Life Ways

Life Ways

Learning to Embrace Life
Through the Power of Poetry

excerpted from Poetry as Prayer: Thomas Merton, by Robert Waldron

Poets are models par excellence of people who live in the Now; they are people who tingle with life. Their verse is charged with their life-force so that when we read it, we, too, are often charged with life. We promise ourselves to make more of an effort to live more intensely our own Now moments. All poets in some fashion remind us, as the ancient poet Horace with his dictum, "carpe diem," that our time here on earth is not eternal, that we must "seize the day" every day.

When I was younger, I turned to poetry not so much to embrace immediate reality but to escape it. Verse became my haven where I could abide with the poets. In my imagination I roamed the beautiful and haunting Lake District of England with William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's verse transported me to exotic and exciting dreamscapes which expelled from their boundaries all that was mundane and worrisome. For the sheer joy of language drenched in beauty, I could always turn to Shelley and Keats, their landscapes fraught with skylarks, autumnal beauty, and magical moonlight. For Arthurian romance I needed only open Tennyson's Idylls of the King to be transported to a realm of chivalry and damsels in distress.

Gerard Manley Hopkins's verse reminded me of life's holiness and God's abiding presence even during the dark night illustrated in his terrible sonnets. Francis Thompson's gorgeous verse was a constant reminder of God's love for us, a love that "hounds" us to the ends of the earth. In my own spiritual aridity, I read Eliot's Four Quartets, and believed that if he could successfully pass through the Waste Land, so, too, could I.

There were so many other poets who mysteriously appeared in my life to nourish my soul on both good and bad days. Poets offered me the saving word, the very one I desperately needed to face and to overcome a problem, an anxiety, an inadequacy, or simply to get through the day, its power like a mantra for centering the soul. Suffice it to say that without the poets I might not have prevailed to be writing this introduction. On second thought, perhaps their appearance is not so mysterious after all, because I believe God sends us the messengers we need. And for me, because teaching literature is my vocation, God's messengers have most often been poets.

Now, as a person over 50, I turn to poetry for different reasons; rarely do I desire to escape reality; on the contrary, I want to embrace it, to live acutely in the Present Moment in the manner of the mystics and poets.

I need poets to repeat "Pay attention!" until I learn to live attentively. I do not want to come to the end of my life and realize that I've not lived intensely, or as Henry David Thoreau would say, "deliberately." Like the poet Denise Levertov in her "Flickering Mind," I've been "absent" from too much of my life, too much from my true self, absent too much from God's presence in the world.

Often when I read great (especially religious) poetry, I feel recharged and more alive. I feel as if a voltage of energy has electrified my spirit. The great poet of Carmel, California, Robinson Jeffers suggests that poetry "is capable of affecting life directly; it sharpens the perceptions and emotions, and it can reconcile man to his environment or inspire him to change it."1 In short, poetry helps us to live well.

So, unlike W.H. Auden who says poetry changes nothing, I believe that if we devote our attentive efforts to reading poetry, we will be richly rewarded. In his recent book Errata, philosopher George Steiner writes, "often entirely unexpected. . .the poem or novel or play which, as it were, lay in ambush. . .the meeting, the collision between awareness and signifying form. . .is among the most powerful. It can transmute us." 2

In fact, each time we engage a poem and plumb its meaning, we create an opportunity for epiphany in our lives: moments of soul-realization that can transfigure us. Thus, a close reading of a poem is a journey into our deepest selves, into the meaning of our lives. And what better companion to have on our life's journey than Thomas Merton, one of the greatest modern spiritual masters and also one of its finest religious poets. Merton deeply understood the power of verse to bring us closer to God through contemplation. Poets rely upon the symbol to transport their meaning because it transcends the ordinary so that we are offered a glimpse beyond the veil. Reading poetry also helps us to train our ability to focus; I firmly believe that attention is the secret of the contemplative life without which it is nearly impossible to be present to God.

I hope Poetry as Prayer: Thomas Merton leads you into a deeper prayer life and into a deeper appreciation of some of the finest verse ever written. In my previous book Poetry as Prayer, The Hound of Heaven, I said "When entering the 'sacred ground' of poetry be prepared for anything to happen." This "anything" abides in the positive and life-enhancing order of things, with transformation an ever present possibility.

Go to Poetry as Prayer: Thomas Merton in our online catalog.

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