A Fugue on Poetry In
Which I Set Two Themes A-Playing Before Resolving Them to One
By Charlotte Ostermann
The first page of
G.K. Chesterton’s “Manalive” is breathtaking. Though prosaic, this is some of
the finest poetry it has ever been my joy to read. One sentence must suffice:
“A wind sprang high in the west like a wave of unreasonable happiness and tore
eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of forests and the
cold intoxication of the sea.” To one who knows the animating secret of this
book, the words carry the thrill of bracing expectancy, though to the
uninitiated they may be vaguely unsettling – like the wind-whisked central
character whose sanity seems insane.
There is a day whose
sanity seems insane except to the initiate. A day when time and eternity are
one; when God and man are one; when I am whole, healed, wholly holy, holy. God
created it and called it Sabbath. He placed His finest, fullest most refreshing
rest within it to prepare a people to receive Him, to be conformed to its
contours and thus to His own. He called her His bride. We know her as the
Sunday of Lord Sabbaoth. The measure of our comfort
and delight in her sky-opening, tree-cleaning, skirt-whipping, door-slamming
weekly entrance measures us.
The wind that brings
Chesterton’s Innocent Smith into focus and the wind that ushers man into the
Day are both winds of revolution – full of explosion, rending, disruption and
invisible energy. Both refresh a man “like a flagon” and “astonish him like a
blow”. Both are the stuff by which tragic dwarves become lively imps and
hammocks fly us to heaven. Borne in by such a blazing breeze a person is made a
deeper mystery – utterly unfathomable yet strangely simple. Onlookers may scorn
him, in fact, as a simpleton, but by virtue of the Sabbath-keeper all things
are made new.
*****
To one who has
experienced the oak, majestic in maturity and glorious in the fullness of its
growth, the acorns lying round it are so obviously the natural scheme of its
fecundity as to come as no surprise – in fact to suffer from banality itself.
Yet to the child, the notion that the tiny acorn in his palm somehow contains
the other Thing – the leaf and branch, nobility and essence of the oak; that
his hand may contain a Being which so overtops and overshadows his own being as
to make him quite unsettlingly small is a wondrous thought, indeed.
To a one-dimensional
being, all other beings of whatever number of dimensions would be perceivable
only as points – disconnected, unrelated, speeding around him with a
frightening arbitrariness. In such a universe – a ‘flatland’ – no continuity,
consistency, or sameness could be perceived between one aspect of a thing and
another. The acornness of an oak, or the oakness of an acorn, for example, would be lost. In our
world the human person is being flattened into a sort of
two-dimensionality-from-three and, thus reduced in capacity to perceive a
sphere except as a passing line, has the spaciousness of his soul compromised.
The capacity of a
soul to receive being – an idea, a thing, a person, an event – into itself in
fullness is formed by wonder. To receive wholly one must first
be whole. This wholeness, this interior spaciousness, this integrity is
cultivated by, is actually created by awe – the desire to know whatever one
encounters and the impetus to know it in its entire dimensionality. Wonder
requires slowness, stillness, stopping, silence, space, safety. Only in its
embrace can the human soul exist in its fullness and thus apprehend, possess,
and love all other Things. Speed disconnects, but Sabbath moments remake,
reunify.
*****
Wonder is a yearning
to know what cannot yet be fully grasped – an unsettled position between
encounter and complete apprehension, possession. It is short-circuited by
pragmatism – putting the Thing to use flattens its inherent meaning, dulls the
soul to mystery. Sabbath separation of one day for encounter between God and
man and for cessation of practicality restores man to his most full humanity,
to his capacity for eternity. A poem is likewise such a pause. Above all
things, useless, it calls to him to see the connectedness of things – things in
the nobility of true relation and relation to Truth.
*****
Poetry connects,
resolves paradox. Through metaphor, symbol, allusion and juxtaposition, the
poet layers meaning upon meaning. The veil of poetry frustrates facile
apprehension – by its very structure at once beckoning and denying entrance. It
delivers its fullness only to patient souls willing to experience wonder – the
discomfort of not knowing what belief, what faith, promises
can be known. Speed disconnects – destroys relationship, atomizes unity,
prevents entrance to the world of meaning. Souls desperately need poetic
formation to become fully Real-ized, fully human.
Initiation into poetry – into the slow-knowing realm of meaning at once
obscured and revealed – forms souls in Faith.
The substance of
things hoped for, evidence of things unseen comes to us in a Person, as a
Person. In this sense, a person is a poem – a place waiting to be filled with
being encountered whole, to be expanded by the qualities of whatever it
possesses. A poetry constrained by form is as a person constrained to the
realities of physical form, weakness, circumstance, place and duty. Self-denial
frees the self’s true creativity. Such suffering is at the heart of beauty, of
wonder, of love. Beauty breaks our hearts, in its way, and such encounter
cannot be glibly reproduced.
Person is the form within which Being can be represented. If we will suffer ourselves to be, constrained but whole – to live as Man insanely, radically Alive – what we possess can be shared. Poetry seeks to draw another into a lived experience by reproducing the very form of the Thing it has loved in a form, a structure that makes transfer possible. Just as the word is not the thing itself, the poem is not the experience, but the place created where two multi-dimensional persons meet in wonder. Sabbath is God’s poem of eternity. A poem is a Sabbath moment.
Note: This was first published in Hereditas, then given in Souls at Rest, where the Study Guide includes insightful discussion questions that draw out its implications in good conversation. That Study Guide is free on this site.