To celebrate National Poetry Day, I have the pleasure of introducing Janet Morley as guest blogger on my site today.
I am fortunate enough to have had my new book, Love Set You Going – poems of the heart (SPCK) published just as we are celebrating the importance of poetry in our lives. Some readers will immediately identify with this, while others may feel that they have never really seen the point of poetry – or believe it to be a bit of a niche interest, an escape from the real world.
But I believe that poetry is needed more than ever in the turbulent world we are living in, where language is used in highly manipulative, quick-fire ways to conceal what is really going on. By contrast, poetry seeks to be truthful; it pays close attention to detail, whether in the landscape of politics or the human heart. It makes us slow down and attend to language that is pared down and carefully shaped, with layers of insight available as we engage our own brain and heart in the search for meaning.
As such, poetry is a real resource for spiritual exploration, and I enjoy introducing Christians who have never ‘got’ poetry (and indeed poetry lovers who have never quite ‘got’ Christian faith) to its extraordinary power to make us go deep. This is what my selection of poems and interpretative commentaries try to do. While some of the individual poems are explicitly religious, many are not so – but they all address important human issues of life and death that Christians should be concerned with.
Love Set You Going is a book of love poetry, but with a difference. Most collections of love poems centre just on erotic or romantic yearnings only (and usually only in that first flush of enthusiasm). But there are many different kinds of love, and love itself has different moods and seasons over time. There is the primary love between parents and vulnerable infants, an ever-shifting relationship that can almost reverse itself by the time parents themselves become frail. Of course there is passionate, erotic love – but this may be undeclared, or unreciprocated, or may go wrong – or it may become a mature companionship that does endure until the death of one partner and the deep grief of the other. But all our human loves are rooted in God, who created us in love and destined us to be fully known and fully loved in eternity.
As the introduction of Love Set You Going puts it:
‘In this anthology, the selected poems are grouped into sections: Up and down the generations; Grown up love; God and the human heart; and a short Postscript. The reader will find that there are many resonances between the sections, since we are constantly moved to understand one kind of love by reference to another: the earliest kind of love experienced by a needy infant is a startling image of God’s love for us; an adult lover soothes his beloved to sleep almost as if he were singing a lullaby to a child; the restless searching of a passionate woman for her lost lover becomes a metaphor of the soul’s seeking after God; and so on. In many of the poems, we see that images of the natural world are vital to conveying love’s force and bodiliness: the changing seasons; the interplay of sunlight and darkness; outdoor activities like farming, mountain climbing, or walking in the woods or across the prairie; gazing at stars; following the flight of birds; watching the tides. It is as if we cannot love another without also being attentive to the vital details of the bodily world we live in. Love set us going; love formed us in the womb; we were made for love, and all our efforts at living well are nothing, if we lack love. And to love we shall return.’
As a taster, Christina Rossetti’s long poem ‘What good shall my life do me?’ (quoted in full in the book) begins in a rather gloomy reflective space, as you can gather from the title. But she swiftly directs her attention away from herself towards the glories of creation – the ‘pomp of blossoms veined or pied’; ‘the winged ecstasies of birds’ – incorporating insights from both biblical psalms and contemporary scientific discoveries. It becomes a paean of praise for the ‘Love that moves the sun and the other stars’, in Dante’s phrase:
Love hangs this earth in space: Love rolls
Fair worlds rejoicing on their poles,
And girds them round with aureoles:
Love lights the sun: Love through the dark
Lights the moon’s evanescent arc:
Same Love lights up the glow-worm’s spark:
Love rears the great: Love tends the small:
Breaks off the yoke, breaks down the wall:
Accepteth all, fulfilleth all.
O ye who taste that Love is sweet,
Set waymarks for the doubtful feet
That stumble on in search of it.
Janet Morley is a freelance writer and retreat leader, who used to work for Christian Aid and the Methodist Church. She has produced a good deal of liturgical writing using inclusive language (All Desires Known), and her recent work has focused on poetry anthologies with commentaries that explore poetry as a spiritual resource (The Heart’s Time, Haphazard by Starlight, Our Last Awakening). She is a grandmother of six.