I never really understood poetry.

My English classes in elementary school and high school covered it a bit, and I had a year of courses on epic poetry in college. I even read Homer and other Greek poets in my Greek classes. But I never understood what poetry is until I was introduced to Malcolm Guite and Waiting on the Word.

Meet Malcolm guite

Malcolm Guite is a poet, an Anglican priest, a chaplain at Girton College, Cambridge, and a rock and roller. He visits the U.S. and Canada frequently for lectures and poetry readings. He is particularly interested in the intersection between religion and the arts, a theme we see in his books and poetry.

Guite has a particular love for George Herbert, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien (in fact, I suspect he’s an overgrown hobbit with a beard), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Guite’s book Mariner is a biography of Coleridge integrated with an analysis of the Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” It’s a fabulous read and another book I highly recommend.

All this makes Guite a brilliant guide to poetry, particularly as it relates to Christianity and the church year.

Waiting on the Word, as its subtitle indicates, is A poem a day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. (He has a similar volume, The Word in the Wilderness, which does the same for Lent and Easter.)

Advent and Christmas

For those from non-liturgical backgrounds, Advent starts on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and is traditionally the time when people prepared for the celebration of Christ’s nativity. It focuses on the Old Testament prophets and the long years of waiting for the coming of the Messiah, as well as our long years of waiting for Christ’s second coming.

Christmas day begins the Christmas season in the church calendar—unlike in secular culture, where Christmas season starts before and ends on Christmas. In the church calendar, the Christmas season lasts twelve days, taking us to January 6, the Feast of Epiphany. In western churches, Epiphany commemorates the arrival of the Magi in Bethlehem; in eastern churches, it celebrates Jesus’ baptism.

The Importance of Poetry

Guite walks us through the Advent and Christmas seasons with a poem for each day. Some are his own sonnets, but he also includes many other poets, including George Herbert, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, John Keats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, G.K. Chesterton, Lucy Shaw, and quite a few others. The poems cover a range of moods and verse styles, giving an overview of different of types of English poetry.

But what made this book so valuable for me is that Guite includes a commentary on each poem, explaining its connection to the theme of Advent and outlining what the poet is doing and how he or she is doing it. Going through these explanations helped me understand not only the poems but poetry itself. None of the classes I had taken ever got much past the technical aspects of poetry, the rhyme schemes, meter, poetic devices, and so on. Using C.S. Lewis’s terminology, this is looking at poetry rather than looking along it. No one ever taught me how to look along a poem, to see what it is pointing to beyond the confines of the words themselves.

Guite’s explanations of the poems in this collection helped me see how to do that, and with it, how my left-brain approach to poetry missed the point. Poetic technique is important for the beauty of poetry and as the means to create something to look along, but understanding and appreciating a poem is far more of a right-brain activity.

And that, it seems to me, is the great value of poetry. We live in a time where we have reduced everything to the literal. But that’s not how Scripture sees the world. The Psalms point to the natural world and see spiritual truth in it. Jesus’ parables tell us that there are spiritual implications to everything from sowing seed to baking bread. Good poetry can help us learn to see beyond the literal, to find meaning, and to recover a more sacramental vision of the world. Poetry can thus be a tool helping us to recover a properly enchanted worldview.

An Advent Devotional

I have gone through Waiting on the Word during the last two Advent and Christmas seasons as part of my devotional reading, and I plan to do it again this year. Like many Advent devotionals, it begins on December 1, which this year actually is the first day of Advent. This isn’t your usual Advent devotional, but it has been immensely value to me. If you don’t have anything planned for this year, I encourage you to try it and let me know what you think.