This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
As someone who’s spent a lot of time writing poetry, I recognize the experience described in this poem very well. I know the need to get out of town, away from busy streets, to go to a place uncluttered by human chatter and distraction. I know a lot about the need for solitude and silence; how the creative mind opens up and crackles with inspiration when given the space to do so. Trees and birds are perfect companions in the writing process: They leave you alone, yet they seem strangely connected to what you’re doing. I know how, when a poem comes alive, it quietly stuns the world (or that’s how it seems!). A well-crafted poem seems to speak of a deeper truth that I could never otherwise articulate. Yes, I empathize with the poet of Tennyson’s poem.
Out of town
Since I converted to the Catholic faith 14 years ago I’ve realized how very similar the needs of a poet are to the needs of someone cultivating a relationship with Jesus Christ. To be serious about prayer, I need to step back from the constant hum of social media and “pass … by the town.” I need to consider that even Jesus intentionally prayed alone (cf. Mt 14:23). When I think about getting out of town, though, I’m not necessarily thinking of New York or Chicago. The “town” can be the built-up area of our own concerns. Sometimes we need to head off, even into a different room, certainly into a different way of listening, for the creative act of prayer.
Why is prayer creative? Prayer may not make us a poem, but it builds our relationship with God. He who created us at the beginning knows we are works in progress. Prayer is allowing him to transform us, to be created always anew. And we need to be willing partners in that creation.
The world listens
In Tennyson’s poem, nature itself is awed by the creation of the poet’s “melody.” “The wild swan pause(s) … the lark drop(s) down.” Even the hawk is arrested in the act of his kill. We know that birds react to the drama of a coming storm. We know from Matthew 27:45 how the natural world darkened when Christ died on the cross. We can imagine birds falling silent then as they do during an eclipse or at the coming of a hurricane.
Tennyson’s song is nothing like as cataclysmic as the death of the Son of God, or even a storm, but what we see here is that when a poet strikes the right note of truth, the world will listen. It makes me think about how authentic prayer, much more than poetry, changes the world in sometimes imperceptible ways. As a hermit friend of mine in Canada once told me, “Every time we celebrate the liturgy something changes in heaven and on earth.” After all, the Mass is the sweetest melody of all.
The Poet’s Song
By Alfred Lord Tennyson
The rain had fallen, the Poet arose,
He passed by the town, and out of the street,
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun,
And waves of shadow went over the wheat,
And he set him down in a lonely place,
And chanted a melody loud and sweet,
That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud,
And the lark drop down at his feet.
The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,
The snake slipt under a spray,
The hawk stood with the down on his beak
And stared, with his foot on the prey
And the nightingale thought, “I have sung many songs,
But never a one so gay,
For he sings of what the world will be
When the years have died away.
