Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew Scriptures, is the voice that speaks through the prophet Isaiah in those first three lines. Don’t be afraid, Yahweh tells the people of Israel, because I have chosen you, named you; you belong to me. To name with a creator’s authority is to redeem, and to redeem is to possess. I used to believe the poet’s role was comparable to Yahweh’s, that poets must assign names properly, thereby redeeming whatever we choose to write about — places, experiences, individuals.

        This is how I initially interpreted Lu Chi’s words. I believed that he, too, writing in third-century China, saw poets as benevolent gods, naming and possessing through virtue of craft. Those three lines, in fact, are reminiscent of the first chapter of Genesis: “Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit hovered over the water.” There are the same symbols of darkness and water and the same underlying potential for creation. It took me years to realize the profound difference between assigning the proper names — and collecting them. Nestled like a seed in that second word, “collecting,” is the faith that the names already exist. The poet doesn’t invent names; rather, through descending into her own mysterious and sometimes terrifying “heart’s waters,” she learns them.

        If one is raised in a Judeo-Christian culture, as I was, this idea of all things innately possessing equally important names is suggested all too rarely. Instead, we are given the rubric of Adam naming the animals: “each was to bear the name the man would give it.” Adam is master over beasts as the poet is master over experience, shaping and perfecting it into her own creation.

        There is a better rubric. Some months ago, at a friend’s urging, I read The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram. In his book Abram discusses the beliefs of various indigenous peoples, including the Carrier Indians. This Native American tribe believed that, long ago, humans and animals intermarried. What knowledge the tribe possessed about beaver, bear, and salmon was acquired through animal wives who taught their human husbands their needs and habits. The relationship between animals and humans is an equitable one. Carrier Indians do not assign names to animals, they are taught them by the animals themselves.

        This story feels true to me in a mysterious way that is not metaphorical. It speaks of a sacred relationship severed so long ago we don’t even know to mourn for its loss. “Ere God made us, he loved us,” wrote Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century Christian mystic, in A Book of Showings. A passage in this remarkable text that moves me each time I read it is when God places a hazelnut in Julian’s palm and tells her it represents all of creation. “I marvelled how it might last, for me thought it might suddenly have fallen to nought for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth and ever shall, for God loveth it [ . . .].”

        It lasteth and ever shall, for God loveth it.

        Not just human beings, but earth worms, and coral reefs, and hills.