What's Happenin'?

In W.H. Auden's poem, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," Auden writes (in stanza II) about the nature of poetry:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper; it flows south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

These are well-known lines. "Poetry makes nothing happen" . . . nothing an executive [someone who makes things happen] would be interested in. Still, poetry (as the last line says) is a "way of happening."

We don't have to "make things happen" in order to experience the haps and mishaps, the fortunes and misfortunes, of life. After all, life does "happen"! Poetry is a "way" to make sense of life's happenings, to discover meaning, even though it doesn't change anything. The "mouth" of poetry can be a mouth to wisdom.

I think of "the way of poetry" as comparable to the "way" mentioned in the first Psalm (and others like Psalm 119). It is a way, not of sinners, but of meditating "day and night" on God's law, on the true things that bring good fortune. Auden likens the "way" to a river or stream; Psalm one does the same, asserting that the way of meditation on God's law leads to thriving and fruitfulness, because it unwinds under God's loving gaze.

Followers of Christ also thought of themselves as "people of the Way" (Acts 9:2), following in the footsteps of the Christ who went before, walking as disciples of love. What happens along this "way" is what matters most in life: love and its fruitfulness.