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The Purpose of Poetry
To express the inexpressible (note Sam's words 'so I can't tell you what I mean'). To tap in to that ancient haunted longing for our true home that certain smells and songs remind us of. To become human again.
1. C. S. Lewis, responding in a 1949 letter to a woman who had written him explaining that her religious doubts had 'all dissolved in a wordless illumination of the mind':
1. C. S. Lewis, responding in a 1949 letter to a woman who had written him explaining that her religious doubts had 'all dissolved in a wordless illumination of the mind':
No, one can't put these experiences into words: though all writing is a continual attempt to do so. Indeed, in a sense, one can hardly put anything into words: only the simplest colors have names, and hardly any of the smells. The simple physical pains and (still more) the pleasures can't be expressed in language. I labor the point lest the devil should hereafter try to make you believe that what was wordless was therefore vague and nebulous. But in reality it is just the clearest, the most concrete, and the most indubitable realities which escape language: not because they are vague but because language is. What goes easily into words is precisely the abstract--thought about 'matter' (not apples or snuff), about 'population' (not actual babies), and so on. Poetry I take to be the continual effort to bring language back to the actual.2. Martyn-Lloyd Jones recounts a time that a friend of his wrote to Chesterton asking, 'Why is it that the poets can be so glorious in their poetry but often are so disappointing in their personal lives and in their beliefs and in their prose?' Chesterton wrote back:
Poets often sing what they cannot say.3. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings:
'The Lady of Lorien! Galadriel!' cried Sam. 'You should see her, indeed you should, sir. I am only a hobbit, and gardening's my job at home, sir, if you understand me, and I'm not much good at poetry--not at making it: a bit of a comic rhyme, perhaps, now and again, you know, but not real poetry--so I can't tell you what I mean. It ought to be sung. You'd have to get Strider, Aragorn that is, or old Mr. Bilbo, for that. But I wish I could make a song about her. Beautiful she is, sir! Lovely! Sometimes like a great tree in flower, sometimes like a white daffadowndilly, small and slender like. Hard as di'monds, soft as moonlight. Warm as sunlight, cold as frost in the stars. Proud and far-off as a snow-mountain, and as merry as any lass I ever saw with daisies in her hair in springtime. But that's a lot o' nonsense, and all wide of my mark.'
The Logic of Grace
The ending to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,' set a few days after Christmas in late nineteenth-century London. Horner, who has just been proven guilty by Holmes, confesses, and then says--
'My sister thinks that I am going mad. Sometimes I think that I am myself. And now--and now I am myself a branded thief, without ever having touched the wealth for which I sold my character. God help me! God help me!' He burst into convulsive sobbing, with his face buried in his hands.
There was a long silence, broken only by his heavy breathing and by the measured tapping of Sherlock Holmes' finger-tips upon the edge of the table. Then Holmes rose and threw open the door.
'Get out!' said he.
'What, sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!'
'No more words. Get out!'
And no more words were needed. There was a rush, a clatter upon the stairs, the bang of a door, and the crisp rattle of running footfalls from the street.
'After all, Watson,' said Holmes, reaching up his hand for his clay pipe, 'I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. If Horner were in danger it would be another thing; but this fellow will not appear against him, and the case must collapse. I suppose that I am commuting a felony. but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward.'HT: Jack Collins