POETRY AND RELIGION by Les Murray

Religions are poems. They concert our daylight and dreaming mind, our emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture into the only whole thinking: poetry. Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words and nothing's true that figures in words only. A poem, compared with an arrayed religion, may be like a soldier's one short marriage night to die and live by. But that is a small religion. Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition; like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that? You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn; you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror; mobile, glancing, we call it poetry, fixed centrally, we call it religion, and God is the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror that he attracted, being in the world as poetry is in the poem, a law against its closure. There'll always be religion around while there is poetry or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent, as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot - who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut. The quote on our home page comes from this poem - the fourth and fifth lines - but the whole poem is a marvellously compressed picture of the wonders of 'full' religion and great poetry, and the way in which each speaks of far more than we can ever pin down.

Return to the Index - Go to the Main Page