The first poems were spells. Charms. Witch words. This is what made poetry different from stories, and chronicles, and songs. Where fictions work to create illusory worlds, and records to document the world as it is, and songs to evoke feeling, the first poems were meant to change the physical reality of the people who spoke them.
There are few cultures without some kind of mystical tradition surrounding words—the scrap of paper bearing the true pronunciation of the name of God that gives life to the Golem, the Middle High German incantations against colds and demons, or the bibbety-bobbity-boo of Cinderella’s fairy godmother.
Some of the earliest examples we have of this, in the western tradition, come from two spells called the Merseburg Incantations that have deep roots in Indo-European literature. You’ll get the sense of it when you read them:
This one was meant to allow you to loosen bonds, so you could escape a captor:
sazun hera duoder.
suma hapt heptidun,
suma heri lezidun,
suma clubodun
umbi cuoniouuidi:
insprinc haptbandun,
inuar uigandun.
Once sat women,
They sat here, then there.
Some fastened bonds,
Some impeded an army,
Some unraveled fetters:
Escape the bonds,
flee the enemy!
This one was meant to allow you to heal the broken bone of your steed:
du uuart demo balderes uolon sin uuoz birenkit.
thu biguol en sinthgunt, sunna era suister;
thu biguol en friia, uolla era suister;
thu biguol en uuodan, so he uuola conda:
sose benrenki, sose bluotrenki,
sose lidirenki:
ben zi bena, bluot zi bluoda,
lid zi geliden, sose gelimida sin.
Phol and Wodan were riding to the woods,
and the foot of Balder’s foal was sprained
So Sinthgunt, Sunna’s sister, conjured it.
and Frija, Volla’s sister, conjured it.
and Wodan conjured it, as well he could:
Like bone-sprain, so blood-sprain,
so joint-sprain:
Bone to bone, blood to blood,
joints to joints, so may they be glued.
The way spells worked to change the form of things was by taking the form of things very seriously. They rhymed and repeated and followed their own logical rules. And poetry does too. Poetry rests on the belief, inherited from witches and shamans, that the sound of the word, the look of the word, the length of the line matters, matters as much or more than the meaning of the word. For the early poets, the physicality of the words wasn’t some accident to be overlooked on the way toward understanding, but rather a force of its own. And this was magic.
Starnino writes: “Put into poetic form, that belief therefore becomes something else: a patient, precise, purposeful, adhesively held-together succession of sounds. Unlike prayer, poems live entirely inside their linguistic devices and designs. Indeed, the poet is someone for whom language is so important it gets the whole of his or her attention—for whom language is more important than God.”
These early poets then are pagans and heretics, but there is something to their ideas, even in a secular world, even in a Christian one. Spells are not such an unreasonable notion. Words change the world all the time. Laws. Computer code. Saying, “I do,” in the marriage ceremony. Many poems are still spells, underneath it all. Not meant necessarily to change the world, but meant to change the brain. Incantations against forgetting, or emissaries meant to cross impossible gaps between people. And in the fight against forgetting, in the reaching across the gaps, the sound– for reasons no doubt both mystical and biological– the sound helps.
So this is the first assignment, to know that poetry, all poetry, is rooted in the command, that by saying something, you can make it so. And to believe that it became so because of how the words sounded put together. To give yourself over to the sounds. The best piece of advice I’ve ever been given about poetry is this: “I take care of the sounds. When I take care of the sounds, the sense takes care of itself.”
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Merseburg Charms, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.