When I read poetry, there is that density of meaning I love. Like getting to know a person over many years, you nuance your relationship, as in marriage
Or, as with reading scriptures, it is more like a gateway or dimensional entrance—a larger window into The Real. Still, art comes closest to sacred text, I think. Music takes you into another realm, one already there, but not seen or heard without the help of art. Maybe this is why most sacred text are largely poetry! the Bible for instance is over a third sheer poetry. It’s the most direct, and requires to most of us to lovingly encounter and know.
As I study, there are always different densities of knowledge. Different weights of knowing.
Just as in conversations with strangers versus close friends.
Casual contacts are also fine and needed in life, but with an old friend, the density of exchange and encounter goes deeper. The risk is higher as well with deeper exchange or encounter, there is greater risk of being hurt.
Like marriage, it is a huge risk to “meet” another’s heart over and over. But the wine is richer, more nuanced, and potentially more mutually transformative at the end of the days. Sometimes casual contact is good, but it can’t sustain you in the same way a poetic dialogue is able to. This is one reason it is good to look or listen to great art. A stranger in a bus stop or train station, may give you insight into life unexpectedly; but sharing a meal with a friend, can alter your life’s course.
Just as a merely entertaining film, can be needed at the right time; great cinema, can change how you see yourself and the world. I like reading poetry, for the same reason I like being married. It’s a higher risk, and more rewarding or potentially life changing encounter. And it requires or calls forth more of yourself to know. Poetry provokes the heart towards more of life, as they used to say. I suppose all great art does so, as well as all depth relationships. But there is something uniquely rarefied about how poetry does that.
If our lives are like a concentric circle or a dart board, and the bullseye or very center is what we are most intimate with; I think poetry requires us to let it into that inner circle in order to know it. And poetry again like marriage offers that opportunity. It’s good to practice that sort of intimacy, it is exercise for the human heart!
“Loving the Lord with all your heart” assumes your heart is fully engaged. Reading poetry is a practice for engaging your heart!