a student at glorious old Oxford, a university I had dreamed of attending all my life. I wandered old English gardens, walking with the pleasant ghosts of Lewis and Tolkien, following them in the long study hours of discovery that brought me to the kind of understanding that was deepening my faith and widening my grasp of grace. But somewhere along the way, the study load, then a part-time job, then the wondrous (but exhausting) business of falling in love and planning a wedding, then the ceiling in our newlywed house falling in, then the back-to-work busyness of the fall shifted me out of that sense of blessedness. There was still so much to enjoy and enjoy to the full—a marriage sweeter than I could have imagined, a new cottage (with a garden!), life in a cobblestoned corner of Oxford—but there was so much work to be done, so little time in which to do it, and so much that exhausted me that I walked my glorious Oxford streets with downcast eyes and a harried heart.
Until I encountered a poem. A radiant poem by a poet who struggled throughout her life with a depression that voided her world of beauty but who managed, in rare, sweet moments, to come to attention, and thus to wonder. Through her hard-fought words, she called me back to attention and to gratefulness, too. I read the poem with a group of women at my college. We had started an Advent poetry group that met once a week for a bit of reading and discussion, our attempt toward creativity and quiet in the midst of our harried lives. We savored that poem, reading Sylvia Plath’s words with thought and care, and as we did, these verses leaped out to grip my mind, describing the way that light can fall, briefly, on a
. . . kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then—
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent[3]
I left our discussion with the sudden feeling that Plath’s “incandescent” light suddenly burned in my own eyes; I looked upon the “inconsequential” elements of my own existence in a newly awakened way. I felt as if I had somehow been living in a tired, dark place in my mind, far away from the ac
tual presence of my ordinary moments. That poem summoned me to attention. I saw my cottage, my husband, my own intense work, the women round me at the table in the light of that “celestial burning.” How precious, how precious the tiniest moments of this life in its love and creativity, its ordinary splendor of home-cooked meals and the growing partnership of new marriage. How precious those moments spent in the study that would shape the rest of my life. How precious my very walk home, under leaves whose gold was a fire on the dark branches of the trees, a flicker of flame in the rainy air.
Through that poem, my attention was restored, and with it, my thanks. I realized that day that gratitude is in large part the shift of conscious attention that helps me to see miracles in their tiny glory all about me, and then to praise. My Advent season was spent in a much calmer state because in the words of that poem, my sight had been “set . . . on fire” (Plath again). In the rainy weather; in the frequent text fests with my precious, scattered family; in the arms of my husband; and in the work of my last papers, I was able to take joy in the present moment, attentive to the wonder of my own life in its ordinary grace.
What I recovered through that poem was wonder.
J. R. R. Tolkien once wrote that the reading of a fairy tale allows us a “recovery” of vision.[4] We think we have entirely understood our own world; it comes to us in the “drab blur of triteness or familiarity” that makes us think we have mastered it and know it entirely, the very assumption that comes to us in the frenzy and distraction of the modern world. But when we step aside into the world of story and encounter “the centaur and the dragon,” we learn to see our own world in a new light. We emerge from a story to behold the equally startling reality of “sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves.”[5] A story jolts us out of boredom with the familiar, out of distraction and carelessness, so that we are able to rediscover “the wonder of things such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine.”[6]
I said earlier that Anne of Green Gables was my first taste of a sacramental viewpoint, but what I have realized is that every good book I have read, from The Lord of the Rings to the poetry of Sylvia Plath to the epics of the human heart by George Eliot, has been teaching me, through words, to see the world as a gift and to recognize the loving presence behind it. As Alexander Schmemann, a theologian I love, so joyously puts it, “All creation is the sign and means of God’s presence and wisdom, love and revelation.”[7] The gift of great books, of well-crafted words is that they liven us to this reality again and again. A woman who reads is one who sees that every common bush is afire with God. A book girl is one who takes off her shoes, and wonders.
[1] Owen A. Barfield, “A Felt Change of Consciousness,” A Barfield Reader: Selections from the Writings of Owen Barfield (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 78.
[2] From a series of autobiographical articles by Montgomery, published in installments in 1917 in Everywoman’s World, gathered into a book titled The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career (1974).
[3] Sylvia Plath, “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” Best Poems Encyclopedia, https://www.best-poems.net/sylvia_plath/black_rook_in_rainy_weather.html.
[4] J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-stories (London: HarperCollins UK, 2014), 77.
[5] J. R. R. Tolkien, Tales from the Perilous Realm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).
[6] J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins UK, 2012), 58–69.
[7] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 8.
“A Little Poetry Every Day”: The Poems That Opened My Eyes to Wonder
(OR, A POETRY LIST FOR BEGINNERS, BY A BEGINNER)
WHEN I STUDIED at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, I took part in one of the weekly fellowships that brought together students from various courses for a morning meeting of prayer, friendship, and discussion. My first year there, we each took turns leading the group in exploring a topic that interested us. Somewhat to my own startlement, I decided to lead the group in an exploration of poetry and prayer. I found this surprising because in the wild and wondrous realm of poetry, I am but a novice. Poetry is something that both fascinates me and bewilders me in the way it distills scenes of beauty and moments of deep emotion or powerful narrative into sparse yet compelling words that help me to perceive the whole subject anew. At times, poetry also befuddles me. I don’t always find it easy or clear, and I tend to seek out anthologies that help me by giving some context or explanation.
Maybe it was that need for communal input that made me dare to try a bunch of poetry out on my generally introverted fellowship group. The result was a delight as the poems worked upon us like light on a prism, each person glimpsing a different refraction, a different depth of meaning in the words. Our observations deepened our understanding of the poem and also our insight into each other. That’s why I include a section here, but it’s also why this chapter is a list for beginners written by a beginner.
I’ve included a brief list of anthologies and collections by contemporary poets that I’ve found immensely helpful in my first voyages of poetic discovery. You can journey much further by searching out more poems online or in individual collections by the poets you particularly enjoy from the following compilations. The point is simply to begin. I love the Goethe quote “A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life” for many reasons but particularly for that phrase “a little poetry.” That’s how I’ve discovered poetry—bit by bit, pursuing the snippets and single poems that strike my fancy. I’ll admit, I don’t usually sit down to read poetry for hours at a time, but I keep a book or two of it around, and when I have time, I take a moment to savor the woven language and startling imagery that somehow rekindles a glad light within my eyes. Robert Frost, great poet that he was, opined that “a poem . . . begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”[1] May you taste a bit of that aching beauty as you explore.
The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer through Robert Frost by Harold Bloom (Editor)
A superb immersion into the greatest poems of the English language, compiled by Harold Bloom, the eminent literary critic and scholar. With key selections from six centuries of great American and British poetry (most headed by Bloom’s knowing commentary) and an essay entitled “The Art of Reading Poetry,” this anthology is an excellent place to begin if you want a survey of the best-loved English poetry.
Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year and Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany by Malcolm Guite
Priest, poet, literary scholar, folk-rock musician, rider of motorcycles, and defender of imagination, Guite sometimes seems to embody poetry as well as write it. But write it he does, in sonnets of verve and spiritual insight, written to celebrate the feasts and seasons of the church year. You can find these in the lovely volume Sounding the Seasons, as well as more of his original poetry in The Singing Bowl. Guite is also well known for his seasonal anthologies of poetry in celebration of Lent and Christmas. In Waiting on the Word: A Poem a Day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany and Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter, he selects luminous poems, accompanying each with a short essay contemplating their particular insight or power. I’ve used these collections in my personal devotions as well as in hosting an Advent poetry group.
Drawn to the Light: Poems on Rembrandt’s Religious Paintings; The Color of Light: Poems on Van Gogh’s Late Paintings; and In Quiet Light: Poems on Vermeer’s Women by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
Combining McEntyre’s own hushed poetry with the great art of a few beloved artists, these books are a combination of written and painted beauty from which I have drawn great comfort and joy.
A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry by Czeslaw Milosz (Editor)
A unique collection, with poems from around the globe and across the
centuries curiously juxtaposed in this “luminous” volume of poetry by Milosz (a Nobel laureate poet himself). A collection in which you will encounter poets you might not discover otherwise, themed around universal ideas such as epiphany, nature, travel, and the moment, this anthology offers a glimpse into the varied splendors of poets around the world.
Poetry for Young People Series by Sterling Publishing
A series of mini-collections of poems by the world’s great poets, each picture book is based on a single poet and illustrated to match the mood and tone of the selected work. A vivid, beautiful way to engage with classic poetry a little at a time with the aid of unique and fitting illustrations.
A Sacrifice of Praise: An Anthology of Christian Poetry in English from Caedmon to the Mid-Twentieth Century by James H. Trott (Editor)
A rich, historical survey of Christian poetry from the seventh century to the present, drawing on works from Protestant, Catholic, Reformed, evangelical, and contemporary poets. Comprised of hymns, poems, prayers, and meditations, this over-eight-hundred-page book was a rich resource for me in both my devotional life and my poetic exploration. There are also brief, helpful introductions to the various poets.
Book Girl Page 19
