Poetry

 Poetry is an attempt to convey a reality that the poet has in some way experienced by attempting to capture its totality through metaphor. In such an endeavor, metaphorical language demonstrates superiority over mere descriptive language by incorporating both meaning and ambiguity (allowing for the poet to communicate the perceived and the intuited, the “seen” and “unseen” of reality). Novalis said, "Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason." The holistic experience of reality that metaphor engenders gives a poem its special texture, sometimes referred to as “mood,” that unique combination of sign and feeling. But feeling in this case refers to more than what is ordinarily understood as “feelings”; it is a kind of intuitional intersubjectivity and remains on the boundary of the expressed and the inexpressible by its very nature. That is why a poem will be understood in a number of different ways, depending on the mindset of the reader. The poet and the reader will inevitably have distinct experiences of the poem as well. But this does not mean that either experience is invalid. This “tension between congruence and incongruence” (Paul Ricoeur, The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling) is at the heart of metaphor, as it is at the heart of our conscious perception of totality. All art entails perceptual distortion by both artist and aesthete. But the metaphor, by its allusiveness and ambiguity, goes beyond this distortion to create in the reader a combination of experience and insight. All this has been expressed better and more clearly by others, but it is very much at the heart of my interest in poetry.

Grace

 

When the indivisible Trinity willed eternally and undividedly the existence of beings able to receive God, to have part in his delight, gladness, peace, joy, then the Trinity created from nothing the rational mind made in God’s image. The very fact of creation from nothing, the truth of—as I’ve already mentioned—God’s perfectly gratuitous generosity makes nonsense of the notion that some have had of a certain compulsion inherent in his nature that could not be put to rest. Creation certainly is an effect of his natural goodness, but only because he wills it. Blessed, no less, the Being that demands doing good. Does not he who is compelled to do the good deeds demanded by the goodness of his own nature do them gratuitously and freely?

                                                                               --Blessed Isaac of Stella, 8^th Sermon for Sexagesima

 

By recognizing the gratuitousness of our coming into existence, we can we understand the fullness of God’s creative love. By knowing that our existence is a totally free and gratuitous act of God, we can begin to appreciate that we are complete only in God; that we are destined only for God; that we need nothing but God.