John 2.23-3.21

And many people, when they saw what He

had done while He was in Jerusalem

for Passover, believed that He must be

the Son of God, as He had said to them,

and trusted in His Name. But Jesus knew

their hearts. He knew the motives of all men

and needed no one to advise or to

explain to Him the heart of any man.

Thus, to commit to them He would not do.

The primary reason to take up reading and studying both poetry and theology is that these can show us paths for journeying with Jesus through our lives. Poetry and theology can point us to Jesus, inviting us to consider Him in ways that can make His Presence with us more real and continuous.

To many readers, poetry represents a kind of mysticism. We know the poet is trying to say something, but we’re not quite sure what it is. Perhaps he’s just inviting us to have some sort of inward and personal encounter with his words, to lead us in making our own poem out of the lines, images, structure, form, and all the rest he supplies?

We have seen that among the aspects of a work of literature which identify it as poetry are a certain employment of form, rhythm, rhyme, and image.

The heavy lifting of poetry is by the images poets choose to convey meaning and experience, together with the rhyme schemes they adopt to add musicality to the verse. Images can be of various kinds, as also can rhymes. Images and rhyme are the muscle and flesh of a poem.

Images come into play when poets use one thing to stand for another. Images are primarily of two sorts, metaphors and similes, which are simply metaphors introduced by “like” or “as”. In a metaphor a poet gives us something familiar to help us understand and experience something less familiar. A good image can make a lasting impression and convey a deeply meaningful experience.

We need to say a bit more about the role of meter and line and how they contribute to making verse an art form. Meter and line provide the skeleton and sinews of a poem. They give shape and rhythm to the words that hang on them stanza after stanza. The more regular they are, the more the poem “feels” like a poem. Much of contemporary poetry has thrown off all requirements of regular structure and demonstrates very little regard for meter and line as these have been practiced over the centuries in traditional English verse. I find such poems more difficult to read and appreciate, and to recall or commend. Many very fine examples of what is referred to as “free verse” exist, but I regard them as the exception. For our purposes I want to consider as an art in the long-standing tradition of the arts, those poems that honor the value of regular meter and line length.

Undoubtedly, a sizeable majority of people today, including most Christians, would answer the question above, “Not I.” It’s hard enough to get people to read these days, much less to read verse. So estranged is the reading public from any diet of poetry that, not that long ago, one of our leading poets published an important book bearing the title, Can Poetry Matter?

Of course, all theology is spiritual because its object is to know God, Who is a most pure Spirit. So whether we’re doing work in Biblical, creational, historical, systematic, or practical theology, we are doing spiritual theological work.