Appreciating Tea and Poetry

How to enjoy a good cup and a word-smattering.

Photo by Elena Kloppenburg on Unsplash

I never really liked tea. Never, that is, until the fateful day it dawned on me I could drink my tea with sugar in it. (It’s not as obvious as it might seem.) My world was revolutionized, turned upside down. I felt like I was really seeing things for the first time, and I haven’t looked back. Odd as it may sound, my experience with poetry has been much the same.

Go with me on this one.

Back in school I can remember feeling at once there was something good and worth savoring within the verse, and also that it would always be just out of my reach no matter how hard I tried. Maybe I just wasn’t cut out for it. Like a good and sweeping story, I wanted to get poetry—wanted to be able to appreciate the weight of the words, to taste their depths and let them sink into me. Or maybe I wanted to sink into them. In any case I didn’t want to feel like a dunce for not smelling what everyone else was stepping in. Steeping in. But there always seemed to be something in the way. Now, I can’t be sure, but I think it was the free verse.

I get the sense I’m not really with the times when I say this, but unstructured poetry hasn’t always been my cup of tea. Call me an old soul if you will, but know you’re not the first to say so.

“Isn’t free verse just obscure prose?” I’d have previously asked. “How can we call something poetry if it doesn’t follow a poetic structure?”

Taking for granted words have their own inherent rhythm, there are admittedly times I still struggle through modern verse, looking for an overarching structure that just isn’t there, looking for some kind of guide to lead me through the thoughts and images. I’ve appreciated the challenge of writing within bounds of an established poetic structure, and admire the ability of others who do this well. The constraints themselves can lend their own meaning and power to a work, and encourage intentional word choice and diction. To be fair though, structured verse has also been known to tease the trite from the pen, encouraging a rhyme instead of the right words to convey an image or thought. When I began to see this in my own writing, I found I needed a new framework for understanding poetry—needed to expand my heart and allow language to rule over my expectations.

So as one does in such conundrums, I consulted the Inklings. Owen Barfield’s sharp little punch of a book Poetic Diction brilliantly broke poetry free from my verse trappings, and as a result broke prose from non-verse. In essence, Barfield suggests poetry is the use of language (by way of metaphor, archaism, and strangeness among other tactics) to help reader and writer alike see the subject matter afresh, and to resurrect a fuller meaning from the increasing over-precision of our modern language. In other words, poetry is language imaginatively employed to redress an imbalance between reason and intuition, the former of which runs rampant and amok in our technologically-attuned Western psyche. As Barfield puts it, “It is only when we have risen from beholding the creature into beholding creation that our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres.”¹

To “catch for a moment the music of the turning spheres,” to convey it to another, to let it resonate in your own heart—that is poetry, whatever it looks like on the page.

Poetry, which I had previously consigned to structured verse, can be either poetic or prosaic. Non-verse literature, so often called prose, can be either prosaic or poetic. My world was turned upside down. The difference here is not structural but spiritual, affecting a change in consciousness and encouraging fresh perspective. This spiritual component, which Mr. Barfield calls poesy, sounds akin to J.R.R. Tolkien’s description of the purpose of fantasy literature: to help us “clean our windows” and to rescue the world around us from “the drab blur of triteness or familiarity.”² Poesy, it would seem, knows no genre.

The school-age me didn’t dislike poetry for its own sake, but because I could not (or would not) at the time see the spiritual and imaginative component in it. For me, this took a slowing down and an attentiveness I was not used to practicing. It may be a bit obnoxious to our busy selves, but like enjoying a good cup of tea, we’re meant to slow down and taste—no, taste—poetry and allow it to waft images and meaning and thought to us like a sweet herbal steam. And while an avid reader may feel a resistance to even metered verse (“I’m just not interested in ‘poetry’”), it may well be they have always fostered a love for the poetic—for poesy—without realizing it. I know I did.

Like sugar bringing out the flavor in my favorite steep, poesy in both poetry and prose can open our eyes and hearts to see that “all matter is radiant of spiritual meaning.”³

This reframing has helped me enjoy reading and writing poetry more (and more broadly) and to be willing to set my expectations aside, pay attention, and let the words reveal their own weight to me. And like appreciating a good tea, I find that’s what a lot of reading and writing comes to: slowing down, paying attention, savoring. And sharing.

Of course, this all falls apart if you prefer your tea without sugar, but we won’t get into that.

---

And what about you, dear reader? Do you prefer your tea with or without sugar? Maybe coffee’s your jam?

What has made it difficult for you to engage with poetry? What non-poetry works do you find particularly poetic or perspective-shattering?

1. Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, First Wesleyan ed. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 181.

2. J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories," in Tree and Leaf: Including the Poem Mythopoeia and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth (London, UK: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001), 58.

3. George MacDonald, "The God of the Living," in Unspoken Sermons, vol. I (London, UK: Longmans, Green and Co., 1887), 239.