Why You Should Say Your (Secular) Prayers – Nick Pompella

The studio audience erupted with applause; Hitchens was the only panelist who was able to fulfill the request, rather than just laugh it off and proceed onto a political soapbox.

That night’s particular installment of the show Question Time went on to discuss the British education system. The panel concluded that the quality of the system had drastically dropped over the preceding decades, and ironic tone of the poem-questioner (“explain how this [poem] has been useful in their subsequent careers”) shows that he meant to prove that Britain was focused on all the wrong things when it came to educating its children, teaching them “useless” skills—e.g. memorizing poems. The contours of this debate should be familiar even to American observers; everyone voices platitudes about teaching “what works,” and instilling “practical skills,” including via the horrifying discipline that the Brits call “maths.”

After his recitation, Hitchens—who has written an entire book (with a substantively more conservative outlook than the Tory party has ever had on the issue) about how to actually reform British education for the better—laid waste to the panel. He said that it is a terrible thing to suggest that this practice of poetic recitation does not matter, that saying so is to “declare oneself a spiritual desert,” and that he is grateful beyond measure to have had his mind “furnished with beauty” through to his own education.

In an effort not to be a dead-eyed spiritual charlatan, I thought I would take Hitchens’ advice and actually commit some poetry to memory. The most embarrassing part of this mission has been how long it has taken me. A better-functioning brain in a different historical epoch probably could’ve memorized all of Robert Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by now. Instead I have managed four rather short poems, with more to come as I become less smartphone-addled and more practiced in how exactly one goes about this memorization process.

The last time I did this was in high school. Only one poem from my years in school has stuck with me: to my embarrassment, it is the comic poem by Lewis Carroll, The Jabberwocky. No, I don’t retain any of Hamlet’s monologue, or Mark Antony’s funeral oration—but I can tell you that “the Vorpal Blade went snicker-snack.” Needless to say, I am glad to quintuple the meager number of poems I can recite—and even gladder that they are less embarrassing than what I had memorized before.

The first addition to my middling repertoire was the Housman poem that Hitchens himself recited on Question Time; it took me 48 hours—with only about an hour of active practice—to have its eight lines completely down pat. Maybe a touch too grim, though, so I decided to balance it out by moving to something with more vim.

The next poem, Rudyard Kipling’s If—, a message to his son about the trials and tribulations of growing up, was a bigger lift at 32 lines. For this poem to stick, I knew I was going to need a pretty ironclad methodology for memorization. I defaulted to a system I knew: I said two lines over and over again until I couldn’t possibly misremember them, then very carefully transcribed them by hand (in the closest thing to good penmanship I could muster as a lefty). I could’ve gone faster, but in a little more than two weeks I had the whole thing down, and the poem has so far stayed in my skull.

At this point, I realized I was putting in more effort to memorize a random selection of poems than I had to memorize, say, the prayers introduced to me during OCIA (the Catholic Church’s program for American adults looking to convert). I have known by heart the slightly outdated form of the Lord’s Prayer from my parents’ generation for longer than I can remember. But in recent times, when actually called upon to put some effort into the process, I memorized the Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel by brute force—reading it over and over again, mouthing the words like a toddler until I had it 90 percent of the way there, and then fixed the remaining errors over the course of the next six months.

I could dwell on why exactly I have lacked the rigor in my own prayer life that I’ve put into these poems, but I’d prefer to look toward something a little more interesting. There really is a case for treating a poem and a prayer as similar things. There is of course the method by which one memorizes them, since they are formally similar (a monologue arranged in bite-sized lines, shorter than they would be in straightforward prose). But there are also the two forms’ similar effects on the mind. They really can be almost the same thing, thus some truly great poetry sits in the oxymoronic register of a “secular prayer.”

Our theological forebears wrote about how prayer is actually supposed to work. Their instructions help us see how vocal prayer reaches toward some kind of healing effect. For the religious (in prayer’s case) and/or for those inclined to literature (in poetry’s case), we often feel that these things are supposed to be “good for us,” in some big, hand-waving sense. But St. Teresa of Ávila was totally clear about what we are doing in such practices, and where our minds and spirits are supposed to move once the vocal recitation has ended.

What St. Teresa and others have written serves as a reminder that meditative practices are not only a phenomenon in Eastern religions—Christians are called to a similar practice literally called meditation. The things we are trying to do in prayer can be split into three broad categories: vocal prayer, meditation, and finally contemplation.

After vocal prayer, one can meditate on the meaning of the words they just said. With effort, it’s possible to do this often enough to build some kind of empathetic connection with God—to get the sense that something is actually listening. St. Teresa explicitly tells us this is done in silence: “When [God] secretly shows us He hears our prayers, it is well to be silent, as He has drawn us into His presence; there would then be no harm in trying to keep our minds at rest (that is to say, if we can).”

If we can sit in this meditation successfully, we may eventually be lucky enough to move into contemplation—something like what we’d call “enlightenment” if we transposed this into a Hindu or Buddhist context. Contemplation is definitely not a vocal practice—it happens “in” you. St. Teresa calls it “a Divine union, in which the Lord takes His delight in the soul and the soul takes its delight in Him.”Contemplation is something like a direct “gazing” at the face of God, or at the very least a joyous sense of being in touch with something beyond ourselves.

I have to wonder if poetry, read well, has a similar effect, if this is why a person like Peter Hitchens cherishes the poems that have furnished his mind, and why this same effect grows in me the more that I memorize. It is well and good to know these things by heart; at the very least, it’s a fun party trick in the age of TikTok to recite something longer than a meme. But more importantly, in reflecting on the words themselves, a poem can put you in touch with another mind—either the specific author’s mind, or with a kind of collective unconscious that speaks for a whole generation. Housman’s poem, for instance, gives me a much deeper appreciation for the unease and nostalgia felt by a whole generation of Britons who survived long enough to see the interwar period’s depressive slump. In memorizing these things, we get to take some beautiful words with us. But more importantly, we also take the most vital pieces of their personal stories and historical epochs.

William Wordsworth, on the other hand, composed poems in a way that draws the reader into his particular mind, for example through one of his rare poems that isn’t about nature: London, 1802. This poem showcases nostalgia’s self-referential quality; people who lived in the eras we are nostalgic for often pine for their own half-imagined past.

Here, the reader can peer into the mind of a man with very real worries about his society. A poem not even in Wordsworth’s thematic wheelhouse—which can also be read in mere moments—so potently provides a sense of place, time, and the jaded perspective of a person who feels the world moving past the things he knows. There’s a prayerful attitude in London, 1802, something like a “supplicative prayer” where one directly asks for God’s help. Only, Wordsworth reaches out to Milton instead, and begs his spirit to return.

Since these poetic contemplations had thus far provided me with only an empathetic link to long-deceased poets of Britain, I thought I owed it to myself to get with the times and learn something from a fellow American—and preferably something in less traditional meter. I found the poem by Frank O’Hara called On a Mountain to be actually hilarious, if read as a parody of Wordsworthian romanticism:

Instead of the heavenly glories of the English countryside, O’Hara shows a blustery, filthy East Coast hike. O’Hara was an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and his ability to capture the totality of a moment, whether beautiful or ugly, seems to arise from his familiarity with painting. So many of O’Hara’s poems are semifictional retellings of the mundane parts of his day-to-day life as a New York City layabout, but there is always some glorious image that punches through to catch the reader off guard (his non-grammatical “gleams the nether pond” is especially lovely).

O’Hara transcribed a certain kind of American life that was relevant to a whole generation of people. Reading him puts one in touch with the life and times (not to mention the rich interior life) of a person from an era that has come and gone. America in the New Frontier era wasn’t that long ago by comparison, but the slice of the world that O’Hara writes about is still pretty alien to the present, and he is still able to make it speak to the reader of the present by rendering it rich with color.

Since I have been out of the poetry-reading game since, well, high school, I do not know if there is an equivalent, current poet taking snapshots of our own slice of American history. What if Hitchens’ worries are right, and a generation whose minds are not “furnished with beauty” are incapable of replicating such a thing in their own poetry?

I must hope that current artists are still capable of reaching prior heights, and that I am just not aware of these people as a consequence of our diffuse, internet-dependent media environment. My chief reason for hope is that, in my own short reintroduction to poetry, I have had an experience I believe is pretty common when people revisit the things they learned in school. That is: I am glad that I was made to do certain things against my lazier instincts as a young person. 

Still, to be honest, learning these same things again as an adult has left a much bigger impression on me. I needed to collect more experiences in the real world to understand just how grand an achievement it is to write something so strong in content and form that a person would commit it to memory for life. This is not a “normal” achievement in the writing world. Most of us prose writers have to make peace with the fact that, if our work is read at all, 99 percent of what we write will go in one proverbial ear and out the other. It makes something like the Lord’s Prayer look all the more remarkable, as a collection of lines written in Greek, then Latin, then translated into countless modern vernaculars—preserved over time and effortlessly recited every week by millions at Mass, in Protestant services, and in the privacy of homes around the world.

A good poem is an astonishing achievement, and I think is rightly comparable to the Lord’s Prayer or the Nicene Creed as a way to put the reader (or reciter) in touch with a world beyond themselves through meditation and contemplation. And if reading it as an adult doesn’t inspire a modern Wordsworth, or even an updated Frank O’Hara, at the very least it can provide a kind of solace that is adjacent to prayer, in a world that needs a great deal more of it.