‘We band of brothers.’ Shakespeare gave us that. And much more. Yes, we all remember quotations. That is because how you say it is as important as what you say. We remember poetry. We forget prose.
And there is another aspect to poetry if we are worshippers. When we worship, we sing. And we sing not prose but poetry. A book of hymns is a book of poetry. We can’t do without it. A hymn is a specialised poem, agreed. And some hymns (or sacred songs) are better than others. But it has been said that we learn more from our hymns than from the sermons we hear. In the history of hymns or worship-songs it is instructive to note that Watts and Wesley (who are the gold-standard in this) turned to the Psalms for inspiration as often as not. One of the unfortunate wrong-turnings we have taken in recent years has been to neglect the Psalms in favour of contemporary songs, a dangerous move from deep water to the shallows.
How are we to distinguish good poetry from bad in the case of worship-songs? Sam Johnson put it clearly. ‘No man can properly call a river deep or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains and many rivers; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be styled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind.,’ In other words we have to put our worship-songs alongside other poems to assess their worth. That means getting acquainted with poems that are part of our English culture. A film took its title from Gray’s elegy: ‘Far from the madding crowd’. Marvell’s phrase ‘time’s winged chariot’ is remembered by lovers knowing that time is short. Milton we remember for ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ Coleridge gave us: ‘Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.’ As well as the much sung ‘Jerusalem‘, Blake also gave us his poem about the tiger: ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ Burns knew something about self-deception: ‘O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us. In a melancholy vein Emily Dicknson wrote: ‘Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me.’
A new book by John Carey ‘A Little History of Poetry’, published by Yale, unlocks the store of English poetry promised by such quotations. It runs through the sequence of poets from Chaucer to Auden and beyond and around. It introduces us, as Johnson said was necessary, to the variety of poetry that is ours as English-speaking people. With such a background we are in a better position to appreciate the poetry we find in the Bible in English, incomparable as it is: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’, ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’ and ‘The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear?’
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