Grass is for grazing. Branches are for browsing. Cows and deer do not need to be told this. It comes naturally to them. For us humans it is different. Grass is a natural carpet; it is ideally suited for sitting on. Jesus told the 5,000 to sit down on the grass before he multiplied the loaves and fish. They hardly needed to be told that, we imagine. True, we do other things on grass nowadays. We play cricket, for instance, and football. Again, it is a natural carpet.
Similar conventions occur in human posture. We don’t need to be told to sit to hear an address, to stand when a lady comes into the room, to kneel or even prostrate ourselves before God. In our infancy we squirm, crawl and toddle. As adults we may adopt unnatural motions like a goose-step or become adept at dance-steps. All the time we follow nature or relate our movements to music or a drum-beat.
And so we come to rhythm. This, again, is something already in us. We don’t have to invent it. We have a heart-beat and a readiness for repetition. Rupert Brooke saw us a pulse in the eternal mind. We have only to tap our fingers on the desk to realise that this kind of play can be inventive, to involve anticipation, development and resolution.
We are talking of the raw material of human existence, of our given terms and conditions. Poetry and rhetoric are as powerful as they are in catching our attention and engaging our emotion because they take these natural features as their starting-point.
We ignore this at our peril. Just as we eat when we are hungry and drink when we are thirsty, so we obey these less obvious imperatives in our being. We have sayings to remind us to wait till the penny drops, to seize the moment. Routines of one sort or another came naturally too to the brontosaurus and all his herbivorous mates. The aurochs joined the merry crew at a later stage. We cannot ignore our rhythmic being.
There is a time and a season, as we read in ‘Ecclesiastes’. The same insight is put memorably in ‘Proverbs 25.11'.
PSALM 90
Isaac Watts had another take on grass when he wrote his classic hymn O God our help in ages past’. He could do no better than paraphrase Psalm 90. Others have been similarly inspired. ‘You bring our days to an end just like a dream. We are merely tender grass that sprouts and grows in the morning but dries up by evening.’ (CEV)
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