One Calleth unto Another: On the Poetics of the Liturgy

ABSTRACT:The liturgy of the Church has a core of poetry, not only in the form of the Psalms, but also in its antiphons and especially its hymns, culminating in the Gloria in excelsis. In this article, I explore the reason for the prominence of poetry in the liturgy, beginning with a discussion of the nature of poetry in terms of Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction, followed by an examination of the heavenly liturgy of the Isaianic theophany in Isaiah 6. The language of poetry, which consists of the formation of several types of unity, especially the semantic unity of biblical parallelism, is uniquely suited to expressing the several kinds of unity which are accomplished particularly in the liturgy of the Mass.