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 modern verse remains a challenge. Poetry in general can disorient (a feature, not a bug), and especially if there is no overarching structure to help orient the reader. An established poetic form can be a guide, can even lend its own meaning and power to a work and encourage intentional word choice and diction. To be fair though, structured verse has been known as well to tease the trite from the pen, begging a rhyme instead of the right word to convey an image or thought. It was when I began to see this latter tendency in my own writing I knew I needed a fresh framework for understanding poetry—needed to expand my heart and allow language to rule my expectations. Insofar as writing is a means of contemplating and engaging with life, faith, and the world at large, my growth as a person was on the line.

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 out of the verse trappings I’d made for it. Consequentially, it sprung prose free from non-verse as well. Setting form aside, Barfield suggests poetry is the use of language (by way of metaphor, archaism, strangeness, and 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 modern speech. 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 blasted 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.”

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 (dry, reductive, flattening). 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 his friend 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.” 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,” as George MacDonald puts it.

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. There’s nourishment in it for us.

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

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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?