Category: poetry and theology

I miss Seamus Heaney. Not that I knew him, or met him. I only know him through his poems, a couple of documentaries, and a book of interviews. But I miss him. Yes I can read his poetry, some of it I know by heart. Some of his poetry about his father, his upbringing in the country, his shrewd and qualified love for the land expressed in poem after poem – these I read, and can reread to my heart's content.

But I still miss him. By which I mean I can see clearly the emtpy spaces in our landscape left by his passing. By which I mean my sadness that there will be no further words which so wisely cherish and humanely critique this fragile, frightening complexity of human life in all its potential for ambiguity.

I miss him, by which I mean the indefinable lift given to our hearts when we know that there are writers who understand, who care, for whom human tragedy is not always an inevitable given, and whose moral rigour is reserved for the unnecessary cruelties and intransigent prejudices of human behaviour.

I miss him because his own experience of a troubled land created a poet whose compassion and forgivingness are often given words in poems which are universal in their healing and appealing power, teaching through words those human feelings that are the ultimate glory of human community, in which love is lived out in generous and consistent goodwill, humane judgement and a passionate commitment to the other.

I miss Seamus Heaney, but I have his poems, like this one below, which does for me what a good poem should do. 

Digging

The cliche that as you grow older you discover you have more questions than answers is just that – a cliche. I'm not sure how many of us are ever so deep core sure of the answers in the same way we feel the poignancy, pain, excitement or apprehension on hearing, sensing, being addressed by, the questions that matter most.

Anyway, for myself the question has always been one of the grace gifts of God. It's the question that creates the possibility of growth, is likely to initiate change, is a first step in a new direction, an invitation to movement rather than stuckness, an opportunity to be different and perhaps, to make a difference. One of the many gift graces in Denise Levetov's poetry is her patience with questions and her impatience with answers. It is seen in her instinct for the transformative imperative of the interrogative mood, and her tireless vigilance to ensure that proffered answers could stand the scrutiny of integrity, humanity, justice and compassion. I could relinquish many other poets, and their disappearance would leave me the poorer.

For those who want to learn to look at the world, and look within, and look above and beyond, Levertov's ouevre is not in the category of the important, but the indispensable. Her voice is an essential accompaniment on my own search for questions that do justice to the most intractable issues the human community faces today. Here is one of her poems, pointing to a via negativa, not of theology, but of how we cherish, hold and pay gentle attention to the mystery and miracle of being here. The title uses the indefinite article – this is not once for all gift, it is gift in the present continuous. The "Yes, perhaps is neither question nor answer, but an affirmation of that wonderful place in between, in which as human beings we live, and move, and have our being.

A Gift

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers 
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps 
this gift is your answer.

The photo is of a burn running off Glen Dye, filled with melted snow water, and peaty brown. Had I taken time I'd probably have seen some small fish in it, but standing on the bridge looking down I was simply captivated by the play of light on water, the sound of water on stones, and the wild freedom of tumbling water as a sacrament of life and the extravagant brilliance of grace.

Which brings me to Denise Levertov once more. It's always presumptuous to say more than we know, even if we are getting carried away with our admiration and enthusiasm. I wouldn't dare suggest this is Denise Levetov's best poem, nor that it is the one which captures most faithfully her own search for that elusive inner acknowledgement we might call faith. But it is a poem she chose to begin her essay exploration of poetry as 'Work that Enfaiths'. And it is the poem that her biographer suggests has a clear autobiographical reference to her own faith journey. (Dana Greene, p 185).

In any case it is a poem which gives words to those recurring moments of fleeting uncertainty, that follow on the occasional encounter with God, and in which recognition, awareness and captured attention come as a gift for which we are unprepared. Second thoughts and rationalisations, the onward push of life's circumstances and the busyness of our inner lives, and the sheer elusiveness of the transcendent when we seek to recapture it, make such heightened joy hard to maintain over time. Perhaps because olrdinary experience tells us such extraordinary joy is too good to be true, whatever true means.

Few poets I have read combine Levertov's honest searching, persistent longing and determined doubting as a complex intersection of themes as Levertov does in her later poetry. And this poem, speaks to that condition when, in our most honest moments we confess, "Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief". The question which ends the poem, in its poignancy and possibility, is Levertov's version of what the author of The Colud of Unknowing meant by 'the dart of longing love.'

This is a beautiful poem.

Flickering Mind

Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places:
a quick glance, and away — and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now
I elude your presence.
I stop
to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river's purling and passing.
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn.  Not you,
it is I am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow,
you the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?

Dana Greene's biography of Denise Levertov is both a labour of love and a significant work of contextual literary criticism. For the first time I've found that some of Levertov's poetry is dated and placed exactly in the life circumstances she was facing, which makes the biographical details at times harshly revealing of her vulnerability, relational crises, insecurity and yet; which also show us the slow, even late maturing of one whose late poetry became expansive towards that in ordinary life which gives life its mystery, and that which is transcendent which gives that mystery teleological significance. 

This was a woman searching for meaning. All her life also a woman hungry for approval yet determinedly independent, disinterested in the claims of traditional faith expressions but moving, perhaps drawn inexorably, towards a vision of God and the world in which her primary concerns for justice and peace, wholeness and purpose, human brokenness as a given and human wholeness as a journey towards rather than a destination reached, all came together in a fusion of horizons. Out of that fusion comes some of her very finest poetry.

Readers of this blog know Levertov is in my canon of writers whose words take with utmost seriousness the role of the poet as the one who enables to see, and as one who believes the imagination is one of the most powerful moral forces of the human mind. 

PRIMARY WONDER

Days pass when I forget the mystery.

Problems insoluble and problems offering

their own ignored solutions

jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber

along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing

their colored clothes; caps and bells.

                                                    And then

once more the quiet mystery

is present to me, the throng's clamor

recedes:  the mystery

that there is anything, anything at all,

let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,

rather than void: and that, 0 Lord,

Creator, Hallowed one, You still,

hour by hour sustain it.

— Denise Levertov

Time for a mary Oliver poem. In fact this week I'll post a poem a day from my favourite poets. Hard to reduce them to seven, and I wouldn't want to say that these this week are the top seven – but they are seven I read often, sometimes deeply, and seldom disappointingly. I'll indulge myself by combining the poems with a photo – not because the photo holds a candle to the poem, just because I…well, just because!

This first poem is like the flip side of a Psalm of Lament. Often enough I'm a sharp eyed observer of life's apparent negatives; a conscientious barometer of my own inner climate; an alert listener to the background noise of life to hear the rumbling bass more clearly than the melody. And this poem, like many of Mary Oliver's, is a perspective changing poem, an equilibrium restoring poem, a rhythm of words and syntax of lightness that awakens gratitude.

Mindful, Mary Oliver