Five Poems – Part 1 – The Power of a Poem

I am not going to make the blanket claim that spending a little more time reading and sharing poetry can change your life. Well, with at least one exception.

I will claim, as scores of poets and critics before me have, that reading and sharing—and even writing—poetry can greatly enhance your life. Poetry can reach to places in the soul that mere information cannot. Poetry is more important to what it means to be a human being than most of us know. But God knows. And maybe that’s why somewhere around one-third of the Bible is written in, yes, poetry.

Poetry works differently than narrative, whether biographical, historical, or theological. It’s difficult to explain how poetry works to enhance our experience of life, but that it does is pretty much beyond dispute. As Dana Gioia, poet and former director of the National Endowment of the Arts, explained in his book, Poetry as Enchantment, “The aim of poetry—in this primal and primary sense as enchantment—is to awaken us to a fuller sense of our own humanity in both its social and individual aspects.” He adds, “Poetry simultaneously addresses our intellect and our physical senses, our emotions, imagination, intuition, and memory without asking us to divide them.”

I always liked poetry as a kid, especially writing it. So, naturally, when I went to college, I took a major in English literature. The question driving me in my choice of majors was not “What will I do with it?” but “What can I do?” I could do poetry. I have a diploma to prove it.

But I mentioned the possibility of at least one exception concerning the power of poetry to change your life. And I’m that exception. My life was dramatically changed one day in an empty classroom with a college textbook open before me, trying to prepare for a class.

Of course, I should have prepared long before then. But I knew the classroom would be empty in the hour preceding our class, so I grabbed a cup of coffee and headed up, found my seat, got comfortable, opened the text, and read the poem that changed my life.

At the time I was a confused, uncertain, disillusioned young man. I was not a believer in Jesus Christ. I believed in myself, and I was coming not to like the self I was becoming. For nearly two years now, on my own at university, I began spiraling away from the morals and disciplines I had learned growing up. What used to be the best part of me—my gentleness and decency—had taken a pass on life, while the dark and frightening me that I’d worked most of my life to suppress was gaining ascendancy in my soul.

If I ever thought about my future, it was disconcerting. Troubled visions of me failing in everything I tried haunted me day by day. And worse, I could see me becoming a first rate ne’er-do-well, or worse, to the shame of my parents and the glee of my erstwhile “friends.”

To be brief, I was in a scary place. But I wouldn’t admit it, and I could not stop thinking there must be something better for me, right? I just needed to hold on, press on, and hope in hope.

And then, on that hot September afternoon, I read these words from 20th century Irish poet, William Butler Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats’ “The Second Coming” seemed to confirm all my fears. Things are bad and getting worse, and they’re only going to worsen. I was stunned. The poem plunged me into despair, a season of deep inner darkness that lasted for six long months. I despaired of everything I had ever loved or trusted or hoped, and I gave myself up, like some character out of a story by Camus, to the utter absurdity of my life.

Which is precisely where I needed to be to hear the Good News of Jesus in February of the following year. The Lord used this poem to hasten the process of my giving up on myself, so that, when He came offering a new life, new hope, and a whole new existence with Him, the offer was irresistible. I’m grateful to Yeats for setting my soul on the tee, so that Jesus could drive it for a hole-in-one in Him.

So today: Know a friend whose feeling hopeless? Tell him to cheer up, things could be worse. Then recite “The Second Coming” to Him, and tell him about the Babe in a manger Who is changing the world.