Text and Talk
August 24, 2024
‘Carpe Poem’
Introduction
In his essay “Poetic Experience,” Jacques Maritain writes, “Things are not only what they are; they constantly pass beyond themselves, and give more than they have, because from every side they are pervaded by the creative influx of the first cause. They are better and worse than themselves, because being superabounds . . .” (cited from Kim Rice’s essay, “Jacques Maritain: A Balm for the Twenty-First Century,” which we will have her present to us at an upcoming Text and Talk.)
This “give more than they have” is part of what poetry seeks, and it is part of what poetry can give us. In his book Poetic Knowledge, James S. Taylor writes that “There is such a thing as poetic knowledge, and consequently, that there is a mode of learning that can be called ‘poetic,’ there can be no doubt. Among the philosophers and poets of ancient, classical, and medieval times, this way of knowing was virtually a given as a part of the human being’s ability to know reality. Only after the Renaissance and the Cartesian revolution in philosophy does a less intuitive, less integrated view of man emerge.”
Taylor goes on to say that “poetic knowledge is not necessarily a knowledge of poetry but rather a poetic (a sensory-emotional) experience of reality. That the ancient Greeks considered all education a matter of impulse to reflect what is already there . . .. Poetic experience indicates an encounter with reality that is nonanalytical. Something that is perceived as beautiful, awful (awefull), spontaneous, mysterious. It is found in poetry, but also in common experience, when the mind, through the senses and emotions, sees in delight, or even in terror, the significance of what is really there.”[1]
When we see and encounter things of this world, as the poet calls our attention to, we do indeed encounter them as things, but through them we encounter more, something beyond just this world. As C. S. Lewis says in The Abolition of Man, “The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”
So let us seize the poem and see what we can find.
Poems
Selected and read by Nancy Lovell
Spring and Fall
to a young child
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
From Dante, selected and presented by Michael Guravage
A poem by Jim Roseman
Soliloquy on the Resolution of Beauty
Where does the beauty lie?
Is it all in me when I am made breathless at the sight of a fiery orange sky mixed with changing scales of blue and gray in the fleeting moments of dusk? When I am lifted heavenward as the pencil lines of a roof-top cross are drawn faintly against the darkened purple sky of Ravello on a summer’s eve? Is it all in me when I am crushed with the weight of the passionate decree in the haunting aria of Puccini’s Nessun dorma? When I’m redeemed wholly in the solace and simplicity of Debussy’s clear moon light? Is it all in me as tears roll from my eyes at the scandalous idea that “sun, moon and stars in their courses above join with all nature in manifold witness to thy great faithfulness, mercy and love?” What is the source of beauty in Degas’ strange gaze from the rafters on the dancers below, and when Canova set his hammer and chisels to craft the hardened softness for Paolina’s white marble stage?
Does this beauty lie inside of me, in my eye, in my ear, in here?
Or possibly in another sphere – in me but as a call upon my heart, a resonant longing;
The faint aroma from a scent not found, the distant echo from a tune not yet heard?*
Then came Christmas: There the Beauty Lay!
No Foreign Flora, No Illusive Dreams, No Haunting Melodies
Immanuel, Now I May Sleep!
[1] James S. Taylor, Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education, State University of New York Press, 1998, pp. 5-6.
* This image was adapted from a similar one in C.S. Lewis’, “The Weight of Glory”. See C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in Screwtape Proposes A Toast. London: Collins, 1965, 97-98.