“This Book Is Called a Garden Enclosed”

The Psalms were the poetic lifeblood of medieval civilization.

Sunday’s post explored the nature of poetic literature, Plato’s philosophy of poetry, and the centrality of the Psalms in medieval life and thought. We need to continue this discussion by looking more deeply into the Psalter’s poetic qualities and its intimate relationship with medieval spirituality.

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In the previous essay I suggested, following Chesterton, that poetry is the first language of the soul: “We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live,” Chesterton says, “and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech.”

The Book of Genesis tells the story of two people who had no such impediments. In their prelapsarian paradise they knew nothing of sin, disease, fear, or strife. Their bodies and spirits were so radiant with divine light that to the ancient Greeks they would have seemed more like gods than human beings. If poetry is the soul’s natural mode of expression, would not Adam and Eve—still possessing such perfect wholeness that their speech moved like a prima ballerina upon the stage of thought—have spoken in verse?

How they were wont to converse, we cannot know. Genesis tells us almost nothing of what the happy couple said before they traded bliss and immortality for one delicious moment of disobedience. But there is something that we do know, and let us never forget it: the first recorded words of the human race, spoken in paradise by a being with body and soul still united in sublime harmony, were written in the Book of Genesis as verse—an affectionate little poem, such as might arise in a man’s heart when first he looks at a woman, and loves her.

And the Lord God made a woman from the rib which he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man, and the man said,
    “This one, at last, is bone of my bones
        and flesh of my flesh;
    she shall be called ‘woman,’
        for from man she was taken.”