10 Poems Offer Testimonies to the Universal Longing for the Sacred

“Ten Poems to Change Your Life” is a small book, the kind that takes up just a little space on your bedside table, an invitation to spend a few minutes in contemplation of the sacred before closing your eyes; its resonance, however, like that of the very personal and joyful selection of poems, will ripple pleasantly through vast reaches of consciousness.

Presented in Zen-like simplicity, the jacket image of a white cream jug placed on a white tile counter tells us much about the short poems or extracts that Roger Housden includes among those 10 he says will “change your life.” They span about 700 years and several continents, from the 13th century Sufi poet Rumi to the 14th century Muslim spiritual teacher Kabir, and from the 16th century Spanish Christian mystic St. John of the Cross to Walt Whitman and a handful of contemporary poets.

If nothing else, the poems are testimony to the universality of human spiritual longing for the sacred. Disarmingly simple, crisp and precise in their choice of image, sometimes declarative in expression, they belong, Housden writes, to a kind of poetry that “gives voice to a spiritual reality that is beyond the copyright of any religion. It voices the longings of the spirit and our deep desires--the desire for meaning, for a life of passion and creativity, for a sense of belonging, for wisdom, and as always, for love.”

The journey is a common metaphor for this search, and it is the title of the poem with which Housden opens his book:

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice

The poet, Mary Oliver, describes a feeling familiar to anyone who has reached the end of his or her tolerance for the suffering that life can bring. It is this sense of familiarity, with its accompanying shiver of recognition down the spine as the words hit home, that characterizes how these poems work on us. We have known their truth long before it is spoken. We have been there; this is our life.

From awakening, the poems lead us through all the arenas of human struggle with the great spiritual issues that confront us: with the conundrum of the self--its imperious hold on us, its dubious glory and the limitations it imposes if we can’t transcend it--in extracts from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and in Rumi’s “Zero Circle”; with the seductive materiality of the world itself in Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to my Socks”; with the passionate intertwining of sacred and profane in the ecstatic experience of sexual union, breathtakingly, in Galway Kinnell’s “Last Gods”; with our relationship with God--”the lover and the beloved” in St. John of the Cross’ “The Dark Night of the Soul,” or the “Guest” in Kabir’s “The Time Before Death.”

Death, not surprisingly, is the subtext of many of these poems, because it is death that provides the physical threshold between our life and whatever lies beyond. With how gentle a nudge, for example, does W.S. Merwin move us into a contemplation of our own death in his early poem “For the Anniversary of My Death”:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Timeless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star.

Curiously, all these issues blend seamlessly in the world of poetry, where to speak of death is to speak of God, to speak of God is to speak of love, to speak of self is to speak of the presence of the other. Each of these poems contains everything and is “about” nothing.

There’s a risk in glossing poetry, as Housden does, adding to each some pages of commentary to elucidate its meaning. “A poem,” the old adage goes, “should not mean, but be.” At times, I found myself impatient with his choice of certain meanings and associations over others, judging them too restrictive or superfluous. Extracting, too, is heresy to the purist. But I was grateful that Housden remains sensitive to the perils of his approach and clear about his purpose, acknowledging the individuality of his reading by grounding it frequently in his own life experience. And, sensibly, he suggests reading the poems aloud.

It’s good to be reminded that poems teach us in ways that pass other forms of understanding, that they come closer than other modes of writing to the notion of “the word” as sacred in itself, the fulcrum of a special kind of truth to which, when the poet has it right, we can only assent. In such instances we find ourselves, as Merwin succinctly puts it, “bowing not knowing to what.”