'The truth will make you free.' John 8.32
'Tell all the truth but tell it slant.' Emily Dickinson
The interesting theme for this year's National Poetry Day is 'truth'. Possibly it has been chosen because, in our febrile social climate, truthfulness is regarded as unimportant, or is deliberately under attack in pursuit of certain political outcomes.
But Christians should care very much about truth and strive for it in public discourse, and I believe that poetry is a resource for us – not as an escape from harsh reality but as real spiritual food for both our inner and outer journeys. For there is absolutely no point in writing poetry if you are not going to tell the truth, even if the reader needs to work for it.
The work of interrogating the meaning of a poem can reveal many satisfying layers, within both the words on the page and the complex responses of our mind and heart. A good poem can offer us a template of how to be searchingly truthful.
During the last few years I have been creating anthologies of poetry very much aimed at Christian readers, including those perhaps who never really got on with poetry at school. Many people appreciate a spiritual book to read slowly over Lent or Advent, and so I used a format of a poem a day, accompanied by my own commentaries – to offer help in getting into the poem, but with a devotional intent suitable to the season as well (The Heart's Time, Haphazard by Starlight). Some of the poems I chose were explicitly religious, but many were not. What mattered for me was whether they address issues about life and death that Christians need to attend to.
And the books have proved popular with churchgoers. But what has really struck me is the interest from non-churchgoers who are really into poetry. It turns out that spiritual books that are centred on poetry offer a fruitful common ground and place of dialogue between Christians and others. Because of course Christians do not have a monopoly on honest self-examination, or on the appreciation of beauty, or on clear-sighted exposure of what is going on in our world, or on addressing our deepest human fears and desires.
For some non-churchgoers, reading and reflecting on poetry fills the place of prayer in their lives. And for those of us who pray, why deny ourselves the wealth of insight that is available there? Not just from those wonderful religious poets like George Herbert, Charles Wesley or Christina Rossetti, who consciously used their poems as a way of wrestling with God, but from all poets who seek to tell the truth.
So what makes good poetry especially close to the truth? First of all, poets really notice things, whether the vivid features of landscape or weather, or the tricky terrain of the human heart. They pare down their words and images until the most significant details are highlighted; there is no 'padding'. But by contrast with the simplistic, repetitive 'memes' through which an unscrupulous politician will try to trigger your unthinking outrage or admiration, the poet draws attention to the way language operates, and makes you work as you read. You are engaged with the poem, and you have to pay proper attention. You slow down; you read it twice (perhaps even out loud, as the rhythm and rhyme matter).
The apparent assertions in a poem might need to be questioned by the reader, because irony may be involved, or because there is an unreliable narrator, or even because things we rather wish were not true in fact are so. Poetry can succeed in holding together complexity and paradox, resisting an over-simplified view of the world, and deepening our sense of mystery.
And poets are frequently willing to face and to explore some truths that most of us are desperately trying to avoid. For example, it is often said that our culture is very poor at speaking to each other honestly about death, but in fact this is not true of poetry. I have explored this in my anthology Our Last Awakening – poems for living in the face of death.
Christians as well as others do have fears, and do suffer grief in bereavement (in spite of our hope in what lies beyond death) and we should not pretend otherwise. Love may be stronger than death, but in ordinary human experience, the cost of great love is deep grief.
And so to another area of human life where we struggle to be completely truthful. When my editor asked me to tackle an anthology of love poetry, I hesitated. There are endless books of 'love poetry' out there; why add to them? And how on earth would I choose my selection from such a plethora of material? I decided to try and address that common ground between ordinary human experience and Christian faith.
We are all formed by love and made for love; it is fundamental to our being, our growth, our development and our continuing wellbeing. Love has many stages and moods: it can be passionate or comfortable, painful and unrequited, light-hearted and absurd, needy or utterly secure. And there are many different kinds of love – not just the erotic or romantic yearnings we associate with 'love poetry' (important though these are).
Life offers us and asks of us many kinds of love: towards children, parents and grandparents; between siblings and friends; towards this beautiful earth. And of course before and beyond all is the love of God and our yearning for God. The truth is, whether human or divine, 'Love never falls away' (I Corinthians 13).
Janet Morley's book Love Set You Going – poems of the heart is published by SPCK September 2019.
