The article explores whether poetry might be as compelling a vehicle as liturgical or doctrinal language for exploring a human resonance that could still be termed ‘religious’. Poetry, with its containment of experience and its reach towards a distilled and broadened comprehension, is revealed as a welcome, and often surprising, channel for encountering a religious resonance that persists, and remains recoverable, in our ‘secular’ societies. As a ‘soul language’, poetry is considered as the native language of the human activity known as ‘prayer’.