Photo by Brian Schrack

The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

Edith Wharton

Early in my teaching career, I sat with a community college student in an empty classroom at the end of the day. He had come to see himself as a poet in mid-life. For months, he had been trying on different voices, different forms, different perspectives. Now, he said, he wanted to learn to write traditional poetry with perfect meter and rhyme. The rhyme part was coming along, but the meter? I’m struggling, he confessed. Teach me to hear the rhythm, so I can master meter. 

Truthfully, I had never considered how I heard rhythm and counted meter. I just did from as early as I can remember. I inherited an ear and love for the rhythmic symmetry of perfect meter. Iambic pentameter? Its five iambs registered in my ears naturally and musically. And iambic pentameter gone wrong? Like the gash of a bow raked wildly across violin strings, its discord was an auditory assault for me.

As we sat together peering over a poetry anthology, I began to read aloud, exaggerating the meter of each line. My student listened intently through an entire William Wordsworth poem and then said, I just don’t hear it. I could make an educated guess at the meter, but I’d be guessing. I just can’t hear it. 

And he couldn’t and didn’t–even after several tutorial sessions. He conceded that he would stick to writing free verse and leave the meter and rhyme to other poets. He desperately wanted to hear that symmetry of rhythm, the predictable metric pattern of many classical poems, and he understood this compulsion to be one of the most inveterate of human instincts. This is the power of symmetry. Even when we can’t achieve it or wholly understand it, its instinctual presence lives to remind us of what is perfectly there, just beyond our grasp.

There is something in us that loves and seeks such balance. A candlestick on either end of a mantle. A pairing of photos on the wall. Two silos of the same height and width silhouetted against a Colorado sky.

Socrates writes:

If measure and symmetry are absent from any composition in any degree, ruin awaits both the ingredients and the composition. . . Measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue the world over.

To a great degree, there is beauty and virtue in symmetry. Consider the intricate beauty of a snowflake. Each snowflake is unique, but each is completely symmetrical with itself. Or consider the beauty we find in such natural phenomena as romanesco brocoli, an amazing example of fractal symmetry. Each part of the broccoli has the same geometric pattern as the whole.

Symmetry is such a show stopper. Ladies and gentlemen, in the center arena: the coneflower! To your left: the fern frond! And to your right: the chambered nautilus!

And the Master of Ceremonies? Such exactitude displayed in so many magnificent creatures and creations can only be the work of an artful and mathematical designer. Symmetry flies in the face of chance and thumbs its nose at randomness. Mathematicians kneel, awestruck, in the throne room of the Golden Ratio. Musicians bask in the faultless marriage of treble and bass. In adoration, lovers marvel in the light of their beloved’s face: one eye, one cheekbone, one nostril mirrored perfectly in the other.

Novelist and playwright Stefan Zweig writes:

Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of the extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when the dissonance dissolves for a blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with the lips of the word and of love.

And what of the symmetry of extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation? What of that blissful harmony when the dissonance dissolves for a blink of an eye? When two individuals, two extreme opposites, come together in respect and understanding, this is symmetry that can change lives. And when from the greatest alienation one warring nation with one particular philosophy comes together with another warring nation and philosophy, this is symmetry that can change the world.

Poet and Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott argues that if we break a vase, the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than the love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. Perhaps it is in the reassembling, the coming together, the matching and piecing of parts to the whole that we love the best. For if we take symmetry for granted (and I think we do), recreating it makes us painfully aware of its magnificence. And when symmetry is restored, for a time at least, all is right with the world.

Humans may duplicate the perfect designs they see all around them, but they neither imagined nor created them. Symmetry is, indeed, an exquisite effect of a more exceptional cause.  In the sanctuary of symmetry, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we can find this exceptional cause in God. And seeking God, too, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.