If you want to speak directly to the human spirit, then you must learn to speak truly about immortal things. Not all poets and writers stand guard at the gate of the human heart, but those who do win their readers’ hands in marriage for a lifetime. These past few weeks, I’ve returned to poets who—if only for a single poem—speak bravely and boldly, speak without contempt or fashionable doubt. They rail at the real, teaching us to weep with abandon and to hope when hope feels impossible. These are the voices who work a poem into a piece of writing worthy of their calling: Poet.

What does it mean to be called forth from humanity as a poet, especially in times of crisis? What is my responsibly as a poet, as a writer, a teacher to the world? For me, it means the poet must confess the soul is real by learning the language of the soul, and the poet must speak directly to that place in everyone’s chest. 

In an interview with The Marginalia Review, poet and writer Pádraig Ó Tuama speaks of another Irish poet, Máirtín O Díreáin, and the role of the poetry and how it can be a place to rediscover our soul. I’ve been trying to find O Díreáin poems in translation ever since while unsuccessfully “learning” some Irish. Here is a stanza I’ve kept close to my heart:

Gather in all that’s known
Man who makes poems,

Don’t stir, don’t bend

Before this present tempest.
 

This present tempest bears down with the winds of ideology and the lashing rains of fear. In this raging storm, I wonder what poets will emerge with the poems that will not be uprooted by the whirlwinds.  The poets who listen for the human spirit and begin humming it to the surface, calling it forth from days spent in anxiety and fear. The poets who remember that poetry can not do anything. A poem should never be about the business of doing, disgracing itself by mixing company with the likes of tools and machines. A poem must be strong enough to be.

I stand with Oscar Wilde: “All art is quite useless.” Yes, all art is useless in the same way my dearest friends are quite useless. I do not draw them near to me for what they can do, as if the primary reason for hanging out is based on their utilitarian role to me. The best poems are like the people we most love, that is, they meet us at the soul. We love them simply for who they are to us; we love and adore them for their being. That energy of being, not doing, is the spark that jumps from the page into our breasts when we encounter a poem that knows the language of the soul.

In times such as these, I worry we reach too quickly for solutions and answers. I fear poets are abandoning their posts as keepers of what makes us most human: the indomitable spirit that, when awakened, can endure more suffering than it thought was possible and be transformed by the trial. Our present tempest of fear and illness and death is real, but it is not all there is to reality. At least not for me and the poets in whose pages I seek shelter.

Ask anyone before the COVID crisis if they were reasonably sure of their future, at least in the short term. It is very likely a person’s confidence in their job, savings, or other routine aspects of living would not seem unjustified. But the truth is – a truth that any sane person would not wish to be reminded of every moment of every day— is that we simply do not know. We do know what the next moment will hold, let alone days and years. Nothing in this life is unshakable. So when the entire globe is reminded every minute by partisan and capitalistic driven media outlets that life is fragile and everything is uncertain just to sell papers, it is little wonder the streets and markets gather the collective existential despair of humanity. Loss of health causes more fear and anxiety than anything most people can imagine, I think, because it does not allow us our tricks and illusions. We can not escape that we are mortal. We do not know what the days will bring; we can not control them. Where can we find the poet who will speak when we need the power of comfort and prophecy?

Poetry that speaks to the soul does not fidget like children around real images of suffering, destruction, and death—it does not remain indifferent. Poetry that knows the soul’s language has imagination; it is able to confront and navigate our suffering on Earth. Illness and death are on the minds of many. For some, this maybe the first time they have had to confront illness or death. This is not the case in my family.

COVID reminds me of the best the poetry can be and the high calling of the poet to remain a free voice when there is much in the world that would constrain the poet’s song. Poets, when everyone is afraid, yanked by the media’s leash, it is we who must rise and speak boldly and clearly to the deepest, most fundamental need we share as humans: How do we love this world with all our fragile hearts can offer and let it go with peace and joy even as we live and breathe? The things of this world are not constant. So what remains? The poetry of the soul.

Alexandra Barylski was born to beauty and the love of nature, inheriting from her parents—a gardener and artist—an abiding attention to detail, craftsmanship, and the life of the word. A current Yale graduate student studying poetry and religion, she is the Editor of LETTERS Journal (Yale, ISM) The Managing Editor of the Marginalia Review of Books, an award-winning poet, and an experienced educator, she also works as a life-coach and mentor for teen girls who are focused on creative and literary careers.