The Poetry of God

I would dearly love to write better poetry and also to enjoy good verse, so I have been reading Norton’s Anthology of Poetry.  I stumbled onto an extended portion on versification – the mechanics of poetry - in the back of the large volume.  This treatise presents the types of poems (epic, dramatic, lyric), discusses meter (iambic – dih dah, trochaic – dah dih, etc.), and and explains poetic feet (monometer, dimeter, pentameter, etc.)

(Stay with me; there is thought at the end of this…)

A Maddening Paragraph

Now I’m very anal about meter when I write songs and poetry.  I don’t like when words are unnaturally stuffed or stretched into a line and mess the meter up, so I like my verses to be nice and neat and fit – with perfection.  I used to proud about this, until I read this paragraph in Norton:

“Poets who write in strict conformity to a single metrical pattern will achieve the music of a metronome and soon drive their listeners away.  Variation, surprise, is the very essence of every artist’s trade; and one of the most important sources of metrical power and pleasure is the perpetual tension between the regular and the irregular, between the expected and the unexpected, the base rhythm and the variation.”

So when I read this, I think, “What? So you’re telling me that I should write in iambic pentameter, but not really? That the high standard of metrical perfection that I have been striving for is boring and not what I want at all? And worse yet, that there is some mystical music to words and sounds that is outside of the calculus of poetry, and that it’s ‘variation, surprise and tension’- call them the ‘imperfections’- that give the poetry life and interest?”

Ugh.  Forgive me for ever writing anything to which I unfortunately assigned the term “poetry.”

God as Artist and Poet

Though my poetic aspirations still lie unconscious in the street after Norton’s roundhouse kick, I did see the truth in what the author was saying.  This is especially true when we consider the Poet Par Excellence, God Himself, as He weaves His poetry and artistry into our lives.  Isn’t it the variation, surprise and tension that He deftly places in the normal meter of our lives that add interest and give character to the verses?  Would He not find excessive order and “perfection” boring? 

This is the way the creative Master Poet works.  While we are misguidedly striving for daily control and perfection, He trips up the normal iambic pentameter of our lives with trochaic feet and spondee.  These look like irritations, imperfections and failure to us, but His intent is that they be transformed into good poetry, with music, interest and character – the very essence of life itself.  

“We are His workmanship.”