There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
– Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
It’s difficult to say exactly why poetry comforts during difficult times, but through 2020, and now, into 2021, when the world is still unfamiliar and uncertain, poetry has been a source of comfort and unexpected consolation. It isn’t that poetry provides explanations, for as Ursula K LeGuin writes, “Science explicates, poetry implicates.” I’ve found that poetry doesn’t necessarily provide answers, but it helps me frame questions.
Take, for example, one of my favorite poems by Rilke. Take a deep breath before you read it; it’s not easy.
“It feels as though I make my way
through massive rock
like a vein of ore
alone, encased.
I am so deep inside it
I cannot see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.
Since I still don’t know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small.
It it’s you, though—
Press down hard on me, break in
That I may know the weight of your hand,
And you, the fullness of my cry.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, “III, 1,” Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
This poem is difficult to read, even more difficult for me to pray, as I believe Rilke intended. The beginning is so easily relatable: the loneliness of making our way through heavy rock, the hard path, the brokenness, the smallness.
The line that brings tears to my eyes is “Since I still don’t know enough about pain.” It’s the still, if I’m honest with myself. He’s clearly suffered before, and he’s suffering at the time he’s writing the poem. He knows there was a lesson before, and he may have missed it, so it came back around.
It reminds me of a terrifying passage from the book Suffering is Never for Nothing by Elisabeth Elliot. In it she has just discovered that her second husband has cancer. This is years after her first husband was killed while serving as a missionary. She writes “Lord, haven’t we been through this once before? You took husband number one. Now surely, Lord, you wouldn’t take Ad, would you? And it was as if the Lord said, ‘I might. Trust Me.’ So I had to begin all over again, I thought, learning the lessons that I really thought I had learned well enough before. I was saying, ‘Lord, did I flunk the test? Do we have to go over this again?’ and the answer was ‘Yes, you have to go over it again.’”
So she has suffered, is suffering, and is seeing once again the lesson she failed to learn the first time. Here it is again. I missed it, and it came around once more to teach me.
In the poem by Rilke, the ending is almost a relief, after the intensity of his grief. It is the end of the long road to true gratitude, which begins with gratitude for the good things, then progresses to the small things, then ends ultimately at the cross.
What comes later is hard gratitude, deep gratitude, being thankful for brokenness, being able to ask for more weight, able to accept all, because we know the One pressing down, and accept all things with open hands.
There is a beautiful poem by Paul Mariani in The American Review entitled “I Did Say Yes,” which ends:
“Now, saying yes, yes, whatever you will, my dear,
Yes echoing down the long halls of time, yes,
In spite of all disappointment, of the death of Love even,
The barely sayable yes again, yes again, yes I will. Yes.”
I wish I could read this beautiful poem by Paul Mariani aloud to you so that you could hear its music. The escalation in the last stanza, followed by the melodic reassurance of “yes, yes, whatever you will, my dear,” is a real comfort to me. He reiterates the “yes, echoing down the long halls of time, yes, in spite of disappointment.” He even takes the yes all the way to the “death of Love even,” which in my mind is very much about the crucifixion, Love being the person of Jesus Christ. And then he ends with “The barely sayable yes again, yes again, yes I will. Yes.”
Difficult years seem to require this of me, to say the “barely sayable yes,” as Mariani writes. It’s the yes given by the Theotokos at the Annunciation, the yes given by Christ on behalf of humanity on the cross. It is the yes asked of us when nothing is familiar, nothing is certain. Years that ask seemingly impossible things: the covering of our faces, the loss of our childcare, the changes in our work identities, the feeling of being “nonessential,” the inability to hold loved ones. Sometimes losses are true, and life-changing, like the physical loss of loved ones. Sometimes the loss is seemingly small: the pleasure of the familiar warm weight of a mug of coffee in my favorite coffeeshop, the scent lingering in my curls while I pick up groceries from my favorite store, and prepare a meal at home before going to see a play with my sweetheart.
Oh God of the big and small, I pray, yes to the big losses, which hurt so much. Yes to the small losses, which also hurt. Yes, yes, I will say yes. From your hands, yes to the good, the years that answer, and yes to the hurt, the years that ask, and ask, and ask.