Meaningful Patterns: A Meditation on Poetry and Faith

When I was a little girl, my sister, five years older, and a bit of a genius, would read to me—everything. Not just fairytales and Dr. Seuss, though we loved our Brothers Grimm¹ and Arabian Nights² and Green Eggs and Ham,³ but whatever she was reading as well: The Wizard of Oz,⁴ A Wrinkle in Time,⁵ The Witch of Blackbird Pond.⁶ And all of it was wonderful for a five year old, who was not a genius, but soaking it in, late at night, under the covers, after lights were out, with a flashlight poised to cover the page, and the repeated plea of “one more chapter, please, please, just one more, before we go to sleep.” And then my sister found some freshman English anthology on a back shelf in my grandmother’s house, under a pile of Archie comic books and Saturday Evening Posts. We still don’t know whose text it was or where it came from, but it was wonderful too, and we embarked on an old-fashioned poetry course of Shakespeare, Shelley, Marvell, Milton, Herrick, Housman, Tennyson, Dickinson, Poe, and Frost.

But what has this to do with faith?

Everything.

It’s not just that this was a time I felt attended to and loved, or that a larger, more knowing being was offering me the world through words. It was poetry that claimed me, the older forms, with a backbone iambic rhythm, steady as a heart beat, setting up the expectation of a certain meter and a certain sound—a rhyme at the end of the line, it’s coming, I feel it, so many syllables in, so many stresses away. Here was a world you could count on, one that not only answered the expectation it created, but also created a longing for it. I may not have understood the philosophical underpinnings of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” or the religious fervor of Blake’s “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright.” And I certainly missed the sexual implication in Noyes’s “The Highwayman,” as Bess the landlord’s daughter is bound to the musket meant for her lover. But I knew being was better than not being, from the faithful stress on the verb to be. And I knew there was wonder to behold in a tiger that could light up the night, his fiery tiger eyes afire from “distant deeps or skies.” And I knew the gallop of the highwayman—“tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot” as he rode to avenge his beloved Bess—heralded a love as sure as could be had in this life, and not just because the lovers were willing to die for each other in the end. The opening lines of the poem repeat as the closing lines of the poem, and the repetition of the sound and the repetition of the rhyme as the highwayman’s ghostly gallop clatters up to the old inn door for Bess, the landlord’s ghostly daughter, told me here, here was an order that would stand, a world that made sense, even in the face of death.

Rhyme offers a pleasure akin to faith. I believe that. A child laughs when Little Miss Muffet sits on her tuffet or Little Bo-Peep can’t find her sheep, but it’s not the political undertone of Mother Goose the child’s embracing. Instead she delights in rhyme’s seeming power to manipulate time, its circular movement to recapture a sound that was lost in the past by repeating it in the present. And this resurrecting power is one she now commands as she demands the rhyme be repeated, again and again (children are notorious for this request), and then repeats herself, for rhyme is a mnemonic device that can stay with you into adulthood. Up until she died, my grandmother could recite “Little Orphan Annie,” “Maggie and Jiggs,” and “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” by heart. Something there in the driving rhythm, unstoppable to reach her, even at the age of ninety-seven, could lasso her back to the days of...