The Day of Saints - Day 28, Soul Language

Here is a stone engraved in the Church of Saint Samson, Golant, which carries a striking poem, and a literal modernised rendering following the picture.

A poem on a memorial stone in Golant Parish Church

"Short blaze of life meteor of human pride,

Tried to live but liked it not and died,

Here lies its dross, the spritely part has gone,

To bless abodes where Sin and Death are none."

Yesterday, in a charity shop in Truro, I came across a book with the striking title, Poems That Make Grown Men Cry. I had been vaguely aware of this work as it is referred to in the opening chapter of Mark Oakley's excellent The Splash of Words, which I am currently working my way through. The premise of the former is that famous men share poems they cannot get through reading without welling up. I am not sure which I would choose, if asked, but only this week I found myself with wet eyes reading Jane Kenyon's 'Let Evening Come' (which, if you like, you can read here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46431/let-evening-come ) Kenyon died of leukaemia aged just 47.

A family at Golant Quay

As Oakley says, 'Not all poems make you start weeping, of course - far from it. There is, though, a sense that when we start talking about poems we are talking about soul-language, a way of crafting words that distils our experience into what feels like a purer truth.'(xiv) I spend a lot of my time writing or preaching sermons, and I guess there is an amount of overlap, but there is also a lot where this isn't the case. I am often asked to preach or 'give a word' in many different contexts, from a Christmas fair to a funeral following a tragic death, and one way of saying something will not do for another occasion, in content, tone, style, length, etc. Sometimes it is necessary to comfort, entertain, encourage, to urge on, to challenge, even perhaps to admonish, and sometimes silence is the best thing that can be said. These days, I don't think I do too bad a job of sermons, though there is certainly always much to learn, but I feel like I am only beginning with poems. Both help with self-understanding, but maybe in differing ways.

Perhaps one of the contrasts I see between sermons and poetry is how deeply personal poems can (often should) be, whereas sermons tend to need a much wider application and generality to them. I do not find it an easy mode to enter, probably for many reasons, but among them, as Oakley observes when discussing a Jungian view of self, 'Clergy...usually have very big shadows because of their often very manicured personas and their inability to publicly say or do what is thought to be inappropriate for a 'person of God'.' (p.46). Along with this, I am sure there is some (again, as Oakley puts it), 'I'm afraid to tell you who I am, because, if I tell you who I am, you may not like who I am, and it's all that I have.' I am nowhere near as fearful of this as I once was, but it's an ongoing thing for me, and not just me. Confidence and self-awareness do not always go hand in hand, but both are good.

Riverside Ropes