Cross Post: "In an age barren of magic, where is our poetry?"

“In an age barren of magic, where is our poetry?”

This quote begs the immediate question, when we have removed the magic from our society and understanding of the world, what then will we compose about, what then will we sing about? The Norton Anthology of English Literature quotes that poetry devoid of this ‘magic’ will inevitable concern itself with death. Why is this? What is it about magic that keeps us from this inclination?

The subject of magic must be discussed carefully in a society divided amongst itself. For on one side there are those why have dedicated themselves to the destruction of magic, or faerie, the mythos and mystical part of the world, in its entirety. On another front are those who improperly limit magic and place rigid guidelines on what it is and what it is not. These people are closer to the truth, yet they are mistaken in their thinking that they can control faerie. Again, there are those who oppose magic because they misunderstand it, and fear it to a degree because it shakes their conception of the world and reality. These people are sometimes those that would ban books from being read because they use uncomfortable allegory or symbolism to convey truth. Then there are those who misunderstand and do horrible things with mythos. These are arguably the most dangerous people in the world, because they rightly understand that the world has magic in it, and that the soul requires the Great Myth for its very vitality, and yet they pervert this truth just enough to keep it compelling and yet unutterably dangerous. Lastly, there are those that seek the mythos, the magic of this time, and seek to properly understand what it is and what it is not, seeking to not divorce it from truth and goodness, but attempting to utilize it toward the end for which it was created: to save the soul.

Yet what shall happen in an age barren of magic; does poetry cease to be? It would seem almost better if this were so. Poetry is an extremely powerful device. For within its rhyme and reason is contained the power to ensnare the soul and bewitch the senses. People who are especially sensitive to this allure often stand apart and carry with them a sort of out-of-this-world quality. Artists are among them, musicians as well. Yet in a time when the soul of poetry itself, which requires magic as well, is starved of its bread and wine, a most dire chain is initiated. When the faerie in the world dies, so then does the soul of true poetry; that enchanting force with the power to wrest the soul’s attention. We then have the substance of something more like prose, and while it can imitate poetry to a large degree, it will always be lacking. Those artists that I mentioned above are the first to notice this, but often they do so cynically, not hoping for the return or seeking how they might bring it back. They almost resign themselves to an awful fate; and so with the loss of magic comes despair, for what, outside of the magical, can stand against the crushing hurt of this age? Then our poets turn to the hurt, the moldy bread, because eventually they forget the taste of meat and drink. We then have poetry obsessed with death, or perversion, or obscenity. Beauty evacuates, knowing that with the martyrdom of magic comes her own impending death sentence.

What, then, are we to do? We do not forget; we do not cease from our exploration. We find the Great Story, the Great Myth; the source of the longest river, the source of the world’s soul, the faerie, the very truth and nature of magic itself. For magic is the counterpart to material, and the two are siblings under the Fatherhood of the Creator. Plainly spoken, the Christian story, the Greatest Myth ever told, carries the only source of redemption strong enough to demolish the soul-deep boredom and pain and quandary that an age without magic instills in its artists, and to everyone else. This is our journey, our charge, our great exhortation: that through testimony the Great Story, to which true magic bows in humility, and by which bad magic is obliterated, the deep magic of redemption and ultimately glorification may come to the souls of men as initiated by the Greatest Poet to ever walk this earth.