The involuntary association of words, objects, or persons with colors is called ‘synesthesia.’ As a boy, my synesthesia had mainly to do with girls. Each girl in my class at school had her own color. Some girls were black, others yellow, one was orange; there was even a blue girl and some silver ones. Girls did not dye their hair back then; and the girls in my school, all of them, were Caucasian. So my mental images of girls as crayon colors had nothing to do with race or dye. Natural tones and hues evoked girls’ true colors. How spectacular it was to have these crayon girls distributed randomly about the room! As a man, my synesthesia has mainly to do with words. And as a Christian, it has mainly to do with biblical words. One day awhile ago I read and liked a poem that was overtly colorful. This triggered my synesthesia so much that biblical associations were automatically suggested. That is how I came to write this unusual article.
I faintly remember the first poem that I wrote. It was a sentimental tribute to a black farm cat that we called Bob. Typical of amateur poetry, the element of rhyme predominated. My teacher, not expecting much and pleasantly surprised by my little strength, scored me ten out of ten for that project. No poetry assignments were to follow, unfortunately. I thought infrequently of poems after that, and grew up.
It wasn’t until about the age of thirty that, as a man set apart, I thought of poems again. I had been reading the Bible in a desperate search for truth while intermittently exposing myself to literature. During the couple of months that it took me to read the Bible for the first time, I was undergoing an awakening to literature. In my daily perusal of the Scriptures, I discovered incomparable poetry. No poetry in the philosophical mold can equal Ecclesiastes; no poetry in the form of devotion is comparable to the Psalms; no poetry in dialogue can arrest us like the book of Job; no poetry is as colorful, dreadful, and multi-layered as the book of Revelation. To further slake my thirst for poetry I bought several anthologies and I read their poems from beginning to end. I read commentaries. I studied technique and structure. I learned how to identify things like unrhymed iambic pentameter, which stretched my patience and failed to stick. I tried to read Milton and even Chaucer, gave up, and then tried again. Despite the impediments of complex rules and archaic language, I relished my new exploits. I had been awakened. It may be that my awakening was part of the illumination that the Holy Ghost imparts in the born again experience; I am not sure. But I still think that the awakening preceded the regeneration. Notwithstanding my uncertainty as to the sequence of these divine acts or how or if they were mingled and mixed, I know that around that time I was unexpectedly blessed with a palate to taste the written word. Until this happened, poetry was no more attractive and comprehensible to me than calculus was. Unless the poem was straightforward and simple like the one that I wrote as a child, I did not understand it any better than a poet knows how to pound sand. I do not mean by the awakening that I became instantly or particularly able to interpret poems. I mean that I could now detect in the poem the importance of beauty and philosophy to the poet. The poet was not being purposely obscure, after all. He was trying to convey his idea as concisely, truly, and prettily as possible. He was trying to convey the ideal of his idea. I do not mean that my awakening shed light on poetry of the postmodern sort, however, for no one can be awakened to see something sensible in lines that were never meant to communicate sense. Every thinking person will see nothing but randomly written words or phrases in postmodern verse, for this kind of poetry is written to disclose whatever the reader wishes to see in it, and therefore, no certain idea. So I recognized that the poet had a distinct outlook that he wished to make known and that to some degree this outlook I could now perceive. I further noticed that even when the poet spoke through a voice that was not his own, he was revealing something about his beliefs. Each person writes, after all, what his mind dictates it is mannerly for him to compose. One cannot hide from responsibility by speaking in the voice of another. Is the ventriloquist not responsible for what his dummy says? The poet’s voice is a significant factor, if not the chief one, in determining the thrust of a poem. I am not referring to the voice that conveys the tone of a poet’s work as a whole. I refer to the specific voice that speaks out from the particular verse—the voice chosen by the poet to tell his poem. For example, in a poem the poet may speak as a soldier, a father, or the boy that he used to be; or he may speak for someone else entirely. It does not take the reading of his whole body of work to confidently insist that the voice of Leonard Cohen may be fairly coined as indecent spirituality, or devotional indecency. That is his voice generally considered, even though this or that poem of his, taken strictly in context, might not exhibit this voice.
So to interpret a poem, the poem’s voice must be identified. Where the poet is coming from must be determined. In the poem that I wrote in grade five or so, I spoke in the voice of a boy. In the following poem by William Carlos Williams, the voice is that of a man about being a boy. Perhaps it is the voice of Williams himself:
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
(Robert DiYanni, Literature, p. 491.)
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