The First Language of the Soul

An introduction to medieval poetry.

“The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live…. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song…. The poetic does not misrepresent the speech one half so much as the speech misrepresents the soul.”
—G. K. Chesterton

Over the last few weeks we’ve discussed medieval music, architecture, painting, and sculpture. That means that we’ve been thinking about four of the five arts that are traditionally classified as fine arts. The fifth is poetry. Since it makes sense to complete this brief but scenic journey through the medieval fine arts, and since I also happen to be in a rather poetic frame of mind, we’ll spend the next few essays contemplating the via mediaevalis as a via poetica.

I’m in a poetic frame of mind because my academic year begins tomorrow, and I’ll soon be engaged in a strange and wonderful task: helping postmodern college students to understand, appreciate, and enjoy medieval literature. And when I say “medieval literature,” I essentially mean “medieval poetry,” because the fictional prose narratives that we call “novels” were, in fact, novel: they were a new way of reading and writing stories, having developed in the modern period after many centuries of classical, medieval, and Renaissance culture in which “literary” was virtually equivalent to “poetic.”

The traditional understanding of literature is “written works of superior or enduring artistic merit,” and for pre-modern societies, if a writer expected his or her linguistic expression to be regarded as artistic, the language had to be … well, artistic, or what we would call poetic. It wasn’t enough to craft a story that was humorous, or action-packed, or romantic, or filled with clever plot twists, or equipped with a surprise ending. The language itself had to be crafted—that is, deepened and intensified and beautified by rhythm, alliteration, metaphor, elegant contrasts, vivid imagery, striking vocabulary, pleasing variations in sentence structure, and so forth.

We know that pre-modern cultures all over the world felt this urge to express themselves in the mysterious language of poetry. Why they did so is a more difficult question, but I think that Chesterton, in the quote included above, is on the right track: poetic language is the natural language of the soul. In our present state we achieve poetry only through study and labor. But when the human spirit is freed from the frailty of the body and from the weight of sin, it doesn’t speak. It sings.

David: king, warrior, penitent, poet, and the quintessential musician of medieval iconography.