Is Winnie-the-Pooh wise? The two most sane characters in literature, Tom Bombadil and Winnie-the-Pooh, are poets.
“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.” G.K. Chesterton
They are poets to such a degree that they speak in rhyme about everything. They see poetry in everything. Sanity is all about seeing the world as a multi-layered nesting doll for you to open up and explore.
“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.” G.K. Chesterton
Poets don’t go mad. They don’t rely on their reason. They don’t try to get the heavens into their heads. They already have the heavens in their heads — that’s what poetry is. The presence of heaven informs their minds, which is the very definition of sanity.
Tom Bombadil is J.R.R. Tolkien’s absolute metaphor for pure poesis — the Divine making. The world was created through poesis — speaking Divine words: “Let there be light. And it was light.” This is poetry at its pinnacle.
Tom Bombadil, who calls himself “the Elder,” was the first one to see the first dust of the universe. He is the pure poesis, the speaking of the world into being. The world is still held together by poetry.
“He [The Son of God] holds everything together with his powerful word.” Hebrews 1:3
Tom Bombadil is unaffected by the One Ring. He is immune to insanity. He is like the awakened Neo in The Matrix who is able to see the code behind the world. The code is poetry. He sees it and speaks it — 24/7. He knows that the world is spun from words. He doesn’t look for words; words look for him.
Winnie-the-Pooh’s head is also in that word-heaven. He famously said,
“Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.”
Winnie-the-Pooh is another paragon of sanity. His every sentence is just as silly and whimsical as Tom Bombadil’s and yet they reveal incredible profundity of perception.
“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”
Behind his hilarious puns hides a world of meaning. Obviously, nothing is not nothing, it is everything. It is something full of potentiality. It’s the womb of the world. That’s what poets do 24/7 — birth the world into being through speaking. Speaking out of nothing. That’s how God created the world.
Winnie-the-Pooh took words out of Heidegger’s mouth (or the other way around), who said that “nothing” is inextricably connected to being.
His “Das Nichts nichtet” means “The nothing nothings” — nothing is not merely the absence of something but an active force. A poet does nothing every day — because he does everything. Winnie-the-Pooh’s nothing is everything, just like Tom Bombadils silly songs are nothing, and yet they order the Old Forest.
Old Man Willow obeys Tom’s silly song because Tom is Master. He is Master because he knows how the universe is ordered and run. It is ordered and run through words. He goes around his realm, he picks flowers for Goldberry, he talks to the trees — he does “nothing.” Every day. He is too connected to being to waste his time on trifles.
Sanity is art. Sanity isn’t the thing you get; it’s the thing that gets you when you leave the trifles of the world and do the only productive thing in the world — the nothing of Tom Bombadil and Winnie-the-Pooh.
Check out my 3rd book in the Mystical Vision of the Inklings series Daily Spiritual Readings from Literature Classics.
