I suppose we all noticed it -- the outpouring of poetry that followed
the events of Sept. 11. For me, phrases rose unbidden. Some were appropriate
-- "No worse, there is none" from the sonnet by Gerard Manly
Hopkins. Some were inappropriate -- "A terrible beauty is born" from
Yeats' "Easter, 1916."
When asked to select a poem for the campus memorial service on Sept. 14,
I combed through favorite collections and anthologies, seeking wholes behind
phrases, seeking something appropriate. There was Auden's "About
suffering they were never wrong/The Old Masters: how well they understood its
human position..." There was Frost's "What to Make of a Diminished
Thing" and Moore's "No Swan So Fine" and Rich's "Double
Monologue." The digging was a pleasure, the revisiting a consolation.
"I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day," again by Hopkins,
seemed sufficiently eloquent, reflective, and difficult.
Others, with a technological savvy beyond my own, transferred on to the
Internet and sent careening through the land Auden's entire "September 1,
1939" and Shelley's "Ozymandias." Also traveling through the
ether were analyses of this very phenomenon, this turn to poetry. One of the
most thoughtful, forwarded to me by a Buddhist friend breathing deep in
Pinedale, Wyo., was by Dinitia Smith, written on Oct. 1, and titled "The
Eerily Intimate Power of Poetry to Console." Why and how? it asked. Why
and how does poetry console? Does it, one of her commentators asked, serve as
a substitute for religion? During times of crisis, for at least some people in
some contexts, can poetry stand in for religion?
Possibly. But I'd like to try out a different idea. Can we think of
religion AS poetry? Not a substitute for it, not a stand in, but rather a type
of poetry? When I speak of religion here, I am not speaking of the ineffable,
the Tao, that-which-cannot-be-named. I am not speaking of Jehovah or Allah or
God or G-d or Brahma or the ground-of-all-being. I am speaking of humans
speaking. I am speaking of human attempts -- eloquent, heart-felt, passionate,
never adequate and always groping -- to name the un-namable and articulate the
ineffable. Buddhists might say I am speaking of a human finger pointing at the
moon.
So, might all poetry be religion? Heavens no. Think of limericks, rap
lyrics, sassy couplets, nursery rhymes. But all religions might be thought of
as vast and complex poem cycles. When confronted by a deeply baffling crisis,
I can't think why we wouldn't turn to human reservoirs of words about that
which is baffling, reservoirs we call poems and/or religions.
Harris is professor and head of the UW Department of English. More information about the Religious Studies Program can be found on the Web at www.uwyo.edu/relstds/index.htm.