The Origin of the Praise of God

Robert Bly began publishing prose poems in the 1970s. Several have become well-regarded. One of my favorites is “The Origin of the Praise of God,” from the book This Body is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood. The poem is dedicated to Lewis Thomas, who wrote the influential book, The Lives of the Cell.

"My friend, this body is made of bone and excited protozoa! And it is with my body that I love the fields. How do I know what I feel but what the body tells me? Erasmus thinking in the snow, translators of Vergil who burn up the whole room; the man in furs reading the Arabic astrologer falls off his three-legged stool in astonishment; this is the body …"

To borrow terms from Bly, the poem moves “swiftly and heatedly.” The voice is exuberant. The poem roots itself in longstanding intellectual tradition—represented by Erasmus, Virgil, and the Arab scientist. It attests to the interconnectedness, the unity, of all people across time and place—and our connection with the divine.

"The cells dance inside beams of sunlight so thin we cannot see them. To them each ray is a vast palace, with thousands of rooms. From the dance of the cells praise sentences rise to the throat of the man praying and singing alone in his room. He lets his arms climb above his head, and says: 'Now do you still say you cannot choose the Road?'"

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This poem bears the hallmarks of Bly's style, including, for example, his exuberance and mystical strain. If the poet Mirabai (whom Bly translated into English and popularized in the U.S.) had written prose poems, they would sound like this!