This is also why the sacred books are written in rhythmic language, clearly making of them something altogether different from mere ‘poems’ in the purely profane sense, which the anti-traditional bias of the modern ‘critics’ would have them be; and besides, in its origins poetry was by no means the vain ‘literature’ which it has become owing to a degeneration resulting from the downward march of the human cycle, and it had a truly sacred character. Traces of this can be found as late as Western classical antiquity, where poetry was still called the ‘language of the Gods’, an expression equivalent to those we have indicated, since the Gods, that is, the ‘Devas’, are, like the angels, representations of higher states. (The Sanskrit ‘Deva’ and the Latin ‘Deus’ are but one and the same word.)
~ René Guénon: Symbols of Sacred Science
Indifferent bards pretend,
They pretend a monstrous beast,
With a hundred heads,
And a grievous combat
At the root of the tongue.
And another fight there is
At the back of the head.
(…)
There shall be a black darkness,
There shall be a shaking of the mountain,
There shall be a purifying furnace,
There shall first be a great wave,
And when the shout shall be heard –
Putting forth new leaves are the tops of the beech,
Changing form and being renewed from a whithered state;
Entangled are the tops of the oak.From: ‘The Battle of the Trees’, translation by D.W. Nash, a Victorian author who also wrote ‘Taliesin or The Bards and Druids of Britain’; quoted after Robert Graves: ‘The White Goddess’
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