I know a poem is good when I feel, as Dickinson said, like no fire could ever warm me. Or, alternately, like no ice could ever cool me, because sometimes a poem catches fire in my chest. Poetry is a bodily venture. The first time through, I read it with the sensations on my skin and in my gut. I read it the way a person reads Braille or a barometer reads atmosphere.
The first time I remember experiencing this phenomenon, I had been assigned William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey” for a college assignment. As I read, my body shivered to life.
—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns…
I felt the poem before it could fully unfold in my mind. My sensory organs knew what my mind had yet to grasp: the numinous—whatever that meant—was nearby, hovering just out of sight. Sitting at an old wood desk in an abandoned corridor of my college’s library, I felt my body leap in recognition, like an unborn John the Baptist stirring in Elizabeth’s womb.
You can read the full essay over at Ekstasis’s online publication, Ecstatic.
Hallie Waugh 