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.

“I am persuaded that good poets by a divine inspiration interpret the things of the gods to us.”
—Plato

As we see in the quote above from his dialogue Ion, Plato sensed something supernatural in poetic expression. Plato is well known for being rather suspicious of poetry, which in the Ion seems to have more or less the dynamics of a tornado: heavenly forces descend to earth and are concentrated into the spirit of the “inspired” or “possessed” poet, who then distributes these (potentially destructive) energies to his immediate vicinity by singing verses to rapt listeners. “For not by art does the poet sing,” the philosopher writes, “but by power divine.”

Ponder for a moment the following exchange (which I’ve paraphrased and condensed) between Socrates and Ion. The latter was a professional rhapsode, that is, a man who recited epic poetry in front of audiences.

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Socrates: Tell me, Ion, when you powerfully affect an audience by reciting some striking passage, such as the apparition of Odysseus leaping forth on the floor [from Homer’s Odyssey], or the description of Achilles rushing at Hector [from Homer’s Iliad]—are you in your right mind? Are you not carried out of yourself? Does not your soul, in an ecstasy, seem to be among the persons or places of which you speak?

Ion: I must confess that at a tale of pity my eyes are filled with tears, and when I speak of horrors, my hair stands on end, and my heart throbs.

Socrates: Well, Ion, and what shall we say of a rhapsode at a festival who weeps or appears panic-stricken before twenty thousand friendly faces, when there is no one despoiling or wronging him: is he in his right mind or is he not?

Ion: No indeed, Socrates. Strictly speaking, he is not in his right mind.

Socrates: And are you aware that you produce similar effects on the spectators? Do you know that this chain of poetry, which links the gods to the poet, and the poet to the rhapsode, has the audience for its final ring? Through these a god sways the souls of men in any direction which he pleases.

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Much could be said, but let’s limit ourselves to three reflections.

1. Plato recognized poetry’s immense power to open the mind and enflame the heart. He also recognized that anything so powerful must, when misused, be dangerous.

2. This is not merely the power of story; we are dealing here with the power of artistic language. Homer’s epics were written in metrical verse and so thoroughly enriched by metaphor, imagery, irony, metonymy, and so forth that they are still admired as poetic achievements of the highest order.

3. We see traces of Plato’s ideas, but also things new and extraordinary, in the relationship between medieval culture and the poems that influenced it far more than any others: the Psalms.

The Hebrew word for “song” (שיר, pronounced “shir”) in a fourteenth-century manuscript held by the British Library.

“The Psalms were at the heart of medieval Christian life and thought. Monks chanted them daily in the Divine Office, lay people recited them in the offices of the Virgin Mary and of the Dead, children learned them as the basis of their ABCs, exegetes meditated upon them in commentaries, artists illuminated them in manuscripts, and composers drew upon them for their chants.”
—Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown

The subtitle of this essay is “an introduction to medieval poetry,” and the first medieval poems I’m mentioning were not even written in the Middle Ages—the Psalms were composed by Hebrew poets, and the Latin translations used throughout the West were the work of St. Jerome, a scholar of the Patristic era. And yet, I could not in good conscience start anywhere else: medieval societies embraced the Psalms as their own, hearing and reciting and singing and pondering those Latinized Hebraic poems until they surpassed all other poetic texts in forming and expressing the movements of their minds and the yearnings of their spirits.

How does Plato’s view of poetry help us understand medieval psalmody? What sort of poetry do we find in the Psalms? How did psalmic poetry enter into medieval life? We’ll answer these questions in the next post.

The god of love leads a dance, in an illustration for Le Roman de la Rose, a long, allegorical, widely read medieval poem composed in Old French.