Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks.

Where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Tanya Wilmoth.

When Eric and I were dating and still trying to impress each other with our romantic prowess, he gave me a Valentine's gift that still makes me laugh and still makes him roll his eyes.

It was a book of Emily Dickinson poetry.

I think he picked it out.

I think he wrote in it.

He definitely had a nice little card to go with it and he gave it to me and he was pretty proud of his thoughtfulness.

I opened the gift and the words I was thinking in my brain spilled out of my mouth before my brain could catch up. I said, have you read this? Do you know

what these poems are about? I don't remember how he answered, but I can remember the look on his face.

Of course he hadn't read the poems. He hated poetry. We

often talked about how he thought that people who read and dissected poetry were

finding things the author had never even thought about. So I knew he hadn't read

Emily Dickinson's poems when he selected her book because it was a collection of

poems about her obsessive thoughts of death for Valentine's Day.

And to be honest, I don't even like Emily Dickinson's poetry.

It's a bit dark for me.

But he was right, I do love poetry.

It's like a puzzle to unlock where the fewest and most poignant words possible are put on the page to convey the largest most in-depth illustration the mind can grasp. In his 1980s play, The History Boys, Alan Bennett wrote about eight boys who were trying to get into Oxford, and they had to study poetry.

In a conversation between Tims the instructor and Hector the student,

Hector groans when Tim's hands him yet another poem to read and analyze.

What is this? Sir, I don't always understand poetry, he says.

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