The Spirit and the Sign: How Great Poetry Works
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There are two ways in which we relate to the mysterious reality which we inhabit, the first is through the symbols of words and representation, the second through the is-ness of consciousness, the inward givenness of you, a wholeness of all-at-once meaning and sense that is you in each moment, as present as the air you breathe.
Poetry in its immediate form contains only the former. It is by definition an intentional arrangement of words, a container of symbols. Yet to anyone who has known or appreciated what it is to be moved by poetry you know it contains something in common with the latter kind of human sense, indeed even something in common with music, a wholeness of meaning and feeling not reducible to its components.
Importantly, this sense is not subjective or arbitrary, while we all have our own personal islands of meaning we can speak about great poetry collectively, indeed the storehouse of myth, stories and song that have formed us as a culture and in the wider world are testament to this. Great art endures because it works, it really means something that you don’t just make up as the reader. The abstractions and forms of meaning: beauty, goodness, love, truth, are as universal as the river and universe of our minds, part of the very water of our inwardness and sense of what it means to be alive.
Poetry contains these things by a simultaneous creative and emergent property of relations within the tropes of the poem. The ‘aboutness’ of a poem is formed by its sequential reading, spread over the poem like a canvas of stars that illuminates its symbols upon each re-reading, thus investing them with the possession of a spirit, or a meaning. Each symbol becomes not just a thing on its own, but a thing that relates to the thing-the-poem-is-about, which in a broad sense is a wholeness of meaning connected to the very sense of what it means to be you.
In more practical terms, the two elements that compose a poem are its tropes, particularly metaphor and symbol, and their bridge to the meaning, or sense that is created. As in the title of the poem I have called these two elements the sign and the spirit.
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Metaphor is a vital element of a poem. This trope is the fundamental bridge between the object representation of a word, and the subject sense of the thing-ness that that word represents. To take an example of a metaphor, say, ‘time is a river’. Many things are going when this metaphor is invoked, firstly you probably have some imagery of a river in your mind, perhaps even a sense or feeling of the idea of time. What you think of when the word river is used might be connected to how word or image orientated your mind is, but it also connects you to a wider knowing of the feeling, or sense of ‘river-ness’, something of the set of things understood by the image of a river snaking through a landscape, the rush of water, the memories of dipping your toe or wading, rafting, boating, concepts of flow, movement, and also a kind of still transience, a calmness of passing-by. Maybe you knew someone who had an accident in a river, or maybe had holidays by a river, thus having some personal relation to either the power and force of moving water or the happiness of its gentle flow. Maybe you think of the grand canyon, and a river’s eroding power. The metaphor uses this concept of a river that is created from a real world phenomenon, takes its elements of ‘river-ness’ that are both collective and personal, and uses it as an image for the abstract word or concept time.
In the context of a poem, this metaphor can create a kind of overarching ‘sense’: let’s say a poem begins by describing a river journey, and might throughout the poem drop images of time, perhaps a person checking their watch, seeking to reach some destination, thus the identification of time/river is brought about indirectly through the construction of the poem. The overarching sense, that this poem describing a river is about time is created by the combinations of symbols in the poems sequence, and creates an overarching symbol or metaphor that constitutes an aboutness. Each rereading (rereading is an important part of poetry, no poems are written to be read only once), means that meaning is in some sense ‘put back’ over the poem from the start, small features might further be re-understood, might further illuminate the meaning. Early lines about the river rushing might be re-understood as representing hurry or time’s passing.
Part of why a metaphor like ‘time is a river’ is so useful here is because it illustrates something of the relationship between words which we use for objects or concepts, and the sense that in a strange kind of passive way, we already ‘know’ what things are. Time in some sense is completely familiar, like goldfish in a bowl it is the medium we are in, the experience we all have. Yet in our conscious minds it remains elusive, incomprehensible. Unlike literal language, which cannot create new ideas, only describe things, metaphorical language and poetry can create forms of revelation by engaging unconscious and creative, imaginative or intuitive systems of the mind. Poetry in this sense is both aesthetic and emotional. To compare time to a river is to evoke images of beauty and scale, feelings of vastness and movement, of eroding power and the sweet passage to the infinite sea. It makes us engage a kind of knowing that is also feeling, it illuminates us as well as the world. Unlike, say, science, which is a tool use of language, poetry illuminates the mysterious world around us with its strange light. It allows us to see, in the words of the philosopher Roger Scruton, talking about wine, that it “transfigures the world at which you look, illuminating that which is precisely most mysterious in the contingent beings surrounding you, which is the fact that the are, and also that they might not have been. The contingency of each thing glows in its aspect, and for a moment you are aware that individuality and identity are the outward forms taken by a single inner fire, and that this fire is also you.”
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Perhaps strangely I am going to use two images from the bible as metaphors for metaphor. The first, the towel of Babel, the second, the ladder to heaven that Jacob sees in a dream at the place he would name Bethel. The former is an image of man’s attempt to become like God, to ‘get up’ to heaven, the builders say “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves”.
Conversely at Bethel (Bet-El in Hebrew, which means house of God), Jacob lays down to sleep and in a dream, he sees angels ascending and descending from heaven. The story says he awoke and said “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven”.
Literal language has swamped much of our ideas about truth. It has its use in science and technology, but such endeavours are in the end inherently akin to Babel, they climb high into our understanding but leave us without meaning. Poetry, because it invokes the imaginative, the intuitive and the creative elements of the mind, opens us to forms of revelation that go beyond our conscious will. In doing so such language is akin to Jacob’s vision at Bethel, the place of heaven. Poetry is the dream that opens the gateway to the spirit, to the all comprehending is-ness of our inner reality, our conscious and unconscious minds. It is the realisation that what constructs the world around us is not a world of things, but a world composed of the relations of things, and so realises our reality as one composed of forms of harmony and morality, beauty and goodness. Poetry is the sunlight that glitters on the surface of the lake, invoking the image of a million luminous mermaids swimming beneath, breaking the surface with their shining bodies. Beneath the surface is where we have to look to really see. Poetry flings open the door to the moonlit halls of truth. Augustine said God is closer to us than we are to our inmost selves. Yes, Bethel is words away.