What if the path to spiritual healing wasn’t paved with clarity, but with fragments? In Chanting at the Crystal Sea, Susan Howe shows us that poetry can be sacred not because it answers, but because it endures. This is a map for those who’ve lost theirs.
When the Map Disappears: Learning to Walk Without Answers
I’ve always been drawn to poems that don’t want to explain themselves; those poems that arrive like broken transmissions from some half-forgotten past, fragments really, and those jagged bits of sound and memory scraped across the page waiting for you to reconstruct them.
One of my absolute favorite poets of this type of poetry is Susan Howe, and her Chanting at the Crystal Sea showcases spiritual healing through poetry because it is a poem not to be understood, so much as it a terrain to be wandered in, with the ache of intuition pulling you forward without direction or answer.
This is a poem without a center or a clear path through, resisting us at every turn.
It opens in some sort of aftermath or maybe in the middle of a collapse:
Vast oblong space / dwindled to one solitary rock
This could operate as both a beginning or an ending, and perhaps it functions as both.
However we read this opening line, it is clear that the world of this poem is shaped by absence like the body-shaped impression in a bed long since abandoned.
The lines here are always trailing off into something, time and war and frost and forgetting so that the poem begins to take the shape of a fog rolling in, holding the presence and then ghost of something once submerged.
Read more about the power of difficult poems.
This isn’t poetry to be understood. It’s a terrain to be wandered, pulled forward by the ache of intuition.
There is a heap of hay that remembers a man and a voice trails into smoke with history becoming a bruise on the landscape, visible only when the light hits it right, and so this poem doesn’t progress so much as it pulses.
It pulses through scenes of exile, mythic detritus, and psychic rupture, suddenly a captain disappears into fog or the children paddle through snow, all the while figures flicker in and out of the poem like old film reels skipping.
I always get the feeling reading this poem that I am following something just out of reach.
I believe that its an effect of the speaker themselves being unmoored, not just from the place in the poem but from knowing itself, much like the reader:
I thought we were in the right country / but the mountains were gone
How many times have I felt exactly that, where I seem to be in the right place but the wrong terrain; when I get the achievement and the fleeting sense of fulfillment only to realize it can’t permanently fill me.
Still, we move in the poem through scorched meadows and ruined towns and halls haunted by councils and crows, but this isn’t aimless, we come to find here that the wandering is the meaning, and the persistence is the prayer.
This poem enacts a kind of spiritual healing through poetry, where it is less about finding peace and more about walking through the dislocation of place with an acceptance and a cracked voice.
Survival here isn’t heroic. It’s human. A cracked whisper into a doll’s ear. A fire kept alive in the wreckage.
History in the Bone: Myth, Memory, and the Haunted Present
Threaded through this disorientation of place is history, but not the abstract kind we came to in the history textbooks in school, but the kind that breathes through skin and scar in colonial echos and biblical upheavals and classical rubble.
Hannibal appears beside a faceless infant and a doll delivers an oracle:
Get up and go home.
And suddenly we’re in a nursery and a battlefield and then a memory we didn’t know we remembered.
It is easy to think of time as the collapse in Howe’s poem but it isn’t an external collapse at the place of the poem but something that has already collapsed within us.
We carry the weight of it in our posture, our phobias, and the way our voices trembles when we say certain names.
I’ve come to believe that myth isn’t some distant story from a civilization before ours, but the residue of unresolved memory and it’s alive in how we speak about that which we can’t look at directly.
And in Howe’s hands, myth becomes a site of the spiritual healing through poetry; a site that is fractured and intimate and often quietly brutal, so that the divine moves through this wreckage not in salvation, but in disturbance:
God is an animal figure / clearly headless.
We don’t encounter God as a resolution, we encounter Him as an absence, the via negativa, or maybe the ache situated in the seeking or reaching itself.
We don’t encounter God as resolution. We encounter Him as absence and the ache situated in the reaching.
Children in the Rubble: Spiritual Healing through Poetry
And there are children everywhere in this poem; they leap and carry and burn and whisper, charged full with an agency that makes them the most human thing in the poem, but its childhood not defined by its innocence, but by its persistence, by surviving when survival seems impossible:
A newborn infant / sat in the hollow / of my pillow.
We often speak of survival as in the metaphor of war or an extreme act, but here its the more quieter and human association, where survival is care and holding and remaining with.
Read more about poetry and endurance.
That word survival takes on less of its heroic connotation and more of its fiercely, imperfectly human understanding; the making do with what is, as in the muttering into a dolls ear and calling it prayer, or the making of shelter out of the scrapheap and the sacred discipline of staying.
Writing as Refusal: When the Pen Leaks and the Fire Remains
Language in the poem runs like water through fingers with the speaker writing with a pen:
leaky as a sieve,
Which might be the most honest description of writing I’ve ever read.
Still, the poem goes on in broken syntax and fractured lines, that grammar of the disorientated, and yet, every word seems like an act of belief in its attempt at articulation.
It is always in the attempt that we see the flares of belief, even if the poem can’t explain, or the prayer remains unresolved, and especially, since God never answers.
Spiritual healing through poetry isn’t about answers. It’s about staying near the flame, even when the map disappears.
There’s a moment near the end of the poem which could be read as the thesis of whatever argument the poem is making:
opened the clock with a snowshoe… looking for peace / in its deep and private present
The speaker here doesn’t find a peace in the surreal, but they do find the deep and private presence, and thus we see that maybe spiritual healing through poetry is less about answers and more about the endurance and courage to continue chanting through the wreckage, however fractured, disoriented, and hopeful that happens to be.
Spiritual Healing Through Poetry: Chanting as a Sacred Act
The poem ends as it began in movement, with the snow falling and a fire burning and two people:
timidly engraved on one another.
And by the end of the poem it becomes clear, that I can believe that this is enough, because Howe doesn’t offer doctrine, only the fragments and the prayers without endings and the courage to hold them anyway.
We see that this is the work the poem asks us to engage in, to speak even when we dont know how, and to stay when noting can stay still, and to scribble and burn and wander, chanting through the silence of God.
Sometimes the spiritual healing through poetry shows us that we must be content with the silence and the absence, and that, even this is holy.
The poem doesn’t end with clarity. It ends with chanting, with two people, timidly engraved on one another, still walking.
Have you ever felt like the map disappeared but something in you kept walking anyway? Share your story in the comments below, I’d love to read it.
Craving a deeper dive into how language becomes a tool for survival? Explore the full framework in Poetry for Emotional Healing, your guide to reading as renewal.
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Dr. Samuel Gilpin is a poet and essayist who walked away from the academy to write at the edge; where poetry meets philosophy and transformation starts with ruin. At samuelgilpin.com, he explores the deep architecture of change, not with hacks or hype, but with language that sharpens and thought that lingers. He holds a PhD in English literature, but what he offers isn’t academic; it’s personal, raw, and precise. When he’s not writing, he’s reading Eliot for the hundredth time, rewatching The Wire, or lifting weights. Download his free guide, Dangerous by Design, and start reading like your mind depends on it. Or sign up for his free course, The 5-Day Poetic Reset.
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