* Finish reviewing J9 thoughts to notes
* Grammar Review: Block Day
The Origins of Literature
The
book of Genesis accounts for our first things. Interestingly,
God created the world, the planets, people, and most everything we know
by his Word, with words (we don’t know how He made the angels, wisdom,
justice, and other things that would have existed before the world, but
it stands to reason that it was in a similar manner). Wisdom worked at
his side, and the world was fashioned in six days. Was this creation by
God a song, as Tolkien describes the great ones singing in The Silmarillion?
Could such song waves be the mysterious waves that charge the atoms of
every cell, holding all things together by those first reverberating
words?
Regardless,
we were made in God’s image, so we should and do love to create with
our words. Proverbs reminds us that the fruit of a good tongue is a tree
of life, that we can work with our hands or with our words, generally,
to earn our keep, and that words well-chosen will bless and heal the
hearer and win you the favor of those God has chosen to rule. Words are
powerful. This is one reason Christ reminds us to speak honestly; when
we speak falsely, we tarnish the image-bearing we and our words should
carry, and we become less human, less glorious.
Returning
to literature, we note that it stems from the Latin word for letters.
So, when do these stories become things written down? That we cannot
tell, for so much is destroyed. Yet we know that God created Adam and
Eve ready to converse, and that our first generations were mighty in
their arts. It stands to reason that literature began in those first
generations. The first quoted words uttered by a man that anyone thought
worthy of recording form a poem:
“This is now bone of my bones
And flesh of my flesh:
She shall be called Woman
Because she was taken out of Man.”
(Genesis 2:23)
Poetry is what happens when we pay more attention to the way of words. Thus, poetry is a kind of elevated speech. With prose, we mean to communicate a particular meaning. With poetry, the medium, the form, the way, the sound, is elevated in importance.
In recent generations, many writers found it good to put their artistic energies into prose, and the distinctions between prose and poetry have blurred some, but we still recognize an obvious difference between the news in the the Sentinel and a poem by Billy Collins or Robert Frost. Just as speech differs from song, prose differs from poetry. This language crafting is innate in man, part of the image of God in us. Thus, every culture has poetry. Song is poetry. You know poetry. We all, somehow or other, enjoy poetry just as well all enjoy a splendid BBQ meal (poetry) to munching on dirty vegetables just pulled from the earth (whatever happens to come out of my mouth). Is the prepared meal (poetry) artificial, prepared, doctored, unnatural? Yes, and oh, the glory of it!
HW: None
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