Poetic License

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the effect that poetry can have on human beings. This was the subject of my recent book, Soul-Changers, as well as of a short story of mine, “How Are You Doing?”, which is included in the collection The Heart of the Matter. In that story, I read “God’s Grandeur,” a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, to a group of teenagers; one of them starts crying as a result.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

The story also contains a poem of my own, “I Miss You”:

“Letting go of love

when you have no choice

is a little like dying without morphine.

And then you realize—though you knew it before, of course—

that the closeness was not about sex

but about being able to take care of someone

without a thought for yourself.

‘Our goal is not to make something happen,’

goes an old Gestalt saying;

‘It’s to see what actually does happen.’

I found out.”

In any case, this theme is the recent subject of a book by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections, which was reviewed by Adam Kirsch in the 5 December 2024 issue of the NYRB. It is Taylor’s contention that spiritual experience is a scientific fact, and he supports this by citing excerpts from the poetry of Wordsworth and Hölderlin, whose works give evidence of spiritual experience. Kirsch writes that “it is exactly because poetic language is incomplete and tentative that it is able to capture truths that simple assertion cannot.” For Taylor, he adds, “poetry coaxes the heart out of hiding.” Not bad, imo.

Here's an example of this from Soul-Changers, a poem by Mary Oliver, one that helped me through some dark times:

Wild Geese (1986)

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

Did I live a life that was harsh and exciting? I think so…but of course, it’s hard to say. What I can say for certain is that I am still alive, and that my life is still being enriched by poetry.

©Morris Berman, 2025