Poetry and the Function of Prayer

That poetry and prayer have much in common has been a commonplace of criticism, though the exact operations in play seem worth considering. Perhaps W. H. Auden put the matter most usefully when he suggested that “to pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.” The poet, like the person in the depths of prayer, loses all sense of anything else; subject and object blend in the focus, which takes on a holy hush. The exercise itself leads to closer contact with a reality that seems, to the poet or person in prayer, a heightened consciousness, what might even be called a state of grace.

The spiritual dimension of poetry has always been obvious to readers; indeed, over the centuries, a good deal of poetry edges close to prayer in the most explicit fashion. This is evident in poetry that falls within the meditative tradition, as in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets or George Herbert’s The Temple or the sacramental poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which poetry becomes an exercise in natural incarnation, celebrating what Hopkins calls “the rise, the roll, the carol, the creation” in a way that links the details of the universe inexorably to a Creator-God. In some cases, such as T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, the poetry itself moves in the direction of liturgy, as the poem traces the evolution of a sacred vision in meters that assume a distinctly liturgical cadence. (Eliot’s work often echoes Anglican liturgy, of course, as in “Lord I am not worthy / Lord I am not worthy” in part iii of “Ash-Wednesday.”)

On the other hand biblical literature (and most major religions have some form of scriptural writing, as in the Koran or any number of Hindu or Buddhist texts) is poetry that has been deemed worthy of liturgical significance or proved somehow useful in a spiritual way and therefore was canonized, which only means that at a certain point in history a selection of texts was singled out as official, even regarded as—in certain circumstances—divinely inspired.

Of course Jews and Christians frequently consider the Bible in some sense as the Word of God—a message beamed from above, embodied in a sequence of writings. In certain Christian sects this belief is literal, with the Bible regarded as emerging from God’s mouth directly as a series of commands, dictated perhaps (as Luther argues) by the Holy Spirit. By contrast Jews—except in the most orthodox circles—have almost never been obsessed with a literal belief in the Hebrew scriptures, and the existence of a vast tradition of commentary in Midrash and Talmud has dampened the thirst for literal interpretations: too many conflicting readings exist to begin to pin down any particular interpretation.

And yet the Israelites leaned heavily on beloved poems, such as those eventually included in the Book of Psalms, which I like to think of as simply an anthology of Hebrew poems written over a period of several centuries—an early version of some imaginary Norton Anthology of Early Hebrew Lyrics. The hundred and fifty poems that survived in the final selection seem relatively consistent in approach, often subscribing to a particular form and using similar techniques, such as repetition and parallelism. But first they were lyrics, chanted with a background of musical accompaniment and often sung on the steps of the great Temple in Jerusalem by members of the tribe of Levi. A number of the Psalms celebrate important occasions, such as weddings or coronations; others are lamentations of one sort or another—a vein of poetry that continues to thrive since poets seem perpetually out of sorts with their world; and some are clearly didactic or instructional, making legal points or offering directions for living. They represent the work of many hands, although tradition has it that King David himself wrote them all. But this David is no more...