Poetry… What is it for?

A meditation.

I began the journey I’ve been documenting here in an attempt to unravel the history of an ancient war. The heart of that history is a poem. What this impressed upon me is that if the pen is mightier than the sword, poetry is more powerful than an army. That presented an imperative question: what is poetry for? I’ve thought long and hard about that, venturing into realms I had never been before, and I think I found an answer, so I’ll share it for what it may be worth.

I believe the true purpose of poetry is to connect phenomena in nature with our deep internal feelings. Without this connection, we are rootless, adrift, tossed and turned about, buffeted and bashed by the chaos of what then appears to be a mathematically cruel universe. This can lead us to seeking solace in things we should not and that can cause us to spiral ever downward – the Unconnected in relentless pursuit of the Unreal.

Our best defense against a dismal seeping away (or bleeding out) of our lives is to be found in nature, be it the grand sweep of mountains, the power of a turbulent sea, or a tiny fragile flower asserting its will to grow in the cracks of a sidewalk. This is the mainstay of our resilience; our bulwark against devouring nihilism. To nurture our connection with nature is to live.

The genius of ancient poetry was to explore, express and exalt this connection; there is no society from which poetry is absent and its themes form the bedrock of human experience.

Homer’s poetry conveys this connection brilliantly in his exquisite similes, Sappho’s radiant genius earned her the rank of the Tenth Muse – an literal deity in the eyes of her peers – but perhaps no where is this more evident than in Japan, which elevated poetry to the center of social, intellectual and emotional life. The Manyōshū, the first known anthology of Japanese poetry, compiled in the 8th century AD, contains 4,516 poems by over four hundred poets from all walks of life: emperors appear along with soldiers missing their wives back home; elite courtiers next to fishing girls tartly telling them to mind their own business. All this and more was expressed in poetry.

The practice arguably reached its apogee in the courts of the Heian period (794–1186 AD) where nothing significant happened without an accompanying poem; the exchange of poems was a key part of social interaction. The most acclaimed poets of this period were women and they transformed Japanese poetry, giving it the shape it has largely retained to the present day. The crucial event enabling this transformation was the invention in the 8th century of man’yōgana, a syllabary that used Chinese characters to render Japanese phonetically, which led to the development of hiragana in the 9th century. Chinese itself had been adopted in the 5th century as Japan’s first written language, but it was the province of men; women learning Chinese was unseemly (although some did, which could attract adverse comment). This development liberated women’s creative genius not only from the ban on learning Chinese, but from the strictures of formal Chinese literary tastes and modes, allowing them to write about the most important and deeply felt aspects of their lives, which they did with extraordinary success.¹

A key aspect of Japanese poetry is the emphasis on nature; indeed, it is something of a formalism that a poem should contain a reference to nature as a pivotal point. References to the seasons, to cherry blossoms, the scent of plum, the moon, snow, rain – the list goes on – are frequent and no mere literary gloss; they are illustrative of the deeper meanings of which these things are emblematic. The purpose is to emphasize our connection with them and all they mean. I feel this is no where better expressed that in a poem by Ono no Komachi, the 9th century poet who was legendary for both her beauty and her genius:

Seeing the moonlight
spilling down
through these trees,
my heart fills to the brim
with autumn.

This poem needs no analytic discourse to interpret it – it speaks to us even through translation and we feel its truth in our bones. Izumi Shikibu, considered Japan’s leading woman poet, extended her reflections to our deepest internal life.² She wrote:

Should I leave this burning house
of ceaseless thought
and taste the pure rain's
single truth
falling upon my skin?

Who has not felt this way at one time or another? When have any of us not spent a night (or longer) when our minds run riot and give us no peace – when we are trapped in a “burning house of ceaseless thought”? And what better remedy than to “taste the pure rain's single truth” falling on our skin? Shikibu understood that connecting with nature is our salvation; that the “pure rain's single truth” is the single truth we all need and more than this, she could express it with profound poignancy.

In expressing the rhythms of time, these poems are timeless. And while their exquisite beauty, delicacy and grace are the products of a particular culture and its language, their essence transcends cultural barriers and the inadequacies of translation. Their voice still resonates with us today; the emotion in them remains immediate and palpable.

Poetry is a bridge between our greatest loves and deepest fears and all-encompassing nature. This is where its true meaning lies. We instinctively recognize this meaning in the best poetry; again, no analysis needed. All we need do is listen.

The two poems quoted are from The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani. Random House, 1990.

1. The invention of man’yōgana in the 8th century AD irresistibly brings to my mind the Greeks adopting and adapting the Phoenician alphabet in the 8th century BC. It allowed ancient Greek to be rendered phonetically, and a great explosion of poetry followed thereafter. Is there a link between the introduction of the new writing systems and the poetic efflorescence? Has a fixation on oral poetry tended to obscure the role the availability a new method of writing may have played in the development of ancient Greek poetry, just as it appears poetry strongly influenced the development of writing?

I think it’s also worth pointing out that while Japan had writing for about three centuries before the invention of man’yōgana, Iron age Greece maintained some contact with other cultures that retained writing: the western Anatolians, who wrote in Luwian hieroglyphic, and (perhaps later) the Phoenicians, with their alphabet. So in both cases, writing was known but practiced only by a limited group; elite, educated men in Japan, and foreigners in Greece. So the historical analogy may be uncertain or unconvincing, but perhaps worth a thought nonetheless.

2. Remarkably, Izumi Shikibu lived at the imperial court with the authors of the two most revered Japanese literary classics: Murasaki Shikibu (no relation; Shikibu is a title), the author of The Tale of Genji, the first psychological novel and generally considered to be the first great novel; and Sei Shōnagon, author of the Pillow Book. Other famous female poets, including Ise Tayū and Akazome Emon, were also in residence – undoubtedly, the greatest gathering of literary genius ever to be found under one roof.