Category: poetry and theology

Guest post from Graeme Clark about a favourite poet and poem.

I have been reading a new poetry book, Rain by Don Paterson.  An accomplished Jazz musician and a wonderful poet who has recently received the poetry medal as well as other numerous awards.  He has twin sons.  One
had an easy birth, as he says, Russell was fine, ‘He just popped out’,
but Jamie, had a more difficult birth and was left with a slight
disability, a tremor in his left hand.  The poem below is about this but about much much more . . .

 

 

Correctives, by Don Paterson

 

The shudder in my son’s left hand
he cures with one touch from his right,
two fingertips laid feather light
to still his pen. He understands

 

the whole man must be his own brother
for no man is himself alone;
though some of us have never known
the one hand’s kindness to another.

 

Don Paterson, Rain (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2009),16

  Sunday last I was preaching on Isaiah 9. The great poet prophet scatters lights around his writing like a Van Gogh starry night. "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light…." But what makes the brilliance of Isaianic light and hope so startling is the setting, against the darkness, gloom and menace of the night. Van Gogh's masterpiece works because of the same contrast, golden swirling balls of light against cobalt blue framed in black.

The picture Isaiah paints reminds me of that painting, and of one of my favourite poems, Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night".

I read it at the start of the sermon, and sensed once again the wistful resignation, the knowing that can only come from loneliness, uncertainty and the chronic longing for home. As a poem of exile, inner, urban, spiritual or emotional, it describes the half remembered pain, the yearning for solace, the listening of the heart for the sounds of other human presence, that we each might find we also were 'unwilling to explain'.

Anyway, it's too good a poem to not cite, and too important in my own stellar constellation of best loved poems to not find a place on this blog.

Acquainted
with the Night

by: Robert Frost  

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;

And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have waited for him
               under the tree of science,
and he has not come;
              and no voice has said:
Behold a scientist in whom
              there is no guile.

I have put my hand in my pocket
              for a penny for the engaging
of the machinery of things and
              it was a bent
penny, fit for nothing but for placing
              on the cobbled eyeballs
of the dead.
                  And where do I go
              from here? I have looked in
through the windows of their glass
              laboratories and seen them plotting
the future, and have put a cross
              there at the bottom
of the working out of their problems to
              prove to them that they were wrong.
R S Thomas, The Echoes Return Slow, (London: MacMillan, 1988), 89

Very few poets manage to write theological apologetics. R. S. Thomas of course never set out to do that, his aesthetic and spiritual integrity make it literally unthinkable. Nevertheless in this poem there is a knowing skepticism about scientific certitude and the imperialistic tendencies rational modernity.

And as often with Thomas, the use of a trojan term, an oblique reference to a Christian symbol, almost camouflaged by ambiguity and easily missed by the secular mindset, by which he pushes the reader towards the place of revelation:

                "…and have put a cross

                     there at the bottom

of the working out of their problems to

prove to them that they were wrong."

One of my favourite poems from the gloriously eclectic Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, D H S
Nicholson and A H E Lee (Eds.), (Oxford 1917), 463-4. This anthology has never been revised or updated so has little in it of the 20th Century. But there are a lot of poems like this one, by minor or near forgotten poets.

This kind of poem pushes
the boundaries of thought and theology, and whatever else prevents that
devotional reductionism by which we try to eliminate mystery and ‘the
heart-shattering secret of His way with us.’ There are lines in this poem that are worth a while of anyone's time to contemplate – maybe alongside the great Christocentric hymns of the New Testament in Colossians, Ephesians and John chapter 1.

 

Christ in the Universe, Alice Meynell.

 

With this ambiguous earth

His dealings have been told us. These abide:

The signal to a maid, the human birth,

The lesson, and the young Man crucified.
      

 

But not a star of all        5

The innumerable host of stars has heard

How He administered this terrestrial ball.

Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.
      

 

Of His earth-visiting feet

None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,       10

The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,

Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.
    

 

No planet knows that this

Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,

Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,       15

Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.
      

 

Nor, in our little day,

May His devices with the heavens be guessed,

His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way

Or His bestowals there be manifest.       20
      

 

But in the eternities,

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

A million alien Gospels, in what guise

He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.
      

 

O, be prepared, my soul!       25

To read the inconceivable, to scan

The myriad forms of God those stars unroll

When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

"Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought."

Robert Browning's line comes from one of the very best introductions to John's Gospel – his long poem, "A Death in the Desert".

Does anyone still read Browning?

Rublev's enthroned Christ I've always thought conveys the majesty of the glory of Christ – and thus the miracle of what it meant to say, "we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth".

Some time when you want to come at John's gospel from a different route, try Browning's poem. You know how on the motorway or A road you sometimes see the sign that offers the tourist route, or the scenic route? Think about leaving the critical historical motorway for a while to meander with Browning into the mind and heart of John the ageing evangelist, reflecting on the Gospel he is composing in his head, and every now and then "stung by the splendour of a sudden thought".

Along with biography as theology, and poetry in relation to theology, I've long made a habit of reading biographical studies of poets! The latest one recently arrived, Paul Mariani's Gerard Manley Hopkins. A Life. I've read two earlier and major biographies of Hopkins, both published a decade and more ago. The argument and thesis of Robert Bernard Martin I found unconvincing in its psychological analysis of Hopkins as a man of anguished spirit and troubled sexuality. Its sub-title A Very Private Life suggests more can be established as fact than is the case. Martin's speculative reconstructions, however well informed and meticulously documented, remain one person's reading of widely acknowledged and major gaps in the data of Hopkins' inner life. The other biography by Norman White is what it says it is, a literary biography laden with literary analysis, just the kind of biography you expect and enjoy from Oxford University Press – long, detailed, erudite. But the danger, not avoided here, is that the scholarship is so overdone, the essential mystery of the person is obscured by a too conscientious thoroughness.

But I learned a lot from these two writers, especially about what happens when poems are read from different perspectives informed by largely unexamined assumptions. Presuppositionless exegesis, according to Bultmann is impossible – that's as true of poems as biblical texts. Neither biography got to the heart of the man, perhaps because neither took with sufficient seriousness one of the most obvious and definitive facts about Hopkins – he was a man of profound religious devotion, whose poetry gave high expression to some of his hardest questions and most moving confessions. With that as an acknowledged presupposition Paul Mariani has written a quite different biography – resulting in a quite different interpretation of the poems.

Mariani has read and written about Hopkins throughout a long career as a scholar of English Literature in general, poetry in particular, and Hopkins' poetry as a special focus of long attentive study. Hopkins is understood (both empathetically and intellectually), as a religiously intense man, and as a poet whose gift is applied to the mystery of God, the world, the human soul and the woven ambiguities of human existence, and these great truths glimpsed in their frighteningly complex inter-relationships, whether as developing or unravelling pattern. Here is one example – simple, and I think reminiscent of George Herbert in interrogative mood, conscience haunted by assumed failure, longing for assurance yet the longing unresolved – not even by a closed parenthesis and full stop at the end of the poem.

Poem 94
Trees by their yield
Are known: but I –
My sap is sealed,
My root is dry.
If life within
I none can shew
(Except for sin),
Nor fruit above-
It must be so –
I do not love.

Will no one show
I argued ill?
Because, although
Self-sentenced, still
I keep my trust.
If He would prove
And search me through
Would he not find
(What yet there must
be hid behind

.     .     .     .
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W H Gardiner (Ed.), Oxford: OUP, 1938, p. 144.

Maybe
Sweet Jesus, talking
   his melancholy madness,
      stood up in the boat
         and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
   So everybody was saved
      that night.
         But you know how it is

when something
   different crosses
      the threshold–the uncles
         mutter together,

the women walk away,
   the young brother begins
      to sharpen his knife.
         Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
   like the wind over the water–
      sometimes, for days,
         you don't think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
   after the multitude was fed,
      one or two of them felt
         the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight,
   before exhaustion,
      that wants to swallow everything,
         gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
   as they are now, forgetting
      how the wind tore at the sails
         before he rose and talked to it–

tender and luminous and demanding
   as he always was–
      a thousand times more frightening
         than the killer sea.

(Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems, Volume One, pages 97-98).

And here is one of my favourite pieces of non-western art that shows Jesus "tender and luminous and demanding as he always was".

Resurrection Fibonacci (I)

Christ?
Yes!
Risen?
Disbelieve!
Disbelieve for joy!
Incredulity learns to laugh,
unembarrassed by the scandal of resurrection.
"And on the third day." His promise no exaggeration. Empty graveclothes, empty tomb.
Galilee. Peter. Upper Room. Thomas. Garden. Magdalene. Emmaus. Cleopas. Places transfigured, people transformed. Risen indeed! 

Luke 24.41 should always be read in the RSV or AV. "The disciples disbelieved for joy". When that which is singular, unprecedented, inconceivable, incredible, unimaginable, occurs, the normal response is disbelief. When that occurence forces the realisation, even the minute possibility, that our worst fears and worst nightmare can no longer happen, then that disbelief is energised by joy. To disbelieve for joy isn't scepticism, it is wonder giving birth to possibility, because the impossible has just been contradicted.

To disbelieve for joy is to struggle with mixed emotions, at one and the same time to dare to hope and hope to God we are not wrong, deluded, mistaken, duped by our own desire that it be so. Joseph Fitzmyer is my first resort on Lukan exegesis; his translation of the key phrase in 24.41 is 'because they were still incredulous, overjoyed yet wondering…". Resurrection does that . It doesn't take much imagination, (though maybe even the little it takes is too much for some of us) to think our way into the minds and hearts of disoriented disciples, traumatised, grieving and scared. Yes incredulous. And yes overjoyed, overcome with that hilarity that is somewhere between joy and hysteria. Later they would begin to understand, incredulity would give way to faith, joy would become something akin to assurance, worship would become urgent in a world now changed forever, and their witness to that world an affirmation of Christ crucified and risen. And the news so good that countless others who encounter Jesus will disbelieve for joy, that God is like this Jesus, reaching out in love and mercy, meeting them where they, and we, are.

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

The statue is by Frederick Hart, and is called "Christ Rising". The image expresses the anguish of Christ's sacrifice and the power of resurrection. One of Hart's descriptions of his own art shows why this statue is such a powerful statement: "Art must touch our lives, our fears and cares – evoke our dreams and give hope to the darkness."

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

……………………………….

And because I can't print it the way George Herbert intended, here is a scanned image of Easter Wings, a poem I think is hauntingly beautiful – the words and the form. I've included the words below for easier reading – but the typesetting on the scan was Herbert's original intention.

 

Easter-wings

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne:
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With thee
Let me combine
And feel this day thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.