“Did, perhaps, God say: you should not eat from any tree of the garden?” (3:3) This is a common translation of the snake’s opening words, seemingly innocuous, to Eve. The word “perhaps,” in particular, creates an unthreatening atmosphere. But what... Continue reading

Like poetry, the Bible often leaves out important information. Character and plot description are kept to a minimum, and emotions are often hinted at but rarely stated directly. And both sometimes contain what seem like disconnected fragments. The Bible’s narrative,... Continue reading

The speaker in Emily Dickinson’s poem, “A narrow fellow in the grass,” describes her response upon each time she meets a snake: ...never met this fellow, / Attended or alone, / Without a tighter breathing, / And zero at the... Continue reading

If “Imagination is evidence of the Divine” then, as John Keats wrote in a letter, “What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.” When something beautiful captured Eve’s imagination, she knew it was “truth.” This link between the imagination,... Continue reading

Yesterday I wrote that the biblical Eve lived in, as Goethe called it, “the poet’s trance.” But then the snake seduced her out of that place of passionate clarity. Rabbi Moses ben Naḥman, otherwise known as the Ramban or Nachmanides,... Continue reading

Last week, C.K. Williams gave the annual Poetry Society lecture in London where he quoted Goethe who said (this is paraphrased – Williams said the words quickly, and I scribbled down what I could): “The poet’s requisite trance is the... Continue reading