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Poetry and prayer: Parallels of invocation
Spiritual Life, Spring 2000 by Goodwin, Rufus
POETRY SPEAKS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE akin to prayer. Praying, like poetry, is an activity. It activates man. We are less concerned here, at the start, about what one prays -the creed of prayer-than that one begins an inner life of words, praying, or poetry, and that one finds a certain attitude of inner life.
This can be found by starting to pray, or saying focal words, using even secular prayers, or saying poems, even if one has not found God, grace, a religion, or a church.
Starting to Pray
Praying is like poetry, like swimming--one has, sometime, to jump into the words or water and hope that something will be there. That something will hold one up. One has to learn the strokes, maybe, on dry land beforehand. Maybe another person has to hold one up, as in childhood prayers, while one first attempts to paddle. One can learn what praying is about by praying. Prayer itself opens the dimension of the other, of the higher or the divine. One poem, one prayer, is like one grain of sand on the beach-it starts the dialogue. This is why even focus words or poetry can help a person in the direction that leads to prayer: that of wholeness, or healing, which is the secret realm of holiness. And that is why prayer begins with the cultivation of an attitude, not just in stillness or a strange church, and this is where poetry can help prayer:
There sleeps a song in all things
Which dream there on and on unheard,
And all the world will wake and sings
If only you find the magic word.
-Jacob Freiherr von Eichendorff (1787-1856)
What is the magic word? You need not be a church person, an Arab, a Jew, or a Christian to say this poem, or even a believer, but it can invoke the same attitude of reverenceor relaxation response -that prayer awakes in a person. These words can, as well as wonder at the magic word, elicit the prayer response and start the person on the attitude to otherness, a Thouness with the universe, a sense of a higher, magic life in the world around us.
Outwardly, these observances may sometimes seem dead to the nonbeliever. In fact, they have an inner life, but the newcomer or habituated old-timer may not always be able to see or share it. We sometimes mock Arabs at their prayers or poems if we are Christians; we suspect the Christian prayers if we are Jews.
Poetry activates the memory, attitude, and perception, and it may be a good beginning or refresher for persons interested in eliciting the peace, power, and the active inner life of prayer. Prayer and poetry originally come from the same place, and much early poetry was sacred. Poetry, like prayer, accompanied ceremonies both at the temple and at the court. They were observances of the priest and king. They had the function of ritualizing, raising, and celebrating a sense of higher life. They were a training and discipline of inner attitude towards public and divine and even supernatural events. They were the developers of the culture.
We can recapture some of these beginnings of man and the world through both poetry and prayer. This connects us with origins of our feelings, which for some may be God, for others nature and omnipotence. Take this ancient poem of Zoroaster, the Persian teacher from the 7th century B.C. It asks these questions of the creation:
This I ask Thee-tell it truly to me, Lord!
Who the Sire was, Father first of Holiness?
Who the pathway for the sun, and stars ordained?
Who, through whom is't moon doth wax and wane again?
This and much else do I long, 0 God, to know.
This I ask Thee-tell it to me truly, Lord!
The Vocative Relation
Poetry, from the Greek word poesis (to make), like prayer from the Sanskrit word pras or prcchati (for asking), often calls on unseen powers and addresses nature, the lover, time, or the West Wind as Thou. This is the mood of invocation. It is, philosophically and grammatically, the vocative relation: the poet calls out "0 Thou" to the universe. It is the grammatical case, the vocative, in inflected languages which calls out or invokes.
This vocative relation-the grammar of calling out-is a personalizing, a connectedness with destiny, death, love and chance, shared by prayer and poetry alike.
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes!
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise!
-Robert Burns
Or,
0 Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere Destroyer and preserver: hear, oh, hear!
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
The vocative relation, or mood of invocation, is the calling out of the soul to life itself, be it the West Wind, Joy, the fountains and meadows, or love, or time, or even death. The poet, in his inner life, impersonates the world, and all poetry is a kind of prayer to the universe. Edmund Waller (1606-1687) speaks and talks, as in prayer, even to the rose:
Go, lovely Rose!
Tell her that she wastes her time and me
That now she knows
When I resemble her to thee,
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