We live in a hurried age. Attention spans are sliver-thin, and clickbait headlines and incendiary tweets jostle to monopolize such a scant resource. In a time of frenetic activity, words are functional tools to accomplish urgent tasks for harried people: “Can u pls get milk on way home? TY.” Like paper towels, words are useful and disposable. You don’t contemplate or admire a paper towel. You wipe crumbs from the counter, then throw it away.
We live in a polarized age. Our culture prunes complicated issues to talking points. Words convey those points to the already convinced.
We live in a virtual age. Social media disembodies our relationships, live-streams disembody our worship, Zoom calls disembody our meetings, pornography disembodies our sex lives. And words grow increasingly disconnected from physical touch, personal contact, body language, and embodied experience. I know spouses who conduct their arguments via text message.
We live in an AI age, an age of words outsourced to machines that cannot mean or feel them, an age of LLMs (large language models) that push out words at warp speed, choosing the probable over the piquant.
Most of us are more formed by this hurried, harried, polarized, disembodied AI age than we care to admit. The formation happens every day, in ways big and small, many of which are invisible to us. But we’re shaped.
Our attention spans are decreasing—How often do you sit down with a book only to wind up scrolling on your phone? When did you last converse at length, person-to-person, with someone who holds a different view on an important issue? How often do you make a concentrated effort to craft a beautiful sentence?
The character-forming effect of the age shapes our use of words, and the way we use our words in turn shapes our character. In light of this reality, here’s a radical suggestion for those who long to be differently formed: Let’s resist the system and shape our souls, let’s build good character and buck bad culture, by reading good poetry.
Join the Counterculture
For most of my life, I kept a careful distance from poetry. I wanted to like it; I really did. But I’m a child of my age, and poetry required discipline and concentrated effort, like bushwhacking through a jungle. I was more of a walk-on-the-path kind of guy. If I wanted to be informed, it was easier to read a news article. If I wanted to be entertained, it was more enjoyable to open a novel or turn on the television.
Then something began to change. Relations between poetry and me improved dramatically. Over the past decade, I’ve found great enjoyment and gleaned fresh insight from many poems. I’ve even been formed spiritually by some. Two discoveries made the difference.
The character-forming effect of the age shapes our use of words, and the way we use our words in turn shapes our character.
First, I found several poets I genuinely enjoy. The former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins makes me laugh aloud while showing me fresh angles on everyday realities. I savor the sounds of Seamus Heaney’s poems even before I grasp their meaning. The words keep me coming back to ponder further—enjoyment seeking understanding (see Ps. 111:2). Malcolm Guite’s poems resonate with reality. The words fit the truth. Reading them is satisfying and surprising, like choosing the right Tupperware lid from the drawer and feeling it snap into place on the container.
Second, almost by accident, I began to read the poems of the 17th-century English country priest George Herbert. I found that he understood my fearful thoughts, that his delight in God increased my own, that his love for Christ was infectious.
I came to think of him as “Pastor George” and to realize that poetry was a key part of his pastoral strategy—a feature, not a bug. The poetic form wasn’t something to figure out and then discard, having obtained the pastoral insight. Rather, Herbert’s spiritual message was embedded in the specific sound, shape, and structure of his poems. Each poem’s form was forming me.
Perhaps the first part of my story is true for some readers. You want to like poetry, but you don’t. It requires time and effort to puzzle through a poem, and there’s no answer key to let you know if you got it right. Well, I too want you to like poetry, because if you like it, you’ll read it. And if you read good poems, you’ll be formed in good ways that counter our hurried, polarized, disembodied, AI age.
Poetry can do some things even better than prose can. What if you could experience poetry as not just a concealer but a revealer of meaning; a clarifying, complicated, realistic, holistic form of words that addresses your mind, heart, and body? What if poetry could begin to change your relationship with words? Or even to shape your relationship with God?
Because the personal and specific is more compelling than the abstract and general, I’ll invite you into the countercultural, formative act of reading poems by drawing on the poet who has most drawn me. His words are different. Each was carefully shaped and set by a small-town English priest who died before age 40 with his poems still unpublished. Could they alter your experience of poetry and even shape your soul? I hope so.
Pastor George’s Strategy
A good way to see the countercultural, formative value of Herbert’s words is to understand his pastoral-poetic strategy. Consider the first stanza of his poem “Easter Wings (I)”:
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poor:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
Strikingly, this poem takes the shape of what it describes: a wing (stanza 2 is an identical shape). That’s because, like many other poets, Herbert is interested in communicating to readers through their ears and eyes. Whereas prose is written mainly for the ear, usually arranged in standard lines or columns of no particular significance (like this piece you’re reading), poetry has a particular form. The visual arrangement of a poem is part of its meaning.
For instance, notice that lines 1–5 become shorter and shorter. The fullness of the first line visually expresses the plentitude of God’s created blessings that it describes. But by line 5, that expansive first line has been progressively whittled down to just two single-syllable words: “Most poor.” The top half of the stanza is therefore a visual representation of the destructive effects of the fall, which stripped humankind of the Edenic “wealth and store” God had given.
Herbert is using the shape of this poem to give us a (visual) experience of the enormity of humanity’s loss. We’ve all gone our own way, deserting and defying God. Notice that the Lord is mentioned in the first line but absent in the next four. We’ve forsaken him and squandered his largesse. Each of us is the Prodigal Son, and the scrawny, two-syllable poverty of line 5 is the Prodigal’s pigsty. If you continue to follow the rest of the stanza, you’ll see that, with Christ, our fortunes rise.
The point here is that Herbert doesn’t just tell us these truths—he shows us. He offers a visual experience. Pastor George wants us to know bitter sin and blessed grace through our ears and eyes. He means to engage not just our minds but our bodies.
Embodiment
Though it may seem strange to say, poetry has ways of engaging our bodies that prose doesn’t. Sometimes it does this through the sounds of the words. When Seamus Heaney writes of his Irish father digging peat, the words sound like what they say: “The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots awaken in my head” (“Digging”). Can you hear the peat (“squelch and slap”) and the spade (“curt cuts”)?
Similarly, Herbert was alive to the power of sounded words and their ability to grant an experience of the truth they convey. He wrote, “Beauty and beauteous words should go together” (“The Forerunners”). It makes sense. If you want a reader to know beauty, let her hear and feel it. Huge realities expressed in hackneyed language feel small. But well-chosen words tell and show.
Sometimes poetry engages our bodies through meter. When you read formal verse (i.e., poetry with rhyme and meter, as opposed to free verse), you feel it.
I still remember a saying I often heard as a child (“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”) mainly because of its sing-song rhythm. The meter drummed it deeper. I’d have forgotten the same truth stated in accurate but forgettable prose: “Material objects such as sticks and stones may be harmful to my body, but I won’t be physically injured through the speech of another person.” Meter matters. What we feel in our bodies lodges deeper in our hearts.
What we feel in our bodies lodges deeper in our hearts.
When you listen to a catchy song with a driving rhythm, your body jumps into action. You drum your fingers, tap your foot, bob your head. Similarly, the meter and rhythm of poetry engage more of our embodied selves than does prose.
Herbert knew this truth and used it to good effect. In his poem “Denial,” about a time when God seemed silent, he intentionally scatters words across the page, using erratic rhythm and rhyme. He tells us precisely what he’s up to: “Then was my heart broken, as was my verse.”
Through the erratic rhythm, he’s offering a gift. He wants us not simply to know intellectually but to feel in our bodies that lurching, unsettled angst of a broken soul struggling to trust a seemingly absent God. The poetry provides the arrhythmic experience of a sad and scattered heart.
But in the final stanza, he restores both rhythm and rhyme. It’s no accident. It’s his way of giving us an embodied mini-experience of the joy of walking in the grace and favor of God. Our lives work better. We’re united, not scattered.
Pastoring Through Poetry
Sometimes, however, Herbert refuses to provide the resolution we desire. “Longing” is a long poem that ends this way:
My love, my sweetnesse, heare!
By these thy feet, at which my heart
Lies all the year,
Pluck out thy dart,
And heal my troubled breast which cries,
Which dies.
The final word is bleakly unresolved: “dies.” Herbert asks for help but hasn’t yet received an answer. The blackness of death is present at the end of the poem. Perhaps Herbert is thinking of the ending of a much older poem, Psalm 88: “You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness” (v. 18). That’s it. End of psalm.
Both Psalm 88 and “Longing” paint a picture that’s true to our experience. There are long seasons, sometimes years or decades, in which we see no answer to our prayers, and quick resolutions are unavailable. By ending “Longing” as he does, Herbert offers us an experience of what he describes. It goes deeper that way. He’s pastoring through poetry.
Sometimes he uses poetic effect to administer a sharp slap. To experience this for yourself (do you dare?), read the 14 lines of his poem “Sin (I)”:
Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round!
Parents first season us: then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers,
Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,
Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
The sound of glory ringing in our ears.
Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.
In the first 12 lines of this sonnet, Herbert calls our attention to the many ways God protects his people from sin. It’s an impressive list. By the time we arrive at line 13, we see we’re close to the end of the poem and may assume we’re coming in for a smooth landing. That’s when Herbert springs his surprise:
Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.
It turns out Herbert was leading us here all along. He wants us to feel the stunning blow of sin’s haymaker. It comes out of nowhere, dropping us to the mat. And it was an inside job, a “bosom-sin.” Sin is cunning like that. It blindsides us, evading all protections.
Haven’t we all experienced this? Haven’t we all been stunned by a sudden sin? Herbert could state the truth as a plain proposition. But if we experience it for ourselves, it’ll go deeper and last longer. Herbert pastors through poetry.
Poetry as Counterculture
I’ve offered a few readings of a few poems by one poet. That’s not much, but I hope it’s enough to awaken a taste for a world of thought, experience, and language different from our own. Herbert worked deliberately with words. He prized poems. His aim was to serve and shepherd souls. He has certainly done that for me.
Writing good poems is hard work. In “Digging,” Heaney admits he couldn’t dig peat with his dad’s skill and determines instead to dig with his pen. He’ll find, see, and share things through poetry. Like writing poems, reading them is also work. It usually requires a willingness to concentrate and a window of time to do so.
Herbert’s aim was to serve and shepherd souls. He has certainly done that for me.
Rather than tailgating a slow poem, or swerving into the passing lane, we pause and ponder. Rather than reading for a utilitarian bottom line, we allow our ears and eyeballs and all the rest of us to be engaged in spiritually transformative ways. Digging can be backbreaking. But when you dig you just might hit treasure. It’s good work to dig into a poem that a poet has dug down deep. It forms our characters in ways that resist our culture.
I anticipate an objection to my claim that poetry is countercultural. It goes like this: “What about sung poetry? The poets Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Taylor Swift have huge cultural impact and appeal. Is poetry really countercultural?” To this I reply: While there’s overlap between song lyrics and poetry, they’re not the same.
A lyric surrounded and carried by music is distinct from poetic verse that generates its own sounds and rhythms. And poetry—without the sugar of music to make the medicine go down—continues to lack broad cultural appeal. Lyric poets aren’t filling stadiums.
Additionally, the overlap of song lyrics and poetry points toward the latter’s formative influence. Where in our day are words more parsed, prized and memorized, more learned and less disposable, than the lyrics of popular songs? Where is the thoughtfully human production and arrangement of words more vigorously defended than in professional music circles? Why can songs draw together people of varying ideologies and affiliations? And don’t live concerts demonstrate and celebrate the enormous value of embodied presence?
In these respects, even the song lyrics of artists with massive popular appeal and cultural influence are pushing back on cultural currents. So, why not poetry?
Could it be there’s a more fruitful and formative response to our harried age than hurrying up? Might there be a more productive reaction to the advent of AI than watching yet another YouTube video about the AI apocalypse? How about engaging in a simple countercultural activity instead? Perhaps invite a friend or two to join you. Pull a slender volume of poetry off your shelf and begin to read.
