“O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” T. S. Eliot brought to our attention the harm that is often brought into the world by people who think they are doing something noble. In the Four Quartets, Eliot noted, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done, and done to others harm, which once we took for exercise of virtue.”
Poets are so skilled at bringing our attention to matters of the heart. This is because a poet speaks and writes from the heart, a murky realm that most of us escape by subscribing to “common sense reality.” That is why so often poetry falls on deaf ears and is the reason that for the first thirty years of my life I had no ear for poetry at all, even having a disdain for it! My ears were “deaf” to poetry and I now realize that it could have been said, I “had ears to hear but heard not” as well as “eyes to see but saw not.”
Poetry introduces one to the maelstrom of the unconscious and often brings uncomfortable insights to us, such as the one in the Eliot quote above. It is much simpler to live on the surface of life. Poet Adrienne Rich entitled one of her books, “Diving into the Wreck” and I sometimes use that image to describe my headfirst plunge into poetry in the mid 1980’s. When one spends three and half decades obsessively living in a linear world, sudden exposure to the subterranean depths of the human heart certainly felt like a “wreck” at times…and often does even now!
Here is another Eliot selection addressing the issue of disillusionment that life deals us if we dare to “Dive into the Wreck”:
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.
-T.S. Eliot “Four Quartets”
***********************************************************************
ADDENDUM—This is one of three blogs that I now have up and running. Please check the other two out sometime. The three are:
https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com
https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com
literary lew 