We are listening creatures; whence else our speaking? And whence are we? So there is a Word that precedes us. We are spoken creatures. What constitutes this speech constitutes us in some way. And listening to this speech and speaking it are the acts of discernment and virtue.
Words have many meanings. Mutatis mutandis, listening carefully to this word detects several valances. General listening is anthropology. Then a triad of co-implicating relations appear: listening to the Speaker is theology. Listening to the spoken is metaphysics or cosmology. And listening to the word between these two is poetics.
Anthropology is our primary concern here. If we are spoken we are speech. Listening is discernment. Speaking is living our lives out. There are two kinds of discernment, formal and material. One way to know form is to apply a principle of likeness to its origin. In this case our Speaker is a poet; his speech is a poem. We then are a poem; our lives show forth poesy. There are many connections between the form of a poem and the form of our lives. Let’s explore a few while resisting truism.
A poem is historical. It unfolds. This it shares with ballet, music, drama, and the other performing arts. These are not delivered wholly and instantaneously as in the visual arts. This historicity implies linear relation between parts. Each word is intelligible on the basis of the past and future words. There is a continuity between all the meanings and sounds. Historicity is why the great books “teach you how to read them.” Each is its own idiom —its own world. But this is not the single linearity of a vector; rather it is the double continuity of a spiral. A spiral continues from its previous linear location and also passes its previous cyclical location.
Rational action takes place under the same historical limit. In a poem there are two kinds of linear intelligibility. Linear formal development is when the present sounds are anchored in their past and future. We can oppose Hopkins and Eliot here. In Pied Beauty, “fallow” follows “fold” by alliteration, and “plough” follows these by assonance. Reading Hopkins often involves this stepwise reading in which the first word is already half the next word. The Windhover is so strong in formal development that it is too easy to lose track of the materials. This vivifying already-not-yet-ness of Hopkins’ speech is opposite to Eliot’s work. In The Waste Land, necromancer T. S. Eliot re-animates the unreal city through violating this linear intelligibility. He continually destroys and usurps the present with the past and future. Nothing about “they wash their feet in soda water,/” for example, can prepare us for the untranslated French that follows. And nothing about that same “et o ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole/” can prepare us for “twit twit twit/ jug jug jug jug jug jug./” This violence is properly speaking apocalyptic, a revolt against Hopkins’ eschatological idiom. This feature above all gives Eliot’s work its distinctive doomsday feel. All the writers of his age felt the same as modernity lost grip on rational action. It is the same historicity that gives sudden change in our lives its uncanny character.
Linear material historicity is also crucial to a poem. Even features that appear at first to come from nowhere ultimately have foreshadowing and hints earlier in the text. Narrative poems are the clearest examples. In Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, we feel the stirring of the witch throughout the poem. It is both climax and resolution when she leaves the loom behind. In epic, we look to a first line to cast its long shadow over the rest of the text. We can think of Plato’s Republic, or Homer’s Odyssey, or Wordsworth’s Prelude.
Poetic historicity has its analogue in rationality. If I am writing another droll essay on poetry, and suddenly start qxylzzy the fnrf jnrf, it makes no sense except in the context of a demonstration. Punning and humor have a similar origin. The form or material invert while the other stays the same. This has been meditated on in works like Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. And the classroom is wonderful for this reason. Most actions by the teacher are rational inside a classroom because the space implicates pedagogy. The classroom is a context-context.
Discrete actions are linearly intelligible in sets. We can think of actions as texts and sets as contexts. I type and I read and I edit; this is essay-writing. Yet soon I will go to bed, for it is far too liminal an hour for logology. So I brush my teeth and say my prayers and tuck myself in. Yet there are levels to texts and contexts. They are convertible. Why do I write late into the night? Why do I say my prayers?—to be happy; to be the be that I be. We may think of discrete acts then as letters, and sets as words, and sets of sets as lines, and sets cubed as stanzas and paragraphs, and our life as the poem entire. Precisely as the writer listens to the past and future in their formal and material aspects to make the right word choice, so we plan our lives.
Words differ in syntax. This phase of your life may be spelling a verb; it develops the materials. You are changing. Another phase of your life may be an adverb; it colors the previous development. In what manner are you changing? Or this part of your life may be a noun; it substantializes you. Or an adjective; it colors your substance. Whole sentences and paragraphs in poems exhibit unique functions from words. They are something of a macro-syntax. There is narration, description, and exposition. This section of your life may be building towards a particular denouement. Or it may be a textual presence of things to you. Or perhaps it is contextualizing your past, present, and future.
Ultimately reading finishes. Hearing is transfigured into sight. This is the meditation of great works like Hölderlin’s Der Blinde Sänger. If a poem is linear in reading order, it is non-linear in ontological order. The whole dictates the parts. A writer will recast her work in light of the discovered ending. The same difference between reading and having read applies between earth and heaven; to remember an experience perfectly is to resolve the tension between linear and nonlinear time. The first is a broadening motion and the second is a comprehending stillness. “Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” It is not too bold to suggest that God sees our lives the way a perfect reader would know a poem. And this is a difference between us. We read a poem and read again, though each reading is transformed by fuller knowledge of the end. So too in our discernment. The more clear our telos is to us, the more our current unfolding is transformed.
There is more than formal discernment. The application of formal discernment is to material. Once I have a plan, I can execute it in its particulars. The poet also receives inspiration, frenzy, or visitation from a muse, and then transcribes these dream-visions. We have already discussed material continuity of idiom. And in some ways it cannot be elaborated because each life is unique. But here are a few notes: first, that the material continuity of a poem is like the substance of your being. What does this mean? That you both can and cannot be yourself. This mug of cinnamon tea in front of me cannot be anything other. Humans are more complicated. We act against our nature by sinning.
But then again we can only sin through the freedom that most uniquely characterizes that same nature. A work may stray quite far from its origin but really it has only gotten closer to it. Evelyn Waugh’s Handful of Dust is a fantastic example. This point is particularly apropos during Lent. Christ says, “father, forgive them; for they know not what they are doing.” But what they are doing is the one thing most necessary—it must stack up against Matthew 16 and John 18, where Peter is rebuked for trying to prevent the crucifixion. You too may find yourself in a place which seems far from where you started, but it is certainly closer than you have ever been.
Material discernment is relational. A writer makes a word choice within the economy of his poem. A word has commerce with its successor and predecessor. We also find ourselves within a network of local relations. This is Mellville’s “Monkey Rope.” If I am a strapping young man and I see an old lady struggling to carry her groceries, I help her out. If I am a singer and my church choir is accidentally Schönbergian, I volunteer. This negative approach has the advantage of being theoretically simple. And it respects the concept of vocation in the present tense. Too often we think of our vocation as a ripped version of ourselves God is thinking about, doing push-ups in formspace. Not at all! God’s speech does not cease from speaking. Even His silence speaks. “Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.” What else is inescapable but our embodiment? And we should think of poetry as incarnational as well.
It is important to note here that I am not arguing simply for the poem as an analogy for life, but rather for poetry as the best analogy for life. The use of this is in its extension and yet conceptual intelligibility. Our lives, especially as students at college, are manifold and overwhelming. But poetry is not. We may be surprised to see microcosms of ourselves in day to day things. I speak to my friends and teachers, after all, and it is not so intimidating. Neither is living my life. Thinking of our life as a poem allows us to adjudicate between goods. It allows us to not all be priests and monks. How can I rationalize going to class when I could keep praying? It may seem a silly question but it demands a serious answer. We cannot justify any acts if they are intrinsically worse than prayer. St. Paul instructs us to “pray without ceasing” in 1 Thess 5:17. But if prayer is most simply speech between God and myself then I have my rubric for action. The relation to some of my non-prayer actions to the rest of my life may be like the relation of definite articles to the whole Odyssey. The verbs and nouns may take the day but it takes each to form the whole in its realest sense. “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” And we are Christians. Each action I take is a word in the total prayer that is my total life. I spell myself out for my God. We are listening creatures.
Joseph Teti is a senior studying English. He enjoys Platonism, walks in nature, and choral music. He would also like to thank Dr. Dwight Lindley, James Shotwell ‘23, Monica Blaney ‘24, and Madeline Scheve ‘25 for their help crafting this work.
Hillsdale Forum 