Mind’s Eye, Body’s Eye

Most of us have, I think it’s safe to generalize, little to do with poetry. Between a paragraph of prose and the stanza of a poem, we are likelier to prefer the indicative sentence to the symbolic verse. Poetry is ponderous in a way even the poorly written paragraph is not; it slows us down, and takes us away from our see-it-grab-it-get-it-done habit. Most of all, it’s just not the way we talk.

But thinking about poetry—what it’s after and how it differs from prose—can help us understand and use our everyday writing and thinking more skillfully. By prose we mean the ordinary language we write and speak in our everyday ways of life. The noun prose and the adjective prosaic are related, the latter meaning factual and ordinary and, perhaps not surprisingly, dull and commonplace as well. With prose we say something about something, and to get that done we find a subject and predicate a predicate about it. Philosophy knows this as the great division of experience into S & P, and it is understood to be the cause of our prize human distinction—a rational life.

Traditional understanding has it that prose lies at the far end of a line projecting out from, strangely, silence; that when our sights are set on knowing the truth and not just understanding the facts, we must set aside all our words and phrases and clauses and quiet our mind to discern realities which grammar cannot hold. This is the ancient principle underlying most meditative regimes and philosophico-religious disciplines of any serious standing. Between those two end points of prose and silence, however, lies poetry, with its grammar of a sort: we might find a subject and its predicate, but then again we might not; and if we do, we’re likely to see what might look like a sentence split between lines and not conforming to those rules of usage that prose will violate only at its own risk. Between silence and the everyday lies the world of images, what has been called the interworld, a place neighboring on where we are when we are singing, when we are being carried (note the passive) by perceptions too wild to stay caged in conceptual prose we actively compose. This is why it is said that we should only read poetry aloud, because it nears more easily then the cadence of song.

That imagistic world between silence and today’s day will always remain forbidden to prose because it is situated closer to silence, a world complete and undivided in itself, than to our common world always in action. Poetry doesn’t sound like prose because it is looking through the objects prose only looks at. We look at something—and make grammatical subjects of them—with the body’s eyes, that is to say with our senses. To our sensorial perception, we see things everywhere, and it is just their relationships with one another, whether harmonious or conflictive, that make up the predicates of our sentences. But poetry will go along with this worldview only so far, until it will so twist and turn its nouns and verbs and syntactical structure that we come to see past the retina, so to speak, and find in the commonplace a world of meaning lying behind—or far more deeply within—the objects we otherwise merely superficially sensed.

All this can teach us two lessons about our everyday writing and thinking. Our prose is working at its best when it is precise, because in its workmanlike way, it is seeing exactly this and saying exactly that about all the possible things that make up the waking world where we spend our time. But we learn too that there are animating meanings which cannot be denotated and affirmed, realities which can only be evoked and pointed in the direction of. The poet works to see—and to come to know more directly than the prosaic mind can—what is going on behind the scenes. To the poet’s mind’s eye, like the jester’s at the grave king’s court, the world and its play of life is ironic—anything but what it seems so prosaically to be.

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