In some form, however, poetry is ubiquitous in the faith. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament contain poetry, and in noteworthy quantities.
Outside of the canon of Scripture, poets in various languages, cultures, times, and places have expressed their faith in verse.
But a huge amount of poetry is hiding in plain sight, so to speak, because the lyrics to a worship song - the words of a hymn - are poetry. Many worshippers might answer in the negative if asked about regular encounters with sacred poetry, but those same worshippers might volunteer that great quantities of song fill their worship.
The style of music does not matter - from Gregorian Chant to the Hip-Hop praises of artists like LeCrae and Trip Lee, from Baroque chorales to tobyMac and Hillsong UNITED. Songs have texts, and those texts are poetry.
One aspect of poetry is structure. Some, but not all, poetry rhymes. Most, but not all, poems have some metrical structure. Ancient Hebrew poetry is structured around comparison and contrast of ideas in couplets. Much poetry is built, in some way around sound. It is meant to heard as much as, or more than, it is meant to be visually read.
Because Jesus followers are diverse across languages and cultures, the reader is confronted with poetry which is not in his idiom. The question of translation is one with spiritual significance. How best to render devotional poetry in another language?
Because worship songs and hymnody are used around the globe, translation is often done with an eye toward a musical setting. This requires relatively strict syllable counts and often includes rhymes.
Confining a translation to metrical patterns and rhyme schemes can do violence to faithfully rendering the ideas into another language. One can successfully fit the words into a musical setting, but at the price of misrepresenting the propositional content of the text.
To this end it can be salutary to make or read free-verse translations of sacred verse. A free-verse poem, or a free-verse translation of a poem, has neither rhyme nor meter. These might complement the standard translations of hymns and songs.
On the other hand, one might take Hebrew poetry, e.g., the Psalms, and translate them into structured poetry which has both rhyme and meter. Hebrew poetry has no rhyme, and generally has no meter, although there are some scholars who suggest that it has, in some instances, a subtle form of meter, which is a rhythm more of ideas than of syllables.
In any case, it is good to be aware of what is happening structurally in a poetic text, whether that text is treated as a poem or as a piece of vocal music. In the case of Scripture, poetic texts can often be clearly contrasted to prose, e.g., Mark 1:4-7 are prose, and set apart from Mark 1:2b-3, which is poetry; Mark 1:1-2a are again prose.
Awareness of poetic forms can help the reader to discern meanings. Hebrew poetry is often constructed around couplets, and those couplets often contain parallel meanings. If a line seems ambiguous or mysterious, it can help the reader to know that it may well be echoing the meaning of the preceding line, or foreshadowing the meaning of the following line.
Psalm 88:18 is a clear couplet:
You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me;
my companions have become darkness.
If the reader is unsure of what it means for people to “become darkness” in this context, the preceding line, i.e., the first line of the couplet, reveals that the phrase refers to isolation or ostracism.
The reader would be well advised to consult Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews and George Buchanan Gray’s The Forms of Hebrew Poetry.
