Loss of a Vital Skill
Reviving Our Fluency in Poetic Language
As I was walking up the stairs of Jabal Amman hill, I met some thistle-gatherers. Amman, Jordan, where I live, is a city of hills—to get anywhere you have to walk up and down hundreds of steps—and beside this particular flight of steps, in a steep little vacant lot, a man and a woman were gathering weeds. I paused and called out over the stairway-wall, “What are you gathering?”
They both smiled broadly, and the man walked over to the wall. “Khorfeysh!” he told me, holding up a leaf of milk thistle. Deftly—with bare fingers—he stripped off the prickly leaf-blade and proffered the midrib to me. “Try it!”
I took the midrib from his hand and bit into it. It was crisp and juicy, and tasted like spring. The introduction made, we talked a bit. I learned that they were not local Jordanians, but Druze from Syria—foreigners, like me.
That story probably seems quaint, perhaps exotic—which is a bit odd, when you think about it. After all, there are weeds everywhere, many of them edible. There are strangers everywhere, many of them interesting. But the story feels quaint because, usually, we don’t put weeds in our mouths, and we don’t talk to strangers.
Estranged from the Natural World
It hasn’t always been so. Our generation—perhaps especially my generation, Gen Z and younger Millennials—are cut off both from each other and from the natural world around us. And of course, quite a few social commentators are worried that this is hurting us. For one thing, there is an undeniable mental health crisis right now among teens and young adults in America. Beyond that, many conservatives are arguing that we are so dead as a culture that we can’t even create good art anymore. In an essay published in the New York Times in December 2022, entitled “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month,” Matthew Walther makes the case that we have stopped writing good poetry because we can’t—we are estranged from the natural world, which was the bedrock of the premodern imagination, and have only machines and garbage with which to furnish our own imaginations.
Walther says that as a result of this estrangement, we often can barely comprehend even the basic meaning of older poems. (What is a “woodbine,” anyway?) He marks the publication in 1922 of “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot as the death-date of poetry, because that famous poem encapsulated the spiritual fragmentation of modern industrial society, which renders us incapable of writing or even understanding good poetry.
If true, this is not a trivial problem. Poetic use of language is central to many forms of art, including songs and stories. If we can’t comprehend the art of the past, we are sprigs cut off from our cultural roots, and we may be doomed to wither. If art is dead, it is a symptom of a greater cultural death.
This reminds me of a C. S. Lewis poem, “The Future of Forestry,” which begins:
How will the legend of the age of trees
Feel, when the last tree falls in England?
When the concrete spreads and the town conquers
The country’s heart; when contraceptive
Tarmac’s laid where farm has faded,
Tramline flows where slept a hamlet,
And shop-fronts, blazing without a stop from
Dover to Wrath, have glazed us over?
Simplest tales will then bewilder
The questioning children, “What was a chestnut?
Say what it means to climb a Beanstalk.
Tell me, grandfather, what an elm is.
What was Autumn? They never taught us.”
This is without doubt a civilizational destination to avoid. But have we already arrived there? Is it already too late? Walther seems to think so, at least as far as the appreciation of poetry is concerned. He grimly opines: “For my part, I have an easier time conceiving of a world socialist utopia than I do a revival of poetry in English. For poetry to reappear, the muses would have to return from wherever they fled after we banished them.”
A Profound & Deadly Change
I’m not so sure. I don’t think the situation is so dire as that. I am going to argue here that there is more hope for poetry—and the condition of human hearts, of which art is merely a symptom—than some of the more pessimistic conservatives are willing to admit.
For one thing, we are not utterly cut off from the natural world. It’s most convenient to use myself as an example here, so I will: I live in the center of a city of five million people. (Let’s not forget that not everyone does.) And yet, even here, as I write, I am listening to birdsong. I am able to watch the sunrise, the sunset, the clouds hurrying through; to see (through a haze of light-pollution, it’s true) the stars, and trace the shapes of the wheeling constellations—the Lion, Bear, Pleaides, Hyades. I can even go foraging for edible plants (and I do). And so can anyone, almost anywhere. It is a matter of where you put your attention. If you wish modern man was more in touch with the natural world, get in touch with the natural world yourself.
That being said, there is another problem. It’s easy enough to say, “Get in touch with nature,” but it may not be easy to do in practice, because the problem is deeper than mere physical separation from nature. Walther argues that we are also spiritually cut off from nature, because of our worldview. We no longer see the world around us as alive, imbued with meaning and transcendence, as the ancients did.
The truth of that assertion is readily apparent. Even in the eyes of many Christians, the universe is mainly just atoms and molecules (human souls being the exception that proves the rule). The difference between the modern and ancient worldviews has been described like this: we see the universe as a place with objects in it; they saw it as a stage with actors on it.
We don’t see the world as alive anymore. We can’t personify the natural world the way the poets of old did, because we don’t know that everything in the universe is imbued with purpose, which has its source in personhood. This is a profound and deadly change from the way most people in the past experienced the world. Tolkien put it well in “Mythopoeia,” a poem written for pre-conversion Lewis:
He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued. There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth.
If we’re being honest, most of us read these words with either despair or baffled indifference. Who is truly capable of experiencing the world that way, in this modern age? To a contemporary adult mind, it is inconceivable—to view the meaning of something, rather than its physical form, as its deepest essence. We can pretend to see things that way, in a spurt of fancy, but to actually see that way requires a complete overturning of our structures of thought. Yet this is how Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle saw the world. Most of us see it differently now, not as a result of careful philosophical thought (was it reading William of Ockham that made you a nominalist?) but through sheer indoctrination.
Meaning-Saturated Reality
This indoctrination runs very deep, but it has one disadvantage: because it is an unnatural way of thinking, it will always be working against nature. Various psychological studies seem to indicate that preschool-aged children see the world “teleologically,” as possessing inherent meaning. This has been rightly touted as evidence that children are born theists, but there is another important truth here. It appears that young children interpret physical objects abstractly in terms of their purposes; for example, they insist that clouds are “for raining.”
This concept of purpose seems to me to be intrinsic purpose, in a Platonic or Aristotelian sense, rather than merely extrinsic purpose artificially imposed by a mind. If you simply think back to your early childhood, you will remember that the meaning and purpose of things was part of their essence, not a mere accident of their history. The meaning was as essential as the physical reality, or perhaps even more so. “Grandma’s house” was that in its very soul. It is only as we grow up that we begin to lose that faith in meaning as primary reality. I am convinced that nostalgia for childhood is so prevalent in modern society in part because we are subliminally taught, as we leave childhood, to reject the natural—and life-giving—way of seeing the world.
But because each new person is born with innate knowledge of a meaning-saturated reality, no level of cultural brainwashing will ever be able to root it out of society permanently. As Joseph Bottum put it in a 2022 essay (referring to the decline of the arts in general, which he attributes to totalitarian tendencies in our society), “Human nature is not eradicated by the attempt to deny it,” and therefore, “like weeds that claw a thin existence in the crevices between slabs of concrete paving, genuine art will always find a way to live” (“Art Will Find a Way,” Acton Institute, July 18, 2022).
This is a profound truth. You can cut down a forest and put down asphalt, concrete, and streetlights, but you must constantly maintain your kingdom of dead things. Leave it abandoned, even for a little while, and the concrete will crumble and living shoots will begin to break through again. And if any person can slip past the watchful eye of the indoctrinators and begin to fill his thoughts with true things, living shoots will break through in him.
This is bound to happen here and there by accident. But once someone realizes he is captive, he can consciously attempt to free himself. And once he is free, he can free others. This was exactly how Lewis and Tolkien viewed their mission regarding their own art. It should be everyone’s mission.
Roo Panes’s Mission & Ours
Some young contemporary poets have taken this mission upon themselves. Roo Panes is a good example. He is a British singer-songwriter who spends a lot of time wandering about in the countryside, and it comes through in his songs. Musically, many of them seem to have the life of the natural world breathed into them. His lyrics, too, are filled with a childlike awe of nature. Take, for example, “Tiger Striped Sky,” which depicts a sunrise in lines of vivid personification:
Pouncing ray to ray through the dappled shadows
Light was pouring down upon the stepping-stones
And,
Half the world was pulling on its colours
As night surrendered day to the hours
This is exactly the kind of poetry that is supposed to be impossible today. And lest I be accused of taking hyperbole literally, I should point out that Panes is not just a throwback to the days when people wrote poems about sunrises and used words like “dappled.” He has achieved some degree of cultural relevance (working entirely in secular spheres—though apparently a Christian, he is not a “Christian artist”). Since its release in 2015, “Tiger Striped Sky” has been streamed over 162 million times on Spotify alone. It would be hard to gain an audience of that size for written poetry in any era. For comparison: T. S. Eliot boasted in a 1929 letter to his mother that his Poems (published in 1919) had sold 3,000 copies to date, “which is very good for poetry.”
So even today good poetry is being written—it simply requires an element of revolt against the dominant worldview of our era. If we want to participate in this revolt, it won’t necessarily happen by accident. Roo Panes has shared in interviews that when he was starting his career and had to live and gig in London to make it as a musician, he saw it as his mission to bring a little bit of the peace and beauty of the countryside into the clamor of the city. We all need this attitude if we don’t want to conform to the world around us; in our society, we are outsiders, not insiders. We have to resist consciously, until our resistance sinks in and becomes natural again. We have to do that even when resistance seems futile.
Never Dominant but Never Defeated
And admittedly, it does seem futile sometimes. After all, the mightiest citizens of the natural world—oak trees, wolves, elk—can’t withstand the advancement of the unnatural world. If they do survive, they survive as refugees in the ever-narrowing hinterlands, or as curiosities in zoos. The march of “progress” mows over everything, and turns conservatives into Don Quixotes if it does not destroy them.
But we don’t face the choice between being mighty oak trees, doomed to perish heroically, or tacky electric streetlights, destined to dominate the world. There exists an entirely different class of creature: that of thistles, sparrows, and mice—foreigners and trespassers too small to be worth destroying, living things in this dead city-world but never really of it. These creatures will never be dominant—but they were never trying to be. And they will never be defeated.
Of course, this self-concept isn’t very aggrandizing. But the key to joy in this world is humility, which is simply knowing what you are and where you stand. And what you are is a small thing, with feet on the ground—nothing more, nothing less. Not the most important thing in the universe, but loved by One far greater and higher than you.
Roo Panes says he likes to look at a single blade of grass—tiny but exquisite, designed with more care and detail than anything man has made—and take comfort in the idea of being, like it, a small thing, with value as a small thing. “And I think one of the comforting things about faith,” he says, “is that feeling that it doesn’t matter how small you are; it’s OK. There is something much bigger looking after you. . . . You’re just you and that’s fine.”
Tolkien would approve. At the very end of The Hobbit, Gandalf tells Bilbo:
“You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”
“Thank goodness!” said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.
Being Children Again
The significance of this insight runs far deeper and higher than mere poetry, art, or culture. The way to life is through death, and the way to heaven is through the humble earth. Though God is high, his eye is on the lowly—but the proud he watches from afar (Psalm 138).
Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
As Roo Panes sings:
I know a land called the Land of the Living;
It’s the world beyond those curtains
Where we learned to play.
Oh, we’ll go back;
We’ll go back to the beginning,
And we’ll pick up on the trails of forgotten ways.
The kingdom of God is for the small and the foolish. It is for the grass of the fields and the birds of the air. It is for children—it has never been for the wise and grown up. The kingdom of man is loud and self-important, and it is constantly demanding our attention, our awe, and our allegiance. But it cannot force us to give it those things. At any time we can turn, and look down at the weeds at our feet, and up at the stars, and be children again.
Daniel Witt is a writer and English teacher living in Amman, Jordan.
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