My Anglo-Saxon and Medieval British Literature class is amazing. We read Genesis B, an Anglo-Saxon retelling of the story of the Fall. Most of the class was made up of juniors and seniors, and I, a sophomore, observed more than participated in the class's discussion. It was crazy amazing how many connections people made in class, and I remembered why I love poetry so much: because it fits. Somehow, even at the end of a poem, the poet remembers exactly how things are supposed to work and makes every metaphor, every level of the poem fit and tie together neatly at the end.
I left the class with this:
Man ate what was hanging from a tree. In Genesis, man died. At mass, man lives. So of course the Eucharist is the Real Presence of Christ. It doesn't make sense any other way.
Poetry--good poetry, anyway--is full of stuff like this: similes, metaphors, double meanings, more layers than a wedding cake. I remember in the Iliad, the incredible ekphrasis (a work of art within a work of art) describing the shield of Hephiastos. Everything fit perfectly.
Dr. Weaire, my Latin professor, told our class that "poetry is your language on drugs." Initially I thought he was right. You look at poetry and you see a bunch of crazy weird nonsense, and not all of it is actually there. You get this giddy, wonderful feeling and somehow you can't stop coming back to it.
But theology isn't poetry. Theology is truth. Poetry is beauty. So how is it that man can eat what hangs from a tree and either live or die?
My AS&MB Lit professor, Dr. Jackson, told me that he often thinks of poetry as language sobered up. Poetry is language trying to get at the truth.
I think he's right. It makes the connection between theology and poetry much simpler.
One can read Genesis and the gospels--or the entire Bible, or all of human (salvation) history--as a historian, as a philosopher. But one can also read it as a poet. Theology is poetry. All of human history is a poem, an epic poem full of love, hate, joy, suffering, fighting, nobility, defeat, courage, cowardice, deceit, adventure, heroism. God is the greatest poet. We are his characters.
And our poetry? The Iliad? The Bells? The scawls on stall doors of public restrooms?
Ekphrases.
Some have said (Your Brain on Music) that music came before language, and that poetry came before prose. Perhaps music and poetry are closer to the language of Heaven. Language is one of the ways we are like God. His spoken word created the universe and his incarnate Word redeemed it.
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