Poetry and Soul

The human soul is a shy creature indeed. The shy soul is not frightened or cowardly. Quite the opposite. The soul that holds each of us is vast, interconnected, vital, and beautiful. And like God's Self, the soul resists being defined, minimized, or captured. Perhaps the soul captures us and it is not we who capture the soul. The soul defines us, but when we try to define it in return our words and ideas often fall short. To try to define the spiritual container in which we all exist is a failed exercise the moment that we utter the first word because words have a way of minimizing and making things too precise. To state a noun is to capture a part of a thing with a word, but the word can never be the thing itself. The word never captures the wholeness of that thing. How profoundly true about something as large and magnificent as the soul.

This limitation of language is why religious and spiritual writing throughout human history has often come in the form of poetry instead of prose. Poetry, or at least good poetry, exists between the great Mystery and the understood. Poetry attempts to speak the unspeakable, that unsayable Souce that is God. That still small voice has always resisted much definition at all but at the same time invited the human soul to respond and know and participate whole-heartedly. Good poetry emerges from that tension between the unknown and the invitation to know and participate. It speaks of experience and feeling that is too deep for words and yet somehow arrives in the words of the poem despite itself. Poetry stands in the paradox that has always been the Way.

Poets from the Celtic traditions have always been particularly good at this spiritual task of shining a light into the Mystery, a light that is not too bright so as to not disturb the Mystery, but not too dim so as to not miss the Mystery. And as is often the case, the Celtic poets see Nature as the great teacher or courier of Divine presence and revelation.

Here, the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, speaks of being in a car on the magnificent and wild west coast of Ireland with waves on one side and ancient mystical land on the other.

This poem is entitled "Postscript".

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

—Seamus Heaney

If there is a particular poem that has impacted you lately, please share it with us in the comments so we might experience it along with you.

Kirk Webb,

Founder & Director of the Celtic Center