Elizabeth Jennings Week (I) Poetry and Friendship

Talking with a good friend after church about poetry – well, as you do, and why not? He was saying when he read poetry he often didn't understand what he read, but enjoyed reading poetry just the same. In our conversation I suggested perhaps sometimes poetry isn't meant to be understood, but rather, it helps us to understand – ourselves, the world, others, those perplexities and mysteries of the life we live. 

In that remarkably evocative book, Mr God This is Anna, there's a definition of poetry that has always intrigued, and largely satisfied me: "Poetry is something made up of different bits that is different from all the bits." I too have come away from reading poetry with that strange intellectual and existential paradox – while I haven't understoood it, it would be quite wrong to say I was none the wiser. Because wisdom isn't only about knowing all the answers, or even knowing all the questions. Wisdom is to know the limits of the question and answer approach as the only way to understanding much that makes up our lives. Curiosity is its own justification; the inner search is not always the search for an answer. The quest for truth isn't so easily reduced to the limits of vocabulary. Poetry allows us to both think and feel, to search and only perhaps find, to question without being overanxious to fix, sort and nail down in words alone, those profound insights and experiences that like time and tide, climate and geology, give shape and character to our inner world.

So it's important who we choose as companions on the road, whom we invite to be conversation partners, those voices that can be relied on not to let us off with shallow and superficial answers, or predictable and unsearching questions. Amongst the poets I have several such critical friends, and readers of this blog will guess most of them. R S Thomas; Emily Dickinson; George Herbert; Mary Oliver; Gerard Manley Hopkins: Robert Frost; Denise Levertov; Elizabeth Jennings; Carol Ann Duffy; Seamus Heaney. There are others of course, and in any case one of my favourite kinds of book is the poetry Anthology of which I have several which are now as familiar as any collected corpus.

But this week I'm having an Elizabeth Jennings week on the blog. She is one from whose poetry I've learned amongst other things the importance of relationships in any spirituality that takes the divine and human intersections of our experience seriously. Here she is on friendship. And this one poem says why each special friendship is cause for celebration, gratitude and the glad recognition that such blessing is ours, undeserved gift, grace at its surprising best.

FRIENDSHIP

Such love I cannot analyse;
It does not rest in lips or eyes,
Neither in kisses nor caress.
Partly, I know, it’s gentleness

And understanding in one word
Or in brief letters. It’s preserved
By trust and by respect and awe.
These are the words I’m feeling for.

Two people, yes, two lasting friends.
The giving comes, the taking ends
There is no measure for such things.
For this all Nature slows and sings.