About a third of the Bible could be described as poetry, including Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and the Song of Solomon. Today, Dr. Glenn Sunshine offers an encouragement to Christians to engage with poetry, especially during this season of Advent.

Poetry is important to God. The longest book in the Bible is a book of poems, and the prophetic books are full of poetry as well. Throughout history, cultures around the world recognized poetry as an important art form and the highest use of language.

Modern America is the exception. We are a left-brained, analytical culture that tends to see only the literal meaning of things. Metaphor, symbolism, and poetry are foreign to our way of thinking, and so we don’t tend to read or appreciate poetry.

This is too bad, because good poetry helps us see the world around us in new and fresh ways, to get past “the film of familiarity,” as poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, and to see things as they really are. Because of this, poetry surrounding Advent and Christmas is a particularly valuable way to get past both the commercialization of the holiday and the sometimes too-familiar and sentimental images we have of the Nativity.

But in view of our lack of understanding poetry, it helps to have a guide. This is where Malcolm Guite comes in. Guite is a poet, an Anglican priest, a chaplain at Girton College, Cambridge, and a rock and roller. He is particularly interested in the intersection between religion and the arts, a theme we see in his books and sonnets. This makes him a brilliant guide to poetry, particularly as it relates to Christianity and the church year.

Guite’s book Waiting on the Word is, as its subtitle indicates, A poem a day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. (He has a similar volume, The Word in the Wilderness, which does the same for Lent and Easter.) Some are his own sonnets, but he also includes poems by George Herbert, John Donne, Edmund Spenser, John Keats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, G.K. Chesterton, Luci Shaw, and quite a few others. The poems cover a range of moods and verse styles, giving an overview of different types of English poetry.

But what makes this book so valuable is that Guite includes a commentary on each poem, explaining its connection to the theme of Advent and outlining what the poet is doing and how he or she is doing it. Guite’s commentaries help to understand the deeper meaning in the poems and how the poetic structures and techniques contribute to this. In the process, he helps us understand not just the poems, but what poetry itself is.

Too often, despite the best efforts of teachers, classes in poetry leave us with the impression that poetry is simply a matter of rhyme and meter. We may learn about other poetic devices and techniques, but we often don’t see that all these things are in service of the meaning of the poem, which comes to us obliquely rather than in a straightforward, literal way. Unlike our normal ways of viewing the world, poetry helps us see beyond the surface into the meaning embedded in the world around us and in our own lives and experiences.

That is the great value of poetry. We may live in a time where everything is reduced to the literal, but that’s not how Scripture sees the world. The Psalms point to the natural world and find spiritual truth in it. Jesus’ parables tell us that there are spiritual implications to everything from sowing seed to baking bread. Good poetry can help us learn to see the world this way, to find meaning, and to recover a more sacramental vision of the world.

Again, this is particularly appropriate for us in Advent and the Christmas season. Poetry can help get past the habitual ways of looking at Christmas and open new dimensions of what the Incarnation means. It can also give new perspectives on our own lives that we would miss if we simply followed the same well-trodden paths that we have followed every other year.

Like many other Advent devotionals, Waiting on the Word begins on December 1. There’s still plenty of time to get caught up.

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