Faith and flower …

… Forgotten Poems #35: "La Flor del Salvador," by Ina Coolbrith.

I should say, while I'm talking about all of this, that the religiosity of a lot of nineteenth-century poetry is probably the aspect of it that I find hardest to connect with, or talk about. I'm an agnostic who wasn't raised as a churchgoer, and the more Bible-thumping versions of Christianity make me profoundly uncomfortable, for many reasons. That said, I wrote an entire dissertation chapter on the deeply religious seventeenth-century poet George Herbert, after writing an undergraduate thesis on Paradise Lost, so maybe the only way I can grapple with religion is through poetry -- or art (see above digression on medieval triptychs), or music.

I think that the only way to grapple with religion is through poetry, which is, after all, a way of knowing.