Deepen Your Knowledge of Poetry

    It might be safe to say that few of us like to write poetry, especially if it is a class assignment. But many of us love to read poetry. It is a unique expression of the heart. I shared recently a poem written by Jewell on the power of poetry over prose. God apparently agrees with Jewell since He included quite a bit of poetry in His word. It is not just limited to the books of poetry but is most easily identified there. Consequently, I have found the study of biblical poetry to be an exciting enterprise.

    To that end, I recommend for your use a book written by Leland Ryken, titled Sweeter Than Honey, Richer than Gold: A Guided Study of Biblical Poetry. Ryken was a professor of English, before retirement, at the Protestant Wheaton College. He has written a number of books dealing with Bible study including the massive tome Dictionary of Biblical Imagery.

    This particular work on poetry is aimed to assist Bible students in mining the depths of wisdom contained in biblical poetry. Some works are written for the academic but this one is easily accessible to the average person.

    Ryken begins by examining the nature of poetry itself. Poetry is the “language of images.” He contrasts abstract concepts with concrete images that are used to convey those concepts: godliness, mercy, forgiveness versus honey, thunder, or a razor. What do images convey? How do you interpret these images? Ryken discusses poetic images on two levels: the affective level (emotions) and the logical level. Each chapter has a separate section marked: “Learning by Doing.” In this section, Ryken encourages the reader to do his/her own work on a selected passage, trying to apply the principles taught in that chapter.

    There are a few major types of figures of speech that are used in poetry and Ryken deals with them in an extended discussion. In chapter two, he deals with metaphors and similes. How do you recognize these figures of speech and, more importantly, how do you draw the proper lesson from the figure? Ryken provides principles to guide the way.

    In chapter three, he discusses some less-frequently used figures: hyperbole, personification, apostrophe, paradox, metonymy, synecdoche, merism, symbols, anthropomorphisms, and allusions. One key to interpreting poetry in the Scriptures, brought to our attention at least as early as the 1700s by a scholar named Robert Lowth, is that of parallelism. There is a lot of parallelism in the psalms and proverbs. Ryken leads us through a discussion of synonymous, antithetic, synthetic, and climactic parallelism in chapter four.

    The author gives some unique aspects of biblical poems in chapter five while teaching how to teach a biblical poem in chapter six. In the final chapter, Ryken presents a brief discussion of some of the main types of psalms.

    Sweeter than Honey, Richer than Gold is not a long book; it has only 128 pages. Yet, if we learn how to better probe the depths that are packed into poetic language, it can add meaning to our own studies of the poetic portions of God’s inspired word.

    You might want to buy the book before you teach another class on biblical poetry.

--Paul Holland