Poetry and Prayer: The Power of the Word II 9781472426215, 9781315600987

Citation preview

Poetry and Prayer Interdisciplinary and ecumenical in scope, Poetry and Prayer offers theoretical discussion on the profound connection between poetic inspiration and prayer as well as reflection on the work of individual writers and the traditions within which they stand. An international range of established and new scholars in literary studies and theology offer unique contributions to the neglected study of poetry in relation to prayer. Part I addresses the relationship of prayer and poetry. Parts II and III consider these and related ideas from the point of view of their implementation in a range of different authors and traditions, offering case studies from, for example, the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare and Herbert, as well as twentiethcentury poets such as Thomas Merton, Denise Levertov, W.H. Auden and R.S. Thomas.

L’expérience poétique se refuse au blasphème comme à la prière, mais avec cette difference que s’il lui est absolument impossible de provoquer au blasphème, elle ne peut pas ne pas metre en branle le mécanisme psychologique de la prière. [Poetic experience knows not blasphemy any more than prayer, but while it is absolutely impossible for it to provoke to blasphemy, it cannot help starting the psychological mechanism of prayer.] Henri Bremond

Poetry and Prayer The Power of the Word II

Edited by Francesca Bugliani Knox

Heythrop College, University of London, UK

John Took University College London, UK

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Francesca Bugliani Knox, John Took and the Contributors 2015 Francesca Bugliani Knox and John Took have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Poetry and prayer : the power of the word II / edited by Francesca Bugliani Knox and John Took. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4724-2621-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Religion and poetry. 2. Poetry–History and criticism. 3. Religious poetry–History and criticism. 4. Christianity and literature. 5. Prayer in literature. I. Bugliani Knox, Francesca, 1953- editor. II. Took, J. F. editor. PN1077.P5745 2015 809.1’9382–dc23 ISBN: 9781472426215 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315600987 (ebk)

2015007927

Contents

Notes on Contributors   Preface and Acknowledgements   Introduction   Francesca Bugliani Knox

vii xi 1

Part I  Theoretical Perspectives 1

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies David Lonsdale

17

2

‘Prayer is the Little Implement’: Poetic Speech and the Gestures of Prayer in Christian Traditions   Mark S. Burrows

3

Poetry at the Threshold of Prayer   Antonio Spadaro SJ

57

4

Poetry as Immanence: How Language Informs Reality   Jay Parini

67

5

Poetry and Prayer: ‘An Inner Kinship’   Jennifer Reek

77

41

Part II  Case Studies: Pre-Modernity 6

Poetic Art and Prayer in Psalm 145   David Rensberger

95

7

Prayer and Prayerfulness in Dante   John Took

115

Poetry and Prayer

vi

8

Prayer, Poetry and Silence: A Musical Correspondence   Małgorzata Grzegorzewska

131

Part III  Case Studies: The Twentieth Century 9 Re-Imagining Prayer: Coming Out of Hiding? R.S. Thomas and Tadeusz Różewicz   Jean Ward

151

10 Saturday Prayers: R.S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God  169 Richard McLauchlan 11

Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer   Sarah Law

187

12 W.H. Auden and the Deep Language of Poetic Prayer   Hester Jones

205

13 Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer   Dana Greene

221

Index  

239

Notes on Contributors

Mark S. Burrows is currently Professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Bochum, Germany. Recently he has published translations of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Prayers of a Young Poet (2013) and by SAID, 99 Psalms (2013). A volume of his own poetry, Epiphanies, will appear in 2015. His work explores the literature of medieval mysticism as well as the horizon of modern poetry. He serves as poetry editor for two journals: Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality and ARTS: The Arts in Religious and Theological Studies. Dana Greene is Dean Emerita of Oxford College of Emory University, author of biographies of Maisie Ward (1997), Evelyn Underhill (1990, repr. 1998) and Denise Levertov (2012), and editor of four other volumes. She is currently writing a biography of Elizabeth Jennings. For three decades she served as Professor of History at St Mary’s College of Maryland and subsequently as Executive Director of the Aquinas Center of Theology at Emory University. Małgorzata Grzegorzewska is Professor of English Literature and Head of the Department of English Studies at the University of Warsaw. She has published on Shakespeare, metaphysical poetry and Renaissance culture. Her research interests include the connections between literature, philosophy and theology. Hester Jones is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She has published works on a wide range of subjects, including the poetry of Alexander Pope and W.S. Graham, ecocriticism and poetry, the Rossettis and, more recently, on twentieth-century poets and Christian belief, including W.H. Auden and R.S. Thomas. She is currently completing a monograph on this subject. Francesca Bugliani Knox is a Research Associate at Heythrop College and Teaching Fellow at University College London. Her publications include translations into Italian as well as several books and articles on various aspects of English and Italian literature from the Renaissance to the present, including The Eye of the Eagle: John Donne and the Legacy of Ignatius Loyola (2011). She was

viii

Poetry and Prayer

the editor, with David Lonsdale, of Poetry and the Religious Imagination (2015). At present she is putting together a collection of essays by various authors on Monsignor Ronald Knox for the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Sarah Law is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at London Metropolitan University. Her interests include explorations of mysticism in contemporary poetry and culture. Her publications include essays on Julian of Norwich: ‘In the Centre’ in Julian of Norwich’s Legacy (2009) and ‘In a Hazelnut: Julian of Norwich in Contemporary Women’s Poetry’ in Literature and Theology (March 2011). She has also published five collections of poetry, the latest of which, Ink’s Wish (2014), was inspired by medieval visionary Margery Kempe. Her chapter ‘“The Pulse in the Wound”: Embodiment and Grace in Denise Levertov’s Religious Poetry’ appeared in the first volume of this series, Poetry and the Religious Imagination (2015). David Lonsdale taught Christian Spirituality at postgraduate level at Heythrop College, University of London, for over twenty years and supervised doctoral students researching the interface between spirituality, theology and literature in the work of John Donne, George Herbert, G.K. Chesterton and R.S. Thomas. He was co-editor of the international journals of Christian spirituality The Way and The Way Supplement from 1984 to 1995. He is the author of Eyes to See, Ears to Hear: An Introduction to Ignatian Spirituality (1990, revised edn 2000), Dance to the Music of the Spirit: The Art of Discernment (1992) and, more recently, some articles on literature, theology and spirituality and, with Francesca Bugliani Knox, editor of Poetry and the Religious Imagination (2015). His books have been translated into several languages. Richard McLauchlan studied theology at St Andrews and Cambridge, where he recently completed a PhD on the encounter with divine silence in the poetry of R.S. Thomas. Publications include ‘R.S. Thomas: Poet of Holy Saturday’ in The Heythrop Journal (November 2011) and ‘Rowan Williams’ in British Writers, Supplement XXI, edited by Jay Parini (2015). His primary research interest is in the relationship between theology and poetry. Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, biographer and critic, is Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College. He has published many volumes of poetry, including The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (2005). He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost and William Faulkner. His most recent book is Jesus: The Human Face of God (2013).

Notes on Contributors

ix

Jennifer Reek completed her PhD in 2013 at the Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts, University of Glasgow. Prior to that, she earned an MDiv from Regis College, the Jesuit Faculty of the University of Toronto. Her research is interdisciplinary, often engaging intersections of poetry and faith that she perceives between Ignatian spirituality and postmodern theory and literature. She has taught courses in literature and religion, and is on the editorial board of the journal Literature and Theology. Her chapter ‘Reading as Active Contemplation’ appeared in the first volume of this series, Poetry and the Religious Imagination (2015). David Rensberger is retired from teaching biblical studies at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia. His publications include books and essays on the gospel and letters of John, articles on Christian spirituality, and a small amount of poetry. He is also the author of a chapter on the ecological use of the Psalms in The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms, edited by William P. Brown (2014). Antonio Spadaro, an Italian Jesuit priest, is the editor of La Civiltà Cattolica. He is consultant to the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Pontifical Council for Social Communication. One of his areas of expertise is the languages of contemporary culture. In 1988 he founded the creative writing association BombaCarta. He is the author of a number of books on contemporary culture, and in particular on literary criticism. He has edited Italian versions of works by G.M. Hopkins (2008), Walt Whitman (2009) and Flannery O’Connor (2011), and has dedicated more than a decade to the study of digital culture from an anthropological and theological perspective. He is also the author of an extended interview with Pope Francis, published in La Civiltà Cattolica and other Jesuit magazines in September 2013. John Took is Professor of Dante Studies at University College London. Author of a number of books on Dante, including most recently an edition of the Fiore attributed to Dante and a collection of essays on Dantean theology, he is currently working on a new spiritual biography of Dante for Princeton University Press. Jean Ward is an Associate Professor at the Institute of English and American Studies of Gdańsk University, Poland. She specializes in the study of poetry, especially religious poetry. Her publications include a monograph in Polish on the Polish reception of T.S. Eliot’s poetry and a study entitled Christian Poetry in the Post-Christian Day: Geoffrey Hill, R.S. Thomas, Elizabeth Jennings (2009).

x

Poetry and Prayer

She has edited and introduced a collection of critical essays in Polish on incarnational aspects of Eliot’s work and has translated poetry by several contemporary Polish poets as well as a monograph on Henry David Thoreau by Tadeusz Sławek.

Preface and Acknowledgements

The Power of the Word project, inaugurated at Heythrop College in 2011 and taking the form of a series of conferences hosted so far by the Universities of London and Gdańsk, with a further conference to be hosted in 2015 by the Pontifical University of St Anselm in Rome, seeks to address the relationship between religious spirituality on the one hand and poetry on the other, between an idea and its expression in the context of the theological enterprise. Thematically, its remit is ample. It ranges from the role of the religious imagination in poetry to the continuity or otherwise of poetry and prayer, and from the place of poetry within the context of an incarnational spirituality to the notion of poetry as the whereabouts of wonder as the beginning both of piety and of philosophy. Its chronological sweep is equally generous, accommodating, as it does, poetry of almost all kinds, from the medieval to the modern. The project’s scope is as ample as it is ecumenical, and open to every kind of critical and methodological sensibility. Open as it is, however, to every thematic and chronological possibility, the project is underpinned by a commitment to poetry rather than propositional discourse, poetry being an increasingly prominent mode of theological awareness, its infinite suggestivity transcending absolutely the linearity and exclusiveness of propositional discourse with its tendency to foreclose upon anything other than the pure mental determination. Underlying it too is a sense of the prayerfulness of the poetic utterance, even when it contrasts with conventional paradigms of religious thought and expression, and of its exploring ever new reaches of the spirit by means of an often developed sense of the immanence of the divine in the human. This co-inherence of the prayerful and the poetic is the focus of this collection of essays from the second Power of the Word conference held at the Institute of English Studies in the University of London, a collection designed to deepen still further the notion of poetic form as the way of spiritual intelligence. The editors should like to thank the Institute of English Studies, University of London, for co-organizing and hosting the second International Power of the Word Conference in 2012, from which the chapters in this volume derive, and the Heythrop College Research Committee for funding the event.

xii

Poetry and Prayer

Colleagues at Heythrop College, especially Anna Abram, Michael Kirwan and Michael Lacewing, and, at the Institute of English Studies, Warwick Gould and Jon Millington, have supported us throughout. Special thanks go to Sarah Lloyd, who has been very supportive of the Power of the Word project, and to Emily Ross and the Ashgate staff who kindly helped prepare the present volume for publication, the second of what we hope will be a series of publications arising from the project and its conferences. John Took Permissions The editors gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce copyright poems in this book: Extracts from the poem ‘Present’ by R.S. Thomas is reprinted by permission of Orion Publishing Group, © R.S. Thomas 1993. The extract from ‘Silence’ is reprinted by permission of Bloodaxe Books, © R.S. Thomas 2004. Extracts from ‘Sea-Watching’ and ‘The Prayer’ are reprinted by permission of Kunjana Thomas. Extract from ‘A Small Prayer in a Hard Wind’ from Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman, © 2011 by Christian Wiman, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Extracts from the poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz are reprinted by permission of Wiesława Różewicz. Extracts from the poetry of Denise Levertov are reprinted by permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Introduction Francesca Bugliani Knox

In various degrees and ways, poetry and prayer have been perennial contemplative exercises. They occur when mind and heart incline to recollection (Guardini, Prayer in Practice 14, 24; Bremond 193), attentiveness (Block 162), receptiveness, surrender, intuition and imagination. Both frequently point towards mystery and silence through words which, though mostly vocal or written, sometimes remain, as in the case of prayer, unspoken or unwritten. Because poetic and mystical experience involve at some stage the ‘intensity’ of what Henri Bremond called the ‘activities of the deeper soul’ (155), poetry and prayer are elusive. To complicate matters further, definitions of poetry and of prayer, whether proposed by theologians, philosophers, sociologists or literary critics, vary greatly. Some emphasize the inner workings of the mind and heart as the wellspring of prayer and of the poetic, others focus on the language used, while others still appeal to the distinctive ways in which poetry and prayer communicate or fulfil their roles. More difficult to define is the relationship between poetry and prayer. European fin-de-siècle literary and religious concerns with symbolism, mysticism and modernist theology made the relationship a major topic of interest during the first decades of the twentieth century. A notable example was its treatment in Prière et poésie (1926), translated as Prayer and Poetry (1927), by the French literary critic, philosopher and modernist theologian Henri Bremond (1865–1933). His book is to be read against the background of several other volumes on mysticism, especially those of Joseph Maréchal (1878–1944) and Léonce de Grandmaison (1868–1927). It established the basis for a debate between the mystical and the poetic which, although diminishing in intensity and not always explicitly mentioning prayer, continued throughout the century, particularly among theologians and philosophers. Bremond, often unjustly underestimated and sometimes misinterpreted, equated mystical experience with the experience of prayer and made two important observations. First, poetry and prayer, different though they might

2

Poetry and Prayer

be – indeed, strikingly different in that poetry, as he explained, was not a ‘formal act of love or faith’ (198) – shared a common trait. Despite an ‘impassable barrier between the two experiences’ (195) in that the poet had no mystical grace (196), the psychological mechanism used by grace to raise us to prayer was, he claimed, the same as that set in motion in poetic experience. Second, the reading of poetry could not but lead to the threshold of prayer. ‘Poetic experience’, Bremond wrote, ‘knows not blasphemy any more than prayer, but while it is absolutely impossible for it to provoke to blasphemy, it cannot help starting the psychological mechanism of prayer’ (199). In his view, poetry facilitated a prayerful mood because the listener or reader exercised the same faculty or gift as went into the making of the poem. This interchange of what he called ‘psychical currents’ took place because the activities of poetry and prayer were directed towards ‘real and unitive knowledge’ (4, 191). Poetic experience, however, only pointed to, rather than led to, a higher experience: In order to give its real name to the reality which offers itself to our apprehension, and to possess it fully, we no doubt require a new and better grace, a free gift which the reading of the most sublime poet will not impart to us, but for which it invites us to ask. In the case of the perfect poet himself, the poetic experience tends to turn into prayer, but never actually does so; in our case [that is, of the reader], it does so without difficulty, and thanks to the poet. (197)

In England the literary man and divine Alfred Allen Brockington followed in part Bremond’s line, emphasizing that ‘intuition’, defined as the ‘immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process’, was the common mode of apprehension of both the ‘poetic mind’ and of the mystic (145). He also noted, however, that ‘writers on the traditional view of Mysticism’ were ‘strangely’ reluctant to acknowledge that ‘the intuition of a poet or of a poetic mind or of a mind in its poetic moments was the same faculty or gift as the intuition of the mystic’ (145). These writers were hesitant, that is, to accept that it was the pre-occupation of the mind, either with God or with words, which determined the character of the intuition as mystical or poetic. Following the publication of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911) and Practical Mysticism (1914), traditional theologians feared that characterizing intuition as a gift endowed on human nature irrespective of time or place, a view promoted by Underhill, would endanger the ‘supernatural character’ of mysticism. Already in 1920, for example, The Tablet published a review of E.I. Watkin’s Philosophy of Mysticism that praised the book for stressing the intellectual character of mysticism and the significant role of religious

Introduction

3

institutions in assessing the authenticity of mystical experiences at a time when, the reviewer wrote, ‘false and confused opinions are abroad’ (The Tablet, 24 July 1920, 10). Similarly to what Bremond was to write a few years later, Watkin (1888–1981) acknowledged that the inspiration of poetry and of mysticism was the ‘depths of the soul’, underlining more forcefully than Bremond the distinction between ‘natural and prophane’ and ‘supernatural mysticism’ (Philosophy of Mysticism, 104–6). His view, expanded later in Poets and Mystics (1953), differed significantly from that of Underhill, who defined the poet as innate mystic and an exemplar of humility and innocence. It differed also from that of Edward Shillito, who, in his Poetry and Prayer (1931), took a very similar line to the one that Bremond had pursued in Prayer and Poetry, which Underhill had praised as ‘a profound and illuminating little book’ (‘Poet and Mystic’ 22). Bremond’s Prayer and Poetry encouraged philosophers to concern themselves with poetry, mysticism and, occasionally, the connection between the two. They seldom discussed prayer in particular, and, on the rare occasions that they did so, they did not relate it to poetry. In France, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) and his wife Raissa (1883–1960) acknowledged that affective connaturality was the source of both the mystic and the poetic experience, but at the same time they highlighted the different function, nature and purpose of the activities characteristic of the poet and of the mystic (The Situation of Poetry 64–6; Creative Intuition 234). Correcting Bremond, Jacques Maritain explained that the poet was not a mystic manqué in that, from the outset, the poet’s activity was not directed to knowledge but to creativity. The poet’s main goal was not to communicate, but rather to make something that would endure over time. A further difference was that expression was essential to a poet, but not to a mystic. Raissa Maritain, herself a poet, philosopher and mystic, also maintained that if the poet and the mystic drew on the same source, they did so with different dispositions and related to the source in different ways (‘Magic, Poetry and Mysticism’ 33). Resemblances there might be between poetry and mysticism, but the two were quite distinct. The poet tended toward the Word, the mystic toward silence. At roughly the same time as Jacques Maritain, the philosopher Romano Guardini (1885–1968) was writing extensively, in Germany, on poetry and, separately, on prayer. In Rilke’s Duino Elegies, he wrote that ‘poetry always serves to make an experience or thing or perhaps human destiny more meaningful and more clear’, and added: real poetry is an affirmation not simply of what the poet feels or thinks, but also of what is. In Poetry those things in our existence which seem obscure or confused

4

Poetry and Prayer are drawn together into patterns which make them alive in such a way as, to quote the Ninth Elegy, ‘never the things themselves hoped so intensely to be’. (303)

Some poets, in Guardini’s view, were religious witnesses on account of their ability to see and express truth more clear-sightedly, profoundly and sharply. They had, in short, the gift of acting as visionary prophets. Here the analogy with prayer, as Guardini conceived it, becomes apparent, although it is not made explicit. Just as prayer was not so much an instinctive act, but rather grounded in disciplined meditation opening up to graced colloquy with God (Prayer in Practice 3–4; Prayers from Theology), so, too, poetry, or at least some poetry such as that of Rilke and Hölderlin, though grounded in the conventions of language and rhetoric, was touched by divine illumination. While early to mid-twentieth-century theologians and philosophers explored the nature of mysticism, poetry and prayer and their possible connections, literary critics, particularly in the English-speaking world, were concerned with affirming the autonomy of literature, and of poetry in particular (Kirwan 9–10, 12–13). For I.A. Richards (1893–1979), for example, poetry became a surrogate for ‘a defunct religion’ (Krieger 173). ‘Poetry is capable of saving us,’ he wrote. Others, like F.R. Leavis (1895–1978), though he did not exclude religious sensibility altogether from poetry, concentrated mainly in constructing an English literary canon and preserving its cultural autonomy. Richards’s student, William Empson (1906–1984), was critical of Christianity, and indeed religion in general, at least in his early and middle career. No wonder that among these literary circles the exploration of the relationship between mysticism, let alone prayer, and poetry was of little interest, of less interest indeed than among poets. Those who, like John Middleton Murry (1889–1957), had been more sensitive to the relationship between poetry and religion saw the former as a means leading to revelation and prophecy, with the poet as a vates sacer inspired by God. Whereas Matthew Arnold had sought, broadly speaking, to replace religion with culture, Murry tried to rekindle interest in religion in literary circles through poetry without suggesting that poetry was a means to salvation. There was plenty of mystery in poetry, he had written, without making it mystical (Cassavant 89). It was left to Karl Rahner (1904–1984), a German Jesuit theologian and attentive reader of poetry, to open up a path along which the poet, the theologian and the literary critic could walk together side by side. He did so through his theological reflections on the mystery of God and God’s selfcommunication in the Word and his renewed theological understanding of grace. The capability of all human beings to experience God and to become mystics derived, in Rahner’s view, from the nature of the human mind and the

Introduction

5

grace of divine self-communication that is always offered to everyone. Rahner’s conviction that God’s self-communication was at the heart of human existence as an invisible and inexpressible mystery served as a gloss upon Bremond’s insight that the poetic gift corresponds in the natural order to what the prophetic gift stands for in the supernatural. Maintaining the distinction between poetry and prayer – a distinction that Bremond, contrary to what is often said, never abolished completely – Rahner was able to indicate a common source for poetry and prayer in the deep and secret longing of the heart where the power of the Word resonates (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 358). He also confirmed and elaborated what Bremond said about the importance of listening to the poetic word, which, even when not addressing God explicitly, encourages the reader or the listener to become receptive to the Word of God. True art, both as word and image, comes from the same ‘depth of the soul’ and so teaches us to contemplate fundamental primordial words and images in which infinite mystery is present (Rahner, ‘Priest and Poet’ 297). Rahner’s reappraisal of poetry, though welcomed by many, met with criticism from some quarters. The idea, whether proposed by him or Bremond, that the common source for poetry and prayer lay in the deep and secret longing of the heart was seen as particularly contentious. The Jesuit and literary scholar William T. Noon, for instance, who in his Poetry and Prayer (1967) mentions Rahner, if only in passing and without engaging with his views, objected that it was to poetry rather than prayer that people turned to find spiritual consolation. He conceded that the exercise of poetic imagination might be a preparation for prayer, that systematic prayer might influence poetry, but was adamant that the two human experiences were not of the same order. Prayer was not another means of organizing human experience, as were poetry and other artistic forms of expression. Noon concentrated on the difference between the two, which, he said, Bremond had blurred (4). Unlike Maritain and Guardini, he was concerned that assimilating poetry and prayer would diminish the status of mysticism. At about the same time, in 1966, another American scholar offered a different, more liberal approach to the topic. Nathan A. Scott, who helped establish the modern field of theology and literature in America, developed further the analogies between poetry and prayer. In his opinion, the poetic experience was, in its most intense moments, suffused with an awareness of the world, in its ‘concrete phenomenality’, as ‘a sacrament of the divine immanence’ (‘Poetry and Prayer’ 61). Prayer exposed individuals to ‘what is ultimately deep in the common, ordinary, concrete realities of our experience’ (73). Likewise literature, and poetry in particular, took us back into the world, and ‘into those deeper

6

Poetry and Prayer

places of it, where the existential reality takes on the character of a threshold, becoming the borderland of something more’ (73). Poetic experience, he said, was a preparation for prayer even in a secular context. He went even further and suggested that deprivation of the transcendent could of itself bring humankind into fresh proximity to its mystery (80). The radically intuitive penetration of reality in poetry was, he believed, essentially akin to mystical apprehension (62). Although the relationship between poetry and the sacred, and poetry and prayer has remained since the late 1960s of abiding general interest in European culture and beyond, especially among poets, there have been few book-length academic treatments of their relationship in English. Scott’s The Wild Prayer of Longing: Poetry and the Sacred (1971) gives a speculative and conceptually sophisticated account of how art invokes mysteries and meanings that might otherwise elude us. Richard Griffiths’s Poetry and Prayer (2005), a more focused and pastorally orientated volume than Scott’s, presents Christian poetry (not necessarily prayers) as a means of raising the heart, mind and soul to God. Griffiths’s purpose is to show how in practice the reader’s poetic imagination is aroused by the poetic imagination of the writer so that poetry leads to private prayer. The volume by Robert G. Waldron, Poetry and Prayer: The Hound of Heaven, and Le poesie di Dio by Enzo Bianchi have much the same aim. On the whole the debate on poetry and prayer has not been conducted truly in an interdisciplinary manner, with the exception, perhaps, of Roger Nash’s The Poetry of Prayer (1994). Often, as one scholar put it, ‘those religiously inclined consider prayer beyond criticism while students of intellectual and religious history may consider it somehow beneath criticism’ (Garret 328). Hence this collection of essays. In addition to reviving the debate that had flourished in the twentieth century, they aspire to present, in keeping with the spirit of the project, the various ways in which creative writers, literary critics and scholars of different disciplines have approached the subject of poetry and prayer. * * * Part I of this volume sets a theoretical and historical framework for the specific case studies of Parts II and III. In his survey of what he regards as the most relevant twentieth-century studies on poetry and prayer, David Lonsdale, in his chapter ‘Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Twentieth-century Studies’, reviews the writings of Henri Bremond, Karl Rahner, William Noon and Enda McDonagh, identifying the main issues of the debate and concluding that Bremond, Rahner and McDonagh convincingly argue in favour of the strong affinities between poetry and prayer. In the chapter that follows, Mark Burrows points out that the continuities and similarities between poetry and prayer illustrated by

Introduction

7

the theologians appear convincing also from a historical perspective. After acknowledging that not all prayers are poems and not all poems are prayers and taking his cue from Emily Dickinson’s ‘Prayer is the Little Implement’, Burrows understands the continuity of prayer and poetry in the Christian traditions as an attempt to make sense of an ineffable reality and of a mystery that transcends them both. The longing, the attention, the desire as well as a tension towards silence are, he explains, traits common to poetry and of prayer, whether private, communal or liturgical, from early Christianity to present times. In short, there is a depth where the poetic and the prayerful will always meet. During the twentieth century, however, several religious poets became, in Burrows’s view, less confident that God was listening and concomitantly became less attuned to traditional liturgical prayer. Hence the presence in late modernity, indeed, a welcome presence, of fragments of prayer which are also poetry, and fragments of poems that resemble prayers. Are the prayerful and the poetic that close? And are they so close that they cannot be thought of as separate (that is, there is always a poetic element in prayer and a prayerful element in poetry) or indeed so close that the poetic and the prayerful are often indistinguishable activities? Should they not perhaps be considered distinct and as belonging to different traditions? Indeed the appreciation of the continuities depends on the viewpoint, as shown in the three chapters that follow Burrows’s. In ‘Poetry at the Threshold of Prayer’, Antonio Spadaro, while acknowledging the broad similarities between poetry and prayer, seeks to clarify when a poem actually turns into prayer, making explicit what Rahner and Bremond had left implicit. In Spadaro’s view, prayer is a lifting up of mind and heart to God. Prayer is therefore a matter of dialogue with God, whereas poetry is a means of articulating the substance of this dialogue. Poetry in itself, that is, leads only to the threshold of prayer; it turns into prayer only when it intuits a silence beyond it and addresses a ‘thou’. The differences highlighted by Spadaro, however, are not such as to exclude that poetry and prayer have much in common. Committed to the continuity of poetry and prayer as cognate forms of expression, Jay Parini, in his chapter ‘Poetry and Immanence: How Language Informs Reality’, identifies a similarity in the ways the poet and the man of prayer look at the world and, especially, use language. He takes as his point of departure Ralph Emerson’s idea that facts are the ‘end or last issue of the spirit’ and explores it in terms of G.M. Hopkins’s insight that Christ ‘plays in ten thousand places’. He considers the relationship between poetry and prayer through the ‘incarnational’ character of language in both cases. The shared concern of poetry and prayer is, for all their difference, to articulate the otherwise hidden and inaccessible substance of spiritual awareness.

8

Poetry and Prayer

The ‘incarnational’ language of prayer and poetry brings us back full circle to recognize the common source from which that language derives. Jennifer Reek elaborates on this in her chapter ‘Poetry and Prayer: “An Inner Kinship”’, in which she examines Rahner’s statement that ‘really great Christianity and really great poetry have an inner kinship’ which realizes itself through the word, expressed and conveyed. Indeed, in Reek’s exploration of Rahner’s theological reflections on the word, poetry moves more than ever intimately into the vicinity of prayer, poetry too being a matter of listening in the inner depths to the word of the Lord in its power to reveal and to transform. Furthermore, readers or listeners, in their attentiveness to a poetic line, become, in effect, what they hear, that same line constituting in this sense a principle of new life. And the mood of all this? Seriousness, to be sure, but over and above this, the joy of it all, the joy of living out in and through the text something of the soul’s deepest yearning. Reek’s presentation exemplifies how the prayerful and the poetic converge when listening attentively to the poetic word. Part II of this volume shows how poetry and prayer have related to each other in practice. The first three chapters offer three case studies from premodernity. David Rensberger deals with one of the Psalms. A treasury of memorable, lyrical expression and a mirror of mankind’s spiritual experience, the poetic qualities of the Psalms were recognized by the early Church Fathers and medieval commentators, and have inspired many a memorable translation (Zim 1, 34). Focusing on Psalm 145, Rensberger shows how a God at once merciful, just and provident is extolled in poetry that is both tightly knit and graceful. Here the sheer artistry of the text confirms its function as an act of praise with all that this entails by way of presupposing and encouraging a prayerful disposition. Acrostics combine with anaphora, chiasmus and anadiplosis as well as with the most sophisticated kinds of lexical and grammatical symmetry, not only reinforcing a sense of God’s own consistency and faithfulness, but also creating and confirming a sense of rejoicing on the part of the pious spirit and of delight in the utterance itself. Here, as indeed in the Book of Psalms in general, which John Donne defined ‘the highest matter in the noblest forme’ and Sir Philip Sidney called ‘divine Poem’, poetry and prayer are as close as they can ever be. Poetry and prayer, as John Took illustrates, engage with each other also in Dante’s Divine Comedy, though with a difference in that here the place of prayer must be seen in the soul’s journey into God devised by the more properly prophetic than prayerful poet, the Dante of the Commedia. For the Dante of the Commedia, like the prophets of old, speaks out to the generations, to those ‘who will call this time ancient’, his purpose, therefore, being to bring them back to the straight way long since made crooked. This is an enterprise both underpinned by,

Introduction

9

and in turn celebrating, prayer as the necessary condition of homecoming, with the great prayers of Purgatorio XI, an antiphonal version of the prayer Christ himself taught his disciples, and of Paradiso XXXIII, a prayer of intercession to the Virgin, bearing witness to an aspect of the text both complementing and, ultimately, comprehending the prophetic. Whereas poetry encouraged the formulation of the Psalms, in Dante’s Commedia poetry paraphrases and echoes pre-existing, liturgical, prayers. The third case study is concerned with another aspect of how poetry and prayer have related to each other in pre-modernity. In the chapter ‘Prayer, Poetry and Silence: A Musical Correspondence’, Małgorzata Grzegorzewska deals with poetic texts which illustrate, imitate or represent prayer in action (Nuttall 9). She shows how William Shakespeare and George Herbert, in different ways and from different perspectives, are interested in the dynamics of prayer, and in particular the extent to which the person who prays is ready to be ‘bedazzled’ by God’s calling and lets God affect him. In Hamlet (III, iii) Claudius’s prayer issues not in an opening up of self to the other-than-self, but in something closer to spiritual self-captivity. Claudius does not perceive the saving hand of God and is bereft of any sense of the divine initiative in prayer, of prayer as a call. Herbert often highlights, too, the deficiency of vision and the lack of determination to love in the act of praying, but eventually perceives that God’s Word gives weight and glory to the poet’s prayers. Despite the persona’s bitter complaint, directed towards God’s ‘silent ear’, in Herbert’s poem ‘Denial’ the prayer ends with a virtuoso celebration of the desired and achieved harmony – a harmony, as it has proved over the centuries, that is sometimes difficult to achieve. In Part III, the second series of case studies looks at four eminent twentiethcentury Christian poets whose poetry dramatizes the complexity and frustrations of prayer or reveals the at times strained, at other times harmonious, relationship between prayerful mood and poetic creativity: the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas (1913–2000), the American Catholic writer and mystic Thomas Merton (1915–1968), the Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden (1907–1973), who joined the Episcopal Church in 1940, and the British-born American poet Denise Levertov (1923–1997), who converted to Christianity in 1984 and joined the Catholic Church in 1990. Of these four poets, R.S. Thomas gives the most explicit poetic account of prayer and its complexities. The senses of failure and frustration which Thomas’s poems about prayer convey are commonly attributed to his sense of the ‘hiddenness of God’, to his notion of prayer forever painfully unanswered. In ‘Re-imagining Prayer: Coming Out of Hiding: R.S. Thomas and Tadeusz Różewicz’, Jean Ward takes a different approach, emphasizing Thomas’s

10

Poetry and Prayer

evocation of the soul’s attempts to hide from God, of being reluctant to stand fully and unambiguously in his presence, a theme that Thomas shares with George Herbert. And this, she maintains, is a situation productive not only, and perhaps not even primarily, of the loneliness of man, but of God himself as no less anxious than man or woman to enter into communion with the first fruits of his creativity. This is a strange reversal of roles, but thoroughly germane to the complex substance and psychology of prayer, one which does not surprise the great Polish poet Różewicz, whom Ward compares with Thomas. Is it perhaps not God, Różewicz asks, who has forsaken the human race, but human beings who have forsaken God? There is another aspect in Thomas, however, that should be considered here. His poems on prayer, whether we see them as witness to the search for a hidden God or to man hiding himself from God, are best appreciated in relation to the notion of Easter Saturday as a matter of waiting and wordlessness. The silence of the Saturday experience, of the soul’s dwelling in the moment between crucifixion and resurrection, is a distraught silence, a silence at once compelled and constrained by death, devastation and hopelessness as yet unrelieved by the Resurrection. It is, in this sense, a wordless silence, a silence lost to its own depth and inexpressibility. This is, as Richard McLauchlan suggests in ‘Saturday Prayers: R.S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God’, what is meant by standing in the presence of God, the quintessence of prayer. Furthermore, offering an account of the gaps or silences in the poem ‘Sea-watching’, McLauchlan shows how Thomas invites his readers to participate prayerfully in his poem, prayer and poem thereby conjoining. The poetry of Thomas Merton, a Catholic American monk who was also a writer well read in Hopkins and Blake, offers another window on how poetry and prayer relate. Merton’s poetry was informed by mysticism, and yet, or rather because of that, there were tensions between the two. To his mind, poetry and mysticism were not always compatible. Whereas poets entered into themselves ‘in order to create’, he wrote, contemplatives entered into God ‘in order to be created’ (New Seeds of Contemplation 111). Merton’s personal dilemma between the two callings became so strong that he stopped writing poetry, only to return to it many years later, trusting that God would integrate the two gifts. Sarah Law, in her chapter ‘Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer’, illustrates that Merton’s vocation as a poet, interwoven as it was with his calling to the contemplative life, was not an easy one. By following the development of Merton’s poetry and poetics, however, Law also shows convincingly that what at first, conceptually, seemed an irreconcilable relationship, in time became less conflictual. Poems, like those of Merton, often point beyond themselves towards the silent and

Introduction

11

unsayable, prayer-like. Like prayer, they bring to the surface and propose as an object of contemplation the pathologies of existence, the sensation of brokenness, loneliness and incompleteness, mirroring what is in the recesses of personality. Auden’s case is quite unlike Merton’s. Auden was not a mystic, at least not in the traditional sense. And yet, as Hester Jones argues in ‘W.H. Auden and the Deep Language of Poetic Prayer’, his poetry has a Christian frame of reference and also discloses a less obvious but important aspect of how poetry relates to prayer. Critics tend to underestimate the presence of prayer in his poetry, a common view being that he thought of the latter as undermining or betraying in its magic and self-conscious aestheticism the substance and the seriousness of faith. Jones notes instead that a number of significant intellectual encounters (Kierkegaard, Charles Williams, Fénélon, Bremond) very possibly encouraged him to see prayer and poetry alike as the means to a more limpid spiritual awareness, to a loosening of the boundaries of selfhood and an opening out of personality upon a ‘poetic of the deep’ concentrated on attentive listening. Needless to say, the issue, as far as Auden is concerned, remains delicate, not least because the mystical in his poetry finds expression in the quotidian. The prayerfulness of Auden’s poetry lies in what Auden called the ‘language of the deep’, in wakefulness, in attentiveness. The final chapter is Dana Greene’s account of Denise Levertov’s life and works. In Levertov’s case, poetry serves as an introduction to prayer. Twenty or so years before her death, in the process of writing a long poem, Levertov claimed to have found a new relationship with doubt and faith by conceiving her creation of poetry as a form of prayer. In her chapter, ‘Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer’, Greene suggests that from the beginning, but not explicitly until late in life, Levertov’s understanding of the world was incarnational. She gradually developed a sense of poetry as a way into the numinous and as an articulation of her prayer life. The mystery, she wrote, was ‘not behind but within’ all that is. Differences, to be sure, remained, poetry involving, typically, a transformation of the word, and prayer a transformation of self. Each alike, however, constituted a matter of ‘enfaithing’, a means of approaching and of dwelling in the reality beyond self. In her words: ‘The poet when he is writing is a priest, he summons the divine, the reader does this through reading the poem … by divine I mean something beyond both the making and the needing element’ (The Poet in the World 47). The chapters in this volume describe the relationship of poetry and prayer from many perspectives, but even so, they do not, and do not pretend to, exhaust the possibilities. We might imagine discussing poetry and prayer more specifically from the point of view of parodies of prayer, for example in the Morgante by the

12

Poetry and Prayer

Florentine Renaissance poet Luigi Pulci, the poems of mystics such as St John of the Cross, or the nineteenth-century poetical devotions of John Keble’s Christian Year. This volume offers instead predominantly theological, philosophical and literary reflections on the continuities and discontinuities of poetry and prayer together with examples of the extent to which poetry and prayer converge. Its aim is to promote further research and insight into a topic as captivating as it is controversial. Let us end with the apparently contrasting views of two major contemporary Italian poets, Mario Luzi and Giorgio Caproni. In Luzi’s view, the poetic word partakes of the power of the Word. By naming what is impossible to name and by listening to the silence which follows, that is, the ‘voice’ of God, the poet enters the dynamics of prayer and invites his readers to recollection and collectedness. Caproni’s perspective was different (Macinante 182–3). The poem that he wrote before dying points dramatically at the discrepancy between, on the one hand the power that faithful prayer has to petition, in the name of Christ, for a ‘grain of charity’ to help the ‘ice of indifference’ (‘gelo del disamore’) of the contemporary ‘waste land’ (‘Terra guasta’), and, on the other hand, the ‘artificial cry of the poet’ (‘il pianto-posticcio-del poeta’). What, he asks, is the ‘artificial cry’ of the poet worth compared to the prayer of a believer? ‘Less than nothing’ (‘Meno che a nulla’), Caproni answers, ‘It is only vain tinsel / It is cowardice’ (‘È soltanto / fatuo orpello. É viltà’) (‘Poesie disperse e inedite’ 961, 962). Works Cited Block, Ed. ‘Poetry, Attentiveness and Prayer: One Poet’s Lesson’. New Blackfriars 89 (2008): 162–76. Bremond, Henri. Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory. Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1976 (first published 1927). Brockington, Alfred Allen. Mysticism and Poetry on a Basis of Experience. London: Chapman and Hall, 1934. Bugliani Knox, Francesca and David Lonsdale, eds. Poetry and the Religious Imagination: The Power of the Word. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Caproni, Giorgio. ‘Poesie disperse e inedite’. L’opera in versi. Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Cassavant, Sharron Greer. John Middleton Murry: The Critic as Moralist. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1982. Garrett, Cynthia. ‘The Rhetoric of Supplication: Prayer Theory in SeventeenthCentury England’. Renaissance Quarterly 2.46 (1993): 328–57.

Introduction

13

Griffiths, Richard. Poetry and Prayer. London: Continuum, 2005. Guardini, Romano. Prayer in Practice. London: Burns and Oates, 1957. —. Prayers from Theology. Trans. Richard Newnham. New York: Herder and Herder, 1959. —. Rilke’s Duino Elegies: An Interpretation. Trans. K.G. Knight. London: Darwen Finlayson, 1961. Kirwan, Michael. ‘Theology and Literature in the English-Speaking World’. In Bugliani Knox and Lonsdale eds, Poetry and the Religious Imagination: The Power of the Word, 9–30. Krieger, Murray. The New Apologists for Poetry. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1956. Levertov, Denise. The Poet in the World. New York: New Directions, 1973. Macinante, Alessandra Paola. ‘Per una rilettura di Res amissa alla luce delle presenze dantesche’. Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana XLIII.1 (2014): 177–90. Maritain, Jacques. Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. New York: Pantheon, 1953. — and Raissa Maritain, eds. The Situation of Poetry. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955. Maritain, Raissa. ‘Magic, Poetry and Mysticism’. In J. Maritain and R. Maritain eds, The Situation of Poetry, 1–36. Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 1972. Nash, Roger. The Poetry of Prayer. Nottingham: Edgeways, 1994 (2nd edn 2004). Noon, William Thomas. Poetry and Prayer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967. Nuttall, Anthony David. Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante, and St John. London: Methuen, 1980. Rahner, Karl. ‘Poetry and the Christian’. Theological Investigations, Volume IV: More Recent Writings. Trans. Kevin Smyth. Baltimore, MD: Helicon, 1966, 357–67. —. ‘Priest and Poet’. Theological Investigations, Volume III: The Theology of the Spiritual Life. Trans. Karl-H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1967, 294–317. Scott, Nathan Alexander, Jr. ‘Poetry and Prayer’. Thought 41.1 (1966), 61–80. —. The Wild Prayer of Longing: Poetry and the Sacred. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971. Shillito, Edward. Poetry and Prayer. London: SCM, 1931 (2nd edn 1948). Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism. London: Methuen, 1911. —. Practical Mysticism. New York: Dutton, 1914.

14

Poetry and Prayer

—. ‘Poet and Mystic’, review of Bremond’s Prayer and Poetry (1927). The Spectator, 21 January 1928, 22–3. Waldron, Robert. Poetry as Prayer: The Hound of Heaven. Boston, MA: Pauline, 1999. Watkin, Edward Ingram. The Philosophy of Mysticism. London: Grant Richards, 1920. — Poets and Mystics. London: Sheed and Ward, 1953. Zim, Rivkah. English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Part I Theoretical Perspectives

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 1

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies David Lonsdale

This chapter is devoted to one aspect of the relationships between faith, religion, theology and spirituality on the one hand and literature on the other, namely, the relationship between poetry and prayer. This relationship in the last century has attracted the attention of theologians and literary scholars and critics, both Christian and non-Christian. There is, of course, an obvious connection between the two. Some prayers have the form of poems, and some poems are prayers. At the end of the twentieth century, a study by an American biblical scholar, L. William Countryman, argued that the English lyric poem offers a very suitable vehicle for the expression of personal spirituality. This chapter, however, is not concerned with the poetic or religious qualities of particular poems or prayers, nor with religious poetics. It is a survey of a few of the more significant theoretical studies of the relationship between the two activities of Christian prayer and the making and reading of poetry. In the 1920s, Prière et poésie by the French scholar and writer Henri Bremond caused some controversy in both Catholic and literary circles.1 Bremond claimed that poetry is ‘pure’ in so far as it moves in the direction, not of music, but of prayer. He argued that the psychological mechanisms operative in mystical experience are the same, but on a ‘lower’ level, as those of poetic experience, so that a poet is, as it were, a kind of mystic manqué. Later in the century, the book Poetry and Prayer (1967) by William T. Noon, an American Jesuit Professor of English Literature, offered a critical response to Bremond’s claims and an alternative view of this relationship from the point of view of a scholar and critic of modern literature. It was in the 1960s, too, that the eminent German Jesuit philosopher and theologian 1 Original title Prière et poésie (1926); English translation by Algar Theorold, Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory (1927). Maud Petre, who was a close friend and confidante of Bremond when he was struggling with the question of whether to leave the Society of Jesus, described him as ‘a fascinating personality’ (Petre 261).

Poetry and Prayer

18

Karl Rahner published some short essays on poetry viewed from a theological perspective. Towards the end of the century, we can also see a theological interest in poetry and its relation to prayer reappearing in the work of the Irish theologian Enda McDonagh, in particular in his book The Gracing of Society (1989). A recent rekindling of scholarly interest in the religious imagination and in connections between theology and literature and the fact that the topic of poetry and prayer has not received very much scholarly attention in the last forty years suggest that there may be some value in drawing attention once more to these twentieth-century contributions. Henri Bremond (1865–1933): Prayer and Poetry Historians have identified two debates about mystical phenomena taking place in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Psychologists argued over whether mystical experience is evidence of pathological mental conditions or ‘potentially positive and healthy, while not denying the possibility of pathology’ (Talar 184). At the same time, Catholic theologians and writers on spirituality fought over two issues: (1) whether the ‘graces’ of contemplative prayer are normal later stages of spiritual growth or supplementary and exceptional, and (2) the nature of mystical experience and of the knowledge it involves (Talar 186–8). Bremond was aware of the often bitter confrontations between these different schools of thought as well as of contemporary debates about la poésie pure (Talar 187).2 Early on in Poetry and Prayer, Bremond claims to have neither the leisure nor the competence to write a ‘real book on the essence of poetry’. Instead he offers ‘a short discourse made up of necessarily dogmatic and abstract formulas’ (4), no more than ‘a rough sketch’, the work of ‘an amateur, a simple inquirer’, who is also ‘in a hurry’ (6). His work is a psychological study, an investigation into the psychological structures and mechanisms that are involved in poetic and mystical experience, with a view to demonstrating ‘analogies of form and communities of mechanism’ between poetic and mystical experience (116–17). To that end he explores the resemblances and differences between poetic and mystical experience. His central claim is that poetic experience is of the same order of knowledge as mystical experience: ‘poetic experience is an experience La poésie pure was the subject of Bremond’s lecture to the members of the Académie française on 25 October 1925. It was at the end of this lecture that Bremond claimed, of all the arts, ‘ils aspirent tous à rejoinder la prière’ (Bremond, La poésie pure). John Middleton Murry criticized Bremond’s notion of la poésie pure in his book Countries of the Mind (17–31). 2

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies

19

of the mystical order’ (81), in spite of the fact that there is also ‘an abyss of difference’ between them (85). Bremond’s method is different from that of others who have written on the subject of the relationship between prayer and poetry. They used an understanding of poetic experience to shed light on mystical experience, while he chose the reverse, to allow the mystical to shed light on the poetic: ‘It is not Shelley’s experience that helps me to know better the experience of John of the Cross, but conversely it is the experience of the saint which makes a little less obscure the mystery of the experience of the poet’ (Bremond, Prayer and Poetry 84). Bremond gave two reasons for this approach. First, mystical and poetic experiences employ the same psychological mechanisms and therefore belong to the same order of ‘real’ knowledge, a form of knowledge which is ‘not immediately conceptual, but unitive’. Secondly, ‘mystical experience is the highest degree and the supreme development here below of all real knowledge; indeed the most perfect kind of real knowledge’ because of its supernatural character and ‘because it alone sets in movement the whole psychological mechanism, all the springs which actuate real knowledge’ (188). The Experience of the Poet and of Readers of Poetry Bremond’s starting point is the idea that there is something intangible, a mystery, in poetry (Prayer and Poetry 2). The true characteristics of poetry are to be found in Romanticism, which was ‘a conscious and reasoned reaction against the rationalistic aesthetic of the eighteenth century and the senile humanism which had prepared the road for that aesthetic’ (55). The Romantics understood the ‘mysterious experience which lies at the root of … masterpieces (of poetry): the interior principle, the poetic gift and invisible springs of action which that gift sets in motion’ (56). And this experience needs to be distinguished from other intellectual activities which go with it. In Bremond’s version, the secret of poetry’s magic lies in inspiration in the traditional sense of a visitation by an external power.3 However, great poets are not the only people who have an experience which at a certain degree of intensity produces masterpieces. Readers who read the poets ‘poetically’ also ‘resemble them and share in their gift, in their poetic state’ (3). To read poetry is to ‘interpret the poet’s experience by repeating it afresh’. Between poet and reader there is an ‘interchange of psychical currents’ (4).

T.S. Eliot called Bremond’s book ‘a modern equivalent for the theory of divine inspiration of poetry’ (The Use of Poetry 137). 3

20

Poetry and Prayer

Psychology: The Soul and the Self Bremond’s basic thesis about the relationship between poetic and mystical experience in his book hinges on his concepts of the soul and the self and his argument for the presence in humans of two different ways of knowing which correspondingly give rise to two distinct kinds of knowledge. When discussing the soul, he makes use of traditional concepts of the ‘powers of the soul’, in particular intellect (or intelligence) and will, and the ‘spatial’ metaphors for the soul beloved of the mystics. According to this way of thinking, the soul has, as it were, both a ‘surface’ and a ‘centre’ or ‘depth’ (sometimes also called the ‘apex’). The intelligence, the ordinary instrument for attaining and working with concepts and images, operates, in Bremond’s scheme, on the surface of the soul (Prayer and Poetry 102). As for the centre, Bremond follows the mystics in seeing this as the site of another very different kind of knowledge. This knowledge or awareness, more obscure and unclear, less well-defined than intellectual conceptual knowledge, is variously described as an ‘apprehension’, an ‘intuition’, a ‘touch’. This apprehension brings a direct contact with the ‘real’, in contrast with the intellect, which deals with concepts and images (103). And it is this second kind of awareness which is common to both poetic and mystical experience. Bremond also links this image of the soul and its activities with Paul Claudel’s parable of animus and anima. For Bremond, animus indicates ‘surface self ’, ‘rational knowledge’; anima, ‘deep self ’, ‘mystical or poetic knowledge’ (108–9). Animus is the agent of ordinary everyday human activities both good and bad (123–4); anima, on the other hand, is the self of the centre of the soul: ‘the self which endures, image and temple of God, the self of all inspirations, the hearth whereon all true poetry and heroism are set alight.’ Anima is what Scripture, Augustine and Pascal call the ‘heart’ (124–5). The Operation of Grace Another key to Bremond’s understanding of mystical and poetic experience lies in the traditional Thomist theology of the operation of divine grace in humans. Grace, the Spirit of God ‘indwelling’ the human soul, does not bypass natural human psychological processes and structures of knowing and acting, but raises them to a different ‘supernatural’ level and ‘perfects’ them. So in graced mystical experience, human capacities of knowing and loving are raised to a new level of knowledge and love of God, which is a foretaste of the Beatific Vision to be completed in heaven. Bremond quotes another Jesuit theologian, Joseph de Guibert, a specialist in what at the time was known as ascetical and mystical

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies

21

theology: ‘The supernatural character of our interior life does not necessarily modify the psychological design of that life; where it does modify it, it does not do so by violently introducing completely foreign elements, but by helping, completing, transforming, elevating the constitution of our natural psychic activity’ (quoted in Bremond, Prayer and Poetry 84–5). There is therefore continuity or commonality between the experience of poet and reader on the one hand, and that of the mystic on the other, because the same psychological structures and processes are in operation in each. Poetic Inspiration Moments of inspiration are those in which writers and poets are made into mystics. Between such moments, trying to write is a matter of ‘high fever of meditation and research’, of many ideas, but one cannot express them; ‘in short, an intense fatiguing activity, but without result’ (Bremond, Prayer and Poetry 91–2). When inspiration comes, however, ‘the spark shoots out, and there is great peace’ (92). One idea or feeling or image remains (92). This is like the ‘simple prayer’ of the mystics described by Père Grou, ‘in which the mind has no other object before it than a confused and general view of God, the heart has no other feeling than a sweet and peaceful tasting of God, which nourishes it without effort, as milk feeds children’ (quoted in Bremond, Prayer and Poetry 92). This experience is that form of awareness or apprehension which takes place in the centre or depths of the soul. It is best expressed, not by saying that we ‘comprehend’ something, but rather that we ‘feel’, ‘touch’, or better ‘possess’ it (93). Bremond maintains that the object which inspiration presents us with is not an idea, which he describes as ‘clear, inanimate, and hollow’, but ‘the reality itself which that idea was at one and the same moment showing to us and hiding from us’ (93). In this kind of inspiration, ‘a foreign presence besieges me, enfolds me, penetrates me – in a word, possesses me’ at the centre of the soul (94), to produce an experience analogous to that of ‘an external intervention which stimulates vital acts’ in the higher mystical states (104). The two modes of knowing that Bremond describes are mutually interdependent. The centre apprehends or possesses ‘the real’; the intellect, on the surface, conceptualizes and discusses it: the intellect could not work with it, if it had not first been apprehended (145–6).

22

Poetry and Prayer

Differences between Poetic and Mystical Experience It is in his discussion of the differences between these two experiences that Bremond makes most use of the ‘higher mystical states’ to cast light on poetic experience. For his definition of mystical experience properly so called, he relies on the work of theologians Augustin Poulain, Joseph Maréchal and Léonce de Grandmaison, all of whom see the essential characteristic of mystical experience as a direct apprehension or feeling of the presence of God (Prayer and Poetry 133–4). And he draws on Grandmaison to list the essential features of such an experience. They include: • a sense of entering, in answer to a call, into immediate contact, without images or discourse, but not without light, with an infinite goodness; • this quasi-experimental perception of God is ineffable; the least inadequate means of describing it are those borrowed from the operations of the senses: taste, savour, sight, touch; and • the resulting knowledge, an illumination in depth, is no less unique, and at the same time it has a powerful ‘affective tone’; it is an immediate ‘imposed’ evidence, rather than dry, abstract knowledge (136–7). Again, Bremond insists that there is no question of positing that the poet’s ‘dim light’ and the ‘sun’ of the Christian contemplative are identical. One is a ‘profane and after all, a fairly common experience’, the other ‘wholly supernatural and one not granted to all Christians, even to those who are very devout’ (137). However, for Bremond, poetic experience is none the less a gift of God, ‘a grace, an activity essentially directed towards prayer’ (138). But even if it were ‘completely profane, worldly, frivolous even’, it would still be a real knowledge distinct from notional knowledge (138). Poetic knowledge unites the poet, ‘not directly, to the sovereign reality, God – that is the exclusive privilege of mystical knowledge – but to all the created real and underneath the created reality, indirectly to God himself ’ (138). Bremond insists, too, that possession of anima, and therefore of a capacity for this knowledge, is not the exclusive privilege of poet and mystic. There is a hierarchy of states: the highest are the mystical; then higher poetical states, then the lower poetical states, that is to say, the experience of thousands of poets which never find expression and of true readers of poetry (196–7).

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies

23

The Miracle of Poetry The crucial differences between poet and mystic, for Bremond, lie in their natures, and in particular in the fact that poets have both ‘an invincible need’ to communicate the poetic experience to others and a certain gift which enables them to do this successfully (Prayer and Poetry 156). By contrast, the illumination that mystics receive in contemplation does not of itself give them the means of communicating the experience to others (157). Poets’ purpose in exercising this gift is to provoke in others an experience similar to their own. When this happens, ‘the poet’s anima stimulates this deeper self of the reader, elevates it and associates it with the poet’s own experience’ (160). The ability to find words capable of this communication is the mark which sets poets apart from mystics and ‘the run of men’ (160). The Poet and the Mystic Poetic and mystical experience, then, are alike in that they belong to the same order of knowledge and use the same psychological mechanisms. They differ, however, in a number of important ways. First, as we have already seen, the poet feels a compulsion to rush to communicate the experience to others and has the ability to do so. Secondly, Bremond states, towards the end of his book, ‘I have already insinuated, I will now say expressly, that God does not give himself immediately to the poet. Whence comes the fundamental difference between the poetic and mystical experience’ (Prayer and Poetry 177).4 Later in the book he puts the distinction between poet and mystic in these terms: The more of a poet any particular poet is, the more he is tormented by the need of communicating his experience; the more of a poet he is, the easier and the more inevitable he finds that magic transmuting power of words by means of which something of his poetical experience passes from his deeper soul to ours. The more of a mystic any particular mystic is, the less he feels this need of selfcommunication, and the more such communication seems to him impossible, should he have the desire to make it. (189)

Bremond also claimed that ‘every poetic inspiration is a gift of God, not gratum faciens, as ‘sanctifying grace’, but one of those ‘natural graces’, which, without supernaturalizing us by their own force, are intended to aid us in our ascension to the good’ (Prayer and Poetry 187). 4

Poetry and Prayer

24

Consequently, poets’ need to communicate constitutes both their glory and their weakness: glory because a poet ‘receives and appropriates a treasure which becomes partly ours through the effect of his magic of words’; weakness because ‘in his haste to exploit and transmit this treasure’, a poet handles it badly and only gets hold of it superficially (190). A poet, therefore, is but ‘a broken-down mystic’ (193). Noting the idea put forward by the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain that all beauty tends of itself to unite us to God, Bremond summarizes his own position as follows: The reason and manner of this tendency is what I have been trying to show in these pages …: primo, there is another thought besides abstract and discursive thought, another knowledge as well as conceptual and rational knowledge; secundo, neither real knowledge nor rational knowledge, each of which, moreover requires the other for its development, can reach completion without implying the exercise of faculties divinely set in motion by the mystical life. Whence come both the excellence and the essential imperfection of poetical experience, the stepping-stone to a higher experience, which in some way it calls out for, but to which, of itself, it would never lead; rather would it block approach. (199–200)

Reception of Bremond In the years following the publication of the English translation, Prayer and Poetry received some critical attention in the London literary world. For example, in a lecture on ‘The Modern Mind’ delivered at Harvard in 1933, T.S. Eliot was critical, although he acknowledged that Bremond ‘safeguards himself by just qualifications’ in his attempt to demonstrate the likenesses and differences between poetry and mysticism and that ‘he makes many penetrating remarks about the nature of poetry’ (Eliot 138). First, on the basis of his own experience as both poet and critic, Eliot challenged Bremond’s statement that ‘the more of a poet any particular poet is, the more he is tormented by the need of communicating his experience’. Eliot rejected this version of the poet’s ‘need’, claiming instead that ‘the poet is tormented primarily by the need to write a poem’ (138). Further, Eliot was critical of Bremond’s concept of poetic experience itself on three counts. First, ‘by the time [a poet] has settled down into a poem it may be so different from the original experience as to be hardly recognisable’ (138). Secondly, the ‘experience’ in question may be a fusion at root of so many and such obscure feelings that ‘the poet may be hardly aware of what he is communicating; and what is there to be communicated was not in

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies

25

existence before the poem was completed’ (138). Thirdly, ‘communication’ will not explain poetry’ (138). Eliot does not go so far as to deny that there is some degree of communication in poems, but he points out that whereas Bremond offers one possible explanation of why poets write, in fact ‘there is room for very great individual variation in the motives of equally good individual poets’ as well as in the ways poems come into being (138). Eliot’s second ‘caution’ also has to do with the poet’s motives and intentions. He is critical of any theory, such as Bremond’s, which ‘relates poetry very closely to a religious or social scheme of things’ on the grounds that ‘it is in danger of binding poetry by legislation to be observed’, whereas poetry refuses to be so bound (Eliot 139). Here, too, Eliot does not deny that there may be a relation between mystical experience and some kinds of poetry; none the less, ‘you cannot find a sure test for poetry … by reference to its putative antecedents in the mind of the poet’ (140). Bremond is deemed guilty of introducing ‘extra-poetic laws for poetry: such laws as have been frequently made, and constantly violated’. Finally, Eliot points out that, far from being the outcome of one particular kind of experience, what counts as poetry differs from age to age and person to person and depends on factors outside poetry itself (141–2). William T. Noon, Poetry and Prayer (1967) William T. Noon was a Jesuit and an academic, and held the posts of Professor of English at Fordham University and Le Moyne College, Syracuse. His intellectual formation included a study of scholastic, largely Thomist, philosophy and theology, and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, as they were understood and practised in his time, provided the basis of his spiritual training. Noon sees himself as writing in the 1960s in a time of crisis and change. He is also critical of a trend among literary scholars and critics to find traces (or even whole swathes) of ‘mysticism’ in the work of Yeats, Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost. His aims in the book are to discuss and evaluate a spectrum of twentieth-century views on the relationship between prayer and poetry. In particular, in a critical response to theologians and literary critics, and in particular Henri Bremond, who have seen close similarities, even identity, between these two activities, he also sets out what he sees as a true understanding of this relationship. He is mainly concerned with the making of poetry, but does also consider from time to time reading and its effect upon the reader. His method is to test various hypotheses about experiences of prayer and poetry by considering the work of Hopkins, Yeats, Wallace Stevens,

26

Poetry and Prayer

Robert Frost and the Anathemata of David Jones. My main concern here is the four theoretical chapters which frame these individual studies. Critique of Bremond Bremond, Noon claims (perhaps unfairly), wants to turn poetry into prayer and prayer into poetry. He wants to find as much likeness as he can between the ‘ineffable’ experience of inspiration and the ‘ecstasy of the mystics’. As a result, ‘mysticism, prophecy, poetry … all tend to merge’ (Noon 32). He picks out several features of Bremond’s theory for critical comment. For example, he points out that a number of Catholic ‘masters of prayer’, notably Dom John Chapman, disagree with Bremond (33). Of Bremond’s theories in general, Noon claims that they stem from nineteenth-century Romanticism and the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, with the implication, perhaps, that they are both old-fashioned and unreliable. In Noon’s view, any adequate discussion of poetry and prayer has to include consideration of the poem, the finished product. The fact, therefore, that Bremond avoids any real consideration of ‘the ontological construct’ of a poem or of the grammar, syntax and language of a poem is deemed ‘not very helpful in pointing out likenesses and differences between actual poems and prayers’ (33–4). Overall, while Noon concedes that there are points in Bremond’s position ‘that may come close to the truth of experience’, still, he concludes, ‘it appears on the whole to blur important differences’. And ‘there is much freewheeling in his use of terms’ (36). Noon makes further critical comments about Bremond. First, there is no obligation to see a poem, as Bremond does, as ‘an aborted prayer’ or a ‘nonpraying prayer’ (93). Secondly, there is no reason to suppose that every poem could or should be a prayer. Thirdly, there likewise seems little sense in insisting that every poet is a mystic, ‘whether, aborted, inverted or manqué’ (93). Fourthly, Bremond and others do not seem to have realized that art itself is a different but also excellent way to forget oneself and take part in a conversation, a communion even, with other people (93). Fifthly, although in most religious traditions a choice between poetry and prayer is not normally found to be necessary, nevertheless some prayerful and contemplative people have been known to withdraw from poetry in order to find God in prayer (94). Finally, the histories of poetry and prayer suggest that the ‘psychological mechanisms’, which Bremond highlighted, are often very different in prayer and in poetry, in both poet and reader. And the same histories show that some few gifted individuals have been able to inhabit both worlds (93–4).

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies

27

At the end of the chapter devoted to the views of Bremond, Louis Martz and Thomas Merton, Noon identifies a few conclusions about the relation of poetry to prayer that have emerged. He sees a shared recognition of an analogy between poetry and prayer, but no convincing case for postulating strict identity. In bringing together the religious and poetic responses to the world, it is valuable to see that a unity is being created out of two separable realities. However, Noon could see no appetite for initiating proceedings for divorce between them: ‘Each partner best guarantees the success of the union by respecting the separate identity and dignity of the other’ (53). Furthermore, to try to substitute poetry for religion is to misunderstand poetry, what a poem says and how it says what it says; ‘a failure, ultimately, to judge a poem as poem’ (54). And finally, prayer, unlike poetry, is a matter of ‘supernatural conversation’, and in this conversation ‘the principal voice is that of God’ (53). Similarities between Poetry and Prayer Noon’s initial overview of the relationship between poetry and prayer highlights the following similarities: • Both are an ‘exercise of the contemplative power’ and ‘offer spiritual nourishment’. • Each in its own way is ‘an illumination of life’ and presents sources for meditation on the nature, values and destiny of humankind. • Poetry is similar to prayer in that ‘almost any good poem may raise the mind and heart to God’; poetry can be ‘a means of sanctification and union with God’. • The languages of prayer and poetry may and often do coincide. Poetry is often in prayer, and prayer in poetry. A poem may take the form of a prayer, and vice versa (8–9). Main Differences between Poetry and Prayer Equally, Noon is at pains to point out differences. For example, each has its own distinct styles and idioms. The ‘graces’ of poetry lie in its aesthetic quality, whereas those of prayer do not (10). Prayer, at its best, leads to holiness and union with God, which is not necessarily true of poetry, even at its best (5). Furthermore, prayer and poetry represent different responses: Scripture, as a focus of meditation or contemplation, calls for an ‘unconditional’ assent, ‘moral endeavour and practical religious effort’ beyond the demands made by poetry.

28

Poetry and Prayer

Hence ‘prayerful meditation cannot be provisional in the same way as the meditation that poetic texts may embody or inspire’ (5). And ‘the wholly committed assent that is asked from a man in communion with God at prayer is not demanded in poetry’ (99). Good prayer may lack some of the qualities of poetry, and it is a matter of common experience that much good poetry lacks at least some of the qualities of prayer. In a later chapter, Noon offers further clarification of what he sees as the main differences between prayer and mystical experience on the one hand and poetry on the other. First, aesthetic experience is not the same as the religious contemplation of God, although religious contemplation may include aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic contemplation does not in itself increase or diminish holiness or union with God (56). Secondly, in Christian theology prayer is seen as a work of the grace of God, as well as a human activity; not so, in Noon’s view, the making or reading of poetry (57). Thirdly, prayer is unlike poetry in that the heart of prayer is a ‘colloquy’, a secret conversation ‘motivated by a loving attention to God’s presence’ (58). Fourthly, prayer, unlike poetry, is oriented beyond knowledge and aesthetic experience to choice and action; ‘conduct is its most searching test’ (59). ‘Contemplation motivates and purifies action’ (60). Prayer and poetry also differ in motivation: ‘those who practise prayer do so because it puts them in right relation to God’ (61). Finally, praying and making a poem are distinct activities: the concern for verbal play, music and patterning that is part of poetry is not of the essence of prayer. Although a person may afterwards express his experience of prayer in poetry, writing a poem is not the same as praying (84). Karl Rahner (1904–1984) Rahner and Prayer Karl Rahner, a German Jesuit priest, was one of the most original, distinguished and prolific Roman Catholic theologians of the twentieth century.5 The Jesuit Rahner scholar Philip Endean sees prayer as the unifying factor of the whole of Rahner’s work: ‘[his] theology was driven by a passion to articulate what 5 ‘Karl Rahner’, wrote Philip Endean, was ‘a formidably learned professional theologian … he had held professorships at the Universities of Innsbruck, Munich and Münster; he had been a significant influence on the Second Vatican Council; he was the recipient of many academic honours; his bibliography in German alone runs to more than fifteen hundred entries’ (Rahner, Spiritual Writings 10).

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies

29

the human person must be like if prayer is possible, if we human beings can really make contact with God’ (Rahner, Spiritual Writings 10). Rahner’s book On Prayer is made up of lectures which he gave in the devastated Church of St Michael in Munich in the first year after the Second World War, when he was in his early forties. In an interview for his seventy-fifth birthday he said: ‘the little book, On Prayer, is … for me just as important as those more scholarly matters – even though it is “only” a devotional book’ (Rahner, On Prayer n.p.). At the very beginning of these lectures, Rahner defines prayer as an activity which engages the ‘heart’ and the mind: ‘it is not the speaking of many words, or the hypnotic spell of the recited formula; it is the raising of the heart and mind to God in constantly renewed acts of love’ (On Prayer 9). ‘It is the opening of the heart to God’ (10). And while prayer certainly is an activity, an element of receptivity, of listening to the word of God is just as necessary. The ‘silence of the heart’ is a basic disposition for prayer, because prayer involves allowing God to ‘speak his word of power’ in the human heart, a word which cannot be heard if the heart has become ‘filled with noise and bustle’ (16). This opening of the heart is necessary because, unless it is set free by God, the heart becomes ‘hedged in by mean limitations, by suffering, by hopelessness, by the daily commonplaces that chain us down’ (11). Then the heart begins to feed on itself. The human heart may be buried in a sense of its own futility, but there is no need to seek escape, because God is present (17). It is in our own nothingness that we find God. The best prayer is prayer that arises out of recognition of human nothingness and absolute dependence on God (17). Prayer is ‘silent communion of heart with heart which comes with sense of God’s nearness to us and our utter, loving dependence on him’. This colloquy of the heart with God cannot be expressed in words, because it is ‘a silent reaching out towards God in reverential fear and sublime trust’ (17) which brings peace because the heart has become open to admit the presence of God (18). Real prayer is the power of God set free to spring in the barrenness of the human heart (18). Rahner locates the springs of human prayer in a profound restlessness ‘deep’ in the human heart, a thirst for the infinite, incomprehensible God who alone can satisfy deepest human longings (24). This ‘divine discontent’ can only be allayed by an opening of life to the Spirit of God. Prayer is the presence and work of the Spirit who lives in the depths of each. ‘God, the Infinite, the Incomprehensible, has been pleased to create man in the image of his own infinity and to take up his abode in the souls of men’ (29). God is ‘source of our being, meaning of our existence and through grace we share in his divine life’ (30). Our part is to accept this divine presence and so to open our hearts and lives to the full power of the Holy Spirit (31). Prayer is thus both a human and a divine activity. The

Poetry and Prayer

30

Spirit of God within us is the source of our prayer, ‘light in our darkness’ (32). The great dignity of human prayer lies in the fact that ‘we pray not only with what is human in us but also with what is divine’ (32). The Spirit of God prays within us. But only when there is silence of the heart can grace work in us to inspire our prayer. Our part is to do nothing to hinder this speaking of the Spirit (34). Theology and the Arts 6 Rahner’s discussion of the arts in relation to Christian faith, theology and life comes in the form of a few relatively short essays and talks, which were often intended for a specific audience or occasion, and it is not always possible to recapture their original settings. These pieces also come from different times of his life. Those from the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, the end of the publication of the Index of Prohibited Books, in the mid-1960s, in the background, and he sometimes recycled earlier material more or less verbatim in later publications. In these essays, he extends some of the fundamentals of his philosophical and theological thought into a discussion of questions surrounding the arts in relation to Christian theology and Christian life and develops a rather distinctive theology of the word. Rahner saw a very close affinity between theology on the one hand and the arts, including literature, on the other. Both theology and the arts are expressions of humanity’s self-understanding; they are ‘human self-expressions which embody, in one way or another, the process of human self-discovery’ (‘Theology and the Arts’ 17–19). The major difference between theology and the arts is that ‘theology is man’s self-reflexive self-expression about himself in the light of divine revelation’ (24). Rahner’s theology of grace is relevant to this discussion of poetry and prayer. The standard Catholic theology that Rahner encountered as a young man, as Endean explains, ‘tended to understand the presence of God among us as something in principle beyond our experience, to be accepted on the testimony of others’ (Rahner, Spiritual Writings 13). Rahner developed an alternative position in which he argued that grace may be accepted or rejected, but ‘if grace exists at all, it exists as a reality of human experience … if God in Christ has become human, then … God has also become human experience’ (14). Endean therefore sees Rahner as ‘seeking to integrate the whole of Christian theology Recent publications on theology and the arts in the thought of Karl Rahner include short works by Robert E. Doud and Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen. The only book-length studies that have come to my attention are those by Antonio Spadaro and Peter Joseph Fritz listed in Works Cited. 6

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies

31

around one simple message: that ‘God is a God of self-gift, a self-gift that can, however dimly and incompletely, be experienced’ (26). Grace is therefore, in the first instance, God’s self-gift to humanity. Strikingly, ‘[grace] is the gift which is God himself and it is the gift of accepting the gift which bestows itself ’ (Rahner, ‘Poetry and the Christian’ 358), a hidden reality which permeates human existence and operates ‘secretly’ in the depths of that existence. Moreover, if grace is God’s self-gift to the whole of humanity, then there are no human beings who are untouched by God’s grace, whether they recognize it or not. The purpose of God’s self-gift in love is ‘to support the life of humanity from within’. Rahner understands grace in human life as an active force which ‘appeals to all, empowers all and invites all’; ‘it wells up from the depths of a person’s heart in a thousand different ways’; it makes human beings restless, and it is through grace that human existence in all its aspects is constantly open to the infinite (Rahner, ‘The Task of the Writer’ 113–15). In his reflections on writers and writing, Rahner argues that every act of writing, as a personal, moral act, represents a response, whether positive or negative, to grace. And this is true even though writers may not grasp the full significance of what they are saying or may be saying more than they intended. Consequently, it would be wrong of Christians to dismiss the work of writers who are not explicitly Christian or who oppose Christianity. A poet’s or novelist’s expression of an ‘anguished atheism’ may be in reality ‘a sharing in the desolation of the Cross’ (Rahner, ‘The Task of the Writer’ 118). And even when a writer implicitly or explicitly denies Christianity, the work may in fact be ‘the false or inadequate explanation and interpretation of a quest for the fullness of life which is, nevertheless, under God’s blessing’ (118). A Theology of the Word In ‘Poetry and the Christian’ (1966) Rahner wrote that ‘Christianity, as the religion of the word proclaimed, of faith which hears and of a sacred scripture, has a special intrinsic relationship to the word and hence cannot be without such a special relationship to the poetic word’ (358). This essay is a short theological ‘apology for poetry’ which seems to have been composed with at least one eye on someone or some group in the Catholic Church who needed convincing that people not only might, but should read poetry, because that opens their hearts to receive God’s self-revelation. In Rahner’s theology, God is a God who takes initiatives, in creation, revelation, grace (as God’s self-communication) and Incarnation. Rahner understands

32

Poetry and Prayer

creation (and evolution within the world) as God’s preparation to enable God to give himself in love and forgiveness to that which is other than God (Doud 448). His argument is that the word of poetry has certain characteristics such that if human persons are attuned to the word of poetry, then they also have the capacity to hear the word of God’s self-revelation. Here Rahner highlights four features of ‘the word of poetry’ which dispose humans to hear and accept the word of God’s self-revelation. The first feature is that the word of poetry has the capacity to mediate the presence of mystery, and more particularly it is a word through which the silent mystery of God can be present (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 358). In this word of poetry, humanity is approached by ‘what is incomprehensible, the nameless silent power that rules all but is itself unruled’ (358). It is therefore through temporal and finite words that the eternal and infinite is mediated to humanity, so that anyone who wants to hear the message of Christianity must be able to hear the human word in which ‘the silent mystery’ makes itself heard (359). Or, to put it another way, the word of poetry prepares human beings to hear the word of God. Secondly, poetic words are words which reach the heart (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 360). The heart is Rahner’s term for the hidden centre of a human person from which knowledge, love and human action spring, ‘the primordial faculty of the inmost spirit’ of a human person (360). Among the words which reach the heart, and hence affect the whole person, are ‘primary’ words, and they ‘strike the inmost depths … killing and bringing to life, transforming, judging and graciously favouring’ (360). Both poetry and Christianity use such words. The poetic word, in Rahner’s view, is also, thirdly, a word which unites (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 360–61). Typically, human words distinguish, define and separate, especially in technical or purely functional contexts. But there are also words which unite, reconcile and liberate. Poetic metaphors bring together into a unity different and sometimes apparently incompatible layers of meaning. Words of truth, love and forgiveness reconcile, unite and set free. A capacity to hear the uniting words of poetry prepares human beings to hear the reconciling, liberating words of Christianity: ‘Only when one can hear the secret sound of unifying love in sundering words has one the ears to perceive truly the message of Christianity’ (361). And finally, Rahner links the word of poetry with Jesus Christ, in whom the inexpressible mystery of God came to expression. The consequence for human language of the Word becoming flesh is striking: ‘In every word, the gracious incarnation of God’s own abiding Word and so of God himself can take place.’ Hence the human word can become ‘the word of eternal love by the very fact

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies

33

that it expresses man and his world’ (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 362). The human word capable of performing all these functions is the word of poetry. If humanity lost the capacity to hear the poetic word, then human beings ‘could no longer hear the word of God in the word of man’ (363). Rahner, Poetry and Prayer We can now point to some implications of Rahner’s reflections as regards the relationship between poetry and prayer. First of all, there is an ‘inner kinship’ between ‘great Christianity’ and ‘great poetry’, though they are not the same thing. Secondly, the word of poetry, whether it is specifically religious or compatible with Christianity or not, has the capacity to open the heart and mind of the reader to the mystery of God: really great poetry only exists when man radically faces what he is. In so doing, he may be entangled in guilt, perversity, hatred of self and diabolical pride, he may see himself as a sinner and identify with his sin. But even so he is more exposed to the happy danger of meeting God than the narrow-minded Philistine who always skirts cautiously the chasms of existence, to stay on the superficial level where one is never faced with doubts – nor with God. (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 365)

Moreover, this opening of the heart and mind to God, as we have seen, is Rahner’s favoured definition of prayer. As a result, ‘when we come upon real poetry … it is even imperative that we should take it seriously and carefully, even though it does not conform to the moral standards of Christianity’ (366). And finally, given that great literature usually leaves unanswered or ambiguous the question of ‘whether it was the mystery of grace or perdition that was played out … in it’, careful discernment of spirits is needed on the part of the reader (366). Poetry, Reading and the Spiritual Exercises Noon’s chapter on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola and modern literature makes a few interesting points but largely reflects an understanding and a practice of the Spiritual Exercises current in the Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council. In the 1950s and 1960s, the method of giving and making the Spiritual Exercises used by Ignatius Loyola himself and his contemporaries was rediscovered, reclaimed and disseminated widely, so that it has now become the norm once again in many parts of the world. At the same

Poetry and Prayer

34

time, signs of an interesting and in some ways surprising convergence of ideas among two groups of people – on the one hand a few poets and on the other practitioners of the Spiritual Exercises – can be seen emerging in the second half of the twentieth century. This approach to a consensus suggests that the creative and transforming potential of the Spiritual Exercises may be seen as parallel to and at the same time offering a challenge to poets and their readers. In Poetry in the Making, a series of BBC radio broadcasts in the 1960s later published as a book, Ted Hughes described ways of making a poem which bear remarkable resemblance to the methods of prayer and contemplation described in the Spiritual Exercises. For example, Hughes tells the aspiring poet to: imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it … . Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it … . You keep your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste, your touch, your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. (Poetry in the Making 18)

Later on, in ‘A Word about Writing in Schools’, Hughes explicitly recommended the Spiritual Exercises as a way of developing children’s imagination (Winter Pollen 25). Sarah Law has also remarked that towards the end of the century, another poet, Denise Levertov, had likewise noticed similarities between her own poetic practice and Ignatius’ recommendations (‘“The Pulse in the Wound”’ 228).7 Meanwhile, several scholars and critics who are familiar with both the theory and the practice of the Spiritual Exercises have noticed and reflected on the parallels and the challenges between the transformative potential of making and reading poetry on the one hand, and the process and dynamics of making the Spiritual Exercises on the other.8 Enda McDonagh: Poetry and Prayer Enda McDonagh is a well-known Irish Catholic theologian who has had a distinguished career as Professor of Moral Theology at St Joseph’s College, Maynooth. In his book The Gracing of Society, he suggests that prayer, poetry and politics are three ‘loci of creative-redemptive activity’ (136) in ‘dynamic interaction’ with each other, and he explores the ‘relationship of unity and Law is referring to an interview given by Levertov and published in Nicholas O’Connell, At the Field’s End. 8 Compare the publications of Michael Paul Gallagher, David Lonsdale, Antonio Spadaro and Jennifer Reek listed in the Works Cited. 7

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies

35

distinction, challenge and convergence’ between prayer and poetry (126–7). Both prayer and poetry are responses to mystery: prayer is ‘awareness of and response to the ultimate reality we call God’, poetry ‘the formal and concentrated and above all beautiful human expression of the reality, including the tragic reality, of this world’ (127). McDonagh explores analogies between prayer as understood and practised in Christianity and poetry under three headings. First, both are dealing with mystery, although on different levels of reality: poetry (usually) as a response to cosmic and human mystery, prayer as response to the mystery of God (127). Secondly, each is a result of ‘inspiration’: again, while poetry comes from human inspiration, prayer is ‘divine gift before it is human achievement’ (127). For McDonagh, Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane is the ‘climactic experience of liberating and re-creating prayer’ in which God may be seen as the transforming, redeeming ‘artist’ (130). Hence ‘human prayer is the immediate field of the divine artist as poet who enables us to say with Jesus ‘Abba, Father’ (130). Thirdly, prayer and poetry illuminate and challenge each other because both are forms of expression in words and involve celebration. Language in the face of mystery, whether human and cosmic or divine, is always both stretched and inadequate, ‘charged with meaning it cannot quite contain or fully express … . The mystery breaks through language and escapes our confining, dominating, domesticating pretensions’ (127). Prayer is the ‘halting human response to the divine initiative, which seeks expression in … language’ (Gracing 127). In poetry, such language seeks less inadequate expression through the ‘authenticity of the respondent and beauty of its form’ (127). From a Christian point of view, as celebration of the beauty and mystery of humanity and the universe, poetry has an ‘inbuilt final reference to prayer’ and so to the divine reality and mystery, the God who is ‘creator-redeemer’. But if prayer is to be a worthy response to divine mystery, it also in its turn needs to pay attention to the universe and its creatures and to the words mediating their mystery (131). Moreover, readers of poetry and people who pray have access to the transforming potential of these ‘loci of creative-redemptive activity’ by sharing the activities of poet and mystic by sympathy and imagination, by ‘entering into the world of the artist and allowing it to re-create’ us and by careful attention to the words and symbols, images and rituals in which the mystery of God is revealed and celebrated (136).9 In a later book, Vulnerable to the Holy in Faith, Morality and Art, McDonagh explored and developed these ideas in practical ways in meditations on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and John F. Deane and Seamus Heaney’s ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’ (see esp. 12–21 and 138–78). 9

36

Poetry and Prayer

Conclusions This chapter has been concerned with describing, largely in isolation from each other, some landmarks on a map. However, in the course of the survey, a few pathways have emerged which link some of the landmarks with each other, or, to change the image, some genealogy has become clear. Bremond, Rahner and McDonagh may be seen as original and creative thinkers in a way that Noon is not. Obviously Noon’s study is a direct response, by a teacher and scholar of modern literature, to a number of theories about poetry and prayer, and to Bremond directly and in particular. Both Bremond and Rahner were influenced by Joseph Maréchal. Bremond based his psychological and epistemological arguments on Maréchal’s work on the psychology of the mystics, while Rahner’s philosophical anthropology found inspiration in Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique.10 On the theological side, Bremond relied on Thomist categories and arguments for his exposition of grace and analysis of mystical experience. Rahner, too, was initially trained in scholastic theology, but one field in which he made an original contribution was his development of a new theology of grace in critical response to inherited scholasticism. This rethinking of the theology of grace produced a genuine paradigm shift in Catholic understandings of the relationship between God and the world and humanity and God, and of the meaning of ‘mystical’ and the nature of ‘mystical experience’ as well as practical approaches to prayer (Rahner, ‘Some Implications’ 321–46). McDonagh, for his part, belongs to the first generation of Englishspeaking Catholic theologians amongst whom Rahner’s anthropology and theology exerted a powerful influence and found a ready following. He, too, conceives of grace as God’s self-communication and some of his ideas about the relationship between mystery, prayer and poetry are not unlike those of Karl Rahner, although he developed them in original and interesting ways in the context of the politics of Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. I would like to end by suggesting that each of the landmarks surveyed in this chapter might serve to open up some fresh perspectives and conversations on the relationship between poetry and prayer for the future. For example, what value, if any, does Bremond’s work have beyond being a historical curiosity? If the Romantic idea of the poet, espoused by Bremond, is not accepted today, how does 10 John Macquarrie’s account of Maréchal in Twentieth-Century Religious Thought offers a short, clear exposition of his thought in its twentieth-century context (378–82). Rahner’s later work, Foundations of Christian Faith, sets out at some length the philosophical and theological anthropology that informed his writing through most of his adult life (24–89).

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies

37

that affect the evaluation of his work from a contemporary perspective? How does Rahner’s idea of a ‘mysticism of everyday life’ according to which humans are ‘immersed in mystery’ support or challenge the more traditional approaches to these questions that this article has surveyed? How would a contemporary Thomist address the issues raised by Bremond? Where does Bremond stand in the perspective of contemporary developments in philosophy and theological and literary approaches to the study of prayer and poetry? How are Rahner’s theories of poetry, faith and theology to be evaluated by theologians, creative writers and scholars of literature today? How might the emerging conversation around poetry and the Spiritual Exercises be continued and developed? Works Cited Bremond, Henri. La poésie pure. 25 October 1925. Accessed 12 December 2014. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/la-poésie-pure. —. Prière et poésie. Paris: Librairie Grasset, 1926. —. Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetical Theory. Trans. Algar Thorold. London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1927. Bugliani Knox, Francesca and David Lonsdale, eds. Poetry and the Religious Imagination: The Power of the Word. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Countryman, L. William. The Poetic Imagination: An Anglican Spiritual Tradition. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1999. Doud, Robert E. ‘Poetry and Sensibility in the Vision of Karl Rahner’. Thought 58.4 (1983): 439–52. Eliot, T.S. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England. London: Faber and Faber, 1950. Fritz, Peter Joseph. Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014. Gallagher, Michael Paul. ‘Teologia, Arte, Discernimento e Cinema’. La Civiltà Cattolica II (1995): 388–98. Edward Howells and Peter Tyler, eds. Sources of Transformation: Revitalizing Christian Spirituality. London: Continuum, 2010. Hughes, Ted. Poetry in the Making. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. —. Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose. Ed. William Scammel. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Ignatius of Loyola. St Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings. Ed. and trans. Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

38

Poetry and Prayer

Law, Sarah. ‘“The Pulse in the Wound”: Embodiment and Grace in Denise Levertov’s Religious Poetry’. In Bugliani Knox and Lonsdale eds, Poetry and the Religious Imagination: The Power of the Word, 221–36. Lonsdale, David. ‘“Tolle, Lege”: Reading and Discernment as a Source of Personal Transformation’. In Howells and Tyler eds, Sources of Transformation: Revitalizing Christian Spirituality, 41–56. McDonagh, Enda. The Gracing of Society. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1989. —. Vulnerable to the Holy in Faith, Morality and Art. Dublin: Columba Press, 2004. Macquarrie, John. Twentieth-Century Religious Thought. London: SCM Press, 2001 (first published 1963). Maréchal, Joseph. Le point de départ de la métaphysique. Bruges: Charles Beyaert, 1923–49. —. Studies in the Psychology of the Mystics. Trans. Algar Thorold. London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1927. Marmion, Declan and Mary E. Hines, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Murry, John Middleton. Countries of the Mind: First and Second Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937. Noon, William T. Poetry and Prayer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967. O’Connell, Nicholas. At the Field’s End: Interviews with 22 Pacific Northwest Writers. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1998. Petre, Maud. My Way of Faith. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1937. Rahner, Karl. ‘Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace’. Theological Investigations, vol. 1. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1961, 321–46. —. ‘Poetry and the Christian’. Theological Investigations, vol. 4. London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1966, 357–67. —. ‘The Task of the Writer in Relation to Christian Living’. Theological Investigations, vol. 8. London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1971, 112–29. —. ‘Theology and the Arts’. Thought, 57 (1982): 17–29. —. On Prayer. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993. —. Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity. Trans. William V. Dych. New York: Crossroad Press, 1996. —. Spiritual Writings. Ed. Philip Endean. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004. Reek, Jennifer. ‘Reading as Active Contemplation’. In Bugliani Knox and Lonsdale eds, Poetry and the Religious Imagination: The Power of the Word, 189–206.

Poetry and Prayer: A Survey of Some Twentieth-Century Studies

39

Spadaro, Antonio. La Grazia della Parola: Karl Rahner e la Poesia. Milan: Jaca Book, 2006. —. ‘“Non tantum lecturi sed facturi”: Reading Poetry as Spiritual Transformation’. In Bugliani Knox and Lonsdale eds, Poetry and the Religious Imagination: The Power of the Word, 177–87. Talar, Charles J.T. ‘The Historian and the Mystic: The Revisionist Vision of Henri Bremond’. Downside Review 125 (2007): 177–96. Thiessen, Gesa Elsbeth. Theological Aesthetics: A Reader. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004. —. ‘Karl Rahner: Toward a Theological Aesthetics’. In Marmion and Hines eds, The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, 225–34.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 2

‘Prayer is the Little Implement’: Poetic Speech and the Gestures of Prayer in Christian Traditions Mark S. Burrows

We know so little about our lives. We strive to find some order in the midst of the swirling events that carry us forward from day to day, calling upon words to try to make some sense of things. Even when we succeed, we know that the unknown, and perhaps unknowable, is of a magnitude we only dimly imagine. And yet these wide margins of unknowing are full of experience, inviting us to dwell in this world with curiosity, perhaps even a sense of wonder, and luring us into speech to give some shape and form to our lives. Wittgenstein reminds us of this when he suggests that ‘not how the world is constitutes the mystical, but that it is’ (Wittgenstein 6.44; my translation). That the world is and that we belong in it: these are the great realities shaping all our efforts to bring order to our existence – or to name the chaos that seems poised to overwhelm us. ‘Do not let the flood sweep over me,’ cries the psalmist, ‘or the deep swallow me up, or the Pit close its mouth over me’ (Psalm 69:15, New Revised Standard Version). Prayer, whatever else it is, remains one of the primary gestures we make in the face of this intractable mystery. One might say the same of poetry, if for quite different reasons. Both are forms of art we make at those junctures of sense and silence. We might even say that both the act of prayer and the life of poetry are ways we give ourselves to this mystery, with its puzzlements and clarities, its allurements and its dreads. Perhaps these two are finally not altogether different from one another for this very reason. What binds them is not the matter of form or the question of style but something far more fundamental and primal, namely the very existence of language each employs and, even more significantly, the quality of silence that each induces. The German poet Durs Grünbein describes poetry as a kind of thinking:

42

Poetry and Prayer that only occurs in certain otherwise quite hard-to-reach places … . For the first time, it will make certain places visible, individual branches of the anything-butstraightforward psychic cave system that runs through the bodies of all humans and can only be discovered by a resourceful imagination audaciously pushing forward into still unsecured galleries. (316)

The same could be said of prayer. Like poetry, it is a gesture of communion that we make in the face of our essential aloneness, a means of practising ‘a resourceful imagination’ so that we might penetrate the darkness that is the ground of our creative life – and its peril. Like prayer, poetry presses forward by means of words shaped at the margins of silence. Both steer towards an essentially ineffable reality, penetrating the ‘still unsecured galleries’ that constitute our inner life. Both are intimately human, and for that reason not necessarily religious, though it is difficult to imagine a living religion bereft of either. If prayer is a ‘voice from the depths of the heart’, as Karl Rahner once observed (52), it seems that the same could be said of poetry. Finding our way into this particular depth of the heart calls for something other than analysis or declaration. Each derives its life from particular gestures of imagination. Jeanette Winterson’s description of poetry as ‘not a version of the facts’ but ‘an entirely different way of seeing’ (28) could apply with equal force to prayer: both are creative expressions that we make as we turn ourselves toward the tedious and the intense in our lives. Both arise from an essential solitude, one that reminds us of our unknowable origins and unmanageable transitions. Both call us to risk language, to shape words out of solitude. Both are gestures that direct us toward the surfaces and depths of our existence. The French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe underscores the continuities between the two by suggesting that ‘poetry in its essence is prayer, and conversely … every prayer is a poem’ (79). But what would it mean to go on to claim, as he does, that ‘the sole archives of the divine are poems, and an address to the god, more than any other kind, requires a conversion in language or an entirely different attitude within it’ (79)? This is a claim worth exploring, as I intend to do in what follows, examining the nature of poetic language and what it is we mean by the ‘gestures’ of prayer. To frame this discussion, let us begin with two testimonials regarding prayer, claims which, taken together, establish something of a thematic arc for our consideration of the continuities and discontinuities between poetry and prayer. The first is not a poem, at least not formally. It is a claim nestled in one of the great repositories of prayers from Late Antiquity, Augustine’s Confessions, that ‘prose-poem addressed to God’, as Henry Chadwick calls it, going on to describe

‘Prayer is the Little Implement’

43

it as a ‘work of rare sophistication and intricacy’, which, like a poem, is resonant with ‘harmonics of deeper meaning’ (Confessions ix). The second is a little gem of a poem from the pen of the nineteenth-century American recluse from New England, Emily Dickinson. First, then, to Augustine. In a probing exploration of prayer, this recently consecrated bishop wonders with a philosopher’s curiosity precisely where God dwells within him. He names this cavern of awareness memoria, a word that literally means ‘memory’ but suggests much more in its Neoplatonic meaning. In this context memoria meant something closer to what we call ‘mind’, a vast repository of images, feelings, ideas and experiences that is capacious enough to include the unconscious. Addressing his query to God, Augustine wonders: ‘You were not already in my memory before I learnt of you. Where then did I find you, so that I could learn of you, if not in the fact that you transcend me?’ He continues his inquiry by describing the experience of those who pray: ‘You reply [to us] clearly, but not all hear you clearly … . Your best servant is the one who does not attend so much to hearing what he himself wants as to willing what he has heard from you’ (Confessions 201). Hearing and willing constitute the circuit of prayer for Augustine, just as he could describe what persons do when they pray: In seeking [God] they find him, and in finding they will praise him. Lord, I would seek you, calling upon you – and calling upon you is an act of believing in you. You have been preached to us. My faith, Lord, calls upon you. It is your gift to me. (3)

These two additional circuits – seeking and finding, and calling and praising – shape the act of praying as Augustine understood it, and prayer, in keeping with the formula lex orandi, lex credendi, is what grounds the act of believing in God. How does the matter stand with that most startling voice among modern poets, Emily Dickinson? One might expect her to inhabit an altogether different world than that of the rhetorician-turned-bishop of Late Antiquity, and in many matters this is surely the case. But on the question of prayer, the two journey on a common path before coming to a decisive parting of ways. One of her poems addresses the experience of prayer directly: Prayer is the little implement Through which Men reach Where Presence – is denied them – They fling their Speech

Poetry and Prayer

44

By means of it – in God’s Ear – If then He hear – This sums the Apparatus Comprised in Prayer – (Dickinson 279)

Augustine and Dickinson agree in seeing prayer as a calling upon or reaching for God across some space or interior distance. Both envision the origin of prayer as a gesture reaching for the one who is not present. As such, both would have agreed with Simone Weil’s insistence that prayer ‘consists of attention’ and in fact ‘is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God’ (Weil 105). But here they distinguish themselves. What separates the two, and we might see this as marking the watershed of modernity, comes down to the small but defining conjunction in Dickinson’s poem: ‘If then [God] hear …’ (my emphasis). With this ‘if ’, the poet assumes with Augustine that the proper framework for understanding prayer is the circle of call and response. But Augustine wonders whether we hear God’s call, while Dickinson wonders about the unsettled question of whether God hears. We will return to the question of this watershed at the end of this inquiry, asking what this shift of confidence suggests for our approach to both prayer and poetry – and, at that point, find ourselves better able to assess Lacoue-Labarthe’s bold claim that ‘poetry in its essence is prayer, and conversely … every prayer is a poem’ (79). In a magnificent little gem of a poem entitled ‘Lyrik’, or ‘Poetry’, the German poet Hilde Domin suggests what a poem is, or rather how a poem ‘behaves’. It reads like this: Poetry the not-word stretched out between word and word. (Sämtliche Gedichte, 113; my translation)

This poem offers an insight into the continuities shaping both poetry and prayer. Of course, it is obvious enough to concede that not all prayers are poems, just as not all poems are prayers. But is there something inherently poetic in human experience that also animates the impulse to pray? In other words, might we identify the habits of poetry, so to speak, as having certain affinities to prayer? And might this proximity be the case even when the two have no formal

‘Prayer is the Little Implement’

45

relationship with each other – as, for example, in secular poems bereft of any theological referent, or in prayers that strike us as prosaic in diction and form? Domin’s claim about the ‘not-word’ of poetry offers help here by reminding us that poetry has to do with what is not said or written, with a sense that lies beyond language. So, too, with prayer: its poetic character shapes how prayer gestures and has nothing necessarily to do with what form it takes. For prayers are also marked by what Domin calls (referring to poetry) a Spannungsverhältnis, a ‘tensive relation’ that brings together an ‘agitation’ (Erregung) on the one hand and a ratio on the other (Das Gedicht 69). Poetry is like this, but what of prayer? A ‘tensive relation’ of this sort seems as apt a description of prayer as one might find. Or, to recall George Herbert’s great poem on prayer, it is on the one hand an ‘engine against th’ Almighty’ and ‘reversed thunder’, an ‘agitation’, in other words, and on the other hand, as he concedes at the close, ‘something understood’. Domin deepens this point when she suggests that ‘the poem lives in the quivering opposition of [these] contradictions’ (Das Gedicht 69). The same could be said of prayer. The tension inherent in this opposition has to do with how a poem’s sense exceeds what words mean, pointing rather to how they mean – much as the meaning of music, if we can even speak of this, has to do with how it resonates within us long after our hearing of it ends (see also Pieper 42–3). Poetry has a music that plays not simply in the sounds of its words, but in the resonance of its presence within us, and the way it indwells us as voice long after the words fall away. The Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik refers to this as ‘the domain of poetry’, a ‘habitation’ within us that he describes as ‘an internal language, that of solitude and the soul, in which what is essential is “how?” as in music’ (14). Both prayer and poetry gesture by means of this inner language beyond their use of words, finding their voice in the borderland of solitude. Both speak by means of the not-word stretched out between word and word

and in this are utterly different from what Bialik calls the ‘the domain of logic’, an ‘external language’ that depends as he understands it upon ‘abstraction and generalization, in which the essential is “what?” as in mathematics’ (14).

46

Poetry and Prayer

Yet these two domains, that of poetry and that of logic, share an essential attribute, following Bialik’s argument: both are barriers of sorts, neither able to reveal for us ‘the essence of things’. Das Ding an sich, as already Kant taught us, remains untouched by the apparatus of thought and the gestures of language – whether from the domain of logic or of poetry. Words are thus an inevitable form of concealment, a shield, as Bialik suggests, that ‘construct[s] a barrier to prevent the void’s darkness from welling up and overflowing its bounds’ (17). The Psalms remain his steady guide in this, for while it may be true that ‘day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge’, we also know in our experience that ‘there is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard’ (Psalm 19:2–3). What this implies for prayer, as for poetry, steers us to the depths of the question before us. And already here we begin to see that the interior language of poetry faces this void differently than that of calculation or analysis. Bialik illustrates this by means of a vivid contrast. The latter, whom he calls the ‘masters of logic’, are like the person who crosses a river walking on hard ice frozen into a solid block. Such a [person] may and can divert his attention completely from the frozen depths flowing beneath his feet. But their opposites … the masters of poetry, are forced to flee all that is fixed and inert in language, all that is opposed to their goal of the vital and mobile in language … . And to what may those writers be compared? To one who crosses a river when it is breaking up, by stepping across the floating, moving blocks of ice. He dare not set his foot on any one block for longer than a moment, longer than it takes him to leap from one block to the next, and so on. Between the breaches the void looms, the foot slips, danger is close. (24–6)

Those who pray know that they inhabit the domain of poetry, vigilant as it is to the ‘vital and mobile’ and opposed to ‘all that is fixed and inert in language’. Prayer may not always take the form of poems but, when it renounces the ‘internal language’ of poetry, prayer loses something essential to its nature regardless of its form. What, then, can be said of poetry and prayer considered in historical perspective, across the broad horizon of Christian traditions? Does prayer emerge and develop as an instinctive gesture of poetic speech? Does it contribute something distinctive to poetic language? And can one speak of a poetica of prayer, as well as a devotio that is proper to poetry, in terms of ancient and medieval cultures as shaped by Christianity, as well as beyond the watershed of modernity in cultures like that of the postmodern West that are increasingly post-religious?

‘Prayer is the Little Implement’

47

To answer this question we must recall that there is no such thing as peculiarly Christian experience, at least in the first generations. As a new religious movement, the earliest followers of what was simply known as ‘the way’ belonged to other communities, shaped by existing religious practices. They were like the ‘scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven’, to recall one of Jesus’ sayings, who is ‘like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old’ (Matt. 13:52). In other words, these early believers borrowed patterns of prayer and ways of praying familiar to them from their old lives, the lex orandi or law or rule of praying which came from Jewish as well as Gentile sources and patterns. Indeed, the prayer Jesus gave his followers, the Lord’s Prayer, became a guide for this development, reflecting the synagogue tradition of Jewish prayer. In the setting and form Matthew and Luke gave this prayer, it represents a poetic model easy to memorize and repeat because of its brevity and simplicity. In Matthew’s account, in fact, Jesus prefaces this guide with sharp words about not ‘heap[ing] up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words’ (Matt. 6:7–8) – a warning against the prolixity of prose. The phrases of this ‘poem-prayer’ communicate by means of metaphor, not concept. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas addressed the function of such images, reminding us that ‘in the poetic imagination, the unheard can be heard, called out to and expressed’ (Levinas 86). This prayer opens with just such a calling out: ‘Our father, who art in heaven …’ . As a poem, it calls upon an imagination that hears the unheard, that posits presence against the pressures of absence. In the practice by which it roots itself in the community’s memory, prayer lives by means of this intentionality – an expression that constitutes its own gesture of experience: ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. The earliest Christians prayed this prayer, including it formally in the earliest known liturgies and encouraging its use informally as an act of personal devotion, as, for example, in the Didachē. But they also took Jesus at his word, at least in the narrow sense of this saying, elaborating their own prayers already in these first generations. Eventually, they even began to fashion formal liturgies comprised of prayers and readings from both the ancient scriptures and what they initially refer to as the ‘memoirs’, together with the ritual of the Eucharist. We also know that when the earliest Christians gathered to celebrate the resurrection of the Lord on the eighth day, they carried with them familiar forms from other communal traditions that had shaped them. Augustine offered a classic defence of this practice of, as he puts it, Christian thievery, interpreting such a practice as re-enacting the Israelites’ despoiling of Pharaoh’s gold and silver as they fled

48

Poetry and Prayer

from slavery in Egypt (On Christian Teaching 160). To his mind, ‘the Egyptians unwittingly [loaned] them things they were not themselves making good use of ’ (160), a version of the Apostle Paul’s suggestion that ‘the letter kills, but the spirit gives life’ (see 2 Cor. 3:6). Among the treasures they took were the scriptures, of course, and above all the Psalms, set within a form of prayer reminiscent of synagogue worship. As these early Christians made such texts and practices their own, the shape of a distinctive Christian poetics of prayer began to emerge, a tradition that more than any other defined how these believers gave communal shape to what they understood as God’s new covenant. The Psalms, were one of the most prominent features of this early Christian theft. By the second century, Christians in the Roman world of the Mediterranean had a workable Latin translation of the Psalms – the so-called ‘Old Latin’ version. This eventually became the central scriptural foundation for the tradition of prayer among the early desert mothers and fathers, and, of course, in the later monastic communities and traditions of both the East and the West. In these communities the Psalms came to anchor the liturgy of the hours. According to Benedict, they were to be sung, and attention was to be paid to sing praise wisely, quoting Psalm 46:8. Benedict explains this admonition by instructing monks ‘to stand to sing the psalms in such a way that our minds are in harmony with our voices’ (Benedict 47). The poetry of the Psalms thus comes to dominate the monastic office. But the Psalms were never prayed alone. Benedict makes use of the expression ‘psalmi cum antiphonas’ (‘psalms with refrain’) to describe the practice of framing psalms with short poems – the so-called antiphons which ‘sound against’ the psalms. These movable poems located the psalms in the Church’s increasingly elaborate calendar of sacred time (Benedict 402). Indeed, the basic shape of monastic prayer constitutes what Jean Leclercq calls ‘the poem of the liturgy’, a tradition shaped by the acoustic experience of poetry and informed by texts that lived by being sung (236–54). The apparently endless repetition of chanted poems found their life through being passed back and forth in the ongoing cycle of singing and listening, of being voiced and heard within the monastic horarium. This liturgy of the hours was poetry ceremonially enacted in the community; its use constitutes what we might think of as verbal ritual. Benedict was also emphatic about the role of silence in shaping monastic prayer, and here, too, we glimpse a poetic sensibility of the Rule. In the Cistercian reforms of the twelfth century, in fact, silence became the defining norm of monastic life, so that what one heard and spoke, or rather sang, would have been

‘Prayer is the Little Implement’

49

constituted largely by Scripture. Monastic prayer, in other words, was largely a cycle of sung poetry. In this sense, it was poetic in both form and function, attuned to the human voice through the ongoing repetition of chanted texts. And, lest this perhaps obvious point be missed, the practice of the Psalter as the central language of the liturgy was an oral practice leading to the interiorizing of scriptural poetry. A vivid illustration of this is found in one of the sayings of the desert fathers, a story that tells of a brother who proudly boasted to an old ‘abba’ at Scetis that he had copied both testaments of the Bible with his own hand, whereupon the old monk, unimpressed by such a feat, remarked: ‘You have filled the cupboards with paper’ (cited in Burton-Christie 115). This story reminds us that Scripture, and above all the Psalms in this tradition, were experienced as poems voiced in song, and, through the weekly cycle of chant, they came to live in the silent ‘cells’ of memory. Poems that one comes to know by heart are like this. The monastic liturgy could be understood as an extended expression of sung poetry. An astute interpreter of medieval monasticism, Leclercq, goes so far as to say that monks experienced the liturgy of the hours as ‘one large poem’, one that shifted according to the hour and the day and the season. But in the midst of such a dynamic movement, this poem maintains an essential identity by building the Church’s memory as at once scriptural, liturgical, theological and devotional. Describing the shape of this prayer, Leclercq reminds us that the value of their words lies more in what they mean than in what they actually say: their evocative power is greater than their precision; each of them is like a note which awakens harmonics. All the delicacy of liturgical poetry comes from the free and harmonious use it makes of the sacred words. (241)

Such prayer found its shape as devotio, Leclercq suggests, and the texture of monastic worship, and in this case the word is a deliberate one, signified its form through attention to the audible word. This hunger for speech expresses the monks’ desire for the divine presence, amid what could otherwise be experienced as the grinding routine of chant – and thus in the face of its often felt absence. In short, the liturgy itself was poetic both as form and in terms of its function. Monastic devotion embodied a poetics of chanted prayer. This tendency to exalt the poem of the liturgy as the essential shape of the Church’s prayer becomes a defining characteristic of medieval Christianity in both its eastern and western forms. This meant that monastic prayer held a privileged place of honour, establishing the basic framework for what came to be known as ‘cathedral prayer’, which is to say the liturgy used in secular or

50

Poetry and Prayer

non-monastic Churches. This preference had a tenacious hold on Christianity through the period of the western Reformation and beyond, at least among the ‘magisterial’ reformers, or the Churches of the Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican traditions. For them, the prayer of the Church remained essentially formal, against an emerging variety of new traditions that emphasized spontaneous prayer. John Donne opposed such innovations, defending the older tradition of the prayer book and, in a sermon on ‘Prayer’ (89–93), he insisted that prayer might be spontaneous but that its proper and effective form was to be found in the Church’s formal liturgy, largely because of the stability that the liturgy offered, with its musical setting, poetic cadences and theological moorings. Of course, Donne did not despise what he thought of as private prayer, referring to those spontaneous utterances we make in times of anguish or joy. These were not, to his mind, without importance, since they constituted what he calls ‘payments of [our] debt [to God], in such peeces, and in such summes, as God, no doubt, accepts at our hands’ (90). But he went on to privilege the formal prayer of the Church’s liturgy since, in respect of the prayers humans ‘owe’ God, Donne argues: God will not be paid, with money of our owne coyning, (with sudden, extemporal, inconsiderate prayer) but with currant money, that beares the Kings Image, and inscription; the Church of God, by his Ordinance, hath set his stampe, upon a Liturgie and Service, for his house … the solemne dayes of payment, are the Sabbaths of the Lord, and the place of this payment, is the house of the Lord. (89)

He insists that prayer offered outside the great poem of the Church’s liturgy, by which he meant The Book of Common Prayer, can be unreliable and thus ineffective. To depend upon it, Donne suggests, is to ‘tak[e] up every tatter’d fellow, every sudden ragge or fragment of speech, that rises from our tongue, or our affections’, a poor substitute for ‘mustering up those words, which the Church hath levied for that service, in the Confessions, and Absolutions, and Collects, and Litanies of the Church’ (90). But what of those ‘darts of a devout soule’, as Donne calls the spontaneous, private prayers we utter, ‘which, though they have not particular deliberations, and be not formall prayers, yet they are the indicia, pregnant evidences and blessed fruits of a religious custome’ (90)? Could such ‘tattered’ prayer, such ‘rags of speech’, be considered poetic, even if a far distance from anything resembling the formal shape of poetry? For such utterances may well be eloquent in expressing what Domin has called the ‘not-word’ of poetry. Here, we might vary Wallace Stevens’s query when he asks, ‘Is there a poem that never reaches words?’

‘Prayer is the Little Implement’

51

(Stevens 343), to wonder about prayers that do, in fact, never reach words, that are borne in the inarticulate depths of the heart. Such utterances or intentions of our ‘interior language’ (Bialik) are not, strictly speaking, poems. But they are surely prayers, and in this sense they are unavoidably poetic. Bialik writes, in this regard, that there are yet to the Lord languages without words: songs, tears, and laughter. And the speaking creature has been found worthy of them all. These languages begin where words leave off, and their purpose is not to close but to open. They rise from the void. They are the rising up of the void. Therefore, at times they overflow and sweep us off in the irresistible multitude of their waves; therefore, at times they cost a man his wits, or even his life. (xx)

Here we find ourselves in the company of the apostle Paul and his notion of ‘sighs too deep for words’ (Rom. 8:16). The poetic of these languages without words opens us to a knowing that is post-verbal, an expression that gives voice to the soul’s ‘agitation’. One encounters this sense of the poetic not only in the organized language of the liturgy, or what we might call the explicit poem of such communal prayer, but also, and importantly, in the silences that shape such liturgy, in the yearnings we bring to its set prayers, and, yes, to the gaps that interrupt the concealments of this language. For the sense we discern amid these vacancies, in the voice of the ‘not-word’ of which Domin speaks, points toward depths and heights of our experience that exceed words. Such sighs mark the places in the heart where longing comes to do its work, in the formal prayers that shape the liturgy as well as in the silent margins where the ‘interior language’ speaks within us. Such yearning also finds its way into language in otherwise secular poems, those distinguished, as Paul Celan once put it, for the ways they ‘are making toward something … standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality’ (396). And here, once again, one hears a witness echoing Dickinson’s ‘if ’. The deep impulse of this sigh, as a mark of inner anguish or longing toward utterance, moves beyond Donne’s conviction about the primacy of formal prayer and the priority of the prayer book above all else. But is the poetic bound to form? Celan’s point argues against such a judgement. He is gesturing to the impulse of poetic imagination, that tensive blend of ‘agitation’ and ratio, as Domin suggests. With this gesture we see once more the modern impatience with Augustine’s confidence that God replies to us clearly. Prayer is a wager on this reply and, even more to the point, on God’s hearing. What will the prayers be like that are felt and uttered within the horizon of this uncertainty? Probably something closer to what Donne scorned in caricaturing as a ‘tatter’d fellow, every sudden ragge or fragment of speech, that

Poetry and Prayer

52

rises from our tongue, or our affections’. Such fragments, and Donne’s image is a good one, will rarely become poems marked by the sturdy diction and formal shape of Cranmer’s prayers which Donne so cherished – and rightfully so. They will belong to the domain of poetry found in those ragged-edged psalms, mingling desolation with praise, vengeance with lament – in other words, fraught with the contradictions that shape themselves within the heart’s chambers. And, yes, they might well find their shape as fragments, perhaps even as ‘sudden rags’ of speech. But whatever their form, they will carry us because of the way they voice the deep longing, knowing a sweetness we yearn for in communion with the other. Of course, we experience this in widely varying forms and shaped by apparently contradictory impulses: as a gesture arising from a great abundance within us, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a reaching from the chasms of loneliness or despair. We find it voiced in one of Sappho’s vivid fragments when she describes: the sweetapple [that] reddens on a high branch high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot – no, not forgot: were unable to reach. (214–15)

Our longing holds in our minds what we know, even when it is absent from us or beyond our reach. In this, we come to know ourselves as creatures whose ‘self forms at the edges of desire’, as the poet Anne Carson once put it (39). We might even vary Descartes’s dictum to say, desidero ergo sum: ‘I desire, therefore I am.’ This yearning guides us like a red thread that traces a way through the labyrinth of our lives, in plenty and in want, reminding us of Plato’s ingenious suggestion in the Symposium that Eros was the offspring of Poros (‘resource’ or ‘abundance’) and Penia (‘poverty’) (Plato 203B). Celan approaches this theme from a quite different angle in one of his masterful poems: Knock down the wedges of light: for dusk has hold of the swimming word. (285)

All of this brings us back to the question of prayer and poetry, now set within the context of the dusk of late modernity. For as surely as poems are not prayers, except when they are, and prayers are not poems, except when they are, the question of continuities and discontinuities has to do with diverging modes

‘Prayer is the Little Implement’

53

of prayer and a certain quality of the poetic. Along the path we have traced in this journey, we begin to see how attention shapes what we mean by prayer – a characteristic that bridges the watershed of modernity. It has nothing to do with what we think about God, ourselves or our world, and everything to do with an inner posture, an interior language, one that we embody, as Weil suggests, by ‘suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object’ (111). In one of his poems Celan speaks of finding himself ‘in rivers north of the future’ (226). It is a sober image, and a cold one. Such waters remind us of Bialik’s notion that the ‘masters of poetry’ are like the one who ‘crosses a river when it is breaking up, by stepping across floating, moving blocks of ice’, looking as they do for what is ‘vital and mobile’ in language – and in life. The same holds for those who pray. Both know that desire holds the key; both sense that desire arises from the quality of our attention. Yet those who pray, who recognize that understanding depends upon the quality of our yearning, or as Weil puts it, ‘the intelligence can only be led by desire’, choose differing paths (110). Some who pray will be content in assuming that getting the words of prayer right is enough. They cherish the poetic resonance of the Church’s formal prayer, preferring with Donne the stability of the prayer book and thus carrying on a tradition shaped by earlier monastic practices. They presume, against the pressure of Frank Lloyd Wright’s familiar dictum regarding modern architecture, that form is function, and are content for this very reason with the Church’s ‘liturgy and services’. Perhaps they find themselves moved by the poetic beauty of her prayers. And, with Augustine, they cannot be shaken from their resolve that their calling God accomplishes what it purports to do. Others will be less certain in such matters, approaching Dickinson’s ‘if ’ with unease. They sense that the words of prayer from the Church’s formal liturgy offer no guarantee of finding God, who seems to them a vacant tenant who might well frame the question posed by that fierce Welsh poet R.S. Thomas: ‘How do you know?’ (160). In the company of such late-modern poets, they try to keep an eye on what is ‘vital and mobile’ in language, to recall Bialik, even if this means voicing their aspirations in those ‘sudden rags or fragments of speech’, as Donne called them. They know that an unseeable depth looms beneath and between their words, those ‘blocks of ice’ in the river offering only momentary and never firm footholds. Yet, as they make their way across these waters, they trust in the poetic to guide them, and not necessarily that which is intentionally ‘religious’, since even the secular voices the longings that serve their need. There is no better way of exemplifying his late-modern vigilance than to close with one of Christian Wiman’s poems, from his recent collection Every

Poetry and Prayer

54

Riven Thing. This one seems particularly appropriate given the fact that Wiman closes the poem with an allusion to Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet XIV’: ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you / As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.’ For these reasons, and because this is both a poem about prayer and a prayer in its own right, Wiman’s ‘Small Prayer in a Hard Wind’, as he calls it, offers an apt place to bring this inquiry to a close. I read it as a way of engaging our predicament as those who live facing this ‘if ’, wondering about the language we use to invoke the divine and yearning for communion with a presence not always immediately evident. Wiman suggests as much in an autobiographical essay entitled ‘Love Bade Me Welcome’, the opening line in Herbert’s poem ‘Love (III)’: the language I have now to call on God is not only language, and the wall on which I make my taps and scratches is no longer a cell but this whole prodigal and all too perishable world in which I find myself, very much alive, and not at all alone. (Ambition and Survival 245)

Throughout this remarkable collection one encounters the calling out of prayer, the use of language that reminds us of Weil’s insistence that the attention common to all genuine study has to do with ‘suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object’. Wiman shapes this impulse by means of a metaphor of dereliction: As through a long-abandoned half-standing house only someone lost could find, which, with its paneless windows and sagging crossbeams, its hundred crevices in which a hundred creatures hoard and nest, seems both ghost of the life that happened there and living spirit of this wasted place, wind seeks and sings every wound in the wood that is open enough to receive it, shatter me God into my thousand sounds... (Every Riven Thing 72)1 ‘A Small Prayer in a Hard Wind’, from Every Riven Thing, by Christian Wiman. © 2011 by Christian Wiman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. 1

‘Prayer is the Little Implement’

55

Here, then, is a voice calling out de profundis, sounding from the depths of the heart the cry that resonates throughout the psalms of lament. But it is more than an expression of anguish. Like these same psalms, Wiman’s ‘Small Prayer’ knows that suffering releases a song of its own – at least for those ‘wounds in the wood’ that are ‘open enough to receive’ the coming wind. It is a witness to a strident Pentecost, one that, as with Hopkins’s ‘reaving peace’, does not ‘come to coo, / He comes to brood and sit’. Wiman’s prayer, of course, does not aspire to peace, but rather admonishes God to ‘shatter’ him from silence into language – a second Pentecostal image. With such an invocation, we too face the ‘rivers north of the future’, standing as we do on the far side of the watershed of late modernity. We need fragments of prayer, like this one, poems that stake their hope on the wager that God will hear our pleas, but in coming will be a fierce lover. We desire poems that dare to engage the wager of Emily Dickinson’s ‘if ’, perhaps not with confidence, but surely without shame. Works Cited Augustine, St, of Hippo. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. —. On Christian Teaching. Trans. R.P.H. Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Benedict, St, of Nursia. The Rule of Benedict in Latin and English, with Notes. Ed. Timothy Fry. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981. Bialik, Hayim Nahman. Revealment and Concealment: Five Essays. Jerusalem: Ibis Editions, 2000. Burton-Christie, Douglas. The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Carson, Anne. Eros: The Bittersweet. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Celan, Paul. Die Gedichte. Kommentierte Gesamtausgabe in einem Band. Ed. Barbara Wiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005. Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R.W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999. Domin, Hilde. Das Gedicht als Augenblick von Freiheit. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2005. —. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Nikola Herweg and Melanie Reinhold, afterword by Ruth Klüger. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2009.

56

Poetry and Prayer

Donne, John. Poetry and Prose, with Izaac Walton’s Life. Intro. H.W. Garrod. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. Grünbein, Durs. ‘The Poem and its Secret’. Trans. Andrew Shields. Poetry 196 ( January 2007): 310–16. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Poetry as Experience. Trans. Andrea Tarnowski. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study in Monastic Culture. Trans. Catharine Misrahi. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. Levinas, Emmanuel. Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. Trans. Gary D. Mole. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. Pieper, Josef. Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation. Trans. Lothar Krauth. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1988. Plato. Symposium. Trans. Tom Griffith. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986. Rahner, Karl. On Prayer. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1967. Sappho. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Trans. Anne Carson. New York: Vintage Books, 2002. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: The Library of America, 1997. Thomas, R.S. Collected Poems 1945–1990. London: Phoenix Press, 2001. Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Trans. Emma Crauford, intro. Leslie A. Fiedler. New York: Harper and Row, 1951. Wiman, Christian. Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. —. Every Riven Thing: Poems. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2010. Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Kegan Paul, 1922.

Chapter 3

Poetry at the Threshold of Prayer Antonio Spadaro SJ

Prayer and poetry have been an ever-present feature in the history of human experience, and this explains why the relationship between them has held such a fascination for, and has been discussed by, so many essayists, thinkers and scholars. Prayer is ‘the habit of being in the presence of God’ and of ‘raising one’s mind and heart to God’. It represents ‘a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God’ (Catholic Church 2558–65). It is therefore important to avoid oversimplifying the relationship: whereas poetry is always articulated in words, the same is not always true of prayer. The latter can in fact be an exercise in silent speech, where words are not pronounced but are simply experienced. There is a profound interplay, albeit not an automatic one, between an individual’s frame of mind, his or her mental or emotional disposition, and the spoken word, an interplay which lies beyond the grasp of the human understanding. The words of a prayer may therefore remain unspoken, going no further than the threshold of the lips or staying in the silent depths of the heart (Guardini; Rahner). However, it must also be understood that ‘prayer cannot be reduced to the spontaneous outpouring of interior impulse’ (Catholic Church 2650). It is, rather, the act whereby an individual intentionally addresses Him ‘to whom we speak’ (2704) and ‘takes flesh’ by ‘words, mental or vocal’ (2700). For example, throughout the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius of Loyola often writes of prayers that are performed propiamente hablando, speaking as though engaged in a normal conversation (§54, §61, §63, §109, §157, §199 and §225). By examining the works of some of the great authors, it is possible to discern how and when poetry in the ordinary sense reached the level of prayer, where the latter is understood as a linguistic expression of ‘a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God’. In doing this, we must distinguish religious meditation or spiritual reflection, which is wider and more general, from the language of prayer, which entails invoking God, or the Other, explicitly.

58

Poetry and Prayer

On the Threshold Between Poetry and Prayer Poetry may express a tension in our relationship with God and a need to open a dialogue with Him. Although prayer may be seen as the next step in the process, the words of poetry often seem to remain on the threshold of our dialogue with God. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that it is exactly here, on the threshold of that dialogue, that prayer and poetry find their ideal meeting point. Emily Dickinson, for example, thought deeply on the subject: God grows above – so those who pray Horizons – must ascend – And so I stepped upon the North To see this Curious Friend –

The poet feels the need to move towards God, her ‘Curious Friend’ who ‘grows above’. She finds no sign of a heavenly home, seeing instead only ‘Vast prairies of air / Unbroken by a settler’, and yet, before this vast emptiness, she feels that she has arrived at a threshold. So then: The Silence condescended – Creation stopped – for Me – But awed beyond my errand – I worshipped – did not ‘pray’ – (431)

Dickinson’s poetry reaches the threshold of prayer but stops just short of it. This leads us to question whether the threshold can be surpassed, and whether poetry can truly become prayer. Within the poem, we can see Dickinson’s gesture of worship and how poetry is drawn towards prayer. And yet the only sound we hear is that of ‘Silence condescended’. The prayer that follows can be deduced from this silence, so heavily laden as it is with religious yearning, while the poem itself stops at the threshold – that is, before the prayer starts. The idea of transcendence is rendered perfectly by the imagery of the ascent. For Dickinson, prayer represents the act of reaching out toward a desired presence. In another poem, she writes: Prayer is the little implement Through which Men reach Where Presence – is denied them – They fling their Speech

Poetry at the Threshold of Prayer

59

By means of it – in God’s Ear – If then He hear – This sums the Apparatus Comprised in prayer – (338)

Prayer is a ‘little implement’ that allows people to strive towards a place where they cannot go. It is a bridge made from words, built in the hope that God is listening: ‘If then He hear’. Don Divo Barsotti, a great spiritual figure of our own times who experienced a conscious, internal communion between prayer and poetry, asked in his 1955 diary: ‘How dare we believe that our words really reach Him, and that He listens? But if you do believe it, you can no longer live without prayer’ (Albertazzi 284; my translation1). This is where the tension that, up to this point, Dickinson has merely described and defined dissolves into a genuine appeal to God that marks the transition from poetry to prayer: At least – to pray – is left – is left – Oh Jesus – in the Air – I know not which thy chamber is – I’m knocking – everywhere – Thou settest Earthquake in the South – And Maelstrom, in the Sea – Say, Jesus Christ of Nazareth – Hast thou no Arm for Me? (385)

Dickinson has yet to find Jesus, but her universe shows itself to be a system of signs indicating his presence. Although she cannot find him, she prays to him regardless, pushing her quest for answers to such an extreme that she loses her equilibrium, turning her poem into a fully expressed prayer by invoking: ‘Oh, Jesus …’ and ‘Say, Jesus …’ . Opening a Dialogue with Him The invocation ‘Oh, Jesus …’ suddenly switches the emphasis of the piece from the first to the second person and it is this change that completely alters the poem’s direction. The transition from poem to prayer, however, can by no means 1

Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

60

Poetry and Prayer

be taken for granted. It is well known that there is an implicit understanding between the poet and the reader and, when the transition is made from poem to prayer, this close relationship must be broken in order to accommodate God as well. Where poetry becomes prayer, the reader is separated from the poet by the figure of the Almighty. Unless he or she can also accept God, the reader is prevented from being truly involved in the poem. In essence, the prayer poem can provide the linguistic framework for a reader to form a relationship with God, thereby assuming the role of a canvas on which the private prayer of the individual reader can take shape. The prayer poem, by appealing to God directly, encourages the reader to generate his or her own prayers (Barthes 48). Given that love poems too are able to create a sense of the beloved’s presence and establish a relationship between poet and reader, it is worth asking at this point whether prayer poems and love poems work in the same way. What, first of all, is the difference between a love poem and a prayer poem? The reader of a love poem has to accept the presence of the poet’s muse; however, he or she remains an onlooker to the poet’s expression of love for the beloved. By contrast, the words of a prayer poem appeal directly to the reader’s conscience, and the reader can then make them his or her own without any sense of shame or embarrassment. In the case of a prayer poem, even the most intimate of the poet’s thoughts do not exclude the reader, nor do they lead him or her to contemplate a relationship as seen merely from the outside. This is true even when the prayer poem touches on the erotic, as is the case with Giovanni Testori’s Nel tuo sangue (‘In your blood’). Both the subject and style of the poem are religious, and the appeal to faith is strong, sensual and dramatic: ‘M’aspetti nel buio / come un’affamata prostituta’ (21) [You await me in the darkness / like an eager prostitute]. Or, again: ‘se Ti chiamassi/ come si chiama un amante/ ... /resteresti, fuggiresti da me?’ (79) [If I were to call to you/ like one calls to a lover, / would you remain or run away from me?]. It is not that explicit faith is required of the reader. It is rather that he or she finds himself or herself constrained, at least temporarily, to take on the attitude of the religious believer in order not to find himself or herself completely excluded from the poem. Indeed, to understand these texts, the reader is left with little choice but to undergo a ‘conversion’; God must be present in the reader’s mind if such poetry is to be comprehensible. Without this relationship the poem would remain beautiful from a detached viewpoint, but the reader would not understand it because he or she would not truly understand his or her own self as part of the poem. Coleridge’s general observation on poetry, made in Chapter Fourteen of his Biographia Literaria, is particularly relevant here:

Poetry at the Threshold of Prayer

61

in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. (6)

In this passage, Coleridge defines poetic faith as the moment in which the reader voluntarily suspends disbelief. This can help to explain why religious conversion also brings with it what might be termed a conversion of the mind. The Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor expressed a similar idea in this way: ‘an impoverishment of imagination means an impoverishment of the religious life as well’ (191). Poetry, Prayer and Faith Can only religious believers write poems that are also prayers? Although the answer may seem to be a resounding ‘yes’, the reality is quite different. Paul Celan, a non-religious German poet of Romanian origin who committed suicide in 1970, wrote the following in his essay on poetry: ‘The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other, it needs an Over-against. It seeks out, speaks toward it. For the poem making toward an Other, each thing, each human being is a form of this Other’ (409). Thus, a poet who is not religious can recognize that poetry strives toward an Other. What are the implications of this position? The following lines by the Nobel Prize winner Pär Lagerkvist will help us answer this question: ‘The god who does not exist, / it is he who inflames my soul’ (36). The poem speaks of an absent God, whose non-existence is explicitly acknowledged. And yet these are passionate lines, verses that are quickly transformed into profound and intense prayer, as shown by one of Lagerkvist’s best-known poems. ‘My friend is a stranger, someone I do not know,’ begins the poet, and then, addressing his friend, he asks: ‘Who are you who so fill my heart with your absence? / Who fill the entire world with your absence?’ (35). These poetic lines at a certain point take on the form of an overtly expressed prayer. It occurs in the last two lines, when the Other appears as interlocutor. The sense of disquiet and longing is transformed into a mysterious presence, which, no matter how strongly desired and yearned after, still remains absent. It is an absent Other, but an Other none the less. Somewhat paradoxically, this kind of poetry is generally composed by men of firm religious convictions. One perfect example is ‘The Terrible Sonnets’ by

Poetry and Prayer

62

Gerard Manley Hopkins. In his poem ‘I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, not Day’, the poet reaches the depths of desolation, exclaiming: ‘I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree / Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me.’ In 1974, Don Divo Barsotti wrote: ‘Your prayers may reach Him, but He does not take away that feeling of emptiness. It is not a prayer for you. You feel like a voice, a cry that rises from the abyss. It is as though the abyss within you cries out, but without a reply’ (Albertazzi 285). From the Terrible Void to an Outburst of Praise It may, therefore, be said that it is the way in which language is employed, through an invocation to God or the opening of a dialogue, that distinguishes true prayer from poetry, be it religious or secular. Even where God is perceived as being absent, prayer is still possible, as long as it acts as a bridge to the great unknown. Countless compositions have drawn inspiration, whether implicitly or explicitly, from the Song of Songs, or from a woman’s search for her lost love. In the second half of the fifteenth century, Lorenzo de Medici sang the words: ‘O Dio, sommo bene, or come fai, / che te sol cerco e non truovo mai?’ [Oh God, supreme One, how can it be that, / I look only for you but never find you?]. In Testori’s Nel tuo sangue there is a tense dialectic between the existence and non-existence of God, even reaching a point where the poet does not appeal to God for mercy, because he no longer believes in Him. It is in this way, however, that the poet professes his faith in God: Se è bestemmia Pensarti inesistente non Ti chiedo pietà (11) [If it is blasphemy To think you do not exist, I will not ask for your mercy.]

Seen from the perspective of a religious person, the most important function of poetry is to provide the necessary language for those who deeply sense the presence of God, but only as an empty mould, or as an absence. Those who feel God’s absence do not speak of a vague or ill-defined mystery. They know that He exists, and that He is God, but they still sense His absence. Poetry therefore takes on the form of a prayer in the darkness. Where a full, flowing and intimate

Poetry at the Threshold of Prayer

63

contact is missing, poetry helps to maintain a conversation with a God that is known to be present, but felt to be distant. At times, this terrible sensation can be overturned. Where the poet is unwilling to accept the feeling of absence, his or her prayer can turn into a furious outburst, as in John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnet XIV’: Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

He concludes with an appeal to be freed from every bond to God’s ‘enemy’: Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. (314)

These lines describe the manner in which God can enter, with an almost violent force, into the hearts of men, and it is this that can give rise to poetry that sings the highest of praises to creation. Indeed, rather than seeing Creation as reflecting light from without, it is seen as transparent, shining with the light that is contained within it. With a violence similar to that of Donne, Michelangelo tackles the same theme in one of his splendid sonnets, which begins: ‘Vorrei voler, Signor, quel ch’io non voglio’ [I should like to will, Lord, what I do not will]: Squarcia ’l vel tu, Signor, rompi quel muro che con la suo durezza ne ritarda il sol della tuo luce, al mondo spenta! Manda ’l preditto lume a noi venturo, alla tuo bella sposa, acciò ch’io arda il cor senz’alcun dubbio, e te sol senta. [Tear you, Lord, the veil, break down that wall which with its hardness keeps from us the light of your sun, now quenched in the world! Send that light, promised to come to us one day, to your lovely spouse, so that my heart may burn free from all doubt, and feel you alone.]

64

Poetry and Prayer

This chapter began by reflecting on the difference between a religious meditation in verse and a true prayer. Poetry makes the transition to prayer when it addresses God directly and personally, drawing the reader into the personal relationship that he experiences with God without barriers and without embarrassment. In a certain sense, God can even be present through His absence, the empty form of an unrecognizable presence, as is the case in several wonderful prayers written by poets who feel that they do not have faith. These are poets who have experienced, in one way or another, a profound connection between their poetic inspiration and the form of expression that is prayer. They reaffirm how creative writing can make a transition to prayer: ‘by words … our prayer takes flesh’ (Catholic Church 2700). Works Cited Albertazzi, Stefano. Sull’orlo di un duplice abisso. Teologia e spiritualità monastica nei diari di Divo Barsotti. Milan: Cisinello Balsamo, 2009. Barthes, Roland. Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Trans. Richard Miller. London: Cape, 1977. Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1995. Celan, Paul. Selected Poems and Prose. Trans. John Felstiner. London: Norton, 2001. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R.W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Donne, John. The Complete English Poems. Ed. A.J. Smith. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004. Guardini, Romano. Prayer in Practice. Trans. Prince Leopold of LoewensteinWertheim. London: Burns and Oates, 1957. Hopkins, G.M. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. London: Humphrey Milford, 1918. Ignatius of Loyola. Spiritual Exercises. Text and commentary. In Michael Ivens, Understanding the Spiritual Exercises. Leominster: Gracewing, 1998. Lagerkvist, Pär. Evening Land. Trans. Anthony Barnett. Lewes: Allardyce Books, 2001. Michelangelo. The Poems. Ed. and trans. Christopher Ryan. London: Dent, 1996.

Poetry at the Threshold of Prayer

65

O’Connor, Flannery. ‘The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South’. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. London: Macmillan, 1969, 191–211. Rahner, Karl. On Prayer. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1967. Testori, Giovanni. Nel tuo sangue. Milan: Rizzoli, 1973.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 4

Poetry as Immanence: How Language Informs Reality Jay Parini

The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde, of course, was being witty in this line from his novel. As always, however, he was making a serious point: we actually know very little about the divide between matter and spirit, or nature and mind – you can frame the mystery in various ways. Perhaps we could benefit from looking closely at a more serious quotation, from Ralph Emerson’s Nature (1836), which is probably the most elevated expression of American Transcendental philosophy that we possess, a sublime work in every sense, especially in its chapter on language, which builds to a remarkably compressed statement: There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, preëxist in necessary Ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections, in the world of spirit. A Fact is the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world. (The Spiritual Emerson 38–9)

I want to keep Emerson’s thoughts about spirit and nature in mind as I move forward, and this is really more of a walk among certain favourite texts than a sustained argument. But where else could one go with a nugget such as this: ‘A Fact is the end or last issue of the spirit’? This is both an exciting and challenging statement, one that links the visible world in a conclusive way with the world of psyche or soul. As I read it, Emerson suggests that nature is, indeed, the final manifestation of spirit, its outward and convincing form, bodied forth

68

Poetry and Prayer

to present and perfect whatever was thought or imagined. What we are talking about, of course, is a kind of incarnation: the visible world as the realization of the spiritual, its endpoint and confirmation. I would argue that poetry, and its cousin, prayer, are intimately involved in ‘seeing’ nature, and therefore in working with the spiritual aspects of reality. Poetry and prayer both involve an effort that could usefully and fruitfully be compared to incarnation: the putting into words of unspoken things, the finding of concrete images that can stand in for spiritual truth, give them ‘a local habitation and a name’, to echo Shakespeare. Expression itself, or utterance, is perhaps the last issue of spirit, or its manifestation. The natural affinities between poetry and prayer seem endless, and endlessly fetching – so much so that I choose to proceed with caution here, resisting the easy connections that will tend to lump these unquestionably separate but related forms of thought or mental action in less than useful ways. As I began to write this chapter, I happened to be reading, not for the first time, William Empson’s idiosyncratic but brilliant work Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). In his chapter on what he calls ‘Double Plots’, which is really an examination of irony and its discontents, he looks closely at Swift, who once said that ‘everything spiritual is really material’. An observation from Empson follows: The language plays into his hands here, because the spiritual words are all derived from physical metaphors; as he saw again and again how to do this the pleasure of ingenuity must have become a shock to faith. Spirit in English is mixed with the chemical sense – ‘the profounder chemists inform us that the strongest spirits may be extracted from human flesh’ (the fanatics are lustful) and with its special sense of alcohol (intoxicated with the spirit, the fanatics are drunk); but its root derivation is from wind or breath (inspired by the breath of God or the wind of the spirit the fanatics are windbags …). (60)

Empson, in his characteristically wild and associative thinking, meditates on the connections between spirit and nature. What lies at the heart of his argument is a truth I want to keep in the forefront of this chapter: ‘everything spiritual is really material’. In this, Empson seems to dissolve a boundary we have come to imagine impermeable, and in doing so he invites a fresh kind of speculation. Perhaps we have, in fact, been too wedded to the old dichotomies? Perhaps the familiar Platonic formulation has actually obscured our thinking? There is a distance to cross, nevertheless, between whatever it is that we regard as the spiritual and the material sides of reality. I would agree with Empson that,

Poetry as Immanence: How Language Informs Reality

69

in so many ways, it is only a superficial difference, more a permeable barrier than a hard wall, and that both poetry and prayer are parallel and complementary means for engaging the one side with the other, or perhaps a better way to put this is showing the divide as ultimately false, a metaphor itself, as we have difficulty in trying to imagine the ultimate unity here. But poetry, as well as prayer, move us in the direction of unity, and this unity involves incarnation, which is the ultimate dissolution of barriers between metaphysical and physical. Poetry is, I would argue, itself a form of incarnation, and prayer operates in much the same way as poetic language to enhance the physical aspects of spirit, to make the spirit visible in ordinary time. And by making the spirit visible, it unites the two sides of the old dichotomy, these contrarieties that have dogged Western thought for millennia. Incarnation is a kind of yoking of one side with another, a way of making manifest what was not before seen. Ordinary time is, of course, that time in the cycle of liturgical seasons when there is no obvious or extraordinary point of celebration, although one seeks nevertheless ‘the kingdom of God’ that lies within us, what Milton in the last book of Paradise Lost refers to as ‘a paradise within thee, happier far’. What, at least in theory, prevails during this liturgical period is calmness, a sense of quiet and comfortable (or sometimes discomfiting) seeking. This happens in the activities of both poetry and prayer. And that seeking involves what again I would call a process of incarnation, a putting of spirit into material terms, a quest to understand and ultimately experience the truth of Swift’s statement that everything spiritual is ultimately material. Poets have always played off the connections between spirit and matter in their use of metaphor, one of the most complex figures of thought. Robert Frost understood this connection well, and he talked at great length about metaphor in his various essays and public lectures. ‘Metaphor is the whole of poetry,’ he once said. ‘Every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing.’ In Frost’s classic essay ‘Education by Poetry’, he said: ‘In late years I want to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking’ (Collected Prose, Poems, and Plays 721–2). This is provocative. Frost works in hyperbole, but a great deal of truth lies here: a poet like Frost would want to move in the direction of expanding metaphorical thinking so that it embraces everything. This is a way, indeed, of dissolving contrarieties, a way of finding a space that is at once spiritual and material. In 1959, Frost was giving a lecture at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont, and there he talked about his feeling that so much of what he had spent his life doing was trying to allow spirit to penetrate deeper and deeper into matter. He said:

70

Poetry and Prayer The great enterprise of life, of the world, the great enterprise of our race, is our penetration into matter, deeper and deeper; carrying the spirit deeper into matter. And though it looks like something different out into space, that’s just deeper into matter, that’s material penetration of the spirit – of the ethereal into the material. Put it that way, and that is our destiny – that is why science is our greatness, it has got to do with our penetration into the material. (Cramer 168)

This is interesting in many ways, not the least being the resort of ‘science’, by which Frost doubtless means the physical side of things, not the metaphysical. Most of his own poems deal with physical activity: putting seeds in the ground, mowing hay, picking apples, and so forth – the activities of farming. What Frost does, in subtle ways, is to imply these acts, making them as much about spiritual dimension as the physical. Perhaps the best early example of this is ‘Mowing’, a sonnet that appeared in Frost’s first volume, in 1913: There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound – And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make. (Collected Prose, Poems, and Plays 26)

The rhythm of the poem itself works to unite the physical and the spiritual, as the highly colloquial pentameter gathers a sway as it moves forward, and so the sound of the poem itself embodies the idea of mowing. One can feel the ‘long scythe whispering to the ground’ as well as hear the swish of the blade in the second line, which is echoed in the final and fourteenth line: ‘My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.’ Frost also delights in making fun of the spiritual side, as when he talks about ‘easy gold at the hand of fay or elf ’.

Poetry as Immanence: How Language Informs Reality

71

Clearly, he dismisses this kind of thinking in: ‘The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.’ The knowledge we gain in this poem is physical knowledge that incorporates, or incarnates, the spiritual side. This is, I would argue, a deeply spiritual poem, but it is one solidly grounded in the realities of physical motion, labour, movement. Spirit, as Empson has noted, has its roots in spiritus, meaning wind or breath. It is a physical thing, not something airy or far away. Matter is another thing, perhaps: its root-word relates to mater: origin, source – and, of course, mother. Are we perhaps looking at two sides of the same coin when we refer to the spiritual and the material? Trying to sort out the differences here has absorbed and troubled philosophers from Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel through Emerson, William James, Richard Rorty and so on, without much luck in the work of disentanglement. I would note, parenthetically, that Hegel regarded his own philosophical efforts as an attempt to clarify the movement by which the rational becomes real. That is, he imagined history as the process of the Absolute becoming increasingly self-manifest (the Incarnate Logos) as it infiltrates, and indeed creates, human consciousness through language. Poetry and prayer, on the other hand, seem to work in a very different way from philosophy. These forms of thought challenge the disentanglement of spirit and matter as a proper goal. The work of poetry, in Frost’s aesthetics, involves the pressing of spirit into matter, of making them one. And it does so through the almost mystical operations of metaphor, this process of ‘carrying over’ in which one thing stands in for another, even merging them. This work is what I mean by language as incarnation. Needless to say, the concept has deep theological underpinnings, as in John 1:4, where we read: ‘And the Word was made flesh.’ The word here, in the Greek, is of course Logos – famously a word that seems to defy translation, even explanation, although it refers to forms of thought, ways of framing the universe, ways of ‘making manifest’ what was previously inchoate. By the fourth century, the Latin word incarnatio had become a term of common use among the Church Fathers, such as Jerome, Ambrose, Hilary and others. These concepts of embodiment, in both Latin and Greek, were meant to suggest a reifying motion, at once physical and spiritual, as meaning itself, logos, the act of putting spiritual truth into physical truth, takes flesh in language and, ultimately, in Christian theology, the person of Jesus, who represents the human face of God. Poets have wrestled with the concept of logos and incarnation over the centuries, as it is a central aspect of the poetic enterprise. The questions come down to this: How does poetry embody spiritual truth? And how does the language of poetry function in this regard? Can we, in fact, simply regard the

72

Poetry and Prayer

physical embodiment of abstract truth in concrete images that are summoned by words a form of incarnation? One sees various attempts in modern criticism to come to terms with these questions, which are also philosophical problems. Modern critics have often focused on poetic language as an opaque medium and, in the age of poststructuralist readings, we commonly think of the huge gap between signifier and signified, with the word as elegy to what it represents, and with an attendant sense of loss, as language attempts, and fails, to conjure or embody realities of a certain kind. This note of loss quite often sounds almost like a note of exile, the poet feeling tossed out of Eden, forced to ‘make do’ with whatever frail embodiments in language he or she can muster. I have in mind here Seamus Heaney’s glorious and sad poem ‘Exposure’, where he sees the poet as a kind of exile, always fated to sing the elegiac tune as he walks perpetually through ‘damp leaves, / Husks, the spent flukes of autumn’. This critique of poetic language has led to a view of poetry as a system of selfreferential signs, with an emphasis on wordplay, even graphic design: any aspects of the linguistic turn that catch the eye and ear. Such a poetics plays off the more traditional view, where language is a window that one looks through, viewing the material world, or some mystical truth, perhaps, but without distortion. In this vein, the poet’s job is to apprehend realities in his or her special way and simply communicate them. There is no doubt that language – poetic language, in particular – is more than a medium of communication. If you look at Gerard Manley Hopkins, for instance, his poems assemble in a dense, euphonious, image-crammed substance, a material in itself, like stone for a sculptor or paint for a painter. It is pointing to itself as much as beyond itself. In this, I would say, it seems very like a language of incarnation; that is, it creates a language that enacts, repeatedly, the Incarnation itself, as in ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’, where the poet writes: ‘For Christ plays in ten thousand places’. I have long been an admirer of Hopkins’s journals, and I return often to the passage about the bluebells from May 1870: ‘I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it’ (Hopkins, Journals and Papers 199). That is, of course, a breathtaking leap there: from bluebell to Lord. But it is thrilling too, as he continues in his usual exact way, describing these impossibly beautiful flowers, suggesting that their ‘inscape is mixed of strength and grace’ (199). And by inscape he means the sense in which God allows nature to ‘play in ten thousand places’, to open or expand in a unique way in each thing in the world, whatever

Poetry as Immanence: How Language Informs Reality

73

its form. It is a process of animation, of putting the soul into things, which compels his attention. Especially in poets with a strong incarnational drive, from Donne and Herbert through Hopkins, Eliot and beyond, one senses a deep kinship between the work of poetry and the work of prayer. Just as the person in prayer attempts to find language for what has not been readily available, the poet tries to find an embodiment for feeling as well as thought. In both cases, there is a sense of expectation, as the person in prayer or the poet in composition awaits revelation. This is no more obvious than in the Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot, which must count among the most systematic of all poetic reflections on the affinities between poetry and prayer. In The Dry Salvages, for instance, Eliot comes as close to a perfect understanding of this kinship as any poet I have read. The poet’s job, as he suggests so aptly in The Dry Salvages, is: to apprehend The point of intersection of the timeless With time.

It is a question of gathering in the ‘hints and guesses’ that present themselves. He adds: ‘The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.’ Eliot might well have said that the way toward incarnation involves the five activities mentioned in this poem: ‘Prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action’. I would suggest that poetic incarnation, finding the words to embody spiritual things, the deeper and deeper penetration of spirit into matter, connects deeply with the activities of prayer and observation, if not observance, even discipline and thought. And action, as it were, is the performance involved in writing itself. Both poetry and prayer seek incarnation, in the sense of fleshing out the spirit with imagery, sound, texture, cadence. Of course, one thinks back to the connections between poetry and meditation here: as when Ignatius invites us to summon a concrete image, the act of compositio loci in his Spiritual Exercises, and to contemplate that image with all of our intellectual resources as we move towards affective prayer, seeking a relationship with God. But everything begins, Ignatius would seem to argue, with the concrete embodiment, the work of summoning an image. Once the image has been sustained, it is possible to meditate on that image, to make comparisons (hence the use of metaphor or simile). This hard work of metaphorical thinking leads one, ultimately, to a state of grace, a place where contrarieties are reconciled and where there can be some sense in which the material and spiritual worlds converge.

74

Poetry and Prayer

We can trace this movement in Hopkins, for example, as Hopkins summons in ‘The Windhover’ the image of a falcon in flight: ‘I caught this morning morning’s minion’ (Poems 29). As the sonnet moves forward, Hopkins uses any number of similitudes or metaphors to contemplate the bird, as the falcon is compared to a ‘skate’s heel’ that ‘sweeps smooth on a bow-bend’, or when his flight is said to ring on ‘the rein of a wimpling wing’, calling up imagery of a horse that circles a trainer on its rein. With these mental motions in place, the poet moves towards a kind of prayer, addressing the bird as ‘my chevalier’, a common image for Christ, the Prince of Peace. Indeed, the poem is dedicated ‘To Christ our Lord’, calling to mind the Jesuit motto ad majorem Dei gloriam. Both poetry and prayer function in a daily way, in ordinary time, to gather and transmute the spirit, the wind, the breath, into a linguistic medium that both holds and spells, or enchants. This enchantment is the goal of the exercise, in that poetry and prayer lead us to levels of awareness as the poet or contemplative moves into God’s presence, making a bid for grace. I used the word ‘bid’ here self-consciously, thinking of the Anglo-Saxon root-word bed. The word for prayer in German is beten, in Dutch it is bidden. These words are cognates of bid, in English. And one hears this deep philological echo in Hopkins’s poem about prayer: Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray, But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks; To do without, take tosses, and obey. Rare patience roots in these, and, these away, Nowhere. Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masks Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day. We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills Of us we do bid God bend to him even so. And where is he who more and more distils Delicious kindness? – He is patient. Patience fills His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know. (Poems 67)

Hopkins invites us to ‘bid for’ the patience to pray. And he complicates the term with the phrase ‘we do bid God bend to him even so’. That is, we put in a bid, a request, to God; we ask that our souls bend to his. We look for this conjunction, which is granted in two ways. It is granted in the poem itself, which gives flesh

Poetry as Immanence: How Language Informs Reality

75

to spirit, which summons the material world in a way that does not separate spirit and matter. And the prayer moves in similar ways: a bid for God’s ear, a hankering to listen, a connection in which the Incarnation itself is manifest as ‘Patience fills / His crisp combs’. Rarely does a poem so neatly fold together the work of prayer and the work of poetry, but it seems useful to have this before us. Hopkins, as both priest and poet, as one trained in the exacting modes of thought put forward by Ignatius, seems ideally placed to help us to understand poetry as incarnation, to see exactly how one begins with an image, self-consciously summoned, then applies modes of metaphorical thought to the image, ultimately releasing a feeling of incarnation, of sides reconciled, of dichotomies healed. This is, perhaps, the goal of poetry and prayer. The obvious affinities between poetry and prayer, as seen in the poets discussed above, lead us to a fresh sense of poetic language as the embodiment of spirit or soul. Nature becomes the symbol of spirit, as Emerson suggested. And so language becomes the means by which spirit and nature, or the material world, engage. That engagement, in the mind of the poet or the person in prayer, opens toward that ‘paradise within us’ that Milton sought – a resting place where, if only for the duration of the poem (its writing or reading), one feels a sense of reconciliation. Or it is akin to what Emerson aspired to understand in his sublime essay on what he called the ‘Over-Soul’, where he writes: ‘One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the spirit in a form’ (138). Poetry and prayer are two of these forms, and they amplify each other. Works Cited Cramer, Jeffrey S. Robert Frost Among His Poems. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. ‘Nature’. The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings. Ed. David M. Robinson, 23–62. —. ‘The Over-Soul’. The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings. Ed. David M. Robinson, 133–49. Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. New York: New Directions, 1960 (first published 1935). Frost, Robert. Collected Prose, Poems, and Plays. New York: Library of America, 1995. Hopkins, G.M. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. London: Humphrey Milford, 1918.

76

Poetry and Prayer

—. Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. Humphrey House and Graham Storey. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Robinson, David M., ed. The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings. Boston: MA Beacon Press, 2003. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Joseph Bristow. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2006.

Chapter 5

Poetry and Prayer: ‘An Inner Kinship’ Jennifer Reek

In this chapter, I seek to disclose a kinship between poetry and prayer. My method, for such an unconventional task, must itself be unconventional.1 Inspired by the French thinker Hélène Cixous’s reading and writing practices, which were in turn influenced by Heidegger’s late poetic readings of poets,2 I proceed, in part, by listening and responding to phrases about hearing the voice of poets and by engaging them in conversation. The phrases appear in the work of two Jesuit scholars who were themselves attentive listeners to the word of poetry: Michel de Certeau and Karl Rahner. It is from the latter that I borrow the notion of ‘inner kinship’, which he explored in his essay ‘Poetry and the Christian’. Rahner (1904–1984), one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and influential theologians, is not usually noted for an interest in poetry.3 Among his several thousand titles, few are devoted to the subject. And yet the number is deceiving, for a passionate love and intellectual engagement of poetry, like that of his teacher Heidegger, comes shining through when he does turn to it.4 By ‘unconventional’, I mean that I will sometimes wander, writing non-linearly and using non-academic style, in order to interrogate this relation of kinship and to enact an alternative poetic way of knowing. A preliminary definition of poetics seems necessary here. I am partial to some of Terry Eagleton’s suggestions for the qualities of a poetic text: defamiliarization; ‘a continual generating and violating of norms or expectations’; words allied and opposed in meaning, sometimes at the same time, as parts of systems moving both linearly and holistically, created by the poet, who ‘relies on his ear, rather as a tennis player relies not on aerodynamics but on her reflexes’ (57). 2 For Heidegger’s influence on Cixous, see, for example, Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous, ch. 6: ‘Writing in History: Totalitarian Settings’. 3 Rahner’s contribution to theological aesthetics (for which his contemporary and fellow Jesuit Hans Urs von Balthasar is well known) has been neglected until very recently. Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen helps rectify that with the essay I cite here. 4 As Theissen notes, Rahner ‘appears to have felt a particular affinity with the possibilities of language and with literature, in particular, with poetry as an art form’ (230). For Heidegger’s later poetic thinking on poetry, see, for example, Poetry, Language, Thought. As Albert Hofstadter writes in his introduction to the collection, Heidegger’s thinking 1

78

Poetry and Prayer

As Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen notes, Rahner believed that the arts are more than merely illustrative of religious truth. Rather, he considered theology and the arts as intimately one, as both refer to ‘the transcendental nature of the human being’ (226). He called for a ‘poetic theology’, one that is ‘based on and leading to the experience of the mystery of God’ (227, 232). Referring to Rahner’s notion of ‘anonymous piety’, a ‘piety outside the Church’ that is sustained by ‘the experience of God’, Thiessen writes: Piety does not simply arise in the specific sphere of the Church but connotes the fundamental relatedness of the human being to God, and his/her witness to sincerity, truth, and love, all actions founded on and pointing to God’s universal grace. This witness includes authentic artistic creation and commitment. [Rahner’s] notion of anonymous piety in art thus directly corresponds to his idea of piety outside the Church and indirectly therefore to his view of the ‘anonymous Christian’.5 (230)

Rahner opens up a space outside the Church and its dogma where we might be more likely to discover what he referred to as an ‘inner kinship’ between poetry and Christian faith. Though the two are not the same, he writes, ‘really great Christianity and really great poetry have an inner kinship’ (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 365). Rahner perceives three areas where such a kinship might be profitably elucidated: descending into inner depths, listening for the poetic word and experiencing joyous seriousness. In this chapter, I take these concerns as my own in an attempt to further delineate a ‘fundamental relatedness’, an ‘inner kinship’, between poetry and prayer, prayer being the basis of faith, as expressed by the saying, lex orandi, lex credendi (‘as we pray, so we believe’). Two very different guides, in addition to the aforementioned, will assist me: the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard and the sixteenth-century Basque saint and founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola. It is a seemingly odd selection, for as ordinarily understood, most of these thinkers are neither theologians nor poets. Nor is their main concern to write about poetry or theology. Rather,

in these writings is not ‘aesthetics’ or even ‘philosophy’, but a ‘thinking about art’ that is ‘a thinking that memorializes and responds, ein andenkendes Denken. Like poetry and song, it grows out of being and reaches into its truth … . The being that is its origin is the being to which authentic human being belongs’ (Hofstadter ix). 5 Rahner’s notion of the ‘anonymous Christian’ suggested that those who were not explicitly Christians could be so implicitly by accepting God’s offer of grace. See Rahner, ‘Anonymous Christians’.

Poetry and Prayer: ‘An Inner Kinship’

79

what they have in common is that they belong to that unique species who think poetically, and in doing so may have something to say to theology. I suggest that they have discerned Rahner’s sense of the kinship of poetry and prayer, albeit in very different ways and not always explicitly. Bachelard, for instance, in his phenomenological analyses of poetry, listens to poets with great joy, often turning to the metaphor of verticality to get closer to the essence of the human imagination. The latter is the site where Ignatius believes God is most intimately and joyously encountered, and his Spiritual Exercises encourage interior descent. Cixous reads and writes poetically, as a spiritual practice, engaging those writers she calls ‘descenders, explorers of the lowest and deepest’ (Three Steps 5). She links depth and joy as integral to the transgressive nature of the poet. Here we have moved essentially outside the Church, perhaps into the loci of Rahner’s ‘anonymous piety’. Going to the Place of Appointment Hélène Cixous insists on the poetic as a way of knowing, on a non-appropriative approach to texts. ‘Hers is a hand that caresses … rather than a fist that pounces on the text,’ writes Verena Andermatt Conley in her ‘Introduction’ to Reading with Clarice Lispector (xvii), in which she insists strongly on finding joy and pleasure, and Heidegger in his Elucidations writes: ‘The poet must talk, for / It is a joy’ (43). Conley remarks that Cixous’s reading of Heidegger’s later writing on poetry contributed to ‘an ascetic turn not devoid of religious overtones’ (‘Introduction’ to Reading with Clarice xiv), and to a move ‘from an academic to a poetic model of philosophy’ (xi). As part of my approach, I will take my cue from a poetic similarity among dissimilarities in the work of Cixous and Rahner, both of whom were influenced by Heidegger. They each work by processes of unfolding, allowing themselves to be drawn forward into life and into texts, rather than imposing themselves upon either. The dynamic is like that of poetry and prayer, one of call and response, of letting go – an active passivity, if you will, over against a grasping desire to master and own. As David Jasper, writing on Heidegger and poetic ways of knowing, notes: ‘at the heart of poetry is precisely not the capacity to think through and toward some hidden and obscure meaning, but rather through a wisdom characterized by the grace of gelassenheit, a serenity and a “letting the unsayable be not said”’ (The Sacred Community 99).6 The internal quoted material is from Heidegger’s Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘Der Rhein’ (quoted in Clark 118). 6

80

Poetry and Prayer

The difference in these ways of knowing may be illuminated in the distinction Heidegger made between Greek and Latin thinking. Timothy Clark offers the example of what happens to the Greek word physis, ‘commonly translated as “nature” (cf. “physics”) but more precisely the “self-enfolding emergence” in which individual things come forth from obscurity’ when it changes into the Latin natura (32). The sense of a world unfolding, of emergence, is lost. What replaces it is the language of empire, a world occupied and mastered. How is this evidenced in the thinking of Rahner and Cixous? As Harvey Egan notes, Rahner’s theology ‘contained a movement of unfolding’ in which the love and joy of God could be found in ‘every dimension of human life’ (4). And Rahner makes a distinction similar to Clark’s example of language shifts when he refers to what he calls ‘primordial words’ in his essay ‘Priest and Poet’, which is itself both priestly and poetic. Such words, as opposed to ‘fabricated, technical, utility words’, ‘bring light to us, not we to them. They have power over us’; we do not master them (296). Such words lead us into what could be called a poetic knowledge, or to what Rahner refers to as a ‘theology of the Word’ in which one would ‘set about gathering together, like Ezekiel, the scattered members on the fields of philosophy and theology and spoken over them the word of the Spirit, so that they rise up a living body!’ (294–5). The following passage gives the sense of call and response, of paths unfolding that characterize, in my view, the thinking of Heidegger, Cixous and Rahner: There is a knowledge which stands before the mystery of unity in multiplicity, of essence in appearance, of the whole in the part and the part in the whole. This knowledge makes use of primordial words, which evoke mystery. It is always indistinct and obscure, like the reality itself which by means of such words of knowledge obtains possession of us and draws us into unsounded depths. (Rahner, ‘Priest and Poet’ 297)

There is a resonance with Cixous, who has described her writing process as ‘a quest’, made up of ‘stages’ she sees ‘not beforehand’, but as ‘they unfold’ (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 45). When asked in an interview how her writing notebooks helped her plan, Cixous replied that she didn’t plan, ever. Instead, she trusted: ‘The only thing I plan is not planning, but I don’t even plan that. I just have a feeling which is a very strange feeling of trust. It’s as if I believe that if I go to the place of appointment, it will come’ (‘“Magnetizing the World”’ 122). This statement, of a type common in Cixous, should be seen as part of her understanding of poetry ‘as that which precludes strategies of capture or containment and that – contrary to philosophy – allows for otherness’ (Conley, ‘Introduction’ to Readings xi).

Poetry and Prayer: ‘An Inner Kinship’

81

Her reading and writing practices are deliberate, and should not be mistaken for a lack of professional discipline.7 Though she has been a professor of literature in Paris for decades and continues to lecture and give seminars,8 she does not allow these commitments to intrude upon her writing. Two months of her summers are spent in Arcachon in the Aquitaine region in southwest France devoted exclusively to writing (Cixous and Jeannet 73–6).9 Her description of this time has a spiritual aspect. The writing is uninterrupted, physical, exhausting. She describes it as trance-like: During this time I keep in mind the book’s landscape or land, its mental map, its armies, its armoires, scraps of sentences, images, dreams, its passages. But not its ‘whole’, not its composition. This I don’t know, I discover … During this time, of being ‘with-book’ as with child, being nothing but the book, I can’t interrupt myself, not at all, which is why I maintain absolute solitude. (Cixous and Jeannet 74–5)

My approach in this chapter and elsewhere is in sympathy with Cixous’s in its desire to foster a relearning of reading, writing, thinking. Hers is a way perhaps best described by Conley as ‘a braiding of voices, or multiple resonances of textual echoes. Cixous’s gesture proposes to ‘mettre en regard’, to put texts side by side (Introduction to Reading with Clarice x). Her practice entails an intense and perceptive listening to the texts she engages, of letting the text speak (xii). Like Cixous, might we discover something ‘whole’ by being attentive to ‘scraps of sentences’, images and dreams? Though I do not know whether Cixous was influenced specifically by the small piece of Heideggerian text I am about to turn to, it resonates with what we have begun to explore regarding her reading and writing practices. Heidegger opens his essay ‘Poetically Man Dwells’ with

Moreover, Cixous is incredibly prolific, author of more than forty books and over a hundred articles, literary theory, criticism, drama, fiction, memoir, philosophy, often breaking boundaries and crossing between genres. 8 For biographical material, see further Cixous and Calle-Gruber; Cixous and Jeannet; Conley, Hélène Cixous, and the Cixous biography on the website of the European Graduate School, where she has led intensive summer workshops. 9 Here, too, is a kinship of sorts: in this region there appeared in the seventeenth century another form of discipline, one that also arose from the spiritual depths: a group of young Jesuits, ‘mystic zealots’ called the ‘little saints’ of Aquitaine, sought to reform their Order through ‘a mystic resistance’, a return to the spirit of their founder, Ignatius of Loyola, ‘in all his wild, pioneering youth’ (de Certeau 241–2, 234). 7

Poetry and Prayer

82

a focus on the titular phrase, which is taken from a late poem by Hölderlin.10 He speaks of ‘following’ the phrase so we might listen to the text and respond freely (213). Though my method in this chapter is not that of Heidegger in his reading of Hölderlin, there is none the less, in his exquisite listening to the poet and in his idea of following the phrase, an inspiration for how to proceed. Heidegger returns the phrase to the poem, and in following it, hears what strikes me as the resonances or tones of thought in the poem. We have moved outside the poem, but still the concerns of Heidegger (and Cixous in her reading of him) are shared here. They will help us define a space both poetic and prayerful from within which form enacts what the content speaks.11 Let us begin, then, to see how things unfold. Let us follow a phrase, as Heidegger suggests. Following the Phrase The phrase of which I speak has insisted on its presence here and refused to go away. It is a scrap of sentence from Michel de Certeau’s The Mystic Fable: ‘like a poem they give voice to what could not speak’ (232). I resisted it, but it haunted me, and to ignore it while listening to the voice of Cixous, after Heidegger, seemed wrongheaded and false. What does de Certeau’s phrase, then, tell about poems and their gift for giving voice to the unspeakable, the unsayable, the silenced? Who are the ‘they’ of the phrase who are like a poem giving voice to what cannot speak? What can they tell us about what it is to be like a poem? ‘They’ are the words of a peasant child whom Jean-Joseph Surin, a seventeenthcentury French Jesuit, met on his way to Paris. Before the encounter, the Jesuit was desolate. Having finished his novitiate, he had been ordered by his superior to leave the mother house and go out into the world (225). In a letter, Surin describes himself as ‘bearing a heart abstracted, solitary, estranged, incapable of getting along and adjusting to the ways of this land we consider to be an exile’ (206). The boy is the son of a Normandy baker, Surin, a ‘son of notables and The poem in which the phrase appears is ‘In Lovely Blueness …’: ‘May, when life is all hardship, may a man look up and say: I too would like to resemble these? Yes. As long as kindliness, which is pure, remains in his heart not unhappily a man may compare himself with the divinity. Is God unknown? Is He manifest as the sky? This rather I believe. It is the measure of the man. Full of acquirements, but poetically, man dwells on this earth. But the darkness of night with all the stars is not purer, if I could put it like that, than man, who is called the image of God’ (Hölderlin 601). 11 As we will see, this is also essentially the way of Ignatius – to listen to the heart and mind and respond in freedom. 10

Poetry and Prayer: ‘An Inner Kinship’

83

members of the Parliament’ (231, 233). De Certeau describes the encounter as one of inversion; the Jesuit is spiritually a ‘child, weaned too soon from his mother’ (225). The relationship between the two is surprising, disruptive and spiritually close. The world has been turned upside down. The Jesuit sits at the feet of the boy, who speaks of how to relate to God rather than what God can give back. ‘I thought he was an angel,’ Surin writes in a letter that is copied and shared throughout France. In his prayers, the boy ‘says marvelous things’ (229). The original letter and its copies are written in words both poetic and prayerful. De Certeau describes the language in those texts as ‘full of life’, transforming into ‘a spoken word, a “song”’ (233). In listening to the words of the boy, Surin ‘has just discovered, awestruck, a “new world”’, one in which he is at ease; he can “breathe” in the space offered him by his interlocutor’ (233). The text of his letters relating the words of the boy and his response to them is fluid, shifting each time the story is retold, resulting in a textual kinship of its readers. As de Certeau remarks, the style of the letters, the word that becomes song, ‘does not arise within oneself but within others and their hospitality’ (233). Why has this phrase and the image of these two figures affected me so strongly? What do they reveal? De Certeau suggests that his interpretation, and perhaps ours too, is a step in ‘a textual journey’ that is ongoing, ‘an immense unending voyage based on the fundamental formality of an interweaving between two people’ (234). And then he has a profound insight: ‘In the moment in which we are studying him, the “pauper” is equally Surin himself, his young man, and that part of ourselves to which an exchange gives a language’ (234). What matters is the encounter of one with an other and the potential for transformation in the relationship between the two. What I see in the two figures is an image of a liberating relation between poetry and prayer, the two engaged in conversation out of which both tend towards greater authenticity, or greatness, as Rahner phrases it when he writes of poetry (Thiessen 231). There are shared elements, a kinship of sorts, which is our concern: vulnerability, fluidity, authenticity, song, disruption, that which is life-giving and transformative, as well as that which is disturbing and upending. Does one figure symbolize poetry, the other prayer? I don’t think so. It is not the figures that are imaging poetry and prayer, but the action between the two, the texture of the conversation, the impact of the word on the listener and of the hospitality and conversation of the encounter on the writer and reader. What matters is the dynamism and fruits of what passes between them, the words about prayer that are like a poem. Here is another phrase that flows naturally from the first: ‘the poet speaks to others, and hence to the non-poets, and hence that they too come of themselves into relationship to poetry and poets, and must know what poetry is about’.

Poetry and Prayer

84

So writes Rahner in the beginning of ‘Poetry and the Christian’ (357). He sees the writing, speaking and reading of poetry as relational, a communal undertaking, involving call and response. The essay evidences many of the qualities of Rahner’s life and work, qualities that lend themselves to an exploration of the affinities between poetry and prayer: a humility in his approach to the eclectic subjects he engaged, his emphasis on the freedom of the graced human person, his commitment to a way of work and life that arose out of prayer. Rahner’s approach to poetry is as a Christian and lover of poetry. He makes no claim to being a poet or literary critic, and he expresses some humility as a theologian writing on poetry (357; Theissen 226). Yet, to my mind, that makes him a superb reader of poetry. By way of contrast, both theological and poetic, Rahner’s contemporary, Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Swiss Jesuit12 and another major Catholic theological force of the twentieth century, imposes himself upon the texts he reads and seems to consider himself something of an expert in literary matters. And yet, as Jasper remarks in reference to von Balthasar’s reading of Hopkins, the theologian ‘finally bypasses the poet’s aesthetic, ascetic theology by beginning at the wrong end in the theological tradition and reading only from the outside inward, a theology of surface only that can now be sustained simply through an intellectual concurrence’ (Sacred Body 174). In von Balthasar’s consideration of literature, theology comes first, drawing ‘on the great works of poetry, narrative, and drama for its own purposes’ (Block 220). Influenced by German philosophy, including Heidegger, with whom he studied for two years, and, more importantly, by the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola (Marmion and Hines 2–7), Rahner reads, rather, from the inside outward, beginning his theology with the subjectivity and relationality of the human person. In Rahner’s consideration of poetry, he simply asks, as a Christian and a human being, what can one say on the subject of poetry and the Christian. The query is one of theological reflection that asks if there is something about being Christian that calls for ‘a receptive capacity for the poetic word’ (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 357). Characteristically pastoral and self-effacing, Rahner immediately puts himself and his readers at ease in reflecting on poetry, for we may be ‘consoled and encouraged’, though we are not poets, by several considerations that enable us to engage with it (357). The poet speaks, and in speaking brings us into relationship with poetry. Rahner consoles with Paul’s words to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 2:15) that those who are ‘led by the Spirit of God, may judge all things’ (357). Here is a reminder Balthasar left the Jesuits in 1950, though Kehl claims he ‘remained a true son of Saint Ignatius’ (43). One could argue otherwise, but here is not the place to do so. 12

Poetry and Prayer: ‘An Inner Kinship’

85

of things unfolding, of being led into life poetically. In these times, when so often one hears from the institutional Church that things in the world are to be battled or avoided, how refreshing to read this reminder from a theologian who contributed to the Catholic Church’s opening up to the world fifty years ago with Vatican II: ‘Theology as reflective faith cannot be completely alien to what fills the lofty hours of man and so must be gathered home to God as a whole, since the one seed sown by the one God must ripen in all diverse fields of the world’ (357). Maybe today Rahner’s language can seem overblown, overly optimistic and non-inclusive, yet it rings true. ‘We must go to the Mass of life as we go to the Mass of the altar,’ he urges (365). In other words, in an echo of the founder of the Order to which he belonged, there is nothing in the world profane if only one knows how to look.13 And how to listen. When one does know how to look and listen, he writes, ‘all the senses of the spirit are at one’ (358). As Thiessen puts it: ‘Rahner stressed that in both hearing and seeing we can have sensory experiences of transcendence and that these experiences may become genuine religious experiences of divine self-communication’ (227). It is unsurprising, then, that Rahner would conclude that great, or authentic, Christianity and poetry would have ‘an inner kinship’. Yet it still strikes me as quite radical and remarkable even now, more than forty years after it was written. What are the implications of imaging poetry and prayer as kin? By ‘following’ the aforementioned phrases, we have begun to have some sense of them. Kinship is about inescapable relationality, a deep connection, whether through blood, ritual, character or affinity. To be kin is to listen to, speak to, give voice to an other who is or who will soon be close. Christianity, Rahner says, must have a kinship with the poetic word because of its ‘special intrinsic relationship to the word’ (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 357). To be a Christian, one must be open to the grace of certain requisites. First, one must have ears open to words that have ‘the power of naming the nameless’ (358). Secondly, one must have the power of hearing and understanding ‘words of the heart’, ‘sacral, even sacramental’ words, helping ‘to effect what they signify and penetrate into the primordial centre’ of the human being (360). Thirdly, one must have the power of hearing authentic, reconciling words (361). And fourthly, one must have ‘the power of becoming aware of the incarnational … 13 This spiritual maxim is frequently expressed in Jesuit works. See, for example, Egan’s foreword to Karl Rahner: I Remember, ‘Nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see’ (4), and the Thirty-Fifth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, January 2008, Decree 2, No. 10: ‘For ultimately, there is no reality that is only profane for those who know how to look.’

86

Poetry and Prayer

of hearing the Word become flesh’ (361). Rahner asks, then, what is the word of ‘silent mystery’, which ‘touches the heart’, ‘gathers and unites’ and embodies ‘the eternal mystery’ (362–3)? ‘It is the word of poetry,’ he replies, ‘this power to hear means that one has heard the poetic word and abandoned oneself to it in humble readiness, till the ears of the spirit were opened for it and it penetrated his heart’ (363). What an astounding message from Rahner! At the heart of the Christian message, of its life, is the grace to be open to the gift of poetry. As Thiessen notes, Rahner was exploring the relationship between poetry, theology and Christian living ‘in the context of the decline of Christian themes in literature (and art) in modernity’, asking ‘whether at a more fundamental level, this decline had actually taken place. Perhaps it is simply through new and renewed symbols, forms, and images that something of the spiritual and/or religious is expressed’ (231). To return to one of my proposed, if neglected, poet guides, Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), it is at this fundamental level of both language and the human subject that his creating of a poetics of imagining takes place. He is not explicitly spiritual or religious, yet his work can be experienced as such, and for precisely the reasons suggested by Rahner’s essay. He is not a poet, yet he has clearly the ‘open ears’, to invoke Rahner’s phrase, that allow him to be called by the poets into their world. In his engagement of that world, in his classic text The Poetics of Space (1957), he uses religious language such as ‘soul’, ‘communion’, ‘eulogy’, ‘logos’: ‘poetry is a commitment of the soul … poetic revery … a phenomenology of the soul … Our soul is an abode’ (xxi). Rahner suggests that ‘poetry is one way of training oneself to hear the word of life’ (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 364). Perhaps Bachelard’s greatest relevance here, then, is what he might reveal about the practice of listening for the poetic word. Like Cixous and Rahner, he is an exquisite listener, and it may be this gift that causes him to make a distinction between the mind and the soul. ‘The soul is so sensitive to these simple images’, Bachelard writes, regarding birds’ nests and simple houses, ‘that it hears all the resonances in a harmonic reading’ (99). Bachelard refers always to the poetic image, but he has in mind a linguistic image as he writes, for instance, that ‘the poetic image is an emergence from language’ (xxvii). This poetic word is not static, but rather act and origin. It reaches us at such depths that the result is transformational: ‘It takes root in us … . It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being’ (xxiii). Expression creates being! Here is a word image itself pregnant with transformational possibilities, uniting the sacred and the secular. We are

Poetry and Prayer: ‘An Inner Kinship’

87

reminded of John’s prologue, ‘And the Word became flesh and lived among us’ ( John 1:14). Bachelard speaks of resonances and reverberations that result from the ‘word’. He shows us how the poetic image is relational in its transubjectivity, reacting on independent hearts and minds, creating intimate connections between poet and receiver, some so intimate, if the reader is reading with joy and imagination and not with ‘prudence’, that he or she may even become a reflection of the writer, or, in other words, a participant in an intense kinship. What are these ideas but expressions of communion, which is the heart of Christian faith and community? How might Bachelard’s conception of ‘deep sympathy’ and ‘harmony in reading’ (xxvi) bring new life to our sense of kinship, of communion? For one thing, it has the gift of dynamism, evident even in the language Bachelard uses in his account of it, which always seems to extend beyond mere description. Words like ‘fleeting’, ‘shimmering’ and ‘iridescent’ suggest that there is nothing whatsoever mediocre or static in this interplay.14 The emphasis in both communion and Bachelard’s sympathy is on gift and relationship and their potential to transform those who are participating. For Bachelard, reader and poem are in dynamic relationship as the poetic image transforms the reader, he says, from homo faber into homo aleator, the explorers of possibility in the world and in ourselves’ ( Jones 10). Rahner refers to the depths of one’s heart as the place where both God and the poetic word are to be encountered. Perhaps it is the same space as what Bachelard refers to as ‘soul’. It may be where that kinship between prayer and poetry happens, because, as Rahner writes: great poetry only exists where man radically faces what he is. In doing so, he may be entangled in guilt, perversity, hatred of self and diabolical pride, he may see himself as a sinner and identify himself with his sin. But even so, he is more exposed to the happy danger of meeting God, than the narrow-minded Philistine who always skirts cautiously the chasms of existence, to stay on the superficial level where one is never faced with doubts – nor with God. (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 365)

Reading Rahner, Cixous and Bachelard, praying with Ignatius, the depths of the heart are never forgotten. Cixous is a constant visitor to the depths, a connoisseur of the interior descent. This is what she says about depths and writing, and, like Rahner, she is speaking of ‘great’ – as in authentic – writing. She is referring here to several of her favourite writers: Clarice Lispector, Heinrich von Kleist, Franz See, for example, Bachelard (Poetics of Space xx).

14

88

Poetry and Prayer

Kafka, James Joyce, Jean Genet, Marina Tsvetaeva and a few others she returns to again and again, those she calls ‘descenders’: Writing is not put [on the surface], it does not happen out there, it does not come from outside. On the contrary, it comes from deep inside. It comes from what Genet calls ‘the nether realms’, the inferior realms (domains inférieurs). We’ll try to go there for a time, since this is where the treasure of writing lies, where it is formed, where it has stayed since the beginning of creation: down below. The name of the place changes according to our writers. Some call it hell: it is of course a good, a desirable hell. This is what Clarice calls it: inferno. She does not always use the word hell but all kinds of parallel denominations (‘the other side’ cited in The Stream of Life is Tsvetaeva’s abyss). It is deep in my body, further down, behind thought. Thought comes in front of it and it closes like a door. This does not mean that it does not think, but it thinks differently from our thinking and speech. Somewhere in the depths of my heart, which is deeper than I think. Somewhere in my stomach, my womb, and if you have not got a womb – then it is somewhere ‘else’.

She writes this in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (118), or rather speaks it, as the text was first given as part of the Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory at University of California, Irvine, in 1990. The steps on the ladder, which one ascends as one descends, correspond with three schools of writing: the school of the dead, the school of dreams and the school of roots. Theory becomes practice, spiritual practice. On the following page (in the final ‘school of roots’) of this poetic text I have come to experience as spiritual, at some time, I don’t recall when, I wrote in the margin, ‘cf. Igs. – the interior descent, joy, not in despair’. I had forgotten it and not followed the phrase, as Heidegger had inspired me to do here, to see what kinship Cixous might have with Ignatius of Loyola. This is what I discovered when I read the page again that must have put me in mind to draw them together into conversation: Since we are shaped by years and years of all kinds of experiences and education, we must travel through all sorts of places that are not necessarily pleasant to get there: our own marshes, our own mud. And yet it pays to do so. The trouble is we are not taught that it pays, that it is beneficial. We are not taught the pain nor that in pain is hidden joy. We don’t know that we can fight against ourselves, against the accumulation of mental, emotional, and biographical clichés … . It is a fight one must lead against subtle enemies. (Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing 119; my emphasis)

Poetry and Prayer: ‘An Inner Kinship’

89

What must have resonated in Cixous’s poetic writing was the spiritual writing of Ignatius in his Spiritual Exercises, which I have come to experience as poetic. Ignatius’ text was born out of his spiritual struggles, much of it written as he wandered through Europe, engaging men and women in what he referred to simply as spiritual conversations.15 One could say his book was not created to be read, but to be ‘walked’ while in conversation. It is on one level a manual for those who would direct others in the exercises, a series of Gospel meditations and contemplations meant to enable one to grow into a more intimate relationship with God. This occurs, if it occurs, not by reading the text, but by participating in the narratives of Jesus, from the Nativity to the Ascension. The text is subversive, a quality usually unnoticed by casual readers.16 It is radical most of all because Ignatius cuts out any mediator in the God–human relationship, believing as he did that the human person could encounter God directly and intimately in the imagination. Its theology is unconventional in that it is passionate, creative, experiential, equalizing and founded in prayer. Its anthropology is one of deep respect for the freedom of the human person. The entrance into the exercises is where I find the resonance with Cixous, in the First Week of the thirty-day retreat in which the exercises are undertaken, when the exercitant asks: ‘Where have I been caught in the mud?’ As Ignatius says in his instruction in the First Exercise of the First Week: In a case where the subject matter is not visible, as here in a meditation on sin, the representation will be to see in imagination my soul as a prisoner in this corruptible body, and to consider my whole composite being as an exile here on earth, cast out to live among brute beasts. (§ 47)

As the retreatant moves through the exercises, he or she comes to know that hidden joy Cixous speaks of. The movement is the same: the review of the past, sometimes hellish, but beneficial and with hidden joy. Yet it is their mutual recognition of the damage we do to ourselves that is most striking, where the individual man or woman radically faces who he or she is. The language is too close for two who are so far apart in time and place. It is Once, when challenged by a Dominican friar, who had invited him to Sunday dinner, about his activities and those of his four travelling companions (possibly the beginnings of the Compañiade Jesús, translated, perhaps unfortunately, into English as ‘Society of Jesus’, which was founded ten years later), Ignatius replied: ‘we do not preach, we speak to a few in a friendly manner about the things of God, just as one does after dinner with those who invite us’ (A Pilgrim’s Journey 126). 16 See ibid. 130–31. 15

90

Poetry and Prayer

too strange, but it comes, I imagine, out of the same origin: the two are students of the interior depths we have been discussing, where the kinship between poetry and prayer is most likely to be illuminated. Listen to what Ignatius says about the subtleties of the enemy in his ‘Rules for Discernment of Spirits’. He refers to ‘the customary deceits of the enemy’, the way the ‘evil one’ works subtly to draw one who is experiencing spiritual joy into ‘his own wicked designs’ and how we must face ‘temptations boldly’ (§334, §325). We have attempted to open paths towards a space transfigured by both poetry and prayer. This was the destination sought by Ignatius in his Spiritual Exercises, which end, potentially, with an inner rebirth. Inspired by Heidegger’s poetic reading of poets, we followed phrases about hearing the voice of poets written by two Jesuit scholars who were attentive listeners to the word of poetry. We have touched upon the initial concerns of joyous seriousness, descent into inner depths, and listening for the poetic word, and did so in a manner that attempted authentic listening to the voice of poets and to my own voice. Poetry and prayer. To end with an echo of the end of Rahner’s essay that has inspired this chapter, ‘we have really said very little about this lofty theme’, though ‘there is practically only one thing we can do here: it is to ask ourselves how far we have become men. One way, though not the only way, of knowing this, is to see whether our ears are opened to hear with love the word of poetry’ (‘Poetry and the Christian’ 367). Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969 (first published 1957). Block, Ed . ‘Balthasar’s Literary Criticism’. In Oakes and Moss eds, The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 207–23. Cixous, Hélène. Reading with Clarice Lispector. Ed. and trans. Verena Andermatt Conley. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. — Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva. Ed. and trans. Verena Andermatt Conley. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1991. —. ‘“Magnetizing the World”: An Interview with Hélène Cixous’. The Writing Notebooks of Hélène Cixous. Ed. and trans. Susan Sellers. London: Continuum, 2004, 116–22. —. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Poetry and Prayer: ‘An Inner Kinship’

91

— and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet. Encounters: Conversations on Life and Writing. Trans. Beverley Bie Brahic. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. —and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. London: Routledge, 1997. Clark, Timothy. Martin Heidegger. London: Routledge, 2002. Conley, Verena Andermatt. ‘Introduction’. In Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector, vii–xviii. —. ‘Introduction’. In Cixous, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva, ix–xiv. —. Hélène Cixous. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. De Certeau, Michel. The Mystic Fable, Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Egan, Harvey D. ‘Foreword’. In Rahner, Karl Rahner: I Remember. An Autobiographical Interview with Meinhold Krauss, 1–11. European Graduate School. ‘Hélène Cixous – Biography’. The European Graduate School: Graduate & Postgraduate Studies. 12 May 2014. Heidegger, Martin. ‘Poetically Man Dwells’. Poetry, Language, Thought, 211–29. —. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. —. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Trans. Keith Hoeller. New York: Humanity Press, 2000. Hofstadter, Albert. ‘Introduction’. In Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, ix–xxv. Hölderlin, Friedrich. ‘In Lovely Blueness …’. Poems and Fragments. Trans. Michael Hamburger. London: Routledge, 1966, 601. Ignatius of Loyola. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: A New Translation Based on Studies in the Language of the Autograph. Trans. Louis J. Puhl. Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 1951. —. A Pilgrim’s Journey: The Autobiography of Ignatius of Loyola. Trans. Joseph N. Tylenda. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1985. Jasper, David. The Sacred Body: Asceticism in Religion, Literature, Art, and Culture. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009. —. The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament, and the People of God. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012. Jones, Mary McAllester. Gaston Bachelard, Subversive Humanist: Texts and Readings. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

92

Poetry and Prayer

Kehl, Medard. ‘Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Portrait’. In Kehl and Löser eds, The Von Balthasar Reader, 3–54. Kehl, Medard and Werner Löser, eds. The Von Balthasar Reader. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1980. Marmion, Declan and Mary E. Hines, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. —. ‘Introduction’. The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, 1–10. Oakes, Edward T. and David Moss, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Rahner, Karl. ‘Poetry and the Christian’. Theological Investigations, Volume IV: More Recent Writings. Trans. Kevin Smyth. Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1966, 357–67. —. ‘Priest and Poet’. Theological Investigations, Volume III: The Theology of the Spiritual Life. Trans. Karl-H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1967, 294–317. —. ‘Anonymous Christians’. Theological Investigations, Volume VI: Concerning Vatican Council II. Trans. Karl-H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger. Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1969, 390–98. —. Karl Rahner: I Remember. An Autobiographical Interview with Meinhold Krauss. Trans. Harvey D. Egan. New York: Crossroad, 1985. Thiessen, Gesa Elsbeth. ‘Karl Rahner: Toward a Theological Aesthetics’. In Marmion and Hines eds, The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, 225–34.

Part II Case Studies: Pre-Modernity

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 6

Poetic Art and Prayer in Psalm 145 David Rensberger

This chapter offers a close reading of Psalm 145 (in my own translation), attending to certain aspects of the author’s poetic technique. It does not aspire to say everything that could be said about the poetry of the psalm. Once these aspects are before us, we will consider how the artistry of this psalm helps to create its character as prayer. Psalm 145 A few general words about Psalm 145 are in order at the start. As has often been observed in recent years, there is an overall movement in the Book of Psalms from complaint and petition towards praise, although there is nothing like a straight-line progression (Brown 112–33; Anderson 207–10). The Psalter ends with a stirring series of five praise hymns. Each of these last five psalms begins and ends with the Hebrew phrase halĕlû yāh, ‘Praise Yah’, commonly rendered ‘Hallelujah’ or ‘Praise the Lord’.1 Psalm 145 precedes this concluding sequence of five psalms, and does not have a halĕlû yāh. However, it is framed by cognate words for ‘praise’ in verses 2, 3 and 21. One of these words (tĕhillâ, ‘praise’) appears not only at the end in verse 21, but also in the title as a designation of the psalm’s genre. Most of the psalms have titles (which derive from their editors, not their authors), and most of these titles indicate a genre, such as ‘psalm’ or ‘song’. Only Psalm 145, however, has tĕhillâ named as its genre. Now, the book that we call ‘Psalms’ in English is actually named Tĕhillîm, ‘praises’, in the Hebrew Bible; and it is striking that only this one psalm near the end is actually identified as a tĕhillâ. Psalm 145, then, as a tĕhillâ, occupies a significant position within Yāh is an alternative form of the Hebrew sacred name YHWH (probably pronounced ‘Yahweh’). Since ancient times it has been customary in Judaism to replace this name with a word meaning ‘Lord’ when reading aloud. Thence it has become traditional in English Bible translations to render the divine name as ‘the Lord’, and for the sake of familiarity I have followed this convention where Psalm 145 has YHWH. 1

96

Poetry and Prayer

the Psalter. Its function is to introduce the concluding series of praise hymns (‘the final word of the Psalter before the book’s closing doxological words’; deClaissé-Walford 57), and its genre-title is also that of the book as a whole. Psalm 145 is one of 73 psalms whose titles include the term lĕdāwid, conventionally translated as ‘of David’ and traditionally taken as an indication of authorship. Today it is widely recognized that this expression could mean many things, including ‘written by David’, but it is probably not in fact an assertion of authorship. Instead, it may mean ‘collected by David’, ‘dedicated to David’, ‘in the tradition of David’ or the like. Linguistic factors make it clear that David was not the actual author of Psalm 145. The characteristics of the Hebrew found in this psalm point to a date some time in the Second Temple period, within a maximal range of, say, 500–200 BCE, many centuries after David. Thus we must take the composition as anonymous; at any rate, its author is unknown to us.2 Psalm 145 may have been written for private devotion, but more likely for use in the Temple or some other public liturgical setting (Allen 297; Kimelman 55–8). Though the first-person singular is featured early in the psalm and at its end, there are also references to praise that spans generations, and the psalm’s concerns are not particularly individual ones: ‘God’s beneficence is described in a general, universal way … this is not a personal testimony’ (Berlin 20; compare Goldingay 697; contrast Westermann 224). Table 1 shows my translation of Psalm 145, which will be referenced throughout this chapter. It is based on the traditional Masoretic Hebrew text, with one exception (see below on verse 13A).3 My rendering does not seek to be elegant, but is instead somewhat excessively literal. This literalism is required for the sake of the verbal consistency that is essential to the kind of analysis offered here; for the same reason, I have not attempted to use inclusive language in the pronouns referring to the Deity, but have left them masculine as in the Hebrew text. With regard to one term in particular, most English translations still render the Hebrew word malkût as ‘kingdom’ in the psalm’s central verses, but it must be questioned whether this is really the best translation. The term’s real sense can be brought out by rendering it as ‘sovereignty’ or ‘kingship’ or ‘reign’, as some Roman Catholic versions do (the New Jerusalem Bible and New American Bible, respectively). It does not, in the first place, refer to a place, a ‘kingdom in the skies’, but to an action or quality of reigning, in this case to God’s active rule 2 Despite some interesting comparisons with 1 Chron. the argument of Booij, that Psalm 145 was intentionally written ex persona Davidis as an introduction to the hymns of praise that follow it, is not really persuasive. 3 Concerning a few variants in wording found in other textual traditions, see Kimelman 38–40, and commentators such as Goldingay 693–5 and Allen 293–4.

Poetic Art and Prayer in Psalm 145

97

over the created world and a faithful covenant people. I therefore use the term ‘reign’ rather than ‘kingdom’ in my translation and discussion (as does Allen 293; Goldingay 694). Table 1

Psalm 145 (author’s translation)

Section A

Section B

1 I will exalt you, my God who reigns, and will bless your name forever and ever. 2 Every day I will bless you, and will praise your name forever and ever. 3 Great is the Lord, and much to be praised; his greatness is unsearchable. 4 One generation shall extol your works to the next, and shall tell of your mighty deeds. 5 I will meditate on the glorious splendour of your majesty and on your wondrous acts. 6 They shall talk of the might of your awesome deeds, and I will declare your greatness. 7 They shall pour forth the renown of your abundant goodness, and shall celebrate your justice. 8 The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and great in faithfulness. 9 The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all his works. 10 All your works, O Lord, shall thank you, and your faithful ones shall bless you. 11 They shall talk of the glory of your reign, and shall speak of your might, 12 to make known to the human race his mighty deeds, and the splendid glory of his reign.

13A Your reign is an everlasting reign, and your dominion extends through all generations. 13B The Lord is constant in all his words, and faithful in all his works. 14 The Lord sustains all who are falling, and raises up all who are bent over. 15 The eyes of all look to you in hope, and you give them their food in due time. 16 You open your hand, satisfying the desire of all that lives. 17 The Lord is just in all his ways, and faithful in all his works. 18 The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in constancy. 19 He will carry out the desire of those who fear him; he will hear their cry and save them. 20 The Lord guards all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy. 21 My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless his holy name for ever and ever.

Poetry and Prayer

98

Psalm 145 as Poetry Initial Observations With the translation in Table 1 as a basis, let us consider various aspects of the poetry of Psalm 145.4 The most noticeable literary feature of the psalm is the fact that it is an alphabetic acrostic. That is, the first word of the first verse begins with the letter ʾālep, the first word of the second verse begins with bêt, and so on through the Hebrew alphabet. This is not the only such acrostic in the Psalter: Psalms 9 and 10, 25, 34, 37, 111, 112 and 119 are also complete or partial alphabetic acrostics.5 Sometimes more or less than one verse intervenes between the successive letters of the alphabet: in Psalms 111 and 112, the succession goes by single lines (half-verses) rather than entire verses, while in Psalms 9 and 10 and 37 each letter seems to cover two verses. In Psalm 119, each group of eight verses begins with the next successive letter of the alphabet – a considerable achievement in its own right. Many of the acrostics are incomplete, lacking one or more letters (Psalms 9 and 10, 25, 34 and 37). In Psalm 145, the alphabetic sequence is interrupted: between verse 13, beginning with mêm, and verse 14, beginning with sāmek, there should be a verse that begins with the letter nûn, but the traditional Hebrew Masoretic text does not have a nûn verse. On the other hand, several ancient translations, including the Greek Septuagint, Latin Vulgate and Syriac Peshitta, do contain such a verse. Two Hebrew manuscripts, one medieval and one from among the Dead Sea Scrolls, also have a nûn verse, which is substantially identical to the Greek, Latin and Syriac ones. It has been suggested that Psalm 145 was originally an incomplete acrostic, and that this nûn verse was supplied by a later copyist, perhaps based on verse 17 (Kimelman 49–51; Goldingay 695 presents both sides of the question). However, the vocabulary of the verse is One aspect that will not be considered is metre, since the metrical characteristics of ancient Hebrew poetry are much in dispute. While metre, or at least rhythm, of some sort does seem to be present in most psalms, no systematic description of it has ever proven persuasive. For succinct discussions, see Brown 5–6 and Seybold 66–8 (with examples). Psalm 145 does have a definite sense of rhythm, which varies from part to part (on these parts, see the discussion of structure below). In the promises of praise, the first line or colon of each verse is generally longer than the second; but this is not true of the first two verses and the last (a kind of metrical inclusio). The verses in the substantive praise, on the other hand, tend to have more evenly balanced lines. 5 In the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, Psalms 9 and 10 are, probably correctly, numbered as a single psalm. The concluding poem in the Book of Prov. (31:10–31) and the first four chapters of Lamentations are also alphabetic acrostics. 4

Poetic Art and Prayer in Psalm 145

99

very much in keeping with the rest of the psalm, and as we will see below, there are structural considerations that suggest that it is in fact a necessary part of the original composition. The relatively widespread attestation of essentially the same verse also suggests that it was not a late arrival to the textual tradition; nor do we find missing verses supplied in the ancient versions of other incomplete acrostic psalms. Psalm 145, then, was originally a complete alphabetic acrostic, and in some way the nûn verse was lost from the Masoretic text.6 The nûn verse is accepted by the New Revised Standard Version and most other contemporary English translations. It is shown as verse 13B in my translation (and verse 13 of the Masoretic text is marked as verse 13A). The alphabetic acrostic form has often been thought, especially by earlier critical commentators, to be artistically and thematically restrictive, demanding as it does that the poet begin each verse with a specified letter.7 Particularly in an age such as ours, which prefers free verse to more formal poetry, such a convention might be considered stifling to creativity, more a parlour trick than an artistic undertaking. Some of the alphabetic acrostics in the Psalter do indeed have a certain disjointed and synthetic quality (Psalm 25, for example). Our psalmist, however, has managed to carry it off beautifully, leaving the hearer or reader with no sense at all of artificial phrasing or connections, as more recent scholarship has observed.8 In the hands of this poet, the acrostic has become a frame supporting a sophisticated network of figures in the service of a coherent and compelling theme: the universal praise of God’s gracious sovereignty. Structure Though the alphabetic acrostic provides one kind of overall framework for Psalm 145, the psalm’s full literary structure is determined by other factors. In fact, there are structuring features in Psalm 145 that sometimes coincide with one another and sometimes conflict or overlap, as is the case in many psalms. Because of this, scholars, while agreeing in general on the units that make up the psalm, have offered a variety of detailed structural analyses that differ widely in their complexity (Liebreich; Berlin; Lindars; Kimelman; Auffret; deClaisséWalford; commentators such as Goldingay 696). The primary structuring 6 See Lindars; Clifford 301. Pearl, ‘The Theology of Psalm 145, Part II’, discusses rabbinic theological reflections on the reason for the omission of the verse. 7 For a survey of such views, see Liebreich 181–2. 8 The psalmist ‘took the acrostic pattern in his artistic stride and found it no obstacle to a coherent development of his message’ (Allen 296).

Poetry and Prayer

100

criterion used in this chapter is content.9 However, as will be seen below, other features of the psalm sometimes verify and sometimes violate divisions established on this basis. Only a sampling of those features is included here; others may be found in the works just cited. To begin with, as already noted, the entire psalm is framed by verses that speak of praise and promise that God’s name will be blessed for ever and ever (1–2, 21, forming an inclusio). Between these two promises lie two nearly equal main sections. The first (verses 1–12, Section A in Table 1) mostly contains promises of praise, made on behalf of the speaker (verses 1–2), the coming generations (verses 4–7) and the whole of creation, especially the covenanted faithful (verses 10–12). The second section (verses 13A–21, Section B in Table 1) contains the substance of the praise itself, in the form of laudatory statements about God’s doings. At the centre of the psalm, verse 13A forms a transition, repeating and concluding the themes of God’s reign and the future generations from Section A, while at the same time beginning the substantive praise of Section B. There is thus an overall structure consisting of (A) promise to praise, and (B) fulfilment of the promise, rounded off in verse 21 by a final promise that serves as conclusion and epitome. Granted this basic overall analysis, we find furthermore that Section A, alongside its promises, already contains adumbrations of their fulfilment (compare Kimelman 53–4). The whole pattern is thus worked out in a series of small units forming an ascending scale, as follows. Section A Two verses that promise praise (verses 1–2) One verse that praises (verse 3) Four verses that promise praise (verses 4–7) Two verses that praise (verses 8–9) Three verses that promise praise (verses 10–12). Section B Nine verses that praise (verses 13A–20) One verse that promises praise (verse 21). The praise in Section B is thus a kind of long crescendo prepared for in Section A. As noted above, the subjects who promise the praise in Section A vary from unit to unit. At first, the ‘I’ who speaks the psalm does the promising. In verses Compare Allen 295, and the precedents cited there.

9

Poetic Art and Prayer in Psalm 145

101

4–7, the subject alternates between this speaker and the succeeding generations (simply ‘they’ in verses 6 and 7). In verses 10–12, the promise is ascribed to all God’s works, the creation at large, coupled with God’s ‘faithful ones’ – that is, the covenant people Israel. In the concluding verse, the speaker returns, but the subject of the promise is also extended once again to ‘all flesh’.10 Clearly, this progression from a single praising speaker to multiple praising generations to a praising people to a praising universe is an important feature of the overall movement of the psalm (Berlin 21; Kimelman 40–41; deClaissé-Walford 65). Scholars have observed that references to God’s sovereignty are mainly concentrated in verses 11–12, the verses beginning with kāp, lāmed and mêm, respectively, and that these letters, in reverse order, form the Hebrew root mlk, ‘king, sovereign’ (Watson; Kimelman 45; deClaissé-Walford 58; Lindars 26, 28). Here in the middle of the psalm, then, just before the transition from its first main section to its second, the theme of divine sovereignty is made central to it. Following the transitional verse 13A, the long substantive praise in Section B may be seen as offering examples of God’s glorious and everlasting reign (Clifford 302). This praise itself falls into two equal units: verses 13B–16 and 17–20. The two verses that introduce these units, 13B and 17, are nearly identical, clearly marking the structural subdivisions. After these introductions, the first unit, verses 14–16, focuses on the divine care for and sustenance of all creatures, while the second, verses 18–20, focuses on God’s help and protection of devotees. Thus these two subsections fulfil the promises of praise attributed to ‘all your works’ and ‘all your faithful’, respectively, in verse 10. The structural necessity of verse 13B, the nûn verse, and the reason for its similarity to verse 17, are thus apparent (compare Allen 295, 298). We also begin to see the intricacy with which the psalmist has designed the poem. Repetition, Alternation and Interlace It is already clear that there is significant structural intentionality at work in this poem beyond the alphabetic acrostic, and we have barely scratched the surface. Of the other instances of this intentionality, the most important have to do with repetition. Some of these have already been noted, such as the inclusio that frames the entire psalm, but there are many more, forming variegated patterns of interlacing and alternation.

Note that in verses 1, 10 and 21 the promise is specifically to ‘bless’ God, another structuring device (Liebreich 187). 10

102

Poetry and Prayer

Grammatical Person One of the more interesting examples of structural repetition and alternation in Psalm 145 has to do with the use of grammatical person in reference to God. Second person (for example, ‘your works’, ‘your mighty deeds’ in verse 4) and third person (for example, ‘his compassion’, ‘his works’ in verse 9) alternate throughout the psalm in a careful pattern that interacts with other structural factors. Generally speaking, the promises of praise are addressed to God (second person), while the substantive praises are spoken about God (third person). This can be seen in verses 1–2, 4–7, 10–11 (promises of praise) and 3, 9, 13B and 17–20 (substantive praise). Thus the second person tends to dominate what I have designated Section A, and the third person Section B (compare Mays 438). This pattern is not maintained absolutely, however. There are three exceptions to it. To begin with, verses 15–16 are substantive praise, but address God in the second person. The reason for the shift seems to be that they are drawn from another source (Psalm 104:27–8, as will be shown below), and the grammatical person has been imported along with them. This draws attention to the intertextual allusion, and to the wider themes that are implied in it. The pattern is already disrupted, however, at the division between the psalm’s two main sections. Verse 13A, which begins the substantive praise of Section B, nevertheless uses the second person rather than the third person that typifies that section. Thus, in continuing and concluding the themes of God’s reign and the future generations from the earlier promises of praise, it also continues their use of the second person. As the promise of cross-generational praise for God’s reign made in Section A begins to be fulfilled in Section B, not only the terms of the promise, but even its grammatical form are drawn into this fulfilment. There is a further complication at this transition point as well. In the Hebrew text, verse 12 has third-person pronouns, as reflected in my translation. This creates a very awkward discontinuity with verse 11, and ever since the Revised Standard Version, most English translations have followed the Greek and Syriac renderings in using second-person pronouns in verse 12. It seems possible to me, however, that the shift to the third person is intentional, balancing, as it were, the shift to the second person in the following verse. This may seem peculiar and rather unsatisfactory as poetic technique, but could be part of this psalmist’s method of interlacing the sections of the poem. The final disruption of the pattern occurs in the last verse, a promise of praise that uses the third person rather than the second, perhaps as a means of binding together the entire poem, both the promises of praise addressed to God and the substantive praise spoken about God.

Poetic Art and Prayer in Psalm 145

103

Thus there is deliberate patterning of grammatical person throughout the psalm, partly corresponding to and partly crossing structural boundaries between the promises of praise and the giving of praise. Generally speaking, the promises of praise are, naturally enough, addressed to God, and the substantive praises are spoken about God. But the final, universal promise of praise uses the third person, so that the promises that begin as an address to God conclude by announcing to the hearers and readers a pledge in which they are included, implicitly inviting them to participate in this world-wide praise. The disruption of the symmetrical relationship between person and structural units may be seen, at a basic level, as giving variety to the composition. But this complex pattern also serves to bind together and interlace the parts of the psalm that it first of all distinguishes from one another. In this way, the patterning of grammatical person characterizes the psalm as promising, giving and inviting to praise. Verbal Repetition Other patterns of repetition have to do with particular words. I have deliberately tried to make this patterning visible in my translation, even at some cost in fluency. (The widely used New Revised Standard Version, perhaps seeking a variety more pleasing to the modern ear, has obscured much of this repetition in its rendering of Psalm 145.) Like the grammatical patterning just examined, verbal repetition serves both to mark off segments of the psalm and to link them with one another. For instance, references to God’s glory, might and reign cluster in verses 11 and 12, but they also echo verses 4 and 5, and indeed the very first line of the psalm, where God is hailed as Sovereign. Thus these repetitions on the one hand highlight verses 11–12 as presenting the psalm’s central theme, and on the other hand help bind together the parts of Section A that promise praise. Other repetitions create figures such as inclusio and chiasmus. We have noted the inclusio of eternal praise and blessing that surrounds the psalm as a whole. The psalmist has also managed to insert several elegant chiasms, even while maintaining the acrostic pattern.11 An obvious example is verse 2: Every day I will bless you, and will praise your name for ever and ever. Lindars appears to want to analyse the entire psalm as a chiasm, but this seems to me to be forced. 11

Poetry and Prayer

104

Another is found in verse 20: The Lord guards all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy.

(Further examples in verses 10 and 21 are difficult to reproduce in English, given the differences from Hebrew word order.) A chiasm can even cross verse boundaries, as in verses 11–12, where ‘glory’ and ‘reign’ define the outer elements of the chiasm and ‘might’ the inner ones: They shall talk of the glory of your reign, and shall speak of your might, 12 to make known to the human race his mighty deeds, and the splendid glory of his reign. 11

The most elaborate repetitive figure in Psalm 145 involves inclusio, anadiplosis, chiasm and two significant structural markers. Verses 4–9 (the second pair of units that promise praise and then give praise in the psalm’s ascending scale) are bounded by an inclusio using plural forms of the Hebrew word ma´ăśe, translated ‘works’, in the first line of verse 4 and the last line of verse 9. From the end of verse 9, this term, and indeed the entire phrase ‘all his works’, is then picked up in the beginning of verse 10 as ‘all your works’, one of the several examples of anadiplosis in the more limited construal of these and other repetitions by Liebreich (188). The anadiplosis itself, however, forms the inner elements of a boundary-crossing chiasm that joins verse 10 to verses 8 and 9. Its outer elements are created by the echoing of the word ḥesed, ‘faithfulness’, from verse 8 as ḥăsîdîm, ‘faithful ones’, in verse 10: The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and great in faithfulness. 9 The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all his works. 10 All your works, O Lord, shall thank you, and your faithful ones shall bless you. 8

Finally, these same two roots, ‘faithful’ and ‘works’, are picked up once again in verses 13B and 17, which introduce the two thematic units within Section B. This rather spectacular act of repetition and interlacing thus serves to bind almost the entire psalm together. God’s ‘works’ are both object and subject of

Poetic Art and Prayer in Psalm 145

105

praise, and God’s faithfulness, seen in these works, is mirrored by God’s faithful people, who announce the glory of God’s mighty reign. The works that are the object of human praise in verse 4 receive God’s compassion in verse 9, and in their turn give praise in verse 10. There they are surrounded by the faithfulness of God (verse 8) and God’s praising people (verse 10b). In verses 13B and 17, these works embody the faithfulness for which God is praised, a faithfulness that is spelled out in the bulk of verses 13B–20. By skilfully repeating these two terms, ‘works’ and ‘faithful(ness)’, and placing them in shifting relationships with one another, the poet creates a network of internal allusion that sustains the psalm’s portrayal of a praiseworthy God presiding over a universe of praise. Wordplay (Consonance) Let me mention only briefly another aspect of the artistry of Psalm 145 – briefly, because it is not really possible to represent it in English (for further examples, see Kimelman 51–2; deClaissé-Walford 59–61). The psalm contains a great deal of wordplay of various kinds. There are a number of examples of consonance, for instance. In the acrostic format, the first word of each verse must begin with a specified letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and several verses contain multiple words featuring the letter with which they begin; verse 18 is an example, with three words that contain the letter qôp. Sometimes this phenomenon even crosses verse divisions. For example, verse 20 belongs to the letter šîn (representing the sound ‘sh,’ [(ʃ]), and it has three words that feature this letter; but the second line of the preceding verse 19 already contains three other words using that same sound. Moreover, all six of these words also contain the letters mêm (the sound [m]) or ʿayin (the pharyngeal [ʕ]) or both of them. The result is an appealing, even amusing, collocation of sounds near the end of the poem. Intertextuality I mentioned earlier that verses 15–16 are drawn from another psalm, and even bring the grammatical second person along with them. This leads us to a further striking feature of Psalm 145: its use of intertextual references (for further instances, see, for example, Kimelman 54). Verses 15–16 allude to Psalm 104:27–8, working it into the acrostic pattern.12 The following is the text of Psalm 104:27–8, with the words that also appear in Psalm 145 italicized: Where the verse numbering of the psalms differs between Hebrew and English, the English numbering has been used. 12

106

Poetry and Prayer These all look to you in hope to give them their food in due time. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.

In Psalm 145, ‘the eyes of ’ (ʿênê) has been added in order to begin verse 15 with the letter ʿayin, and ‘you open’ (pôtēaḥ) has been moved to the head of verse 16 to begin it with pê. With these and other relatively minor changes to fit the acrostic and the rhythm, the author has transformed the earlier text so as to integrate it transparently into the new psalm. The verses have their own significance in the context and organization of Psalm 104, and seem to be original to that psalm. The dexterity with which they have been incorporated here indicates the skill of the poet, and the intentionality evident in their incorporation suggests that the allusion itself has some significance, as will be shown below. The other major example of intertextual allusion in Psalm 145 is found in verse 8. This verse introduces the concept of God’s faithfulness, and it does so by quoting the Israelite credo found in Exod. 34:6 and cited in numerous other places. The following is the Exodus text (in my translation), again with the words that appear in Psalm 145 italicized: ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in faithfulness and constancy’. Here the changes are even fewer. First, the words for ‘merciful’ and ‘gracious’ are reversed. This enables a fit with the acrostic (ḥannûn, ‘gracious’, is the first word in the Hebrew of Psalm 145:8, representing the letter ḥêt), but it is also the wording found in many of the other citations of this credo in the Hebrew Bible: Psalm 111:4; Joel 2:13; Jon. 4:2; Nehemiah 9:17, 31, and 2 Chron. 30:9 (Kimelman 49). Secondly, the word rendered ‘abundant’ (rab) is replaced by ‘great’ (gĕdol). This is rather remarkable, since rab is found in all other citations of this phrase (Num. 14:18; Psalms 86:15 and 103:8; Joel 2:13; Jon. 4:2), and even generates a separate fixed expression, ‘abundant faithfulness’ (for example, Psalms 5:7 and 69:13; Nehemiah 13:22). The change is probably made for the sake of repetition, since the psalmist has used the root gdl, ‘great’, three times already (verses 3 and 6), and this substitution, which would have been quite noticeable to the psalm’s hearers, creates an obvious link, especially to verse 6, the previous instance of substantive praise. Somewhat playfully, perhaps, the psalmist also tucks a rab into the immediately preceding verse 7. Finally, the

Poetic Art and Prayer in Psalm 145

107

allusion ends with ḥesed, ‘faithfulness’, which, as noted earlier, is then taken up in the chiasm of verses 8–10 and becomes thematic in the rest of the psalm.13 These two cases of intertextual allusion enable the psalm to expand its hearers’ and readers’ frame of reference. We may assume that the psalmist expected them to recognize the reference to Psalm 104, signalled by its atypical use of the second person. If so, then Psalm 104 as a whole, with its extensive praise of the ‘manifold works’ and wisdom of the Creator (104:24), is brought into this psalm by reference, as a further exemplification of how God is ‘constant in all words, and faithful in all works’ (145:13B). As for the allusion to the Exodus credo, it could not possibly have been missed. By working it into this psalm’s network of internal cross-references in the manner demonstrated earlier, the poet has connected the theme of the divine Sovereign’s praiseworthy faithfulness to Israel’s most basic belief and devotion. The fluency with which these two pieces from other contexts have been integrated into Psalm 145 is remarkable. The allusions are evident to the knowing hearer, yet they are not at all obtrusive, nor do they disrupt the poem’s flow. They rest easily within the alphabetic acrostic, are linked adroitly to the verbal patterning, and function dynamically, and even programmatically, within the poem’s meaning, just as if it were their natural home. Facility This leads me to one final observation about the artistry of Psalm 145, which is that, for all its dexterity, it manages not to call attention to itself. The poet, in achieving all that is laid out above – the acrostic, the structural elements, the repetitive patterns and figures, the wordplay, the intertextuality, incorporating not one, but two verses of a completely different psalm into the new composition – has also contrived to make it appear completely uncontrived. There is never any sense of forcing or strain. As much artifice as some of these techniques undoubtedly require, the psalm does not feel artificial. Moreover, the psalmist has executed all of this while creating a distinct and consistent emotional experience for the hearer or reader. The entire psalm flows serenely and joyously from beginning to end. Casual readers, even in Hebrew, are scarcely conscious of what has been achieved here. Those who read closely, however, are rewarded with ever more remarkable detail. It is rather like listening to the change-ringing of church bells, For other aspects of the significance of the adaptations of Exod. 34:6 here, see Kimelman 43–4, 49. 13

Poetry and Prayer

108

or contemplating an initial letter in an Irish manuscript. In the oral society in which the psalm was first introduced, hearers, very possibly in a liturgical context, would have been affected by all these features, even if below the level of conscious awareness, and this would have contributed to their experience of worship. The author of Psalm 145 was a very skilled poet, using a variety of means to build up the beauty and appeal, even the playfulness, of the psalm, all the while working within the strict demands of the acrostic framework and poetic rhythm, and in the end creating a persuasive emotional and cognitive fabric. It is a remarkable artistic achievement. Poetry and Prayer All this artistry, this verbal and conceptual density and complexity, serves not merely to display the poet’s skill, however. It also supports the function of the psalm as a tĕhillâ, a prayer of praise. As the above analysis has shown, Psalm 145 has two components, deeply interconnected with one another: promises of praise, and the substantive praise that fulfils these promises. Such praise, promised on behalf of the speaker, the ‘faithful ones’, future generations, and indeed the entire cosmos (‘all your works’, ‘all flesh’), is something that has grown sadly unfamiliar in our time. Democratic and egalitarian societies, surveying modern history, have become suspicious of praise because of the falsity of the ways in which it has been demanded by some people and offered by others. The late A.M. Allchin, in his book on Welsh poetry Praise Above All, saw the antidote in recognizing the religious context of all praise, even praise of people. ‘Praise,’ Allchin wrote, ‘like all worship … is that which is due to God’, and other praise refers indirectly back to God: By referring all things back to their creator we see them again lit up by the light of his glory, shot through with the energies of his wisdom and his love. We see that unblemished world of origins, in which God saw all that he had made, and behold it was very good. (Allchin 4)

When human beings encounter these energies – what our psalmist calls ‘the splendid glory of [God’s] reign’ – praise is really the only option. An encounter with divine glory simply generates worship and praise in us. Praise is what humans do when faced with the glory of God, because God is God and we are we. We are creatures, we have a creator, and we are only truly ourselves as creatures when we give free and willing praise to our Creator. To praise God is to

Poetic Art and Prayer in Psalm 145

109

experience a profound form of the delight that we know when we discover who we truly are and what it means to be truly ourselves. It is this experience and this encounter, I suggest, that the author of Psalm 145 seeks not only to report but to re-enact and to recreate in this poem. ‘That unblemished world’ is the world that our psalmist sees, and the purpose of the psalm is to disclose it to hearers and readers so that they may give praise as well. Thus it is that much of the substantive praise consists of reciting God’s attributes: ‘Great is the Lord, and much to be praised … The Lord is gracious and merciful … good to all … constant in all his words … just in all his ways, and faithful in all his works.’ The acclamations in Psalm 145:13A–20 of what God is and does function as praise by setting forth the Creator’s praiseworthiness (Berlin 20). They are laudatory because they express qualities that human beings value; at the same time, they mediate an experience of this great and merciful God to those who hear them, and thus evoke their praise in turn. Psalm 145 is addressed to ‘my sovereign God’, as the phrase in its first line might be rendered, and the praise of God’s sovereignty is its theme. The attributes of this sovereign God as the speaker recites them, ‘gracious and merciful, slow to anger and great in faithfulness’, had been celebrated in the credo of the covenant people that the author has woven into the psalm. These qualities of grace, mercy, patience and faithfulness are not static, but are dynamically displayed in the reign of the God who is ‘good to the entire universe’ (as we may translate the first line of verse 9). Specifics of this reign are depicted in the psalm’s second main section: sustaining and raising up the languishing, satisfying the needs and desires of living beings, guarding the faithful and saving them from wrongdoers. By reciting not only divine attributes but divine actions as well, the psalmist again seeks to evoke praise from those who recognize the need for both justice and compassion in the world’s governance. As suggested above, the allusion to Psalm 104 in verses 15–16 works to incorporate that psalm’s own praise of the Creator’s works and wisdom into Psalm 145. Few biblical texts evoke ‘that unblemished world’ as thoroughly and delightfully as Psalm 104. It soars to ‘ride on the wings of the wind’ with God; tumbles with the watercourses from the mountains down to the valleys; visits the wild asses and the cattle, the stork and the coneys; rejoices in the gladness of wine and the day’s labour; observes without regret the night time when the lions, too, seek their food from God. Each of these creatures, by its very existence in its proper niche of grass and rocks and forest, is a kind of praise (compare Psalm 148:3–10.) Allchin asserts that to praise the goodness in any created thing is to celebrate the goodness of the Creator (6), and quotes from a thirteenth-century Irish defence of poetry:

110

Poetry and Prayer All metre and mystery touch on the Lord at last. The tide thunders ashore in praise of the High King. (9)

Likewise, the poet of Psalm 145 declares, ‘All your works, O Lord, shall thank you’, and points implicitly to one aspect of that thanksgiving by making reference to Psalm 104 and its sweeping praise of the creation’s goodness. We have seen how the complexity of the psalm’s structure and verbal resonances, created by various techniques of positioning, cross-referencing and differentiation, serve both to distinguish the parts of the psalm from one another and to link these parts together and interweave them with one another. What role does this kind of intricate structuring and patterning have to play in the psalm’s function as prayer? Some scholars have pointed out that even the alphabetic acrostic form, rather than being merely a restrictive literary convention, serves the poem’s larger purposes: ‘The poet praises God with everything from A to Z; his praise is all-inclusive. More than that, the entire alphabet, the source of all words, is marshalled in praise of God’ (Berlin 18). In Talmudic interpretation, the acrostic may be seen as figuring God’s omnipotent transcendence: ‘All existence is included in Him and in His power, from aleph till tav’ – all the more so since the Talmud makes the letters of the alphabet the creative elements used in God’s fashioning of the universe (Pearl, ‘The Theology of Psalm 145, Part I’ 7). Beyond the acrostic, the intricate complexity of Psalm 145 both reflects and re-enacts the detailed care and loving attention of God as creator and ruler that the psalmist praises. In approaching this claim, let us look at an example of repetition that I have not yet considered: the use of the word kōl, ‘all’ (noted, for example, by Liebreich 189–90; Berlin 19; deClaissé-Walford 59). It occurs 19 times in the psalm, 15 of them in verses 13A–21. All days, ages and generations are mentioned (in verses 2 and 13A, I have had to translate ‘every day’ and ‘everlasting’). Four times there is reference to all God’s works, and once each to all God’s words and ways. There are references to ‘all’ of various categories: the falling and the stooped, those who call on God and love God, the wicked. More globally, we read of all that lives and of all flesh, while in verse 15 it is simply ‘all’ who look to God for sustenance, and in verse 9 God is said to be good to ‘all’ – that is, to the entire universe. This insistent appeal to totality is at the same time an appeal to detail and particularity. Hebrew has no separate word for ‘each’ or ‘every’, but uses kōl in specific ways to express these ideas. ‘All’ can thus bring into view not only the whole, but its individual constituents as well. ‘All [God’s]

Poetic Art and Prayer in Psalm 145

111

works’ means every single creature that exists, every single action that God takes. In the psalm’s employment of kōl, the speaker invites the hearers and readers to envision the consistency of God’s faithfulness and justice, the immense and exacting detail of God’s creative and sustaining attention, and the universal devotion and praise that these inspire in every individual creature. This evocation of the Creator’s attentiveness to the manifold details of the creation is echoed in the attention given by the psalmist to the making of the poem. Such an apparently slight matter as grammatical person is arranged so as to coincide, for the most part, with the psalm’s varying components, but with a few exceptions that help to connect these components to one another, and to highlight the allusion to Psalm 104. Inclusio and chiasmus are prominent in the psalm. Indeed, they are not uncommon throughout the Book of Psalms, but the need to work them into the alphabetic acrostic demonstrates the poet’s ability and desire to polish the details of the work. Other patterns of verbal repetition give the composition shape and interconnection. The terms ‘works’ and ‘faithfulness’, in particular, are not scattered at random through the psalm, but are placed in multiple relationships to one another and to the psalm’s parts, themes and intertextual allusions. The use of wordplay, in the midst of the acrostic and all these other procedures, also evidences a concern for detail, but one that is open to playfulness. For all its momentous thematic, the poem remains entertaining as well. The complex fabric created by all these means, with all its interworking parts, both delights and gives occasion for deeper reflection. Just as the natural world responds to detailed analysis by human observers, so Psalm 145 responds to the kind of study undertaken here. The fact that it does so implies the presence of a painstaking and dextrous creator behind the work, and as we draw this inference with regard to the poem, the poet would have us draw a parallel inference with regard to its subject. The intricately detailed composition of this psalm embodies what the psalmist has to say about the divine attentiveness to cosmic details and the praise that this gracious attentiveness should call forth, within the psalm itself and beyond the psalm in the response of its hearers and readers. The intricacy of Psalm 145, mirroring the intricacy of God’s praiseworthy actions, is part of the way in which it works as a prayer of praise. Thus the artist praises the artistry of creation through the art of the poem. Let me add to this the suggestion that the sheer delight induced by reading the psalm also mirrors and encourages the delight to be found in the world when contemplating its Maker. Perhaps we may speculate that it also intimates the poet’s joy in creativity as a reflection of the joy of the Creator of all.

Poetry and Prayer

112

A further aspect of how the psalm’s poetry contributes to its function as a prayer of praise is more abstract: the combination of structural coherence and fluidity that Psalm 145 exhibits. By this, I mean the way in which the pieces are all carefully polished and fitted together, yet the poetry has a natural ease of movement from verse to verse and section to section, as observed above. This blending of solidity and elegance, I suggest, is one further, albeit less distinct, reflection of the character of the God whom the psalm praises, a God at once faithful, just and merciful. The Exodus credo offers a series of descriptors of the divine nature: gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abundantly faithful. The latter term in particular, ‘faithfulness’ (ḥesed), is one of the key theological terms in the Hebrew Bible, used to characterize both the covenant God and the covenant people. As we have seen, the poet adopts it from the credo and makes it a linchpin of both the structure and the sense of this psalm. In addition, the psalm expands the credo’s descriptors with several comparable terms: God is ‘great’, ‘good’, ‘constant’ and ‘just’. All these qualities are then exemplified in the recital of God’s actions in verses 14–16 and 18–20. This God, then, who is both faithful and merciful, just and provident, is extolled in poetry that is at once tightly knit and graceful. The elegant fluency of the psalm and its structural solidity work together not only to make a literary impression on the reader or hearer, but to build up a theological impression as well. Characteristics that might be thought to be at odds with one another, such as justice and mercy, greatness and patience, are united in Israel’s God. It is at least arguable that this union of conceptual opposites is figured in the union of sturdy construction and deft agility that characterizes Psalm 145 itself.14 Finally, according to Psalm 145, praise is to be given to God not just by the psalmist and the psalm’s hearers and readers, but by all God’s faithful people, by all human generations, and indeed by all that God has made. This is a wide diversity of worshippers, reaching even beyond the bounds of the human race (as also in Psalm 148). I suggest that praise offered by such a diverse ‘congregation’ is appropriately figured precisely in the intricate language that this poem employs. The intricacy of the poetry represents the intricately interwoven voices of all these worshippers through space and time. The many different words for speaking praise (bless, praise, meditate, extol, talk, declare, make known and so on) emphasize ‘the many ways in which praise for [God] can be expressed’ Pearl, in ‘The Theology of Psalm 145, Part I’, suggests that, in Talmudic interpretation, Psalm 145 presents both the transcendence and omnipotence of God (in its beginning-toend acrostic), and God’s immanence and loving care even in times of suffering (verse 16, and much else in the psalm). 14

Poetic Art and Prayer in Psalm 145

113

(Berlin 19; compare Goldingay 697). It is a complex world, this ‘unblemished world’ that the psalmists envision; and the complexity of the interlaced words and structures of this psalm provides a beautiful image of the elaborate and varied praises offered by its creatures. The poetic artistry of Psalm 145 displays and even creates its nature as prayer, and specifically as a tĕhillâ, a prayer of praise. The psalm as a whole is permeated by praise: praise that arises from encountering ‘the glory of [God’s] reign’ and celebrates the being and the doings of this sovereign God. Such praise shows forth ‘that disinterested joy, that delighted wonder in all that is shining and beautiful, which is at the heart of worship and adoration’, and exists in ‘infinitely varied manifestations’ (Allchin 6). Psalm 145 is a magnificent poetic and spiritual achievement, one that is well worthy of its prominent place near the climax of the Book of Psalms. The poet, whoever it may have been, has devised an elaborately worked out hymn of praise that gladdens and intrigues its hearers and readers, and invites them to join the cosmos-wide and generations-long adoration that it both summons and reflects. Careful attention to the psalm’s composition rewards us with insight into how this result has been accomplished. Works Cited Allchin, A.M. Praise Above All: Discovering the Welsh Tradition. Cardiff: University of Wales, 1991. Allen, Leslie C. Psalms 101–150. Word Biblical Commentary 21. Waco, TX: Word Books, 1983. Anderson, Bernhard W. Out of the Depths: The Psalms Speak for Us Today, 3rd edn. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000. Auffret, Pierre. ‘Qu’ils disent la gloire de ton règne! étude structurelle du psaume 145’. Science et Esprit 50 (1998): 57–78. Berlin, Adele. ‘The Rhetoric of Psalm 145’. In Biblical and Related Studies Presented to Samuel Iwry, ed. Ann Kort and Scott Morschauser. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1985, 17–22. Booij, Thijs. ‘Psalm CXLV: David’s Song of Praise’. Vetus Testamentum 58 (2008): 633–7. Brown, William P. Psalms. Interpreting Biblical Texts. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2010. Clifford, Richard J. Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries: Psalms 73–150. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2003.

114

Poetry and Prayer

deClaissé-Walford, Nancy. ‘Psalm 145: All Flesh Will Bless God’s Holy Name’. Catholic Biblical Quarterly 74 (2012): 55–66. Goldingay, John. Psalms: Psalms 90–150. Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic Press, 2008. Kimelman, Reuven. ‘Psalm 145: Theme, Structure, and Impact’. Journal of Biblical Literature 113 (1994): 37–58. Liebreich, Leon J. ‘Psalms 34 and 145 in the Light of Their Key Word’. Hebrew Union College Annual 27 (1956): 181–92. Lindars, Barnabas. ‘The Structure of Psalm CXLV’. Vetus Testamentum 39 (1989): 23–30. Mays, James Luther. Psalms. Interpretation. Louisville, TN: John Knox, 1994. Pearl, Chaim. ‘The Theology of Psalm 145, Part I’. Jewish Bible Quarterly 20.1 (1991): 3–9. —. ‘The Theology of Psalm 145, Part II’. Jewish Bible Quarterly 20.2 (1991–1992): 73–8. Seybold, Klaus. Introducing the Psalms. Trans. R. Graeme Dunphy. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1990. Watson, Wilfred G.E. ‘Reversed Rootplay in Ps 145’. Biblica 62 (1981): 101–2. Weiser, Artur. The Psalms: A Commentary. Trans. Herbert Hartwell. The Old Testament Library. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1962. Westermann, Claus. The Living Psalms. Trans. J.R. Porter. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1989.

Chapter 7

Prayer and Prayerfulness in Dante John Took

Preliminary Remarks: Dante, Prayer and Prophecy It is appropriate in a volume dedicated to exploring the relationship between prayer and poetry as each in its way an expression of the soul’s sincere desire that we turn to one of the greatest Christian-theological voices in our tradition, to the Dante of the Divina Commedia.1 For here, in a work at every point presupposing prayer and prayerfulness as a condition of man’s journey into God, are two of the most exquisite prayers in European letters, each alike uttered in a moment of maximum spiritual tension and urgency. What we shall do, therefore, over the next few pages is to indicate the nature of that journey into God as conceived by Dante, and then, by way of celebrating his genius as a maker of prayers, read and enjoy the two most prayerful moments of the poem without further comment, Dante thus having the last word. Straight away, though, we run into a problem, for the Commedia, which at every point invokes the idea of prayer as a condition of the soul’s movement into God as the beginning and end of its every yearning, does not on the face of it commend itself as a particularly prayerful undertaking. Prophetic, yes, but not especially prayerful. For, conceived as it is ‘in pro del mondo che mal vive’ (‘for the sake of the world that lives awry’; Purgatorio XXXII.103), the poem is all too angry for this, too busy about bringing people to their senses. On the one hand, then, there are the superiores, the princes and prelates, popes and emperors, who, called upon to guarantee the peace and quiet required for man’s proper coming about as man and to lead him on to pastures new, have instead left him to his own On Dante and prayer, with reference especially to Paradiso XXXIII, see Auerbach; Costanzo; Vallone; Salsano; Barberi Squarotti; Perotti; Migliorini Fissi; Scrivano. On prayer as the soul’s ‘sincere desire’, see the hymn beginning ‘Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire, / Uttered or unexpressed, / The motion of a hidden fire / That trembles in the breast’, a sustained meditation on the nature of prayer with a concluding plea to the effect we be taught how to pray: ‘O Thou by whom we come to God, / The life, the truth, the way, / The path of prayer Thyself hast trod: / Lord, teach us how to pray!’ ( James Montgomery, 1771–1854). 1

116

Poetry and Prayer

devices, ungoverned, untutored, and on the point of ceasing to be as a creature of moral and ontological determination (the ‘poco è più morte’ or ‘death is hardly more’ of Inferno I.7). On the other hand, there are the inferiores, the ordinary pilgrim spirits who, having but a hazy notion of what it might be like to be in, through and for God as the alpha and omega of all being, opt instead for the alternative project, delivering themselves as they do so to something less than their properly human happiness, the kind of happiness contingent on their being forever over and beyond themselves as creatures of seeing, understanding and loving (the ‘trasumanar’ of Paradiso I.70). In this sense, then, the Commedia is an angry poem, a poem conceived and articulated over against a world which, having lost its way, stands in need of prayer, certainly, but, more than this, of prophecy, of a speaking out of the prophetic spirit to the generations. Now this is not to say that the poem is without prayer and the sweet substance thereof. On the contrary, prayer is there and there in abundance, both as the mood and as the condition of man’s proper being and becoming as man. Thus, not only are the souls in purgatory everywhere at prayer, prayer being a means of their purification, but those in paradise are likewise engaged in a constant act of praise and thanksgiving, their whole existence being in this sense a matter of prayer and of prayerfulness writ large. More than this, the Commedia is, as we have said, home to two of the most exquisite prayers in our literature, namely Dante’s gentle meditation on the Lord’s Prayer as recited by the penitent spirits in Canto XI of the Purgatorio as they struggle to assert the humble over the hubristic self, and Bernard of Clairvaux’s prayer of intercession at the beginning of Paradiso XXXIII, designed to confirm the pilgrim poet in a sense of the grace whereby he is able at last to move into God as the terminus ad quem of his every spiritual striving. Again, then, prayer, even in its unspokenness, is everywhere present in the poem both as a condition and as a co-efficient of the soul’s proper emergence, of its knowing itself in communion with the One who is as of the essence. But – and this now is the point – prominent as prayer is as the necessary condition, and indeed the means, of the soul’s indiarsi, or movement into God, the poem itself remains, in the way we have indicated, prophetic rather than in any obvious or sustained sense of the term prayerful in inspiration; so, for example, as bearing precisely on its vatic or oracular substance as Dante himself understands it, these lines from the twilight phase of the Purgatorio: Tu nota; e sì come da me son porte, così queste parole segna a’ vivi del viver ch’ è un correre a la morte.

Prayer and Prayerfulness in Dante

117

[Take note, and even as these words are spoken by me, so teach them to the living whose life is but a race towards death.] (Purgatorio XXXIII.52–4)2

or these from the Cacciaguida episode in the central part of the Paradiso (XVII.121–35) turning now on the courage of that speaking out and on the bitterness it will always and everywhere engender in the darkling spirit: La luce in che rideva il mio tesoro ch’io trovai lì, si fé prima corusca, quale a raggio di sole specchio d’oro; indi rispuose: ‘Coscïenza fusca o de la propria o de l’altrui vergogna pur sentirà la tua parola brusca. Ma nondimen, rimossa ogne menzogna, tutta tua visïon fa manifesta; e lascia pur grattar dov’ è la rogna. Ché se la voce tua sarà molesta nel primo gusto, vital nodrimento lascerà poi, quando sarà digesta. Questo tuo grido farà come vento, che le più alte cime più percuote; e ciò non fa d’onor poco argomento.’ [The light wherein was smiling the treasure I had found there first became flashing as a golden mirror in the sun, then it replied: ‘A conscience dark, either with its own or with another’s shame, will indeed feel your speech to be harsh. But none the less, all falsehood set aside, make manifest all you have seen; and then let them scratch where it itches. For if at first taste your voice be grievous, yet shall it leave thereafter vital nourishment when digested. This cry of yours shall do as does the wind, which smites most upon the loftiest summits; and this shall be no little cause of honour.’]

Now, clearly, the substance and urgency of the Commedia as a pre-eminently prophetic utterance rules out neither the piety nor the prayerfulness necessary to its coming about as the expression of a specifically Christian spirit. On the contrary, each alike subsists in the recesses of the text as that whereby every inflection of the line is authorized from deep within itself and confirmed in Text of La Commedia, ed. Petrocchi. Translations (and occasional modification) by Singleton. 2

118

Poetry and Prayer

its seriousness. But for all that, the prayerful, typically, is taken up in the prophetic as the dominant mood of the text, as that whereby its prayerfulness is modulated in the interests of, again, the ‘mondo che mal vive’. The Divina Commedia: Eschatology and Existence Paul Tillich, who understood very well what is going on in Dante, spoke of the Commedia as entering the ‘deepest as well as the highest places of courage and salvation’ and as offering ‘in poetic symbols an all-embracing existential doctrine of man’ (Tillich 128–9). Both parts of the formula, the ‘deepest and highest places’ part and the ‘poetic symbols’ part, are exact, Dante’s seriousness as a philosophical and theological spirit being matched only by the kind of imaginative genius whereby the fiction or story line is indispensable to the theological project as he himself understands it – to a project, that is to say, proposed by way, not of the idea pure and simple, but of the predicament of the one lost to himself and to the reasons of his being in the world. The story is straightforward. Dante, as protagonist in his own poem, finds himself lost in a dark wood and threatened by three beasts, a lion, a leopard and a wolf, standing between him and the sunlit uplands beyond the valley. Catching sight of a shadowy figure in the depths of the forest, he pleads after the manner of the psalmist (‘Miserere di me’) for assistance, discovering as he does so that the figure before him is the poet Virgil, who advises him that there is no easy way out. Rather, what is required of the lost soul is a roundabout journey down into the pit, up across the terraces of Mount Purgatory at the antipodes of Jerusalem in the southern seas, and away across the circling spheres of Dante’s geocentric universe towards the empyrean as but the divine mind in its encompassing, as the enfolding of everything that is in the world in consequence of the original and abiding fiat. Making his way, then, with Virgil, down through the circles of intemperance, of violence and – as the form in man of ultimate self-betrayal – of fraudulence, the pilgrim poet enters into conversation with any number of the reprobate on any number of matters both personal and political in kind, the latter extending often enough to the specifically ecclesiastical (popes and prelates being well represented in this part of the poem). Finally, he reaches the bottom of the pit, where, the inane beating of Satan’s bat-like wings apart, all is still and frozen over, the very image of spiritual atrophy. Clambering, therefore, across the hideous form of Satan as imprisoned at the centre of the universe, the pilgrim poets emerge at last on the shores of Mount Purgatory at the antipodes of Jerusalem, the vastness of its seascape and skyscape – the very antithesis of

Prayer and Prayerfulness in Dante

119

the darkness, the claustrophobia and the issuelessness of hell – holding out the possibility of new life, of the most radical kind of spiritual self-surpassing. But neither here can there be any dalliance, the figure of Cato, the Cato of Utica who gave his life for the sake of freedom, at once despatching them to the mountain as a place of the utmost urgency, a place brooking no delay when it comes to the business of spiritual self-cleansing. First, then, on the lower terraces of the mountain, comes the ante-purgatory, the moment of thoughtfulness and selfpreparation preparatory to the rigours of purgatory proper, and then purgatory itself, the moment in which, having taken the guilt of self into self as the first step towards its liquidation, the soul embarks on the process of self-cleansing, of, more exactly, bringing home the kind of love generated by the sights and sounds of the world about to the kind given with the act of existence itself and calling the soul into communion with God as its final cause.3 With what amounts, then, to the affective re-configuration of self, to the bringing home of the potentially demonic to the potentially deiform on the plane of properly human loving, the way is open for an ultimate ascent of the spirit, for a movement of self into God, there to rediscover self in all its power to the most rapturous kind of spiritual self-surpassing. Sphere by sphere, then, the pilgrim poet wings his way into the presence of the One who is absolutely, there to behold first of all the co-presencing of all being in the simple light of the Godhead, and then, by way of a progressive assimilation of the subject to the object of understanding, the opening out of that simple light in terms now of a triple circularity bearing inscribed upon its central component our likeness, ‘la nostra effige’. This, however, – this centrality of the human project to the very life of the Godhead itself – is an inkling of the spirit apt straight away to defy all understanding, and it is in the moment of his deepest perplexity that the pilgrim-poet is at last overcome by a sense of the 3 The key text here, decisive for any account of the Purgatorio as something more, and indeed something other, than a matter merely of satisfaction or of paying off debts incurred by sin as in itself absolved, is in the Purgatorio at XVII.91–102: ‘“Né creator né creatura mai”, / cominciò el, “figliuol, fu sanza amore, / o naturale o d’animo; e tu ’l sai. / Lo naturale è sempre sanza errore, / ma l’altro puote errar per malo obietto / o per troppo o per poco di vigore. / Mentre ch’elli è nel primo ben diretto, / e ne’ secondi sé stesso misura, / esser non può cagion di mal diletto; / ma quando al mal si torce, o con più cura / o con men che non dee corre nel bene, / contra ’l fattore adovra sua fattura”’ [He began: ‘Neither Creator nor creature, my son, was ever without love, either natural or of the mind, and thus you know. The natural is always without error; but the other may err either through an evil object, or through too much or too little vigour. While it is directed on the primal good, and on secondary goods preserves right measure, it cannot be the cause of sinful pleasure. But when it is turned awry to evil, or speeds to good with more zeal, or with less, than it ought, against the Creator works his creature’].

120

Poetry and Prayer

love-substance of it all, of a primordial affectivity constituting within the economy of existence as a whole its ultimate and irreducible referent: O luce etterna che sola in te sidi, sola t’intendi, e da te intelletta e intendente te ami e arridi! Quella circulazion che sì concetta pareva in te come lume reflesso, da li occhi miei alquanto circunspetta, dentro da sé, del suo colore stesso, mi parve pinta de la nostra effige: per che ’l mio viso in lei tutto era messo. Qual è ’l geomètra che tutto s’affige per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova, pensando, quel principio ond’ elli indige, tal era io a quella vista nova: veder voleva come si convenne l’imago al cerchio e come vi s’indova; ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne: se non che la mia mente fu percossa da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne. A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa; ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle, sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. [O light eternal, who alone abidest in thyself, alone knowest thyself, and, known to thyself and knowing, lovest and smilest on thyself ! That circling which, thus begotten, appeared in thee as reflected light, when my eyes had dwelt on it for a time, seemed to me depicted with our image within itself and in its own colour, wherefore my sight was entirely set upon it. As the geometer who wholly applies himself to measure the circle, and finds not, in pondering, the principle of which he is in need, such was I at that new sight. I wished to see how the image conformed to the circle and how it has its place therein; but my own wings were not sufficient for that, save that my mind was smitten by a flash wherein its wish came to it. Here power failed the lofty phantasy; but already my desire and my will were revolved, like a wheel that is evenly moved, by the love which moves the sun and the other stars.] (Paradiso XXXIII.124–45)

Prayer and Prayerfulness in Dante

121

So much, then, for the narrative line of the Commedia, its account of Dante’s journey through the three realms of the next life there to behold (a) the plight of those who, called to be in, through and for God, opt instead for a species of self-idolatry, for a location of self at the centre of its own universe, knowing themselves as they do so only in the impossibility and thus in the despair of it all; (b) the struggle of those who, having taken the guilt of self into self as the first step towards its liquidation, are busy about reconfiguring their loves, of submitting the lesser to the greater on the plane of properly human desiring, and (c) the bliss of those who, having been crowned and mitred king and bishop over themselves (the ‘per ch ’io te sovra te corono e mitrio’ of Purgatorio XXVII.142), and thus confirmed in their equality to the forces of annihilation operative from out of the depths, move now into God there to delight in him and he in them. But – and this now is what matters – the eschatological in the Commedia is but the fulfilment and definitive statement of the historical, of the innermost truth of this or that instance of specifically human being here and now, just as the journey of the pilgrim poet through the three realms of the afterlife is but an analogue of the call to the nothing if not arduous process of self-recognition, of self-reconfiguration and of self-transcendence proper to the spiritual journey this side of death. First, then, as far as man here and now is concerned, comes the moment of self-encounter, the moment in which, conscious of the hiatus in self between the what might be and the what actually is of his presence in the world, the individual descends into self, there to confront the will both to affirmation and to annihilation, both to doing and to undoing as moral and ontological possibility (the infernal phase of his journey into God). Then, and in strict dependence on the moment of self-encounter everywhere preliminary in human experience to resurrection and new life, comes the moment of lovereorganization, the moment in which the soul sets about ‘gathering in’ the kind of love engendered by the world about and thus contingent on the moral moment proper of human experience (the moment, that is to say, either of consent or dissent) to the kind given with the act itself of existence and thus preceding the moral moment of that experience (the purgatorial phase of the soul’s journey into God).4 Finally, and presupposing both the infernal and the On the gathering in of contingent to connatural loving (that is, of the love engendered by the world to the love given with existence itself ), see Purgatorio XVIII.55–63: ‘Però, là onde vegna lo ’ntelletto / de le prime notizie, omo non sape, / e de’ primi appetibili l’affetto, / che sono in voi sì come studio in ape / di far lo mele; e questa prima voglia / merto di lode o di biasmo non cape. / Or perché a questa ogn’ altra si raccoglia, / innata v’è la virtù che consiglia, / e de l’assenso de’ tener la soglia’ [Therefore, whence comes the intelligence of the first cognitions man does not know, nor whence the affection for the first objects of desire 4

122

Poetry and Prayer

purgatorial phases of the soul’s journey into God, comes the paradisal phase of that journey, the moment in which, projected as it is on something both other and greater than self, the soul knows itself in the rapture of its being over and beyond self, in the ecstasy of, again as Dante himself puts it in the first canto of the Paradiso, its ‘transhumanity’. It knows itself, in other words, in the most farreaching kind of spiritual recapacitation, in a proportioning of self to the truth in and by which it is confirmed in the fullness of its proper humanity. It is, then, with this, with this sense of man’s being and becoming here and now as a matter of seeing self, of structuring self and of surpassing self, that we come at last to the place of prayer in the Commedia, where by the term ‘prayer’ we mean both the quiet discursiveness of the spirit as it ponders its being in God as the means of being in self and thus of standing significantly in its own presence, and the kind of intercessory urgency whereby it seeks out grace as the condition of this situation, as the ground and guarantee of its proper deiformity or Godlikeness. The Prayerful Moment: Purgatorio XI and Paradiso XXXIII When it comes to prayer and prayerfulness in the Commedia, there are two main moments to consider: the moment represented by the Lord’s Prayer as spoken by the penitent spirits on the circle of pride in Canto XI of the Purgatorio and that represented by the great prayer of supplication on the threshold of Paradiso XXXIII and preparatory to a final, consummate moment of intellection. As far, then, as the first of these is concerned, it is a question not simply of the soul’s intoning the words of a prayer designed, precisely, to deflect attention away from self towards the other and greater than self, but by way of the most exquisite kind of ‘re-flection’, or turning back upon its successive clauses, of its assimilating that prayer as an inwardly operative principle of self-interpretation: O Padre nostro, che ne’ cieli stai, non circunscritto, ma per più amore ch’ai primi effetti di là sù tu hai, laudato sia ’l tuo nome e ’l tuo valore da ogne creatura, com’ è degno di render grazie al tuo dolce vapore. which exist in you even as zeal in the bee for making honey; and this primal will admits no deserving of praise or blame. Now, in order that to this will every other may be conformed, there is innate in you the faculty that counsels and that ought to hold the threshold of consent]. See also XVII.91–102.

Prayer and Prayerfulness in Dante

123

Vegna ver’ noi la pace del tuo regno, ché noi ad essa non potem da noi, s’ella non vien, con tutto nostro ingegno. Come del suo voler li angeli tuoi fan sacrificio a te, cantando osanna, così facciano li uomini de’ suoi. Dà oggi a noi la cotidiana manna, sanza la qual per questo aspro diserto a retro va chi più di gir s’affanna. E come noi lo mal ch’avem sofferto perdoniamo a ciascuno, e tu perdona benigno, e non guardar lo nostro merto. Nostra virtù che di legger s’adona, non spermentar con l’antico avversaro, ma libera da lui che sì la sprona. [Our Father which art in heaven, not circumscribed, but through the greater love thou hast for thy first works on high, praised be thy name and thy worth by every creature, as it is meet to render thanks to thy sweet beneficence. May the peace of thy kingdom come to us, for we cannot reach it of ourselves, if it come not, for all our striving. As thine angels make sacrifice to thee of their will, singing hosanna, so let men make of theirs. Give us this day our daily manna, without which he backward goes through this harsh desert who most labours to advance. As we forgive everyone the wrong we have suffered, even do thou in thy loving kindness pardon, and regard not our desert. Our strength which is easily overcome put not to trial with the old adversary, but deliver us from him, who so spurs it.] (Purgatorio XI.1–24)

The prayer itself, as Christ’s response to the wordiness of the religious of his time, needs, of course, no glossing, for it is precisely in its focus, its economy and, dare we say it, its particular kind of religionlessness that both its power and its persuasiveness lie. But then again, it does, for each successive clause stands in a now fully transitive sense of the term to be ‘thought’ as a property of spirit, this and this alone ensuring its efficacy as a principle of self-understanding and of self-actualization; hence its careful periodization on the lips of the penitent proud, its constant self-reprise in search of an ever more secure sense of what is being said and of what most matters about it: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’ (not as located, but rather as sovereign in love); ‘hallowed be thy name’ (as is only right among those bound to thee by way of thy great generosity); ‘thy kingdom come’ (for short of this we ourselves are forever lost to it); ‘give us this day our

124

Poetry and Prayer

daily bread’ (without which those of us who strive most to advance through this barren wilderness are but mere stragglers); ‘forgive us our trespasses’ (and look not on our deserving); ‘lead us not into temptation’ (lest we yield yet again to the old adversary). There is here, to be sure, no imposing upon the prayer, no prevailing upon it in its particular kind of sublimity, but rather a sweet antiphony, a gentle rhythm of reading and responsiveness as the now chastened spirit dwells in love upon the archetypal text and replies from out of the recesses of personality to its each successive emphasis. This, in short, is prayer – as prayer, properly speaking, always is – under the aspect of intentionality, as a matter of the soul’s sincere desire. But – provided only that the paradox is not all too much to bear – the prayer whereby the proud are scattered in the imagination of their hearts is also the prayer whereby the penitent spirit prepares to stand proudly in the presence of its maker, there to rejoice unreservedly in the fullness of its power to moral selfdetermination and to a consummate act of intellection. It is, I think, impossible to overstate this as a way of seeing and understanding Dante’s particular kind of Christian spirituality, for though his too – but how could it not be? – is a theology of the cross, it is a theology of the cross, not in the sense of a stabat mater or a stabat Dantes in all the agony thereof, but rather of the Christ event as a matter of moral and ontological re-empowerment, of, in and through the positive presence of the Christ to us, the making of man equal to his own high calling as one coinvolved in the working out of his own destiny. If, then, God’s intervention in Christ was indeed a case of his doing for man what man could not do for himself, and indeed of his making good in Christ the catastrophe of Eden, this is not where Dante’s final emphasis falls. Rather, for all his careful restatement of the classical substance of atonement, his final emphasis falls on the notion, not of satisfaction, but of sufficiency, not of condescension, but of co-adequation as that whereby the life and death of the Christ stands also – and perhaps even ultimately – to be understood; on the one hand, then, the redemption moment of the argument, the moment registering God’s concern for man in his fallenness and his taking upon himself the burden of satisfaction, of making good for that fallenness: Ficca mo l’occhio per entro l’abisso de l’etterno consiglio, quanto puoi al mio parlar distrettamente fisso. Non potea l’uomo ne’ termini suoi mai sodisfar, per non potere ir giuso con umiltate obedïendo poi,

Prayer and Prayerfulness in Dante

125

quanto disobediendo intese ir suso; e questa è la cagion per che l’uom fue da poter sodisfar per sé dischiuso. Dunque a Dio convenia con le vie sue riparar l’omo a sua intera vita, dico con l’una, o ver con amendue. Ma perché l’ovra tanto è più gradita da l’operante, quanto più appresenta de la bontà del core ond’ ell’ è uscita, la divina bontà che ’l mondo imprenta, di proceder per tutte le sue vie, a rilevarvi suso, fu contenta. [Fix your eyes now within the abyss of the eternal counsel, as closely fastened on my words as you are able. Man, within his own limits, could never make satisfaction, for not being able to descend in humility, by subsequent obedience, so far as in his disobedience he had intended to ascend; and this is the reason why man was shut off from the power to make satisfaction by himself. Therefore it was needful for God, with his own ways, to restore man to his full life – I mean with the one way or else with both. But because the deed is so much more the prized by the doer the more it displays of the goodness of the heart whence it issued, the divine goodness which puts its imprint on the world was pleased to raise you up again.] (Paradiso VII.94–111)

On the other hand, there is the restoration moment of the argument, that part of it seeing in Christ’s taking on of the flesh evidence of God’s continuing commitment to the human project, of his facilitating yet again everything that man has it in himself to be and to become: Né tra l’ultima notte e ’l primo die sì alto o sì magnifico processo, o per l’una o per l’altra, fu o fie: ché più largo fu Dio a dar sé stesso per far l’uom sufficiente a rilevarsi, che s’elli avesse sol da sé dimesso; e tutti li altri modi erano scarsi a la giustizia, se ’l Figliuol di Dio non fosse umilïato ad incarnarsi.

126

Poetry and Prayer [Nor between the last night and the first day has there been or will there be so exalted and so magnificent a procedure, either by the one or by the other; for God was more bounteous in giving himself to make man sufficient to uplift himself again, than if he solely of himself had remitted; and all other modes were scanty in respect to justice if the Son of God had not humbled himself to become incarnate.] (Paradiso VII.112–20)

Grace, needless to say, abounds, but it abounds in the sense not of obliterating, nor even of overshadowing every inflexion of the created spirit, but of summoning it afresh to its proper finality, to the kind of deiformity or Godlikeness into which it is called from beforehand. And it is this – this sense in Dante of God’s continuing commitment despite all to the human project in the intrinsic viability of that project – that (a) encourages him in his further sense of paradise as but an opening out of self upon its own ultimate possibility on the planes of knowing and loving, and (b) inspires and sustains the tremendous prayer of intercession on the threshold of Paradiso XXXIII to the effect that the pilgrim poet might indeed issue at last into the fullness of his proper humanity, and thus into his proper inheritance as a creature of the Most High. On the one hand, then, there are those many passages in the Paradiso registering Dante’s understanding of the soul’s journey into God as an ever more ample reconfiguration of self as seeing, understanding and desiring (the ‘dilatarsi’ of Paradiso XXIII.41; the ‘farsi più grande’ and the ‘uscire di sé’ of XXIII.44; the ‘sormontar’ of XXX.57); while on the other hand, there is the prayer itself, a prayer designed not so much to lift the spirit despite itself – in the totality of its undeserving – to something essentially foreign to itself, to something as strange as it is inconceivable, but to confirm it in the rapture of its proper emergence, considerations of undeserving and strangeness, though most certainly having their part to play within the economy of the whole, being left behind now in favour of something immeasurably more magnificent. Hence the magnificence of the prayer itself, which, placed as it is upon the lips of Bernard of Clairvaux as more than ordinarily accredited when it comes interceding with the Virgin, is at once a model of doxological propriety and of deep Christian piety, its successive moments, be they celebratory or petitionary, neatly accommodating one another within the sweet symmetry and gentle linearity of the whole. First, then, comes the moment of apostrophe and ascription, a moment nicely complicated by the paradoxes surrounding the notion of Marian motherhood and by its steady tendency to defy an orderly act of understanding, but by paradox at once taken up in a sense of the Virgin’s presence to us as a beacon of life and light and as a wellspring of grace and hope. But then comes the supplicatory moment of

Prayer and Prayerfulness in Dante

127

the prayer, supplication here, however, chiming perfectly with all that we have discovered relative to, as Dante sees it, the ‘viability of the human project’ in the divine mind, God’s continuing commitment to man as co-partner with him in the working out of the divine plan; for it is a question here, not of God’s raising man without man to his proper blessedness, but of his helping man to help himself, divine intentionality being operative, as it always is in Dante, from out of the recesses of human intentionality, of man’s own will fully and unequivocally to be. True, grace subsists – but again, how could it not? – as that whereby the soul stands at last to be confirmed in its self-surpassing, in its overand-beyondness as knowing and loving, but this is grace as responsive to the exigencies of nature as antecedently disposed to be after the manner of God himself, as in potential to its own deiformity: Vergine Madre, figlia del tuo figlio, umile e alta più che creatura, termine fisso d’etterno consiglio, tu se’ colei che l’umana natura nobilitasti sì, che ’l suo fattore non disdegnò di farsi sua fattura. Nel ventre tuo si raccese l’amore, per lo cui caldo ne l’etterna pace così è germinato questo fiore. Qui se’ a noi meridïana face di caritate, e giuso, intra ’ mortali, se’ di speranza fontana vivace. Donna, se’ tanto grande e tanto vali, che qual vuol grazia e a te non ricorre, sua disïanza vuol volar sanz’ ali. La tua benignità non pur soccorre a chi domanda, ma molte fïate liberamente al dimandar precorre. In te misericordia, in te pietate, in te magnificenza, in te s’aduna quantunque in creatura è di bontate. Or questi, che da l’infima lacuna de l’universo infin qui ha vedute le vite spiritali ad una ad una, supplica a te, per grazia, di virtute tanto, che possa con li occhi levarsi

128

Poetry and Prayer più alto verso l’ultima salute. E io, che mai per mio veder non arsi più ch’i’ fo per lo suo, tutti miei prieghi ti porgo, e priego che non sieno scarsi, perché tu ogne nube li disleghi di sua mortalità co’ prieghi tuoi, sì che ’l sommo piacer li si dispieghi. Ancor ti priego, regina, che puoi ciò che tu vuoli, che conservi sani, dopo tanto veder, li affetti suoi. Vinca tua guardia i movimenti umani: vedi Beatrice con quanti beati per li miei prieghi ti chiudon le mani! [Virgin mother, daughter of your own son, humble and exalted beyond any other creature, the settled end of the eternal plan, you are she who so ennobled human nature that its maker scorned not to be made of it. In your womb was kindled that love by whose warmth, in this eternal peace, this flower was conceived and blossomed. For us here you are a noonday torch of love, and there below, among mortals, an everliving spring of hope. You, my lady, are so magnificent and so powerful that whoever seeks grace without turning first to you is like one wishing to fly without wings. Nor in your kindness do you aid those alone who ask but frequently grace them freely before prayer is made. In you is mercy, in you compassion, in you glowing generosity. In you is all goodness that ever was in a creature. Now this man who, even up to this point, has seen from the pit of the universe how it is with its lively spirits, implores you, of your grace, that he be given grace enough to lift his eyes still higher towards the ultimate blessedness; and I, who never burned for my own seeing more than I do for his, offer all my prayers, and pray that they may not be insufficient that you, with your own prayers, may free him from every cloud of his mortality such that the supreme joy may be made known unto him. And I pray you, our Queen, that, in the fullness of your prayer and with all that he has now seen, you preserve his affection intact. May your care preside over his every inclination. See there Beatrice too who, with so many of the saints, clasps her hands in prayer along with my own.] (Paradiso XXXIII.1–39)

With this, then, the Virgin looks momentarily in Bernard’s direction and then away to the radiance of the One who alone is the object of her delight, Dante for his part being made equal now to his proper calling. If, then, as we began by saying, prophecy, in the round, prevails over prayer as both the occasion and

Prayer and Prayerfulness in Dante

129

the substance of his poem, it is prayer that brings the poem to its tremendous climax, prayer and prayerfulness constituting in this sense both the co-efficient and the encompassing of every triumph of the spirit. Works Cited Auerbach, Erich. ‘La preghiera di Dante alla Vergine (Paradiso XXXIII) ed antecedenti elogi’. Studi su Dante. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1984, 273–308. Barberi Squarotti, Giorgio. ‘La preghiera alla Vergine: Dante e Petrarca’. Filologia e Critica 20 (1995): 365–74 (subsequently in Barberi Squarotti, Il tragico cristiano da Dante ai moderni, Florence: Olschki, 2003, 87–95). Costanzo, Nerina. ‘I versi 1–21 della preghiera alla Vergine. Ipotesi di rilettura’. L’ Alighieri. Rassegna bibliografica dantesca 28.2 (1987): 26–47 (also in Nerina Costanzo, Curiosità del ritmo poetico, Pasian di Prato: Campanotto, 2003, 31–65). Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. with a commentary by C.S. Singleton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970. —. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. Giorgio Petrocchi. 4 vols. Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1994. Migliorini Fissi, Rosetta. ‘La preghiera alla Vergine (Par. XXXIII 1–39)’. Archivio Perugino-Pievese 3.1 (2000): 115–33. Perotti, Pier Angelo. ‘La preghiera alla Vergine (Par. XXXIII 1–39)’. L’ Alighieri. Rassegna bibliografica dantesca 6 (1995): 75–83. Salsano, Fernando. ‘Nella preghiera alla Vergine un percorso melodico. Considerazioni sul Canto XXXIII del Paradiso’. L’Osservatore Romano, 8 December 1991: 3 (revised version entitled ‘Canto XXXIII’, in Lecturae Dantis. Ravenna: Longo, 2003, 242–53). Scrivano, Riccardo. ‘Superbia, umiltà e preghiera in Purgatorio XI’. Esperienze Letterarie 3 (2006): 3–19. Tillich, Paul. The Courage To Be. Glasgow: Collins, 1962 (first published 1952). Vallone, Aldo. ‘Par. XXXIII: la preghiera, l’uso della scuola e l’insufficienza della parola’. Cultura e memoria in Dante. Naples: Guida, 1988, 59–119.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 8

Prayer, Poetry and Silence: A Musical Correspondence Małgorzata Grzegorzewska

The Murderer’s Plea As a starting point for the present analysis of the musical triangle of prayer, poetry and silence, I have chosen the crucial moment of Shakespeare’s Hamlet when the murderer kneels down to pray while the avenger rejects the ill-timed chance to settle accounts. This has always been to me a very demanding episode of Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy. The scene in question foregrounds issues that we are bound to deal with when we address the problems of human iniquity and loneliness, God’s silence (perhaps also mercy and patience) and the heavy weight of our confounded, flawed, blemished and, worst of all, seemingly always useless prayers. Claudius, as any reader of Hamlet remembers, is fully aware of his own guilt, which he confesses in the most straightforward manner: ‘O, my offence is rank: it smells to heaven; / It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t / A brother’s murder’ (III, iii, 36–7). In this self-accusing gesture, the sinner involuntarily points to the image of the Garden of Eden, which since the Fall has grown wild and desolate, as evoked in Hamlet’s first soliloquy: Fie on’t, ah, fie, ’tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. (I, ii, 135–7)

Yet in spite of the obvious pangs of conscience caused by the painful awareness of the gravity of his offence, Claudius’s acknowledgement of guilt proves painfully remote from the blessed repentance that opens the possibility of redemption. From the beginning, the king falls into the trap of sophisticated theological arguments, instead of praying to God. His speech is a perfect example not so

132

Poetry and Prayer

much of calling upon God, but of internal monologue, helplessly folded in upon itself. Although the actual content of their prayers differs, Claudius thus falls into the same trap as the hypocrite Pharisee reproached by Jesus in Luke 18:11: ‘The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.’ The phrase rendered in the King James Bible as ‘prayed with himself ’ in the Greek original reads: ‘πρὸς ἐαυτὸν … προσεύχομαι’, which very acutely foregrounds the solipsistic, self-absorbed disposition of a soul swollen with pride; unaware of its own need, it ultimately dispenses with God’s mercy. As noted by the French contemporary philosopher and Catholic theologian Jean-Luc Marion, Ancient Greeks called such absolute reliance on oneself ‘idiotic’: the word ἴδιος denotes one ‘who appropriates his own identity to such a point that he first does not want to, and then is not able to “leave himself ”’ (Prolegomena to Charity 26). The Pharisee and Claudius share precisely this predicament, which may be expressed in other terms as the result of a lack of hospitality towards the divine Other. The Pharisee’s prayer betrays his inherent resistance to the dialogue with this Other. Jesus’ example of ineffective prayer may thus be interpreted in the light of Jean-Louis Chrétien’s project of ‘hospitable listening’, which in this philosopher’s account becomes also the foundation of true communion based on generosity of spirit: It is in a common space, or, more precisely, it is in what founds any possible community, that we welcome the other. When I really listen, I occupy the place of any other man, and it is equally true that, as everyone knows, there is no attention without a sort of effacement. (9; my emphasis)

This concept provides the foundation for Chrétien’s meditation on prayer, which he ingeniously describes as an aperture, a wound, an opening in the apparently self-sufficient and predetermined structure of our world: Prayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence, as it is the human act that alone opens up the religious dimension and never ceases to sustain, to bear, to suffer that opening. There are, of course, other specifically religious phenomena, but prayer constantly belongs among their conditions of possibility. If we could not address our words to God or the gods, no other act would be capable of aiming at the divine … . With prayer, the religious phenomenon begins and ends. (17)

Prayer, Poetry and Silence: A Musical Correspondence

133

We may say in this context that the Pharisee’s prayer lacks not only humility, but also that which is the fruit of humility: the ability to share space with other human beings and God, letting other voices, other presences, appear in the all-embracing luminosity of attentive silence. And although on the surface Claudius may appear the very opposite of the Pharisee, as he surely does realize the weight of his iniquity and no doubt yearns for mercy, he too is bound to fail as long as he follows in the Pharisee’s footsteps, which he does in his hopeless hesitancy and complaint with himself: Pray can I not: Though inclination be as sharp as will, My stronger guilt defeats my stronger intent And like a man to double business bound I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect. (III, iii, 38–43)

In order better to understand the far-reaching implications of this strange predicament, we may invoke here the formula proposed by Marion. Using his terms, we shall say that the murderer from Shakespeare’s best-known revenge play stands on the verge of the ‘smallest of abysses’1 that separates the ardent wish to be a believer from the very act of belief, no matter how frail, that expresses itself in prayer, no matter how deficient. Marion’s incisive commentary on the nature of this smallest and, at the same time, paradoxically, also truly insurmountable barrier that separates faith and hope from loneliness and despair, helps us understand the murderer’s predicament, which is not so much a matter of troubled conscience as of Claudius’s false image of himself. The philosopher writes in this context: What answer do we give to he who objects (and we have all said or heard this admission): ‘I don’t have the faith that I wish I had?’; or, ‘I have the unbelief that I wish I didn’t have’? Nothing – there is no answer to give, and for several reasons. First, such a formulation is given as an objection, therefore as an argument, and attempts, be it only unconsciously, to make the stake of the will once again into a discussion of reasons, thereby risking the concealment of the infinite distance between the orders. (Prolegomena 63)

The phrase ‘the smallest of abysses’ was used as the title of a section in the chapter entitled ‘Evidence and Bedazzlement’ (Marion, Prolegomena 53–70). 1

134

Poetry and Prayer

Marion suggests that the apparent humility of someone who disputes his own weakness and strives to overcome the deficiency of will by means of reason may in fact conceal a deep-seated sense of self-importance. It is hubris disguised as lack of trust in oneself. This is, precisely, Claudius’s dilemma. He seems to be saying: ‘[I do not] believe in Love, and that Love loves me in spite of my belief that “I do not have faith”’ (Prolegomena 64). Despair does not allow him: to put more confidence in the Love that is given than in [his] deficient will; to compensate the distrust in [himself ] with trust in God; to prefer the immensity of the gift proposed (at the risk of failure to receive it through lack of capacitas) to the certainty of assumed impotence (at the price of suicide by a self-satisfaction resigned to nothingness); to make up [his] mind in favour of the infinite that [he] cannot master or possess rather than the dandy’s impotence; to risk abandon to the overabundance of a gift, instead of immobilizing oneself in the idiocracy of scarcity. (Prolegomena 64)

Indeed, Claudius manages to stifle his hope for mercy, which seems well rooted in his knowledge of Christian doctrine and in-depth understanding of the Bible. But a careful listener will hear in his learned argument not only clear echoes of King David’s penitential Psalms and the story of Cain and Abel, but also a version of Macbeth’s bloody hand. Macbeth seems tragically certain of his own damnation: Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hands. No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red. (II, ii, 59–61)

Claudius, on the other hand, ponders: What if this cursed hand Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood? Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens To wash it white as snow? (III, iii, 43–6)

In saying this, he has one advantage over Macbeth, as instead of looking ahead over boundless seas, he chooses to look up to the merciful heavens and recalls the promise of cleansing rain, reminiscent either of Chaucer’s Eastertide ‘shoures soote’ or of the well-known Advent plainsong chant ‘Rorate coeli desuper et

Prayer, Poetry and Silence: A Musical Correspondence

135

nubes pluant iustum’ (‘Drop down due, you heavens from above, and let the clouds rain the just’). This, however, brings the speaker no relief, because over and over again he returns to his exaggerated reliance on reason. There seems to be no flaw in Claudius’s masterly lecture on the difference between the double standards of human justice and the absolute truth of God’s impartiality: In the corrupted currents of this world Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law; but ’tis not so above: There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature and we ourselves compell’d, Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, To give in evidence. (III, iii, 57–64)

Yet everything he has to say amounts to no more than a ‘speech’, a learned discourse about prayer, rather than prayer itself; and still worse than that, Claudius concludes this peroration with the prophecy of a truly agonizing faceto-face encounter with one’s most heinous deeds, a prophecy which may also be read as a demonic parody of the Pauline promise: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know as also I am known’ (1 Cor. 13:12). Let us not forget in this context that the king has just been confronted with the theatrical mirror of his crime, wherein he could see as in a glass – albeit certainly not darkly – the likeness of his very deed. His mind, preoccupied now with the fear of the High Court of Heaven, does not, however, admit the possibility that God may see a sinner from a different perspective, that His light may bring out a different face of ours, that which has been created in the likeness of God. Claudius’s powerful and indeed flawless argument fails to accommodate the dazzling insight which is granted to the mad Ophelia: They say the owl was a baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be. God be at your table. (IV, v, 42–4)2 Most critics agree that Ophelia complains about the loss of virginity, as the story she alludes to involves a transformation, and baker’s daughter had bad reputation (Hamlet, 377n). But these words may also indicate the possibility of another transformation: that foreshadowed by St Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians. 2

136

Poetry and Prayer

Ophelia seems to point beyond the horizon accessible to mortals, whereas the sinner’s vision remains myopic, bound to the earth, and therefore falls short of the unimaginable prospects of eternity. We may understand better the nature of this short-sightedness with the help of Jean-Louis Chrétien, who issues an important warning addressed both to those who dare to listen in their prayers, as well, and perhaps even more importantly, to those who dare not: To listen, we have, as a striking expression of Péguy puts it, ‘to be prepared to be caught off our guard’: only thus can we be reached by, and, as it were, united with, everything that is lofty, for the man who is on his guard, and sticks to the commands set out in his programme of possibilities, will never see anything happening but what he has already seen and will never hear anything but what has already been said. (25)

Shakespeare’s villain cannot afford to be taken in by surprise, so instead of opening up to the hospitable silence of God, he muses alone, in the dead silence of his self-inflicted solitude, in the formulaic wasteland of the ‘already said’. In the end, however, this admirably eloquent soliloquy crumbles to pieces and changes into a series of dramatic, purely emotional exclamations without any pretence of logical consistency: O wretched state, O bosom black as death, O limed soul that struggling to be free Art more engaged. Help, angels, make assay. (III, iii, 67–9)

The last we hear from Claudius before he kneels down for silent prayer (or before he runs short of arguments and surrenders to dead nothingness) gives us a chance to view his petition from a completely different perspective, almost as if we were invited to take notice of the presence of the Other, divine dramatis persona involved in this episode. A simple, unassuming gesture, one that replaces the proud articulacy of the tongue, best renders the spirit of true repentance beyond human hope and beyond human understanding: Bow, stubborn knees, and heart with strings of steel Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe. All may be well. (III, iii, 71–2; my emphasis)

Prayer, Poetry and Silence: A Musical Correspondence

137

The altogether unexpectedly humble and affirmative tone of the last lines before Claudius withdraws into silent prayer opens the scene to a number of different interpretations. First of all, it seems that Claudius’s formerly hubristic reason finally surrenders to infant trust, which expresses itself not in a powerful argument, but in meek helplessness and unconditional dependence on the mercy of God. This time Claudius agrees with Macbeth that pity is thinkable only as ‘a naked new-born babe’ (I, vii, 22). He abandons the illusive security of reasoning and opens himself to the apparently impossible. Contrary to reason: ‘all may be well’. We ought not to miss here the fact that the quoted words are an exact (even if purely accidental) echo of Christ’s answer to Julian of Norwich when the mystic complained about the ubiquitous evil and corruption of the world. For although we shall all agree that if uttered on an everyday, purely human basis, the assertion ‘all may be well’ must sound hopelessly trivial (is it not what we all say without any conviction when we cannot think of any better, more reliable solace?), it is also true, as T.S. Eliot has shown in the Four Quartets,3 that in the eschatological perspective, the same promise gains a truly immense, almost unbearable and insufferable, and yet redemptive validity and weight: if we recall the liturgical formula ‘Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi’, we can say that it is the weight of the cross carried by the Lamb. The following events in Act III, Scene iii of Hamlet provide not only perfect evidence of Shakespeare’s dramatic skill, but, first and foremost, proof that the dialogues between the human being and God never develop according to our expectations. When Claudius pleads for God’s mercy in silence, he is surprised by Prince Hamlet, who moreover enters the stage with his counter-prayer. The avenger is ready to kill, but spares the murderer not because he wishes to abandon the idea of revenge and forgive the man who trespassed against him and his father, but because he has just decided to overstep the limits of human justice and wants to play the role of God. He does not want the reward of heaven for the villain. With devilish patience, he decides to wait until Claudius’s soul ‘be as damn’d and black / As hell whereto it goes’ (III, iii, 94–5). Claudius does not realize the danger because he is immersed in helpless silence, his thoughts about God, or perhaps his one-sided conversation with God. And so, immediately after Hamlet’s departure, Claudius utters the famous couplet, commenting on 3 ‘And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well / By the purification of the motive / In the ground of our beseeching … All shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one’ (‘Little Gidding’: ll. 197–200 and 256–60, in Eliot 305–6; 308).

Poetry and Prayer

138

the futility of his ill-timed prayer. Its epigrammatic brevity, enhanced by the use of short one- or two-syllable words, simple sentence structure and the heavy weight of end-on lines with groaning diphthongs in the rhyming words, seems to confirm the murderer’s conclusion: ‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go’ (III, iii, 97–8). Should we then conclude on the basis of this confession that God turned a deaf ear to the murderer’s imperfect because insincere contrition? The audience witness Claudius’s silent prayer, and they also assume that God remains silent, too; but they may equally well guess that He has different reasons for waiting than Hamlet. Indeed, the murderer is not ready for judgment yet, he does not know either that he has just been saved from death. Most strange of all, although it can be safely argued that it was Hamlet’s sin, his boundless hatred, which prevented him from killing his uncle, if we look back on the scene again, we may (it must be stressed that this is only a possibility, not a certainty) be led to think about the mysterious working of Divine Providence, in accordance with which all things turn out well in the end. In the latter case, Claudius’s greatest tragedy would not consist in his being abandoned by God, but in his persistent insensitivity, his stubborn blindness, which prevents him from perceiving the saving hand of God (I say stubborn, for this kind of blindness is a matter of the will of the disbeliever). If so, the murderer’s doom has been sealed in the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘Let favour be shewed to the wicked, yet he will not learn righteousness: in the land of uprightness will he deal unjustly, and will not behold the Majesty of the Lord’ (Isa. 26:10). Incidentally, the same Old Testament text foretells also the Last Judgment that will bring violent, human, history to an end. As Claudius must certainly remember, this violent history began with the first crime ever, the killing of Abel: ‘the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover the slain’ (Isa. 26:21). The Silent Ears of God In prayer, says Chrétien, we are not supposed to persuade or convince God, but instead we let Him affect us. The philosopher points out that whenever we turn to God, we are also the recipients of this message: ‘The words of our speech affect and modify the addresser, and not the addressee.’ And he further explains this mechanism in the following way: My speech rebounds on to myself and affects me, as indeed would any speech of mine of the kind I always hear, but it affects me much more in so far as it is not

Prayer, Poetry and Silence: A Musical Correspondence

139

aimed at me, and has a completely different addressee from me. It is precisely because I am not talking to myself, because I am not talking for myself, that my own speech, altered at its very origin, and perhaps even before that, turns back on me with such singular force. (21)

Claudius, who for the most part talked to himself for himself, may have missed the dazzling force that turned back on him and possibly changed the course of events. Yet his blindness, in which we also have a share, in no way means that the one who prays can be excused from awaiting the arrival of the impossible, the inconceivable and the ineffable. As Marion explains: What blindness interprets as a simple obscurity must be understood at base as a bedazzlement, in which, in the revelatory figure of Jesus Christ, the Father enters into an absolute epiphany, though filtered through finitude. If blindness sees nothing there and does not even suspect bedazzlement, the fault lies not with the revelation, but with the gaze that cannot bear the evidence. In effect, if what reveals itself is always summed up in Love, then only the gaze that believes, and thus only the will that loves, can welcome it. Thus only the conversion of the gaze can render the eye apt to recognize the blinding evidence of love in what bedazzles it. (Prolegomena 66)

Viewed through the prism of the philosopher’s testimony, Shakespeare’s dramatic account of the murderer’s prayer prepares us for a reading of George Herbert’s poem ‘Denial’ (94–5), which likewise problematizes the excruciating deficiency of sight and lack of determination to love which define our existential loneliness. Both Shakespeare and Herbert show, first and foremost, that prayer conceived merely as calling upon God remains presumptuously selfish (not to say ‘idiotic’), as it precludes the possibility of surprise, being caught off guard and bedazzled by God’s calling, His summoning man to attention, His desire to share His life with us. Herbert, moreover, alerts his readers to the integrity of the poem as prayer, wherein human speech and the silence of the Word interweave harmoniously; sound and silence being governed by the natural rhythm of breath taken in and then exhaled, either calmly or with agitation, as reflected in the harsh or pleasant cadences of poetic speech. Herbert’s message, which underwrites the poetics of his entire volume The Temple, seems to be that the task of poetry is to offer hospitality to the Word that precedes and therefore also shapes, that is, ‘in-forms’ the poet’s utterance. Herbert’s devotional poetry can thus be said to draw inspiration from the regular ‘correspondence’ (both in the sense of ‘close affinity’ and ‘exchange of letters’) of

140

Poetry and Prayer

the divine Logos and the imperfect, wounded, but, we may hope, also redeemable speech of man. Of course, we must keep in mind that this ultimate reconciliation is not achieved without previous struggle and bitterness. The title of the poem in question, ‘Denial’, can be interpreted straightforwardly as implying a refusal to comply with a request. The verb ‘to deny’ in its transitive form is the antonym of ‘giving’, ‘granting’, ‘bestowing’; to deny somebody something is ‘to refuse to give or grant something to someone’. The speaker’s complaint is from the start marked with the unbearable pain of the night of faith: When my devotions could not pierce Thy silent ears; Then was my heart broken, as was my verse: My breast was full of fears And disorder: My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow, Did fly asunder: Each took his way: some would to pleasures go, Some to wars and thunder Of alarms. As good as any where, they say, As to benumb Both knees and heart, in crying night and day, Come, come, my God, O come, But no hearing. O thou that shouldst give dust a tongue To cry to thee, And then not hear it crying! all day long My heart was in my knee, But no hearing. Therefore my soul lay out of sight, Untuned, unstrung: My feeble spirit, unable to look right, Like a nipped blossom, hung Discontented. (Herbert 73–4)

Prayer, Poetry and Silence: A Musical Correspondence

141

The whole poem is an excruciating account of an angry (or perhaps simply bitter) conversation with an indifferent and silent God. The tongue is useless, the knees grow numb like the heart which stops feeling. The same bodily gesture which Claudius hoped for a short while might be more eloquent than speech and might affect the ‘heart with strings of steel’ is here discredited as a futile, dead ritual without any genuine spiritual value. Furthermore, Herbert connects the experience of inner confusion (‘fears and disorder’, ‘My feeble spirit, unable to look right, / Like a nipped blossome, hung / Discontented’) with the lack of musical harmony (‘my bent thoughts, like a brittle bow / did fly asunder’; ‘therefore my soul lay out of sight, / Untuned, unstrung’). All this is not only because of God’s refusal to accept the speaker’s devotions (the pain of which is rendered more acute by the mechanical repetition of the phrase ‘no hearing’, which lacks the grace of a musical refrain), but also because the repetition becomes a symptom of emotional fatigue that affects even the body of the speaker. Helpless rancour fuels the irony expressed in the observation that God’s refusal entails a waste of the most noble prosopopeia (the gift of speech) when the appeals of ‘speaking’ dust fail to reach God’s ‘silent ears’. But does not Herbert’s complaint contradict the most common, indeed the only possible authentic human experience of God who always remains silent? Is this not a lesson that we also learn from the Bible when Moses excuses himself in front of God (‘I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue’; Exod. 4:10) and the Almighty appoints Moses’ brother, Aaron, to speak in the prophet’s name (‘And he shall be thy spokesman unto the people: and he shall be, even he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shall be to him instead of God’; Exod. 4:16)? Does not God, ‘who hath made man’s mouth, … who [also] maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind’; Exod. 4:11) – Herbert’s persona recalls this well-known biblical passage with a touch of unmistakable irony – suffer from eternal ‘aphasia and athambia’, as Samuel Beckett wrote in the twentieth century? Yet although Herbert’s poetry seems to correspond perfectly with the predicaments of twentieth-century existentialism, the speaker in ‘Denial’ finally does enter the space of inner dialogue with the Other, and instead of dwelling on his complaints, manages to succumb to the disconcerting silence, which he finally recognizes as an indispensable part of prayer. Although no thunder, not even the mysterious whisper or gentle sigh of a delicate breeze, interferes with the noisy lamentations of the speaker who constantly demands attention (almost like a spoilt child), the final request already foreshadows an answer, which, paradoxically enough, comes from the man himself:

142

Poetry and Prayer O cheer and tune my heartless breast, Deferre no time; That so thy favoures granting my request, They and my minde may chime, And mend my rhyme. (Herbert 74)

The meaning of this response becomes even clearer when it is juxtaposed with a stunning stanza in the poem ‘Easter’, where the cross itself becomes the harp and lute from the work of the psalmist: The cross taught all wood to resound his name, Who bore the same. His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key Is best to celebrate this most high day. (Herbert 37)

As a matter of fact, the link established in this poem points beyond the limitations of all human songs: Christ’s body becomes here the very instrument and the music of Redemption; on this condition, His tormented but still divine body turns out to be the very same psalm of praise and glory first sung by David, which the English poet now wishes to take up and join in: ‘Awake, lute and harp! I will awaken the dawn’ (Psalm 108:2). The words of the psalmist foreshadow the truly surprising event of the Resurrection, which reverses the natural order of things. It is not the sunrise that awakes the sleeping subject, but the song of God-man awakes the light of the day and, in a manner reminiscent of Orphic magic, leads others from the dark valley of death into the bright sunshine of true life. In other words, it is not human poetry that brings forth the glory of the Lord, but, conversely, God’s Word gives weight and glory to the poet’s prayers. By the same token, the altarpiece in Herbert’s The Temple is not made of hewn blocks of stone damaged by the touch of human tools. Instead it bears the imprint of God’s original handiwork: A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears, Made of a heart and cemented with tears, Whose parts are as thy hand did frame No workman’s tool hath touched the same. (23)

Both here and in the previously quoted poem, ‘Easter’, human artefacts (string instrument, altar) are translated into images of the human body, which alone has been glorified above all other works of God in the miracle of the Incarnation.

Prayer, Poetry and Silence: A Musical Correspondence

143

The belief in the Word made Flesh allows Herbert to draw up a daring programme of Christological poetics, hoping to write in line with God’s ‘fair though bloody hand’, which he mentions in the poem ‘Thanksgiving’ (32–3), and to sing in tune with Christ’s saving song, as he promises in the poem ‘Easter’. The poet’s trustful reliance on the embodied Word thus becomes the guiding theme of the entire volume, whose overall pattern points to the triangular analogy between the Temple (as well as its picture in words: The Temple), the Body and the Word of God. This, in turn, entitles us as readers of Herbert’s poetry in the twentyfirst century to view his texts through the theoretical insights of contemporary phenomenology of the flesh, with its stress on power that is removed from the agency of the individual, as all of our powers and our true selves have their ultimate source in the One who is Life Himself. If then, as Michel Henry argues (222), we experience Life as that which comes to us without our contribution or consent, which does not belong to us, and yet becomes our life, then we are better equipped to understand poetry which derives from the Word experienced by the poet as that which takes him by surprise, visits him without his contribution or consent, which he cannot treat as his property, and which yet becomes his own word in the same measure as he belongs to the Divine Logos. Henry refers his argument to Jesus’ retort to Pilate, ‘Thou couldst have no power over at all against Me, unless it were given thee from above’ ( John 19:11), pointing out that this statement not only refers to the political power of the governor of a province, but extends to all human faculties, including the most rudimentary actions performed by His executioners: handling the hammer, hitting the nails, spitting (Henry 305). At the other end of the scale, we shall add, the same rule applies to human reasoning and speech, whose power to bless or to curse, to pray or to blaspheme proves equally dependent on the primary, essential gift of the Word which is given to us ‘from above’. Accordingly, special attention must be paid to those images in Herbert’s poetry which illustrate the givenness and inherent indebtedness of human existence, and which connect this condition with the givenness of the poet’s language rooted in the Word of God. Indeed, The Temple abounds in the traces of divine authorship. For instance, the idea of the Divine Tuner who mends the poet’s deficient rhyme has an interesting equivalent in the recurrent references to the art of gardening, when the poet not only takes up the role of the one who sows, prunes and engrafts the plants in God’s garden, but also wishes to become himself a tree in that garden, and to be shaped by the hand of the Divine Gardener, as he writes in ‘Paradise’ (Herbert 124). Last but not least, we must recall in this context the startling allusion in ‘Easter Wings’ which refers to mending the poet’s damaged wings (and thus also the instrument which he uses

144

Poetry and Prayer

to write – his ‘plume’) by ‘imping’ (38), that is engrafting into them the feathers from the perfect wings of the Divine Phoenix. Or perhaps we should take up Chauncey Wood’s paradoxical but certainly plausible interpretation, which suggests precisely the opposite process, whereby the poet’s imperfect plumes are grafted on to the perfect wing of God. In this way, we return once again to the fallen word preconditioned, redeemed and sustained by the eternally valid Word of God. By suggesting this trustful reliance on the redeeming Word of God, the poet also seeks to overcome the fatal solipsism of human prayer, contrary to his acute experience of the absent, deaf or apathetic God. His task consists therefore in making visible God’s bedazzling invisibility, which shines forth in the speaker’s response to the usually voiceless and most importantly unexpected call from the Divine Other. In the frequently quoted poem entitled ‘The Collar’ God seems to address the speaker directly: But as I raved and grew more fierce and wilde At every word, Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child: And I replied, My Lord. (145)

Even there, however, God does not speak in response to human prayer, but instead intervenes with his calling, despite the rebellious rage of the speaker. Moreover, the mysterious summons are most subtly referred to as the anonymous voice of someone: ‘one calling’, not the imperial order of One, the Almighty. The act of naming in this poem is God’s sole prerogative. He calls the speaker His (adoptive) child, but at the same time He himself remains hidden and unnamed, until His glory is revealed in the humble response of the person hearing and recognizing his vocation. Focusing on the speaker’s response to God’s silent or inexplicit appeal rather than striving to define or disambiguate its enigma, Herbert thus seems to offer us a very modern understanding of our relation with God, which perfectly accords with the modern theoretical reflection of Marion. Marion’s phenomenology of donation thus helps us understand the paradoxical constitution of Herbert’s poetic persona, whose main task is not to preach the word of God, but to make ready to welcome the arrival of Love and let oneself be entertained by Love. In brief: to accept the gift of Love. The French philosopher explains in this context the condition of the ‘gifted subject’, which he defines as ‘one that is entirely received from what it receives, given by the given, given to the given’. Following this path, he formulates the following paradox:

Prayer, Poetry and Silence: A Musical Correspondence

145

Before knowing an object (surprise), before seeing the Other (interlocution) I always find myself transformed into a me under the impact of the call (summons). Accordingly, my sole individuation or selfhood is found in the facticity imposed on me by the word originally heard from the call, not coming from myself. The call, by definition undeniable, therefore accomplishes the privilege of givenness without reminder or loss. The gifted receives himself as the call that he receives is given – undeniably. (Being Given 271)

Call and Response Paraphrasing Marion, we shall say that the subject of Herbert’s religious verse receives himself in the Word given to him. Yet at the same time he also remains a displaced, questioning (inquisitive), but first of all questioned (interrogated) and thus embarrassed subject, precisely because God Himself is the sole origin and meaning of Herbert’s poetical devotions. We are not talking here about getting to know the Other, nor even a symmetrical dialogue with the Other which would take for granted the equality of the interlocutors. Instead, the subject feels stunned by the unrecognized call from the Other; it is at the same time summoned and impressed by this Other whose watermark imprint it receives. Thus Herbert’s poetic persona always stresses his dependence on his dialogue with Word Incarnate, which ‘mends his rhyme’, teaching even inanimate objects to ‘resound his name’. In this way the poet reminds us that man has been ‘endowed with speech’ that is ‘endowed by the gift of the heard word, heard insofar as given’ (Being Given 270). By saying this, I do not mean, though, that the ‘I’ of Herbert’s poetic utterances dissolves in the polyvocal space of manifold biblical quotations and borrowings, but I refer once again to what Marion defines as the phenomenological sense of the givenness of the word, postulating that an act of speaking ‘always and first amounts to passively hearing a word coming from the Other, a word first and always incomprehensible, which announces no meaning or signification, other than the alterity of the initiative’ (270). Herein lies the difference between the Bakhtinian idea of the individual utterance rooted in the previously said, which underlies the notion of intertexuality, and Marion’s rudimentary concept of the subject: ‘the call gives me to and as myself, in short, individualizes me, because it separates me from all property and possession of the proper by giving it to me and letting this proper anticipate its reception by me and as me’ (270). Marion provides us thus with a perfect definition of Herbert’s poetic persona, constructed in and through an act of genuine poetic prayer. This is because, far from simply repeating the

Poetry and Prayer

146

biblical phrases or alluding to the well-known liturgical formulae, the speaker in Herbert’s poem indeed enters the resonant space which Shakespeare calls ‘the true concord of well-tuned sounds’, and which in Herbert’s poetry denotes a true musical correspondence between the human being and God. This feature of Herbert’s poetic language, originating from the human response to the incomprehensible call coming from the Other and its (musical) resonance, thus makes perfect sense in the light of what a contemporary commentator says about the idea of the subject, the adonné (meaning ‘the devoted’4), in Marion’s philosophy: This subject is taken by surprise; nothing can prepare him for the call, because there is no anteriority to the call or, at any rate, the anteriority is in the call itself … There must therefore be a ‘capacity’ to respond that in some way is suitable to the givenness of the call. This capacity of receiving (reception) defines the adonné. (Ó Murchadha 82)

This is also why we should not – indeed, cannot – ask how it is possible that the painful account of useless prayer ends with a description of desired and achieved musical harmony (we can repeat here, after Simone Weil, that in this case, and in this case only, desire is actually synonymous with fulfilment), or how God’s whisper breaks through the wall of the speaker’s wild and incessant rage in ‘The Collar’. These and many other apparent aporias of Herbert’s poetry only confirm the fact that the poet’s God is indeed the absolute Other, whose radical alterity escapes our understanding, our ability to communicate and also our (inner) hearing, but at the same time, paradoxically, guarantees our capacity of loving which allows us to participate freely in the musical correspondence of words and silence. The same paradox is the main point of Marion’s philosophy, which ‘displaces the centrality of the subject in favour of the pleroma of the object’ (O’Donohue 270). In Herbert’s poetry, too, God does not fit into the prepared space of the poem, does not ‘fill’ the stanzas or ‘follow’ the lines. He is the impossibility, which overflows and saturates the intention of the speaking subject The English language does not allow us to render the subtle language game that illustrates Marion’s point about the interconnection of being given (étant donné) receiving a gift and offering it (or rather oneself as a gift) back to God (adonné) which transforms ‘the given’ into ‘the devotee’ (in the Slavonic languages, this last word can be rendered in two ways: one verb retains, ‘remembers’ the connection between devotion and givenness – dany–(od)dany – the other foregrounds the connection between devotion and holiness – święty (сватый)–poświęcić (посватитъ). 4

Prayer, Poetry and Silence: A Musical Correspondence

147

and therefore remains ‘invisible’ (unknown) also to the reader, who may indeed miss His most discreet arrival. God enters the poem as a puzzle, an enigma, at best: a player of the sweet, unheard melody who – no one knows when or how – always ‘mends’ the poet’s worthless devotions, expressed in broken rhyme. It is through His intervention that the speaker’s bitter account of human frailty and our almost childish dependence on God’s unceasing attention is transfigured into a true musical correspondence of prayer. Returning one last time to Hamlet and paraphrasing the words of the Danish Prince, we shall conclude by saying: the poem’s the thing which alerts us to the possibility of the impossible. Works Cited Cassidy, Eoin G. and Ian Leask, eds. Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion. New York: Fordham Press, 2005. Chrétien, Jean-Louis. The Ark of Speech. Trans. Andrew Brown. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Eliot, T.S. Wybór poezji [Selected Poems]. Ed. Krzysztof Boczkowski and Wanda Rulewicz. Bilingual edn. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1990. Henry, Michel. Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair. Polish edn: Wcielenie. Filozofia ciała. Trans. Marek Drwęga. Kraków/Tyniec: Homini, 2012. Herbert, George. The Complete English Poems. Ed. John Tobin. London: Penguin, 1991. Marion, Jean-Luc. Prolegomena to Charity. Trans. Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham, 1986. —. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Trans. Jeffrey Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Ó Murchadha, Felix. ‘Glory, Idolatry, Kairos: Revelation and the Ontological Difference in Marion’. In Cassidy and Leask eds, Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion, 69–86. O’Donohue, John. ‘The Absent Threshold: An Eckhartian Afterword’. In Cassidy and Leask eds, Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion, 258–83. Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet. The Arden Shakespeare, third Series. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Thomson Learning, 2007. —. The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Arden Shakespeare, second Series. Ed. Kenneth Muir. London: Thomson Learning, 2006.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Part III Case Studies: The Twentieth Century

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 9

Re-Imagining Prayer: Coming Out of Hiding? R.S. Thomas and Tadeusz Różewicz1 Jean Ward

Discussion of the motif of prayer in R.S. Thomas’s poetry usually focuses on the frustrated ‘pray-er’, who rails against God for His failure to respond, for His silence and insistence on being ‘hidden’, and indeed Thomas is known above all as ‘the poet of the hidden God’, the phrase which provides the title for D.Z. Phillips’s study of 1986. ‘Hiddenness’, however, is not only the property of God in this poetry, for a case may be made for considering Thomas to be as much the poet of the human being in hiding as of the ‘absconded’ God, the poet of the ‘old Adam’ who ‘hid … from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden’ (Gen. 3:8, King James Version). The Adam in hiding, inclined ever since the Fall always to blame someone else for the breakdown of communication with God – the fretful, dissatisfied voice of this figure reverberates through Thomas’s poetry, as if drowning out the voice of silence. Discreetly but noticeably, then, Thomas’s poetry, by imagining the perspective of ‘that other being’ (‘The Other’, Collected Poems 457), of the One who, if He is not neglected or ignored, is usually reproached, castigated or besieged with angry claims on His attention, suggests another way of looking at the failure of human conversation with God, raising the question of who is really hiding from whom. In some surprising ways, this little-considered element in Thomas’s work brings him close to that of a writer from a quite different cultural and linguistic milieu, the Polish poet, Tadeusz Różewicz. Without there being any conscious interplay of thought between the two artists, much of Różewicz’s later poetry takes up the same threads as those which are the subject of the present reflections on R.S. Thomas. The author is grateful to Wiesława Różewicz for permission to quote the poem ‘bez’ by her late husband, Tadeusz Różewicz, in English translation. 1

152

Poetry and Prayer

We do not need to look far in Thomas’s poetry to find a speaker who reproaches God for his absence, silence or hiddenness: If he had allowed himself but one word: his name, for instance, spoken ever so obliquely

So complains the speaker in ‘Silence’ (‘No Truce with the Furies’, Collected Later Poems 287), reminding us of Jacob, who wrestles with the Angel in an effort to force his opponent to identify himself, or of Moses in the burning bush episode, asking God to supply a name which he can use in his bargaining with Pharaoh; these Old Testament motifs of struggling with God are the ones to which R.S. Thomas is particularly drawn. The note of protest can be heard in the poet’s description of the: great absence ........................ that compels me to address it without hope of a reply. (‘The Absence’, Collected Poems 361)

‘I pray and incur / silence’ is how ‘The Presence’ (Collected Poems 391) begins, the phrasing suggesting discontent and possible rancour: we may ‘incur’ a penalty, a fine, a risk, a punishment, but we do not ‘incur’ anything pleasant, and the implication is that this is a mean response on the part of the person addressed in prayer. My comments on the passage from ‘The Absence’ quoted above are, I confess, a little disingenuous. I have omitted to mention that the ‘great absence’ is described as ‘like a presence’, and that the poem ends with more than a suggestion of the Incarnation, in which God is no longer hidden, or is hidden only because He is so entirely united with human flesh. (The perceptible allusion in the last line to a phrase from the English translation of the carol ‘Adeste fideles’ [‘Lo, He abhors not the Virgin’s womb’] hints not only at the Nativity, but also at the possibility that if God did not ‘abhor’ Mary’s human body, then He may also not ‘abhor’ the ‘vacuum’ of my ‘emptiness without him’.) Similarly, in ‘The Presence’, the phrasing initially suggests that God’s silence is a sign of antagonism, of his not listening to prayer and refusing to enter into communion with the person praying, but in the course of the poem the significance of this silence changes. Thomas’s poetry implies that while

Coming Out of Hiding? R.S. Thomas and Tadeusz Różewicz

153

silence seems often to be insupportable for fallen humankind, it is God’s natural element: ‘the eternal / silence that is the repose of God’ (‘The Gap’, Collected Poems 324). Accordingly, at the beginning of ‘The Presence’, the link with the word ‘incur’ makes silence seem like a punishment, whereas by the end of the poem, man seems to have adopted something of God’s perspective, and silence has become the one condition that may perhaps allow communion with Him to take place. Furthermore, this lament by a speaker seeking God and striving to behave ‘as if ’ He existed, without really believing that He does or entertaining any hope of finding Him, is in a variety of ways couched in terms that lean, if anything, towards faith rather than doubt, implying that perhaps it is not that God does not exist, but that we fail to perceive Him. As I have suggested, while there are good reasons for describing Thomas as ‘the poet of the hidden God’, a case might equally be made by way of the biblical narrative of the Fall for describing him as the poet of the old, hidden Adam. As recounted in the Book of Genesis, it is not God who hides from human beings, but ‘man’ (this is the meaning of the name ‘Adam’) who hides from God. If we understand prayer as not merely ‘talking to God’, but as a dialogue, a two-way communication in which both parties speak, we may find several intimations in Genesis as to what this dialogue, in an unfallen world, might be. In Paradise, it is God who initiates dialogue, God who speaks first and who speaks most, addressing to Adam words of blessing (in the words of the King James Bible, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’); words of giving (‘I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat’); and words of information (‘And to every beast of the earth … I have given every green herb for meat’) (Gen. 1:28–30). To these are added, in the second creation story, words of permission (‘Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat’) and words of warning (‘But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die’) (Gen. 2:16–17). As for the human part in the dialogue before the Fall, Gen. 2:19 implies that it is one of response and creative co-operation: God brought the creatures He had made to the man to see what he would call them, and ‘whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof ’. In Gen. 2:22–3, the man speaks directly, for the first time in the Bible, and evidently his words about the woman are addressed to the Lord God who has brought her to him: ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’

154

Poetry and Prayer

What characterizes these first ‘recorded’ words of a human being to God? There is no shyness, no fear; rather, Adam continues the co-operation implied earlier, giving the woman her name as he has already done with all the other creatures that God has made. His words reveal delight in the whole creation, acknowledgement of its wonder and utter fittingness. They imply gratitude, but also dignity; Adam addresses God, not with pride, but straightforwardly, as if in partnership with him, in terms of a kind of equality. Let us now examine what happens to this relationship and this dialogue in the immediate aftermath of the Fall. God comes looking for Adam and Eve; in the words of the King James Bible, with the important passages italicized: ‘And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden’ (Gen. 3:8). God, then, was calling for them and although they heard His voice they did not respond, or they responded by going into hiding. The story continues: ‘And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?’ (Gen. 3:9). God, alarmed, surprised, perhaps, at the lack of response, goes on seeking contact with the creature He has made: ‘Where art thou?’ What feeling might lie behind this question? Anxiety? Longing? Whatever it is, when in R.S. Thomas’s poem-prayers the speaker asks God the same question, the tone at least on first hearing seems often to express not so much yearning as accusation: Where are you? You should be here! We should remember, however, that Thomas’s poetry draws subtly on Christian mystical traditions, and often what appears at first to be accusation may equally be interpreted as an expression of love and longing. In the mystical poetry that alludes to the Song of Songs, such as that of St John of the Cross, the question ‘Where art thou?’ is never a cry of accusation, but always one of yearning for the absent beloved. This, no doubt, is the way in which God’s question in Genesis is also to be understood, as an expression of His loving need of the creature He has made. How does Adam respond to this vulnerable love? ‘And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’ (Gen. 3:10). In place of the straightforwardness and dignity that characterized human exchanges with God before the Fall, shame and fear have entered, and loss of desire for God’s company. God replies: ‘Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.’ (Gen. 3:11–12). Here, the implication of accusation replaces thankfulness and delight in what God has made; Adam will not take the blame for what he has done but shuffles it on to the woman

Coming Out of Hiding? R.S. Thomas and Tadeusz Różewicz

155

and indirectly on to God for giving her to him; where the appropriate reaction would be apology, there is only accusation, shifting the blame. So God turns to speak to Eve: ‘And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.’ (Gen. 3:13). Eve, perhaps, is not quite so bad as Adam here: she only blames the serpent, not God! But still, she does not exactly admit her foolishness and disobedience, nor does she apologize. It is the archetypal account of the breakdown of a relationship. As implied in the Hebrew scriptures, conversation with God from the Fall onwards tends to be characterized by the sullenness and belligerence, even rudeness, the avoidance of responsibility and lack of desire for contact that Adam and Eve show here. The same attitude, inherited in the next generation with the terrible persistence of original sin, appears in Cain’s well-known, surly answer to another of God’s ‘where’ questions, ‘Where is Abel thy brother?’: ‘I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Gen. 4:9). It is illuminating to compare here Jean-Luc Marion’s remarks on original sin in Prolegomena to Charity: ‘sin enters the world replete with the entire logic of evil: transmit evil to the other so as to rid one’s self of it and in this way lay claim to innocence’ (9). Marion continues: ‘when I accuse and kill the other [who may be God, the only one ever to suffer evil without avenging Himself or declaring His innocence] … I bar myself from every reconciliation with him, thus depriving myself of what, deep down, I wish for above all else’ (12); and again: ‘revenge does not re-establish the prior state, but condemns the future to an irremediable impossibility of loving’ (13). This is the drama that is played out in many of Thomas’s poems about prayer and prayer-poems. It is not for nothing that ‘The Tool’ (Collected Poems 271) concludes with a reference to the ‘insolence’ of man suffered by God. In a work by the Czech theologian Tomas Halik whose central motif is the Wounds of Christ, it is suggested that the ‘workshop’ or ‘smithy’ in which this damaged relationship begins to be repaired is precisely that which is so frequently Thomas’s subject: prayer. Prayer, so often the scene of conflict and frustration in Thomas’s poetry, is also, as Halik suggests, the place where ‘the will grows to answer God – not like Adam, hidden in the bush of self-justifications, but face to face’ (Dotknij ran [Touch the wounds] 119–120).2 This, the desire to come out of hiding, to see God face to face and therefore by implication to let Him see us, is also the desire expressed in a psalm that is a particular favourite with Thomas: Psalm 42. The opening words, ‘Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks: so longeth my soul after thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, I refer to Halik’s work only in translation, either into Polish or into English.

2

Poetry and Prayer

156

even for the living God: when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?’,3 are subtly echoed, for example, in ‘The Presence’ (Collected Poems 391). Many of Thomas’s poems relate directly to stories of the Fall as well as to the Tower of Babel, including, besides ‘The Tool’, which we have already mentioned, ‘The Woman’ (Collected Poems 330), ‘The Hand’ (264), and ‘The Gap’ (324). Notably, in these poems, as in many of his numerous reflections on prayer and praying, a surprising attempt is often made to imagine the perspective not only of the human being, but still more, of God. As Barbara Kowalik points out in her study of dialogic poetics in early English religious poetry, the ‘address-and-response formula’ is ‘highly characteristic of medieval devotional verse’ (23), and we may find many examples in this period of lyrics that give a voice to someone other than the human person praying, especially to Jesus. Liturgical tradition, of course, furnishes countless examples of this (the Good Friday Improperia being one of the most remarkable), as do the Psalms. Memorably, in Psalm 50, ‘Our God’ does ‘not keep silence’, but instead calls to His people in an extended and passionate address. In Miles Coverdale’s translation in The Book of Common Prayer, it reads as follows: Hear, O my people, and I will speak : I myself will testify against thee, O Israel; for I am God, even thy God. I will not reprove thee because of thy sacrifices, or for thy burnt-offerings : because they were not always before me. I will take no bullock out of thine house : nor he-goat out of thy folds. For all the beasts of the forest are mine : and so are the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls upon the mountains : and the wild beasts of the field are in my sight. If I be hungry, I will not tell thee : for the whole world is mine, and all that is therein. Thinkest thou that I will eat bulls’ flesh : and drink the blood of goats? Offer unto God thanksgiving : and pay thy vows unto the Most Highest. And call upon me in the time of trouble : so will I hear thee, and thou shalt praise me. But unto the ungodly said God : Why dost thou preach my laws, and takest my covenant in thy mouth; Whereas thou hatest to be reformed : and hast cast my words behind thee?

In all quotations from the Psalms, I use Miles Coverdale’s translation from The Book of Common Prayer. 3

Coming Out of Hiding? R.S. Thomas and Tadeusz Różewicz

157

When thou sawest a thief, thou consentedst unto him : and hast been partaker with the adulterers. Thou hast let thy mouth speak wickedness : and with thy tongue thou hast set forth deceit. Thou satest, and spakest against thy brother : yea, and hast slandered thine own mother’s son. These things hast thou done, and I held my tongue, and thou thoughtest wickedly, that I am even such a one as thyself : but I will reprove thee, and set before thee the things that thou hast done. O consider this, ye that forget God : lest I pluck you away, and there be none to deliver you, Whoso offereth me thanks and praise, he honoureth me : and to him that ordereth his conversation right will I show the salvation of God.

From the point of view of the psalm as a piece of poetry, this is the imagined perspective or voice of God. It is a perspective that we find frequently also in George Herbert, for example in the poem ‘Dialogue’.4 But giving God a voice or imagining His feelings and thoughts is rare in modern religious verse. The fact that Thomas so often does this is one of the unobtrusive links connecting his poetry both with Herbert and with the tradition of the Psalms. In the words of W.H. Auden, ‘to pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention – on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God – that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying’ (306). In Thomas’s poetry, we find an attempt to fix the imagination on the ‘Other’; to see things the ‘Other Way Round’. Like Denise Levertov, who suggests in the poem ‘Flickering Mind’ that it is not God, but ‘I who am absent’ (15–16), in Thomas’s poetry it is often a question not so much of God’s silence or absence as of the human being’s. The creature of C.S. Lewis’s ‘silent planet’5 is not prepared to attend to God; and the motifs of the ‘great absence’, the ‘empty silence’, found in the opening lines of ‘Via Negativa’ and throughout Thomas’s oeuvre, may be interpreted not only with reference to the hiddenness of God. Many of Thomas’s poems seem also to ask the following question: is it we who are silent, who hide from God, or, alternatively, who cannot bear silence, 4 The correspondences between Thomas’s poetry and Herbert’s have been extensively remarked. ‘Dialogue’ is a poem that Thomas includes in his selection A Choice of George Herbert’s Verse (1967). 5 I refer to the title of the first part of Lewis’s ‘cosmic trilogy’, Out of the Silent Planet, first published in 1938.

Poetry and Prayer

158

cannot hear it speak, but have to shout at it? Whose fault is the failure of communication? Usually the human being blames God for being silent, taking this for his not answering. But in the Book of Genesis it was God who called, and Adam and Eve who did not want to answer. Thomas makes many attempts to imagine another perspective on this hopeless dialogue: ‘What are the emotions / of God?’, he asks in ‘Silence’ (Collected Later Poems 287).6 The speaker’s change of tactic, so to speak, from ‘prattling’ to ‘dumbness’ implies his realization that God might find his garrulousness wearying. Still more strongly, in the image in the poem of the speaker’s tongue as the clapper of a disused bell that would never again pound on him

Thomas suggests the distress caused to God by such so-called prayer. The notion of a beleaguered God for whom the poet feels sympathy is also noticeable in ‘Present’, in which a speaker who appears to be God Himself is heard to complain: I am at the switchboard of the exchanges of the people of all time, receiving their messages whether I will or no. (Collected Poems 325)

In ‘The Other’ (Collected Poems 457), the echoes of two well-known and frequently anthologized poems, Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ (the waves’ ‘rising and falling’ on an unlit shore) and Edward Thomas’s ‘The Owl’ (the owl’s cry, the reminder to the speaker of other inhabitants of the night), reverberate with suggestions of betrayal. Evidently these are poems that belong, as it were, to Thomas’s personal anthology. Tim McKenzie identifies a subdued allusion to ‘Dover Beach’ in ‘The Listener in the Corner’ (34), and there is an echo of ‘The Owl’ in ‘Sonata in X’ (Collected Later Poems 205) in the reference to ‘lessons’ not in school but ‘in the church- / yard under the owl’s cry’. In ‘Dover Beach’, the ‘sea of faith’ has retreated, leaving human beings alone with ‘ignorant armies’ on a ‘darkling plain’, while the speaker in ‘The Owl’ is a deserter who in his ‘repose’ has left his fellow soldiers to lie abandoned ‘under the stars’. These suggestions The quality of silence in Thomas’s poems about lonely figures praying in empty churches might profitably be compared with that in some of Denise Levertov’s poetry. ‘Altars’, for example, addressing a ‘silent Lord’, finds this silence ‘hospitable’ – that is, welcoming and reassuring, rather than indifferent and cold (Levertov 30). 6

Coming Out of Hiding? R.S. Thomas and Tadeusz Różewicz

159

lend the thought of ‘that other being who is awake’ in Thomas’s poem ‘The Other’ an element of tender pity for his long-suffering patience (‘letting our prayers break on him, not like this for a few hours, but for days, years, for eternity’)

as well perhaps as of remorse for neglecting him. The swell of the sea in the night in ‘The Other’ is not, as in ‘Dover Beach’, a reminder that faith has abandoned man, but rather that man has broken faith with God, as the speaker in ‘The Owl’ broke faith with his companions. In the sense that it gives rise to a thought of God, night in Thomas’s poem might be considered a kind of prelude to dialogue, but primarily it is a symbol of the suffering of a lonely God with whom human beings have no interest in conversing. In ‘The Word’ (Collected Poems 65), Thomas implied that loneliness is the essence of human existence; here, he suggests that since the Fall it is also the lot of God, who continues to long for the restoration of the Paradisal communion. A poem mentioned earlier, ‘The Tool’ (Collected Poems 271), emphasizes the vulnerability of God in the face of human action; speaking to man ‘out of the tree’s / wholeness’, his voice is ‘drowned’ by ‘the sound / of the tool’. In a reversal of the Fall story in Genesis, God ‘came forth / in his nakedness’, saying the words that should have fallen to Adam when he came out of hiding: ‘Forgive me’; and there is a strong suggestion in the poem that the ‘tool’ of the title is one that cuts down the tree from the Garden of Eden so that it can be turned into the Cross on which the naked, vulnerable God may ‘[suffer] the tool’s / insolence in his own body’. By recalling the words of Scripture, ‘Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree’ (1 Pet. 2:24) and more distantly implying also the ‘For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin’ of 2 Cor. 5:21, the poem suggests the depth of God’s commitment to the creatures He has made. Exposing himself to human ‘insolence’, He goes even to the length of saying on humankind’s behalf the words that man and woman ought themselves to say. Although it would be wrong to suggest that the thoughts and words attributed in Thomas’s poems to God are always self-evidently noble or obviously deserving of sympathy, it seems to me that this poetry always implies that the contact with human beings is of total importance to Him. In an earlier poem than ‘The Tool’, an unflattering image is presented of the Divine ‘Other’ as a Creator who is resentful and jealous (Collected Poems 235). What causes this resentment and jealousy, however, is the lack of welcome for Him in the world He has created (unwelcome as a parent would be at the ‘trysts / In the greenwood’), these

160

Poetry and Prayer

creatures’ independence and unwillingness to communicate with Him. Hence the overall implication, as in ‘The Other’, is that God, far from hiding from the creatures He has brought into being, longs for their company, as He does in the biblical narrative where He comes looking for Adam in the garden. If we now consider one of the poems in which Thomas most obviously reflects on the relationship between the human being and God, ‘The Presence’ (Collected Poems 391), we may see that though by a superficial reading it is simply another of many laments on the apparent futility of prayer, it is better seen as an expression of the mutual dependence between the ‘pray-er’ and the One prayed to. By means of a delicate web of allusions to Psalm 42 and, in the final lines, to the description in Genesis of man as created in the image of God, it creates a conception of the relationship between God and the human being as one of loving and necessary interdependence. The hope expressed at the end of the poem that the perceptible but elusive ‘presence’, pictured as an animal drinking from the silence of a man praying, might ‘perhaps like Narcissus’ approach there ‘to linger a moment over its transparent face’, implies a mutuality of relationship. It accords with the theological tradition maintaining that God, who is all-sufficient within Himself, of His own will limited Himself by creating the world, thereby calling forth a need in Himself: to love human beings and be loved by them. Hence, while the comparison of God to Narcissus might seem demeaning to the Deity if we concentrate on the usual interpretation of the myth, which emphasizes the vanity and self-absorption of the beautiful young man, if we think instead of Narcissus’ gazing at his reflection as an attempt to find his identity, then this motif coalesces with the biblical description of God’s creation of man, suggesting the powerful reciprocality of the bond between the two. As Halik points out, the metaphor of God as a Person expresses the idea that God ‘allows us to speak to Him and Himself speaks’; and that he ‘lives’ in a ‘community’, ‘in a relationship of beings’ (Dotknij ran 71). Furthermore, the relationships in which He lives include humanity, which, paradoxically, is not fully human without this relationship. A sense of its loving quality is implied in ‘The Presence’ by one of Thomas’s typically surprising phraseological collocations: just as the verb ‘incur’ in this poem leads one to expect a word such as ‘punishment’, rather than ‘silence’, to follow, so the usual collocations of the phrase ‘Am I under’ would lead us to expect, perhaps, ‘scrutiny’, ‘surveillance’ or ‘observation’, all phrases suggesting at best coolness and indifference, at worst outright hostility. Instead, we find the speaker asking ‘Am I under / regard?’, where attention is drawn by a characteristic enjambment to this unexpected word with its connotations not of mere looking, but of warm feeling, rather than judgment, in that looking. Indeed, the ‘silence’ that fills the poem, though

Coming Out of Hiding? R.S. Thomas and Tadeusz Różewicz

161

powerful, is a presence of gentleness and warmth (‘sunlight quivering / on a bare wall’), tactful (it only ‘catches me by the sleeve’; it ‘nudges’ rather than impels), even a little shy, or afraid to impose itself: when I focus on it, it ‘look[s] a little to one side’. One might be reminded here of the risen Christ, ‘mak[ing] as though he would have gone further’ after reaching Emmaus; not forcing His company on the disciples, but allowing Himself to be ‘constrained’ by them to stay with them (Luke 24:28–9). Unexpectedly, ‘The Presence’, though all its ‘conversation’ takes place in the silence of ‘feel[ing]’, ‘read[ing]’, ‘perceiv[ing]’ and ‘looking’, proves to provide a premonition of a moment of restored communication between the human being and God. Kowalik’s comment on medieval lyric suggests an equally unexpected literary antecedent for Thomas’s poem: Contact with the divine … is crucially mediated through sight. This takes the specific form of an exchange of gazes, wherein the poet/believer is at once aware of being an object of the gaze of celestial beings and remains the subject experiencing the intense desire to see the face of Mary and Jesus. (184).

Thomas’s poem of course implies a less specific object of desire; but nevertheless, there is a suggestion in ‘The Presence’ of the possibility of a kind of dialogue of gazes – a kind of wordless prayer in which each party is at ease in the presence of the other’s silence. What is it, then, that ensures that so often no similar ‘appearing before the presence of God’, no quenching of the Psalmist’s thirst, takes place in Thomas’s work? In a poem mentioned earlier, ‘Present’ (Collected Poems 325), the ‘messages’ that come through the ‘switchboard’ to God seem to be summed up in the question, ‘Do you love me?’; but the speaker, who may be assumed to be God, oddly comments on this: ‘And there is no answer.’ Why does he not say, ‘But I do not answer’? Might this suggest that the senders of the messages are not really addressing Him at all? Instead of an answer: there are only the treaties and take-overs, and the vision of clasped hands over the unquiet blood.

The poem seems then to imply not God’s lack of desire for communication with human beings, but rather their unwillingness, even refusal, to ‘appear’ before His presence. Here we may compare Halik’s reflection on Hell as a place of

162

Poetry and Prayer

bodies without faces, which thus are no longer an image of the soul and can communicate nothing (Dotknij ran 135). The final fate of the Adam who will not come out of hiding, who has no wish to see God or be seen by Him, is imaged by T.S. Eliot’s ‘hollow men’, who enjoy no community with one another and who, so far from longing to see God, are possessed by their fear of eyes and desperate to avoid ‘that final meeting’ (83–6). ‘Praying’, on the other hand, as Halik writes in Night of the Confessor, ‘means being aware I can be seen. The awareness of living in unhiddenness (… an exact translation of the Greek word for “truth”) transforms people’ (142). Halik’s reflections may help us to see that in many of Thomas’s poems there is a reversal of the view of prayer that he is commonly thought to express. Instead of the human being as seeking an elusive God, we have at least a suggestion of God as seeking elusive human beings, who since the Fall, like Adam in the Garden, do not really desire communion with God any longer, and whose idea of communication, if it comes to that at all, is always to blame – God or other people or the Devil – God for giving me this woman, woman for tempting me, the serpent, and so on. William T. Noon, quoting the words of Karl Rahner, so similar in spirit to many of Thomas’s poems, on the silence of God (‘when I pray, it’s as if my words have disappeared down some dark, deep well, from which no echo ever comes back to reassure me’), speaks of the distress in prayer that ‘rises not altogether from a sense of God’s absence, but rather from a glaring sense of [one’s] own cowardice in response to his presence’ (62). This, which we might call the distress of the hidden Adam, who yearns to come out of hiding and yet does not dare, perhaps provides another way of looking at Thomas’s countless poems on prayer and poem-prayers. If, in considering the unsatisfactory nature of his or her prayer, the ‘pray-er’ gives up the accusatory stand, then, like the speaker of ‘The Prayer’ (Collected Poems 270), he or she may perhaps be able to detect the presence of the Lord who was not in wind or earthquake or fire. This speaker prays, ‘but without bile’, so not implying that it is God’s fault that his prayer seems so futile. He listens; and even if he declares that he hears ‘no still small voice’, yet the very mention of it calls the voice that Elijah heard into existence: And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle,

Coming Out of Hiding? R.S. Thomas and Tadeusz Różewicz

163

and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah? (1 Kings 19:11–13)

In Thomas’s poem, too, God speaks, for the first prayer, ‘Teach me to know / what to pray for’, is answered when ‘the prayer formed’, leading to an almost mystical image of communion with God. I should like to conclude these reflections with a brief reference to a Polish poet who, though unknown to Thomas, might be considered to be a kind of distant poetic kinsman of his: Tadeusz Różewicz. The last poem in Thomas’s posthumously published collection Residues reveals precisely the same concern as animates the work of Różewicz, a poet preoccupied with the question posed by Adorno on the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz. Here, human speech becomes ‘as though / tongue-tied’ in the face of the evils represented by ‘Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot’: The adjectives are tired, the verbs indecisive, only the facts remain fresh, sprouting out of the ground manured by victims. (Collected Later Poems 356)

Thomas’s poetics of absence is a kind of equivalent to Różewicz’s poetics of lack, and in the work of both poets similar yearnings appear, along with a similar rejection of the banality, mechanization and commercialization associated with contemporary life in the so-called ‘developed’ countries. In Residues, the poem ‘Don’t ask me’ is an ars poetica whose minimalist and yet at the same time maximalist spirit has obvious resemblances to Różewicz’s poetic programme. Eschewing any kind of linguistic exaltation, the poet in this penultimate poem of the collection nevertheless finds himself capable at the end of an expression of almost romantic faith in his art: Poetry is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart. (Collected Later Poems 355)

Among the recurring motifs of Thomas’s poetry is one that he shares with the Polish poet: Jacob’s battle with the Angel. Tomas Halik offers a compelling interpretation of this story: Jacob is forced to admit the truth of who he is – a cheater (the meaning of his name). By saying ‘I am Jacob’, he faces up to his former deception, when he told his father he was Esau. Now he receives a new

Poetry and Prayer

164

name: Israel. Halik links this story with the Fall and with baptism, in which the child, as it were admitting ‘I am Adam’, is given a new name (Drzewo ma jeszcze nadzieję 131–2). In both Thomas’s and Różewicz’s work, the motif of this battle is one expression of a common concern with the difficulties of conversing with God. But the stance usually taken, certainly in Thomas’s poetry, appears at least at first glance to be a resentful one; unwilling to admit his own name, the speaker is most often frustrated and angered by his inability to force God to disclose His. In ‘The Combat’, for instance, the human relationship with God is presented as the continual struggle of Jacob with a ‘you’ who for no discoverable reason choose[s] to engage us, belabouring us with [his] silence, and never giving his name. (Collected Poems 291)

With R.S. Thomas as the creator of such poems as ‘The Combat’, ‘Silence’ and ‘The Absence’ in mind, I would now like to look briefly at Różewicz’s poem ‘bez’ (‘without’),7 which opens the volume Płaskorzeźba (this lovely Polish word, meaning ‘bas-relief ’, has no good English equivalent). In Różewicz’s dialogue with the god [sic] who has ‘run away’ unnoticed from the life of the person speaking, the same note of pain and yearning can be heard that is audible so often in Thomas’s work. The key concept of absence also appears in Różewicz’s poem, as does the cry of the forsaken god, the cry from the Cross that fills the air of Thomas’s poetry. Różewicz, too, seems to ask the question: is it perhaps not God who has forsaken the human race, but human beings who have forsaken Him? For the purposes of this discussion, I have used my own, provisional translation of the Polish poem; the interested reader may refer to Adam Czerniawski’s selection They Came to See a Poet (1991) for comparison. The poem begins with a statement: the greatest event in the life of a human being is the birth and death of God.

From here on the poem becomes a direct address, and alludes to the phrases of known prayers: the Lord’s Prayer and the psalmist’s cry (Psalm 22): It is difficult to render in English the force of this monosyllable, so much stronger and barer than ‘without’. In Shakespeare’s time, we might have tried ‘sans’. A tempting option that is appropriate to Różewicz’s ‘poetics of lack’ is ‘less’ (as in ‘god-less’). 7

Coming Out of Hiding? R.S. Thomas and Tadeusz Różewicz

165

father our Father why like a bad father by night without sign without trace without word why hast thou forsaken me?8 why have I forsaken Thee? life without god is possible life without god is impossible but as a child I fed on You ate (your) body drank (your) blood perhaps you left me when I tried to open my arms to embrace life light-minded I spread my arms wide and let you go or perhaps you ran away unable to listen to my laughter You don’t laugh or perhaps you punished me small, dark one, for stubbornness for pride Rożewicz’s formulation is slightly archaic, close to the translation of Wujek (1593), apart from the form ‘mnie’ where Wujek has ‘mię’. Czerniawski, unsatisfactorily, opts for a modernized version of the question that has no biblical resonance: ‘Why did you forsake me?’ 8

Poetry and Prayer

166 for the fact that I tried to create a new man a new tongue

you left me without a murmur of wings without lightning like a field mouse like water drained away in sand busy forgetful I didn’t notice your escape9 your absence in my life life without god is possible life without god is impossible10

I have translated the phrase in these last lines, which form a kind of refrain (they occur also in the middle of the poem), as ‘without god’ rather than ‘without a god’. Although Polish would allow either translation, the first one seems more in tune with the overall mood of the poem, on the one hand reminding of the hopelessness of those who are ‘without God in the world’ (Eph. 2:12), and on the other suggesting a ‘god’ who is somehow defenceless, vulnerable, harmless and small – as so often in Thomas’s poetry, for instance in ‘The Tool’. The association of idolatry evoked by ‘without a god’ does not seem to me so appropriate to the poem as a whole. (However, in favour of this translation might be the fact that in Polish, the phrase ‘bez boga’ is much closer to the adjective ‘bezbożny’ (‘godless’, ‘impious’), than the English phrase ‘without god’ is to ‘godless’.) These concluding last lines are both part of the poem’s prayer and a comment on what it is to live without prayer. They express a wavering similar to that at the end of Thomas’s poem ‘The Absence’ (‘my whole being’ as ‘a vacuum he may not Adam Czerniawski’s translation is: ‘I missed Your flight / Your absence / in my life’. In Polish, a capital letter for the second-person pronoun is normal rather than exceptional usage. Różewicz at a certain point in the poem deprives this pronoun of its capital letter, just as he deprives the name ‘God’ of its initial capital, thereby diminishing the person addressed and indicating the distance that has grown between this person and the speaker. Czerniawski’s use of a capital ‘Y’, however, produces an oddity in English whose effect is to dignify rather than to diminish. 10 Or: ‘“life is possible god-less / life is impossible god-less’”. 9

Coming Out of Hiding? R.S. Thomas and Tadeusz Różewicz

167

abhor’), and, also as in Thomas, the scale in Różewicz’s poem tilts if anything towards the hope that God may after all be found. This is indicated by the order of the last two lines, concluding: ‘life without god is impossible’. Here, finally, there is perhaps an even more important point that deserves our attention: in this, the poem’s refrain, Różewicz used a lower-case letter for ‘god’. Evidently, then, the translator is not at liberty to employ a capital. But neither the poet nor the translator can control the resonances of the heard text. In neither Polish nor English can the reduction of ‘God’ to ‘god’ be made except in writing. It is only in writing that the intellect can impose a limit on the word ‘God’ by using a lower-case letter (and even then, unless we add an article, ‘god’ will always remain a proper name, only for some reason deprived of the capital letter to which all proper names are entitled). In speech such games cannot be played; speech cannot, insultingly or for any other purpose, deprive the name of God of its capital letter and so reduce God to manageable proportions. What, then, are the consequences of hearing rather than reading Różewicz’s poem? Does the listener become, perhaps, a witness to a spoken prayer intended to be heard – prayers are not read – by God, part of a living dialogue in which the question of lower- or upper-case letters simply disappears, a matter of blinding and absurd irrelevance? If so, the poem almost involuntarily sets God free from ‘the confines / of our definition of him’, to use one of Thomas’s phrases (‘The White Tiger’, Collected Poems 358). Różewicz’s poem ‘without’ becomes, like so many of Thomas’s, a move out of hiding, sorrowing over man’s abandonment of God. Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. ‘Dover Beach’. In Gardner ed., The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 650-1. Auden, W.H. A Certain World: Nature of Prayer. New York: Viking, 1970. The Book of Common Prayer. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1662. Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. Gardner, Helen, ed. The New Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Halik, Tomas. Dotknij ran [Touch the wounds]. Kraków: Znak, 2010. —. Drzewo ma jeszcze nadzieję [For there is hope of a tree]. Kraków: Znak, 2010. —. Night of the Confessor. New York: Image Books, 2012.

168

Poetry and Prayer

Herbert, George. A Choice of George Herbert’s Verse. Selected with intro. by R.S. Thomas. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. Kowalik, Barbara. Betwixt engelaunde and englene londe: Dialogic Poetics in Early English Religious Lyric. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010. Levertov, Denise. The Stream and the Sapphire. New York: New Directions, 1997. Lewis, C.S. Out of the Silent Planet. London: The Bodley Head, 1938. McKenzie, Tim. Vocation in the Poetry of the Priest-Poets George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.S. Thomas. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. Marion, Jean-Luc. Prolegomena to Charity. Trans. Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press, 1986. Noon, William T. Poetry and Prayer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967. Phillips, D.Z. R.S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God. London: Macmillan, 1986. Różewicz, Tadeusz. Płaskorzeźba. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, 1991. —. They Came to See a Poet: Selected Poems. Selected and trans. Adam Czerniawski. London: Anvil Press, 1991. Thomas, Edward. ‘The Owl’. In Garner ed., The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 800. Thomas, R.S.. Collected Poems 1945–1990. London: Phoenix Press, 2000. —. Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2004.

Chapter 10

Saturday Prayers: R.S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God Richard McLauchlan

Ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, of the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless. In the Utopia of the Sunday, the aesthetic will, presumably, no longer have logic or necessity. The apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savour of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man. Without them, how could we be patient? George Steiner, Real Presences 233

‘Ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday.’ This chapter suggests that it is within a ‘Saturday’ context that one may best appreciate R.S. Thomas’s poems on prayer, poems which bear witness to the search for a silent God. For Thomas, however, this context is more specific than the broad Sabbatarian vision outlined by Steiner, in which ‘the death of love’ and ‘the dream of liberation’ are shorn from the particularities of the gospel narrative. While, as Steiner seems to suggest, almost every writer’s imaginative framework can be conceived in these generalized terms, we must be careful to distinguish, within this framework, Thomas’s distinctive perspective as a Christian. That is to say, Thomas wrote as one who saw himself as standing in the shadow of a specific historical event, namely the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. His vision of redemption is therefore shaped in reference to this particular event and the events of the Sunday which followed, however undogmatically and idiosyncratically he might conceive them. But as the poems make abundantly clear, within Thomas’s poetic vision that which is hoped for, that which the Triduum’s third day inaugurates, is still far from accomplished. The definitive Sunday of history is not yet upon us. To consider Thomas’s poems on the search for a silent God in this Saturday

170

Poetry and Prayer

context is to re-assess features of the poems which may seem, initially, to point to an existence lived very much on the fringes of Christian faith. The prayerful struggle with divine silence and worldly suffering to which the poems bear witness may be viewed, I submit, as part of what it is to live at the centre of the Christian narrative: the Saturday between cross and resurrection.1 In conjunction with this claim, I argue that, in the act of reading these poems, we, as readers, may enter into something of the prayer of Holy Saturday. Thomas gives shape to his poetic vision in such a way that the attentiveness, the patience, the listening and the silence that characterize the prayer of Holy Saturday become our own in the act of reading. Such prayer refuses to accept the finality or triumph of Friday’s ‘unutterable waste’, and yet it recognizes, too, that Sunday’s ‘dream of liberation’ is still far from secure. There is no sense of an Easter ‘triumphalism’ in Thomas’s vision. In this way, rather than beginning with theological concepts which are then read onto the poems, it is the poems themselves that actually give rise to a Holy Saturday reading. But before I show how this might be the case, it is worthwhile outlining in slightly greater detail, the theological, and indeed practical, significance of being led into this ‘Saturday’ prayer. Nicholas Lash, the former Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, tells a story that begins to get at the significance of living within a Holy Saturday landscape: My colleague Stephen Sykes recently set his seminar to spend a term discussing a book of mine called Easter in Ordinary. As they talked about it, one member of the seminar … suggested that any future edition should be retitled ‘Easter on Saturday’. I think that is rather a good idea! But best of all, perhaps, would be to call it ‘Easter Vigil’, in order to indicate the sense in which all prayer and expectation, all keeping of createdness in mind, occur on Saturday, in darkness illuminated from the pain of God, in watchfulness for the rising sun, in patience. (119)2

Obviously, this prayer is not to be directly mapped onto the experience of the disciples on that first Holy Saturday, since they waited, to use the words of the famous Swiss expositor of Holy Saturday, Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘in the 1 I dealt with similar themes in the article ‘R.S. Thomas: Poet of Holy Saturday’, in which I outlined some other aspects of the ‘Saturday’ perspectives encountered in Thomas’s poems. 2 Prior to telling his anecdote, Lash explicitly draws upon Steiner’s claim quoted at the outset of this chapter. The title, and indeed the substance, of Lash’s paper (which was originally given as the Aquinas Lecture at Blackfriars, Cambridge, on 29 January 1990) comes, in fact, by way of response to Steiner.

Saturday Prayers: R.S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God

171

non-comprehension that there is a Resurrection and what it can be’ (51). Lash’s point, it seems, is that, for us, the final emancipation from suffering and from evil which Christ’s resurrection inaugurates, and of which it is the ‘first fruits’ (see 1 Cor. 15:20, 23, Revised Standard Version), has not yet been brought to completion. The Christian stands in the darkness of the Cross, waiting for the light of Easter to come. I perhaps would not go so far as to say, with Lash, that ‘all prayer … occur[s] on Saturday’, since both the New Testament and the testimony of Christians throughout the centuries seem to make it clear that resurrection life can indeed break into the present moment (there are poems by R.S. Thomas, as we shall see, that certainly indicate this). But I would agree that one of the dominant characteristics of Christian prayer is that of Saturday’s ‘watchfulness’. Something of the importance of all this for responsible Christian existence and for theological reflection begins to emerge here. To pray in the context of Holy Saturday is to remain open to the reality of suffering and evil, open to the divine silence which so often comes in the wake of worldly horror, and open to the fact that God’s Word has suffered and been silenced by such evil. It makes no triumphalist mockery of suffering; rather, it bears witness to the cost of redemption, to the depths plumbed by God himself. In refusing to remain blind to the often dreadful realities of this world, a Holy Saturday perspective also sheds light on, it ‘illuminates’ (as Lash says), who God is. Alan E. Lewis, whose penetrating reflections on the day between cross and resurrection were formed while dying from cancer, has suggested: Possibly we are on the way to some insight into the meaning of Christ’s cross and resurrection if and when we can stand – as, intriguingly, so few in history seem consciously to have done – at the ambiguous, invisible, and apparently insignificant boundary between Good Friday and Easter Day. Where better than at the Easter Saturday grave to see with clarity the vivid contrast between the humiliation of the crucified Christ and his glorious exaltation? Where better to find the wisdom which can unite cross and resurrection inextricably, and discover truth in such foolishness as presence-in-absence, powerful weakness, and lifegiving death? Where better to hold in equilibrium the first-time hearing of the gospel story and its constant retelling by the people of faith? (42)

To situate oneself on this threshold, in this liminal time and space, is thus to have one’s theological language and concepts unsettled and renewed. Silence is crucial in this respect. In facing the silence of God’s Word on Holy Saturday, our own words are cut short. To quote von Balthasar again: ‘At the end of the Passion,

172

Poetry and Prayer

when the Word of God is dead, the Church has no words left to say’ (49). In a way, our falling silent is part of what it can mean to verbally embody the mystery of the Passion, which, in turn, makes us receptive to Easter’s renewal. In a gloss on von Balthasar’s theology, Rowan Williams comments: The form of Christ is always a revelation of our untruth (and thus unreality and unloveliness) and so a demand to follow Christ into the abyss of Holy Saturday, into silence, before the Holy Spirit is capable of bringing forth a new language in Easter and Pentecost, the Word restored to the Father’s throne, yet simultaneously given to the community of believers as their heart and their life. (32)

So this ‘following into silence’ is a disruptive, purgative movement, not simply a peaceful interlude. The prayer of Holy Saturday may be marked by difficulties, tensions and ambiguities as it faces divine silence and enters into it. But, as I have indicated, it is this that keeps it responsible: it refuses to blind itself to what the world is really like, and it attempts to remain attentive to the foundational Christian narrative, a narrative always ready to shock and contradict our all-toohuman imaginings, our domesticating attempts to reduce God to, and these are Thomas’s words, ‘the confines / of our definition of him’ (Frequencies 45). Thus Lewis writes: For supremely in the muteness of unuttered prayer, when all we can do is give up every thought of self-redemption, and all schemes, strategies, and nostrums for personal, political, or cosmic liberation, and confess a defeated defenselessness against the magnitude of sin’s increase, then we engage most fully in the prayerful living out of the Easter Saturday story. Then truly, through the Spirit we enter the abyss where the world ended and the Word itself was silenced; and, suspended between patience and resignation, we can only wait for who-knows-what tomorrow might be born out of God’s own fresh possibilities. (307)

This brief sketch of some of the significant aspects of praying through one’s own contemporary Holy Saturday shows something of the practical and theological importance of such prayer. It should also be evident that what will look from one perspective as if it belongs to the fringes of Christian existence (in other words, the difficult and disruptive confrontation with God’s silence and the search for God amid that silence) may actually be, when viewed within the context I have been discussing here, a witness to what it can mean to live at the centre of responsible Christian existence and its foundational narrative.

Saturday Prayers: R.S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God

173

Having established the relevance of praying within a ‘Saturday’ context, I turn now to Thomas’s poems in order to show how they might lead the reader into this prayer. As an introduction to some of the key ways in which the poems are able to achieve this, we begin with a close reading of ‘Sea-watching’:3 Grey waters, vast as an area of prayer that one enters. Daily over a period of years I have let the eye rest on them. Was I waiting for something? Nothing but that continuous waving that is without meaning occurred. Ah, but a rare bird is rare. It is when one is not looking, at times one is not there that it comes. You must wear your eyes out, as others their knees. I became the hermit of the rocks, habited with the wind and the mist. There were days, so beautiful the emptiness it might have filled, its absence was as its presence; not to be told any more, so single my mind after its long fast, my watching from praying. (Laboratories of the Spirit 64)

Perhaps the most noticeable aspect of the poem, initially, is the way in which the ebb and flow of the lines reflect the movement of water and contribute towards the pun on ‘waving’ in the eighth line – the waves are that which wave, as do the lines. But if this waving, which betokens presence or greeting, is none the Permission to quote from the poems of R.S. Thomas has been granted by Kunjana Thomas. 3

174

Poetry and Prayer

less meaningless, as that which follows the pun suggests, then we, as readers, are also led to question precisely what ‘meaning’ may be obtained in the movement of the lines: is this, too, misleading? An analogy begins to open up here. To seek for meaning within the lines of the poem is to participate in something like the poet’s waiting upon a ‘rare bird’ against the backdrop of a shifting sea. Significantly, this waiting, as the last line suggests, becomes a waiting upon God; it is, finally, indistinguishable from prayer before God. In his autobiography, Neb (translated into English as ‘No-one’), Thomas writes: And spending an hour or two looking over the sea hoping to see a migratory bird, he came to see the similarity between this and praying. He had to watch patiently for a long time for fear of losing the rare bird, because he did not know when it would come by. It is exactly the same with the relationship between man and God that is known as prayer. Great patience is called for, because no one knows when God will choose to reveal Himself. (100)

One significant difference with the poetic presentation of this comparison in ‘Sea-watching’ is the fact that, in the poem, the two practices are seen as being more than just ‘similar’; in the last four lines, one actually merges into the other. That is why I called them indistinguishable above. The poem offers a seamless transition. If the analogy holds between the poet’s waiting and the reader’s search for meaning in the poem, I would also want to propose the possibility that the reader’s activity of interpretation will flow, with similar seamlessness, into this waiting, into this prayer. In a sense, the poem becomes ‘an area of prayer’ for the reader, as the sea is for the poet. So the poet makes us read in a certain way, and that way is also the way of prayer. But this needs further exploring. The form entails that the eye scans across each line unevenly, as an eye scanning the waters for the sight of a bird might do. The attention we show to the presence of certain key words placed in certain key areas of the page is like the attention one must show to the various presences that one encounters in the attempt to catch sight of a ‘rare bird’. Two examples illustrate the point well. The line ‘Ah, but a rare bird is / rare’ requires patient attentiveness if we are to begin an adequate (not, of course, complete) reading of it. On one level, ‘Ah’ could be read as if the poet has spotted or realized something of importance (a moment of insight), or as a sigh of resignation (a moment of despair). On another level, it introduces the important element of breath, which we hear/encounter/enact following upon the silence of the page’s blank space, subtly suggesting the presence of life and

Saturday Prayers: R.S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God

175

even, perhaps, the Holy Spirit. Already, much ‘occurs’ in this one exclamation or sigh. As we read on, the web of meanings expands. The ‘is’ at the end of the line can be taken as an ontological statement: the ‘rare bird’ (and so God?) does exist, it would seem. But, as a copular verb, it also creates suspense and expectation as we wait to discover what this rare bird ‘is’. As is so often the case, Thomas allows his readers to participate in his own waiting. And what we discover in the following line by no means clarifies things, even though there is discovery – an important point, suggesting that the encounter with God is not to be viewed as that which simply ties up the loose ends of our thought. Again, ‘rare’ can be read as a moment of insight or a moment of despair. It can even be read as a comic observation and/or as saying nothing in particular at all. Not only, then, are we being trained in attentiveness in order to do justice to the pressure Thomas applies to his language, which, in turn, initiates us into the attentiveness, and therefore patience, needed as we wait upon God in prayer. In the processive elements of our reading, we are also participating in something very much like the reactions we might make as we discover and puzzle over the manifestations, or lack of God’s presence. The second example It is when … … one is not there that it comes

is significant again because the spatial and temporal features of the syntax are all being employed to make present the experience being referred to. The words and the spaces surrounding them become the different presences of the scene. The emptiness following upon ‘times one is not there’ is the ‘not-thereness’ of the watcher’s presence. The words ‘that it comes’ bring into presence the ‘rare bird’ arriving in the emptiness. And the time we take to read this through, to let our eyes follow the words across and down the page, tracing their movement and their meaning, instructs the reader to take the time the poet must take. Surprisingly, the ‘rare bird’ does come for us, in a certain respect: we pay attention to the words ‘that it comes’ as if that is the coming. But there is nothing here to pin down and grasp on to. The poem moves on. Just as the lines mimic the waves, they also reflect, even become for us, as readers, the elusive, unpredictable movements of the ‘rare bird’ in their swift bird-like thrusts back and forth into the page’s silence. In this way, they point towards the presence of something transcendent beyond the words, which refuses to be held still before the reader’s interpretative gaze. There is something both in and

176

Poetry and Prayer

beyond the poem, it seems; an ‘excess’ to be caught sight of, which none the less we may fail to see. Before I discuss the poem further, it is helpful to pause at this point to consider how this participatory encounter with the text begins to resonate with the prayer of Holy Saturday. I outlined earlier the importance of ‘watchfulness’ and attentiveness within such prayer. It is clear from the reading of ‘Seawatching’ offered thus far that not only are these characteristics required of the reader in order to begin to grasp the meaning of the poem, the poem is in fact crafted in such a way that it trains the reader in how such characteristics might be fostered. This is a poem not just about prayerful waiting in patience for the presence of God. It allows the reader to participate in that waiting with the poet and to develop the kind of attitude necessary to make that waiting fruitful. Thus, the attention we must show to the poem becomes the attention we must show as we pray. In fact, even more simply, it becomes prayerful attention. The fact that this is, in part, an attention to the presence or absence of God is one aspect that allows it to be specifically associated with the ‘watchfulness’ of Holy Saturday, when the One incarnating God’s presence on earth has departed, but whose entrance into death speaks of a radical solidarity with the human condition. Yet, as the embodiment of God’s presence, Christ is also God’s Word, and with his passing comes a great silence. The prayer of Holy Saturday is marked by a struggle with that silence, and it is a struggle present in ‘Sea-watching’. The form not only provides visual markers of the dynamics between presence and absence, it also requires that the reader of the poem, if he or she attempts to read it aloud, be especially careful to respect and listen to the silences that the page’s blanks represent. Take the following example: Was I waiting for something? Nothing but that continuous waving that is without meaning occurred.

To ask this initial question aloud and immediately give the answer ‘Nothing’ would be to miss a crucial element of these lines. We must hear the long pause, the lengthy silence that follows the question, before we hear the word in its wake. And in saying this word, we ought to respect the way in which ‘Nothing’ stands alone on the page, despite being connected to the succeeding lines. To listen to these lines is to discover (amongst a number of different discoveries, some in tension with each other) that what we hear is ‘Nothing’. Again, Thomas

Saturday Prayers: R.S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God

177

is training the reader in how to read the poem: to read the word in this way means that we will, upon re-reading, be especially sensitive to attend to the silence before it as silence, not simply a barrier to be swiftly overcome before we encounter more words. The theological significance of this comes into view when we consider the ambiguities of both ‘let the eye rest’ and ‘wear your eyes out’. These can be read in the exact opposite terms that we take them on a first reading. In other words, rather than suggesting a consciously attentive use of the eyes, they may be suggesting that we ought to stop using our eyes (though this should, I suspect, be qualified with the phrase ‘as we normally use them’). We must let go, in other words, all our painful searching, our endless scouring of the (spiritual) seascape. We will only project. If it is when ‘one is not looking’ that the ‘rare bird’ comes, then we must cease looking. This is not to be understood as if we ought to begin another activity that occupies our senses; rather, we must seek to let the very faculty of sight rest as we wait for God. The same can be said, then, of our listening; hence the importance of respecting the silences we encounter in the blank spaces of the page as silences. It is vital to recognize that there is nothing to see or hear in these spaces. If we let this be the case, refusing both to fill them up with the clutter of our own thoughts and to jump ahead into the words that follow without attending to their emptiness and silence, then perhaps something will ‘occur’ that has its origin outside of the watcher’s will. So the tension between these two interpretations (we must be attentive with the use of our visual and aural senses/we must cease to use such senses) is held together by the suggestion that it is in such passiveness that genuine attention is to be found, a non-looking and non-listening that is the precondition for proper sight and sound. A.M. Allchin has observed the spiritual importance of this in reference to the same poem: Watching the sea, praying, living one’s life; they have much in common. Gradually we find we are learning to look. Through the long silence and the emptiness a presence makes itself known. ‘After its long fast’ from the thoughts and explanations, from expectations and plans, the mind becomes single, the eye is enlightened, watching becomes prayer. It is hardly necessary to comment on the intimate relationship between watching and praying, to be found in the Gospels, and developed especially in the Eastern Christian tradition, where nepsis, vigilance, alertness is considered one of the principal qualities of the monk. The ancient insight is here born again, and we discover that it involves a condition which demands attention as well as patience, a growing degree of objectivity, a

178

Poetry and Prayer capacity to look beyond our own desires and illusions to what is actually there, to what is given to us. It means being open to the unexpected. (121)

‘Sea-watching’ is a poem that encourages the reader to relinquish his or her projections, and in so doing, to open up a space for genuine revelation to occur. I suggested earlier that the prayer of Holy Saturday may be marked by difficulties, tensions and ambiguities as it faces divine silence and enters into it. The above reading of ‘Sea-watching’ allows us, I think, to understand the reader’s encounter with the silences of the poem within this Saturday context. The purgative character of our prayerful struggle with these silences (in encounter with them, we may learn to let go of our self-made fantasies) resonates with the ultimate story of transformation that is Christ’s saving re-creation of humanity, forged through silence: the journey from cross to resurrection. Though the foundational journey of faith, in which each Christian is called to participate, it is not always entirely clear as to how such participation might occur. My suggestion here is that the act of reading becomes one of the ways by which one may realize Christ’s journey in one’s own life. This allows one to understand the silences of the poem as representations – as that which makes present once again – the silence between cross and resurrection. The prayerful attention that we show to the poem can be considered the prayer of Holy Saturday because it is an attention that wrestles with a silent God, an attention that unsettles our assumptions and challenges our projections. And thus it is that which prepares the way, to use Williams’s words, for a ‘new language in Easter and Pentecost’ (32). Another aspect that allows the reader to consider the prayerful encounter with the poem’s silences in paschal terms is that the poem encourages a view of both absence and silence that sees them as potential bearers of revelation. Consider the following lines: There were days, so beautiful the emptiness it might have filled, its absence was as its presence …

The ‘emptiness’ surrounding the words ‘its absence’ invites us to attend to absence and silence, both visually and aurally, in such a way that we, too, may begin to consider them as forms that indicate presence, and in some sense speak to us. As in the previous example, the lines combat our own temptation to ‘fill’ the emptiness on the page: we must let the silence speak for itself, as it were.

Saturday Prayers: R.S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God

179

The same dynamic is at play when we consider the silence of God in the wake of Christ’s death. As von Balthasar writes, ‘the death, and the dying away into silence, of the Logos so become the centre of what he has to say of himself that we have to understand precisely his non-speaking as his final revelation, his utmost word’ (79). Von Balthasar therefore emphasizes the need for Christians to attend to that silence, without the noise of human words and concepts: Who … would wish to lay claim to any other course of action than hanging on the lips of God, whose word remains inseparably connected with his historic Cross and Resurrection, and keeping silence, before the ‘love … which surpasses knowledge’ (Eph. 3.19), at that moment when the word of God falls silent in the hiatus, since there it takes away from every human logic the concept and the breath? (83)

I argued at the outset of the chapter that this kind of attention to silence will also affect one’s approach to suffering and to hope. If we turn to a poem entitled ‘Waiting’, we see further how this might be the case: Yeats said that. Young I delighted in it: there was time enough. Fingers burned, heart seared, a bad taste in the mouth. I read him again, but without trust any more. What counsel has the pen’s rhetoric to impart? Break mirrors, stare ghosts in the face, try walking without crutches at the grave’s edge? Now in the small hours of belief the one eloquence

Poetry and Prayer

180 to master is that of the bowed head, the bent knee, waiting, as at the end

of a hard winter for one flower to open on the mind’s tree of thorns. (Between Here and Now 83)

It is important to note that the syntax of each stanza, from the second onwards, flows into the next, allowing the presence of silence to enter into the thought being expressed by means of the stanza break. The poem is, one might say, punctuated by moments of silence. As a poem concerned with what type of ‘eloquence’ one should ‘master’ in response to ‘the mind’s tree of thorns’, the structure serves to disrupt the flow of words; it jolts and alters the thoughts about which the poet is writing. So, for example, when we read: ‘waiting, as at the end / of a hard winter’, we may first understand ‘the end’ as ‘the end of life’, and thus the ‘waiting’ spoken of becomes understood as a waiting for death; indeed, in the opening stanza, there is a suggestion that time is running out for the poet, and this would support this reading of ‘the end’. But once we have read across the silence of the stanza break, these thoughts are forced to shift again towards new interpretations. We as readers, then, are made to wait for a delivery of sense, and in this waiting, to deal with the resulting ambiguities and tensions of our confrontation with the silence on the page itself. On one level, Thomas is playing with the idea of ‘eloquence’ as he witnesses to his own verbal fragility – the stanzaic fragmentation reflecting, perhaps, ‘the mind’s tree of thorns’, and conversely, therefore, to the need for the humility of the ‘bowed head, the bent knee’.4 On another level, however, he is also allowing his readers to participate in his struggle for sense, in his waiting, calling them – us – to the posture of prayer. We are also brought to such a posture by means of the internal pauses within the stanzas themselves, particularly the penultimate stanza. The enjambment is M. Wynn Thomas’s remarks on the use of line breaks in Thomas’s poetry are relevant here and can equally be applied to stanza breaks: ‘Thomas can sometimes use line-breaks to problematize the construction of meanings, to dramatize the contingency of his grammatical connectives, as if he were uncertainly, or stutteringly, piecing together his statements about faith’s perception of a broken world. His baffled theology is thus inscribed in the movingly baffled syntax of his poetry.’ Worth remembering, however, is the qualification that follows this statement: ‘Not that his signature line-breaks always form the broken-backed sentences of a perplexed faith; they can also suggest the rapt meditative mind holding its breath as mystery deepens’ (M.W. Thomas 224). 4

Saturday Prayers: R.S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God

181

significant in this respect, as are the caesuræ after ‘head’ and before and after ‘waiting’. In the latter instance, this crucial title word is made to stand out, framed by silence. These silences, like the stanza breaks, resist any attempt the reader may make to rush on to the end. Such poetic techniques pervade Thomas’s writing, and so to read him sensitively is to undergo an apprenticeship in waiting. If this form of ‘eloquence’ is bound to ‘the bowed head, the bent / knee’, then to undergo such an apprenticeship is also, as we discovered in ‘Seawatching’, to learn to pray. It is evident that such prayerful waiting through ‘a hard winter’, with the hope that ‘one flower’ will ‘open’, resonates deeply with the prayer of Holy Saturday. Earlier, I quoted these words from Alan E. Lewis: For supremely in the muteness of unuttered prayer, when all we can do is give up every thought of self-redemption, and all schemes, strategies, and nostrums for personal, political, or cosmic liberation, and confess a defeated defenselessness against the magnitude of sin’s increase, then we engage most fully in the prayerful living out of the Easter Saturday story. Then truly, through the Spirit we enter the abyss where the world ended and the Word itself was silenced; and, suspended between patience and resignation, we can only wait for who-knows-what tomorrow might be born out of God’s own fresh possibilities. (307)

To read ‘Waiting’ is, I contend, to be ‘suspended between patience and resignation’. Though not explicitly mentioned in the poem (the ‘small hours / of belief ’ point towards it), a struggle with the silence of God is witnessed to in the formal arrangement of the poem. As readers, we must go through silence, wait upon it, even, perhaps, be unnerved and jostled by it, and are thereby brought to the point where the prayer of Holy Saturday may begin to be our prayer too. There is, therefore, no room here for an irresponsible ‘triumphalism’ that evades the reality of our present human condition, but there is also, in the patience we are slowly learning to acquire, the presence of hope. The image of the ‘mind’s tree of thorns’ justifies, moreover, a Christological reading of the poem. It interestingly combines the biblical symbols of the tree (of life, of the knowledge of good and evil, of the cross) and the crown of thorns (and perhaps even the thicket in which the ram, slaughtered in place of Isaac and a type of Christ, is caught; Gen. 22:13), and thus a link between the poet and the Passion can be made. It recalls Williams’s words concerning the ‘demand to follow Christ into the abyss of Holy Saturday, into silence’ (32), since the suggestion here is that, in some small way, the poet, and all who share these

182

Poetry and Prayer

experiences, partakes in the suffering of Christ.5 If this is indeed the case, then it also serves to justify my claim that the poet’s waiting in silence, which also becomes the reader’s silent waiting, is not, from this Holy Saturday perspective, an experience on the fringes of Christian existence. It is, rather, a participation in the central Christian story. But this ought not to obscure the fact that Easter’s renewal also has a place within Christian prayer. Thomas’s poem ‘The Prayer’, for instance, shows how the ‘new language of Easter’ may arise out of Saturday’s silence: He kneeled down dismissing his orisons as inappropriate; one by one they came to his lips and were swallowed but without bile. He fell back on an old prayer: Teach me to know what to pray for. He listened; after the weather of his asking, no still, small voice, only the parade of ghosts, casualties of his past intercessions. He held out his hands, cupped as though to receive blood, leaking from life’s side. They remained dry, as his mouth did. But the prayer formed : Deliver me from the long drought of the mind. Let leaves from the deciduous Cross fall on us, washing us clean, turning our autumn to gold by the affluence of their fountain. (Laboratories of the Spirit 10)

5 It is interesting to note in relation to this that Thomas seems drawn to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the poet as one who suffers. Thomas writes: ‘Kierkegaard’s definition of a poet was that he is one who suffers. It is in his anguish that he opens his mouth, but the sound that comes out is so sweet to the ears of his listeners that they press him to sing again; that is, to suffer further’ (Autobiographies 20).

Saturday Prayers: R.S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God

183

Once again, the resonances are obvious between the kind of prayer we encounter here and the kind of prayer which characterizes the prayer of Holy Saturday. On one level, the prayer witnessed to in this poem is charged with difficulty, distress and incomprehension, and this is reinforced through the vocabulary Thomas draws upon: the language of ‘bile’, of ‘ghosts’ and ‘casualties’, of ‘blood, leaking’, of ‘dry’ mouths. And amid such a world, there is the silence: ‘no still, small / voice’ seems to come. From this perspective, the formal structure, particularly the manner of the poem’s indentation, echoes, and leads us as readers into, the silence which follows upon the poet’s words, while also representing the renewed attempts to pray again in the wake of such silence. But on another level, something much more positive is taking place here. To begin with, it is important to recognize that there is, in fact, answered prayer: ‘Teach me to know/ what to pray for’, the subject of the poem pleads, and eventually ‘the prayer formed’; he is given the words to pray. More significant still, however, is what occurs in the final prayer of the poem. In its beauty, in its epiphanic, visionary language, these words are, in a sense, a realization of what is prayed for concerning the ‘leaves / of the Cross’ – a realization both for the one who prays (a mind in ‘drought’ could never utter such words) and for those who read or hear the prayer. The turn of ‘autumn / to gold’ becomes reality, one could say, in the turn of language. The language of ‘bile’, of ‘ghosts’ and ‘casualties’, of ‘blood, leaking’, of ‘dry’ mouths, is replaced by the beautiful, restorative words of the final prayer. Both ‘deciduous’ (a favourite adjective of Thomas’s) and ‘affluence’ have a wonderfully sensuous sound and feel upon the tongue, not to mention the impressive vitality in the imagery of being washed clean, of gold, and of fountains. This prayer for spiritual invigoration is an invigorated prayer; it fulfils itself. There is deliverance in the language. The words of the one who prays for renewal have been renewed. And, in the beauty of the language, a language which delivers us from the earlier, distressing language, we too experience renewal in some sense. For this transformation is not simply presented to our imaginations; as we read, it is enacted on our lips and tongues. Our understanding of the poem’s structure is therefore completely transformed. If we view the structure in light of the fact that the poet’s prayer has been realized in the poem, the indentation may be seen as that which allows the words on the page to become the leaves of the cross, falling gently downwards from side to side in the wind. It also allows for the soothing, rhythmic ebb and flow of a tide ‘washing / us clean’ to be present (we notice here that the prayer is now for ‘us’, not just for the one who prays). The poem’s silences can be understood, then, as being delicately held within this falling tide (if we may call it that) and thus constitutive of our healing. The words which are so much

184

Poetry and Prayer

part of this transformative process are not, therefore, to be untangled from the experience of silence. They are not to be set side by side, with one reality triumphing over the other. Words and silence, God’s and ours, are of equal importance in the process of transformation. In conclusion, this chapter has shown that the search for a silent God in Thomas’s poems on prayer is not to be understood as an activity that speaks of a life lived on the fringes of Christian faith. It is, rather, a witness to a participation in the central day of the Christian Triduum, Holy Saturday. The poems themselves give rise to this reading, and it is a reading that invites the one who engages with the poems likewise to partake in that day of watchfulness and waiting. The poems are crafted in such a fashion that the attentiveness, the patience, the listening and the silence that characterize the prayer of Holy Saturday are able to be experienced by the reader. These characteristics prove to be an important theological resource, as they not only shape one’s approach to worldly suffering and hope in responsible ways, faithful to the gospel narratives, but they also assist the reader in resisting the illusions and fantasies that so often accompany belief, opening a space where God is free to act and transform. The activity of reading these poems becomes, then, a paschal practice, instructive in the way of prayer. Works Cited Allchin, A.M. ‘Emerging: A Look at Some of R.S. Thomas’s More Recent Poems’. In Anstey ed., Critical Writings on R.S. Thomas, 117–29. Anstey, Sandra, ed. Critical Writings on R.S. Thomas. Bridgend: Poetry Wales, 1982. Lash, Nicholas. ‘Friday, Saturday, Sunday’. New Blackfriars 71 (March 1990): 109–19. Lewis, Alan E. Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001. McLauchlan, Richard. ‘R.S. Thomas: Poet of Holy Saturday’. The Heythrop Journal 52 (2011): 976–85. Riches, John, ed. The Analogy of Beauty. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1986. Steiner, George. Real Presences. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1989. Thomas, M. Wynn. R.S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013. Thomas, R.S. Laboratories of the Spirit. London: Macmillan, 1975. —. Frequencies. London: Macmillan, 1978.

Saturday Prayers: R.S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God

185

—. Between Here and Now. London: Macmillan, 1981. —. Autobiographies. Trans. Jason Walford Davies. London: Phoenix Press, 1997. Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Mysterium Paschale. Trans. Aidan Nichols. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1990. Williams, Rowan. ‘Balthasar and Rahner’. In Riches ed., The Analogy of Beauty, 93–115.

This page has been left blank intentionally

Chapter 11

Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer Sarah Law

Introduction Thomas Merton (1915–1968), the twentieth-century American Trappist monk, was widely known for his writing on contemplative life. His thinking developed throughout his 27 years of religious life, with issues of social justice and interest in Eastern spirituality becoming prominent in his later work. He left a considerable oeuvre of writing on the contemplative life by the time of his death in 1968. But Merton was also a poet, although he struggled with what he saw as this extra vocation. Merton published four volumes of poetry in the 1940s, but none between 1949 and 1957. He returned to writing poetry, and writing about poetry, in the last decade of his life, when he was making many connections outside the Kentucky monastery of Gethsemani and developing his interests in Zen spirituality. His Collected Poems is over a thousand pages, and numerous influences have been cited as important, most convincingly William Blake and G.M. Hopkins. Although unique in becoming a widely known twentieth-century Catholic monk who was also a writer and poet, Merton was not alone among American mid-twentieth-century poets who were attracted to mysticism and contemplation in their life and writing. Neo-pagan, Buddhist and Christian spiritualities were influential in modern American poetics. Critic Stephen Fredman identifies a counter-cultural impulse in each case: ‘Rather than speaking for the liberal mercantile values of the society, poets have often taken a critical stance, addressing through mystical means what they see as moral and political shortcomings of capitalism and consumerism’ (192). Furthermore, ‘in the works of the mystically inclined poets, self-exploration is usually a route not to ego-inflation but to a kind of self-effacement that opens onto the social virtues of love, compassion, and solidarity’ (Fredman 192). Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism, was arguably the most important influence on counter-cultural American poetry, particularly through the teachings of D.T. Suzuki, whom Merton met, as did

188

Poetry and Prayer

other poets such as John Cage. Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder also drew on Buddhism in their poetics, exploring the concept of the present moment as fluid and impermanent, and celebrating the precise spiritual focus of the haiku. Christian mysticism also has had its clear impact on American poetics: T.S. Eliot’s search for faith and his dialogue with the English medieval mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Denise Levertov’s incarnational mysticism, and Levertov’s own writings on Julian of Norwich and Merton himself. As Fredman concludes: ‘American poetry informed by mysticism offers moments of attentive cross-cultural dialogue, something for which the contemporary world evinces a glaring need’ (209). Merton was not alone in his general poetic direction. Nor did he feel himself outside the network of his poetic contemporaries: in a journal article of 1967, he described himself as ‘in contact with groups of poets [and other artists and activists] in all parts of the world’ (Lentfoehr 2). Robert Lax, poet and Catholic convert, was a contact with obvious shared interests, and Merton also knew Dan Berrigan, San Francisco poet Laurence Ferlinghetti and lyricist Joan Baez, among others. Stylistically, while Merton’s poetry developed according to his own lights, it shares features in common with developments in contemporary American poetics. Critic George Woodcock’s assertion that Merton’s poetry ‘admitted only a few features of modernity into itself ’ (58) seems overly cautious. Merton generally wrote in free verse, and utilized both the Whitmanic longline form and the sparer lyric that became popular in post-war American poetry among Black Mountain, Beat and other groups. He was aware of the Confessional movement, and his Eighteen Poems have a clear affinity with the Confessional mode. The critic Walter Sutton claims that, in his last poems, Merton was connecting to the American tradition of epic poetry (Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams) in the ‘anti-poetry’ of Cables to the Ace and The Geography of Lograire (Sutton 55–6). Merton’s poetry is an important part of his literary and spiritual oeuvre, and it has many admirers. Kathleen Norris identifies a search for wholeness as its key quality: ‘Thomas Merton’s most important gift to his readers was his prophetic vocation to perceive and distinguish in his art the fundamental unity in the cosmos’ (xxiii). She contrasts his perspective to ‘the ironies of disintegration and fragmentation currently associated with postmodern perspectives on art and language’ (xxiii). However, for much of his monastic and poetic careers, Merton was conflicted as to the differences between poetry and prayer. This sense of division is detectable not only in his poetic themes and techniques, but also his prose writings considering the roles of poet and contemplative.

Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer

189

Poetry and Prayer: Similarities and Differences Merton did not doubt the aesthetic and spiritual power of poetry. He had already noted the special function of poetic language in ‘Poetry, Symbolism and Typology’ (1953): ‘a good poem induces an experience that could not be produced by any other combination of words. It is therefore an entity that stands by itself … true poems seem to live by a life entirely their own’ (327). Poetry, the essay suggests, can be an iconic (in the sense of icon-like) object of contemplation for its readers, something both holy and untranslatable to other media. However, although strongly drawn to each vocation, Merton did not always consider the callings of poet and contemplative compatible. From New Seeds of Contemplation (first published in 1961), we have this succinct explanation of their difference: ‘The poet enters into himself in order to create. The contemplative enters into God in order to be created’ (111). So a similarity but not an identity is indicated between the purity of contemplative prayer and the divergent call to artistry. Merton studied Blake as a student, and felt Blake believed in an intuitive connection between poetry and contemplation: ‘Blake believes the poet may see God face to face … Blake saw that the artist and the mystic seemed to have the same kind of intuitions, for he himself, as mystic and artist, certainly did: therefore he never troubled to distinguish between aesthetic emotion and the mystic graces’ (‘Nature and Art in William Blake’ 445). There was not, however, such a confident expression of this unity in Merton’s own thought or, arguably, his life. He experienced a sense of division and duality. Although Merton was known in religious life as Brother (later Father) Louis, his poems and other writings were published under the name of Merton. His first collection, Thirty Poems, published by New Directions in 1944, was ascribed to ‘Thomas Merton’, and the others followed suit. Merton biographer Mark Shaw observes: ‘Merton admitted that a shadow, Merton the writer, had followed him into the monastery. Merton felt as if the writer were beside him “[riding his] shoulders, sometimes, like the old man of the sea. I cannot lose him”’ (50). This double naming of ‘Thomas Merton’ and ‘Father Louis’ itself seems to indicate a split between the two vocations. Even though much of Merton’s poetry explored religious themes or celebrated the monastic life, Merton explicitly differentiated between the work of contemplation and poetry-writing. In his essay ‘Poetry and the Contemplative Life’, first published in Commonweal in 1947, Merton’s differentiation between the two paths is harsh: ‘Poetry can, indeed, help to bring us rapidly through that part of the journey to contemplation that is called active: but when we

190

Poetry and Prayer

are entering the realm of true contemplation, where eternal happiness begins, it may turn around and bar our way.’ He goes so far as to advocate, for the poet who seriously wishes to commit to the contemplative life, ‘the ruthless and complete sacrifice of his art’ (‘Poetry and the Contemplative Life’). A concluding paragraph considers the complications for those who deem it a moral imperative to keep writing poetry none the less, perhaps on the orders of a religious superior. Merton acknowledges the consolation of being able to communicate something of the inexpressible through the particular power of poetry. However, even writing under obedience ‘will not take away distractions, or make God abrogate the laws of the spiritual life’. Considering his own years of poetic silence between 1949 and 1957, we can assume that Merton was facing a personal dilemma over his dual callings and unable to satisfactorily integrate the two. Merton scholar David D. Cooper sees the Commonweal essay as a public renouncing of his poetry-writing (30), connecting it to Merton’s 1948 collection Figures for an Apocalypse, in which a concluding poem convicts poetry-writing as a ‘thirsty traitor’ (‘The Poet, to his Book’, l. 16). Merton returned to the topic at the same time he returned to poetrywriting, in ‘Poetry and Contemplation: A Reappraisal’ (1958), a more nuanced and mature consideration than the 1947 essay, of which it is a revised version. Nevertheless, in this reappraisal Merton still declares a ‘radical difference between the artist and the mystic’: when the poet enters into himself, it is in order to reflect upon his inspiration and to clothe it with a special and splendid form and then return to display it to those outside … but the mystic enters into himself, not in order to work but to pass through the centre of his own soul and lose himself in the mystery and secrecy and infinite, transcendent reality of God living and working within him. (‘Poetry and Contemplation’ 350)

It is as though, for Merton, the ‘work’ of poetry still requires a turning back from the divine at a certain stage of spiritual development, whereas contemplative prayer passes to another level. A dual vocation creates frustration: Consequently, if the mystic happens to be, at the same time, an artist, when prayer calls him within himself to the secrecy of God’s presence, his art will be tempted to start working and producing and studying the ‘creative’ possibilities of this experience. And therefore immediately the whole thing runs the risk of being frustrated and destroyed. (350–51)

Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer

191

Merton goes on to imagine an artist, perhaps a version of himself, who: falls from contemplation and returns to himself as an artist. Instead of passing through his own soul into the abyss of the infinite actuality of God Himself, he will remain there a moment, only to emerge again into the exterior world of multiple created things whose variety once more dissipates his energies until they are lost in perplexity and dissatisfaction. (351)

It is as though Merton fears that this world of ‘multiple created things’ is fractured, and any calling to address it will result in fracture and division as well. Merton admits that the artist not called to the higher reaches of contemplation can be blessed by his ‘lower’ vocation: ‘If he is called to be an artist, then his art will lead him to sanctity, if he uses it as a Christian should’ (353). However, the difficulties of a perceived double calling remain for those such as Merton, who continues to consider them ultimately incompatible. Interestingly, though, Merton’s own inability to feel comfortable with a dual vocation does not stop him supposing that God can in fact reconcile the two, as he did, Merton observes, with St John of the Cross: It remains true that at a certain point in the interior life, the instinct to create and communicate enters into conflict with the call to mystical union with God. But God himself can resolve the conflict. And He does. Nor does He need any advice from us in order to do so. (353)

Perhaps this trust in the unknown but God-given integration of the two callings was enough for Merton to continue with his poetry-writing. A few years later, he hinted at a more settled perspective on poets and poetry: ‘at one time I thought I ought to give up writing poetry because it might not be compatible with the life of a monk, but I don’t think this anymore,’ he comments in a letter (probably to an enquiring student) of 1963 (letter to ‘My Dear Friend’). Arguably then, there is a sense of progression and partial resolution of the apparent conflict. Later, Merton seems more comfortable with the role of the poet-contemplative, although perhaps not entirely so. To trace this development through the many poems that Merton wrote is challenging. I will consider some of Merton’s poetry with relation to his awareness of division: not only between poetry and prayer, but also, within the poetry itself, of division between subject and simile, and more generally in Merton’s approach to the feminine. Merton’s changing poetic presentations of women, from Marian poetry and feminine aspects of divinity to individual

192

Poetry and Prayer

human connections, illustrates his awareness of divisions and his attempts to heal them. I will concentrate on some of Merton’s earlier lyric poems and a couple of prose poetry extracts, and also look at the Eighteen Poems (1985), which document his experiences with a more direct poetics that have previously been little discussed. Marian Poetry The figure of the Virgin Mary, however idealized, is a highly significant female presence in Catholic spirituality and iconography. She was a considerable inspiration in Merton’s own poetry, especially his earlier work. Merton’s dedicating of poetic imagination to the Virgin pre-dates his life as a monk. To look at a very early poem, the ‘Song for Our Lady of Cobre’, published in Thirty Poems, was written while Merton visited Cuba in 1940. Its inspiration was the shrine of the black Virgin La Caridad del Cobre. The poem has a notable concision and patterning. Rather than a direct evocation of the Virgin, it is a short lyric making use of parallelism, simile, comparison and antithesis, and coming to rest in a sense of mysterious flight into the heavens. Its structure is built on likeness and unlikeness: ‘The white girls sing as shrill as water / The black girls talk as quiet as clay’ (ll. 4–5). White and black girls are linked, by simile, to elements of air, water, and earth, and to each other. The similes are both simple and puzzling: ‘The white girls open their arms like clouds, / The black girls close their eyes like wings’ (ll. 6–7). The concluding stanza offers a poetic resolution to the previous statements: the stars stand in a ring, indicative of unity and the earthly images are no longer puzzles but ‘pieces of the mosaic’, finally lifted in flight to a heavenly level (ll. 10–13). However, simile and comparison remain pre-eminent in the poem. They each predicate a difference, a splitting, between the subject and the image it is likened to, between gestures and their images, and of course the black and white girls offer a visual difference between themselves. There is, therefore, an awareness of duality and alternative throughout the poem, perhaps reflective of Merton’s sense of duality and alternative perspective in both his spirituality and his poetics, the uplift at the end of the poem providing some hoped-for sense of transcending these alternatives. Another early Marian poem, ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window’ (Thirty Poems), has an obvious indebtedness to Hopkins’s poem ‘The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe’. Robert Lowell, an admirer of Merton’s early poetry, made a connection between this poem and the Metaphysical poets, too, with Donne (‘A Valediction of My Name in the

Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer

193

Window’) and Crashaw especially. The sustained ‘conceit’ in Merton’s poem is one where Mary’s will is ‘simple as a window’ (l. 1), and her life is to ‘die, like glass, by light’ (l. 3). The Virgin is compared (ingeniously) to a window; but the two must remain separate concepts for the poem to work. A rather laboured attempt to provide a linguistic synthesis, calling on ‘the sun, my son, my substance’ (l. 39) at the end, is unconvincing, and the images stack up at the poem’s conclusion in a fragmentary syntax which echoes a semantic failure to achieve simplicity: ‘He’ll be their Brother, / My light – the Lamb of their Apocalypse’ (ll. 42–3). Merton seems to lack confidence in his poetics and his vision here. ‘Aubade: The Annunciation’ (A Man in the Divided Sea) is another example of an early Merton poem, and a Marian poem, which relies heavily upon simile to create a sense of heightened attention: ‘Prayers fly in the mind like larks, / Thoughts hide in the height like hawks’ (ll. 3–4); ‘Desires glitter in her mind / Like morning stars’ (ll. 8–9). The inner movements of the Virgin’s soul are patterned against the natural world. The moment of the annunciation is heralded by another simile comparing a supernatural moment with one of natural impact: ‘Until her name is suddenly spoken / Like a meteor falling’ (ll. 10–11). Although the poem is well structured, with this central couplet providing a memorable turn in the narrative, the reliance on simile continues throughout, once again indicating that spirituality and the visible (‘created’) world have many parallels, but are fundamentally different. This persistence of simile and thus of an intrinsic difference between spiritual and earthly worlds in the early poems is prominent in Merton’s poetics. In 1949, however, Merton published ‘To the Immaculate Virgin, on a Winter Night’ (The Tears of the Blind Lions), which, perhaps bound by the urgency of global conflict (‘the whole world is tumbling down’, l. 24), seems to offer a more synthesized image of sense, nature and spirituality: metaphor is the central device here, rather than simile: ‘Words turn to ice in my dry throat / Praying for a land without prayer’ (ll. 25–6). In a time of external international crisis, perceptions of the inner life are less easily set forth, and here there is a sense of transformation rather than comparison, albeit an uneasy, violently forced one. For a more meditative sense of metaphorical elision, we will need to look at a different approach to the feminine in Merton’s subsequent poetry; poetry written after his own ‘hiatus’ as a practising poet. ‘Hagia Sophia’ Merton’s poetry of the feminine was not restricted to images of the Virgin and it is notable that he addressed new and more complex presentations in his

194

Poetry and Prayer

later poetry. In the lengthy prose poem ‘Hagia Sophia’ (Emblems of a Season of Fury), it is Holy Wisdom, a feminine aspect of divinity, who is the subject of the poetry. The poem developed from a letter written to artist Victor Hammer, who in the 1950s had painted a triptych in which the centre panel shows the figure of a woman crowning a young boy. In his letter of 1959, Merton wrote: ‘Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) is God Himself. God is not only a Father but a Mother. He is both at the same time, and it is this “feminine principle” in the divinity that is the Hagia Sophia’ (Lentfoehr 47). The poem ‘Hagia Sophia’ continues this line of thought, beginning: There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans … . This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom. (The Collected Poems 363)

This opening section to ‘1. Dawn. The Hour of Lauds’ plays with statement and paradox rather than the more precise divisions acknowledged by simile. Rather than being likened to something separate from itself, the invisible is within the visible, the Creator’s thought and art are within the being and nature of the narrator. This is a more integrated use of poetic language, although it is not consistently sustained throughout the poem, which is a long composition following the pattern of the monastic Divine Office. Merton meditates on what he calls ‘the voice of this my sister’. Awakened, he says: I am like all mankind awakening from all the dreams that ever were dreamed in all the nights of the world … like all minds coming back together into awareness from all distractions, cross-purposes and confusions, into unity of love. It is like the first morning of the world … and like the Last Morning of the world when all the fragments of Adam will return from death at the voice of Hagia Sophia, and will know where they stand. (364)

Here the use of simile (like all minds, like the first morning) returns, as does a differentiation between a generic mankind and a mysterious feminine force, who, while named as Holy Wisdom, is also identified at times as like Eve, like the Blessed Virgin, like a mother and like a child. This feminine wisdom is also the healing hand of a nurse: ‘in the cool hand of the nurse there is the touch of all life, the touch of spirit’, a potent force for ‘the helpless man who lies asleep

Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer

195

in his bed without awareness and without defense’ (364). However, the poem takes an interesting turn from this imagined contemporary scenario towards medieval mystical literature and its reframing of the feminine within Christ and the divine. Merton’s language goes on to offer, as a kind of creative fusion, the startling blurring of gender in divinity found most strongly, although not exclusively, in the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich. Her phrase is here, of ‘Jesus our mother’, although she is not acknowledged by name. Note the parentheses around this short paragraph, as though this powerful linguistic and conceptual idea could so easily be ignored, while in fact it is key: (When the recluses of fourteenth-century England heard their Church Bells and looked out upon the wolds and fens under a kind sky, they spoke in their hearts to ‘Jesus our Mother’. It was Sophia that had awakened in their childlike hearts.) (367)

Ross Labrie observes of this poem that Merton acknowledges ‘the imprint of the divine intelligence within his own psyche as female’ (228). He identifies this as a subversive concept: ‘Merton’s … goal was to restore wholeness to the image of God by replacing the patriarchal image that had been passed down through the ages in the West’ (228). In fact, Merton was recovering what the medieval mystics, particularly Julian, had previously explored. But Merton does not simply suggest a fusion of male and female aspects. It is in the child-Sophia, awakened in the human heart, that Merton’s thinking on unity and creativity develops. Sophia in Merton’s writing is purported to be many things, but this childlike manifestation of her is more confident, and presented with childlike conviction: ‘Sophia, the feminine child, is playing in the world, obvious and unseen, playing at all times before the Creator’ (The Collected Poems 368). As a child, she still embodies paradox (she is both obvious and unseen), but her creativity is a constant characteristic (‘playing at all times’; not ‘working’ or ‘studying’ as Merton had elsewhere described poetic practice). Her creativity is looked over, looked after, by God, the primary Creator and her state of prayer is simultaneously a state of creativity. We have in a complex and richly allusive poem many aspects of Hagia Sophia, some of which present comparison and paradox and some of which are incorporations of female imagery in the divine and the self, echoing earlier mystics and visionaries. We also have an indication that creativity need not be serious work or study but something more childlike and spontaneous, and in alignment with the creative work of God.

196

Poetry and Prayer

‘Grace’s House’ Children frequently feature in Merton’s poems, sometimes asking questions or learning from teachers. They are the focus of some searing poems of social and racial conscience, such as ‘Picture of a Black Child with a White Doll’ from Sensation Time at the Home (1968) published posthumously only in The Collected Poems (1977) and the lengthy Original Child Bomb (1962). Children are also, through their creative play, instruments of peace, as in Merton’s poem ‘Paper Cranes’ (Appendix II, The Collected Poems) in which a child’s hands ends all wars by folding the wings of an origami crane. A favourite poem of his own was ‘Grace’s House’ (Emblems of a Season of Fury), where Merton describes a child’s drawing of a house on a hill. The drawing was in fact a real one made by the daughter of one of his correspondents and so like the artwork which inspired ‘Hagia Sophia’, the inspiration for an ekphrastic poem, complete with windows and door and surrounded by grass, flowers, trees and animals, too, but with no route up to the house through the landscape of the paper: ‘Alas, there is no road to Grace’s House!’ (l. 50). The tone of this poem is more conversational than ‘Hagia Sophia’ and the earlier Marian poems (‘I must not omit to mention a rabbit / And two birds …’, ll. 47–8). Yet its generally simple voice still captures a sense of the marvellous (‘this archetypal, cosmic hill / This womb of mysteries’, ll. 45–6) as well as suggesting that Grace’s House, with, of course, ‘Grace’ representing a state of spiritual enlightenment as well as a child, cannot be accessed by any linear route. There is a significant white space between the enjambed ‘because’ of its penultimate line and the final line of the poem, echoing the white space on the original drawing between the house and the river. The house is a ‘paradise’ as well as a ‘child’s world’ (‘O paradise, O child’s world!’, l. 37). The image of the window is one connection between ‘Grace’s House’ and ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window’, although it is the ‘crystal / Water’ (ll. 35–6) which seems the more spiritually potent image in the later poem, depicting, as it does, a stream infused with light until it has the qualities of radiant glass. Grace’s childlike ‘playing’ before her Creator has created the house and the stream that surrounds it. The element of spontaneity symbolized by the playing child offers a possible resolution to the divided nature of poetry and prayer. Grace’s playing produces a spontaneous creativity that does not primarily seek to communicate or instruct. This spontaneity is identified as genuine creativity in some of Merton’s later writing. In ‘Message to Poets’ from February 1964, Merton writes: ‘We who are poets know that the reason for a poem is not discovered until the poem itself

Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer

197

exists’ (The Literary Essays 371). Nor is this spontaneity restricted to the educated elite. Rather ‘poetry is the flowering of ordinary possibilities. It is the fruit of ordinary and natural choice’ (373). In fact in this essay Merton depicts poetry as a gift, one that leads directly towards, rather than away from, contemplation and silence: ‘Let us be proud of the words that are given to us for nothing, not to teach anyone, not to confute anyone, not to prove anyone absurd, but to point beyond all objects into the silence where nothing can be said’ (374). Interestingly, Merton also offers the image of river in this message: ‘the Heraclitean river which is never crossed twice’ as the resource to which poets should go, and ‘when the poet puts his foot in that ever-moving river, poetry itself is born out of the flashing water’ (374). This water is, to use a favourite Merton phrase: ‘the water of life. Dance in it.’ (374). Perhaps, too, this is the same water as the crystal stream in ‘Grace’s House’. However Merton’s poetry developed from this graceful but de-sexualized child’s play to engage with a more adult female figure and a concomitantly more problematized poetics. Eighteen Poems Merton had wide-ranging interests not only in poetry and prayer, but also psychology and the symbolism of dreams. He recorded striking dreams, sometimes attempting a Jungian analysis of them. In 1958, he dreamt about meeting and embracing a beautiful Jewish woman named Proverb: ‘On a porch at Douglaston I am embraced with determined and virginal passion by a young, Jewish girl. She clings to me and will not let me go, and I get to like the idea’ (Learning to Love 176). Merton was fascinated by her, drawn to the simplicity of her name, and wrote letters to her in his journal. Critics have debated the meaning of this dream. Was it a manifestation of Jungian unity, animus and anima, or simply an expression of physical longing? Robert Waldron identifies Merton’s dream and his subsequent engagement with it as an important development towards psychological wholeness: ‘It symbolically portrays Merton’s willingness to accept the feminine’ (The Wounded Heart of Thomas Merton 73). Waldron also points out that Merton’s anima, represented as a young woman, is an undeveloped aspect of himself, demanding attention. Ross Labrie observes that as an adjunct to conceiving the divine as both masculine and feminine, ‘Merton had more than once noted the “absurdity” of his incompleteness as a celibate monk, cut off from intimacy with women’ (229). There is no reason why Merton’s dream should be restricted to one interpretation, although clearly

198

Poetry and Prayer

it points towards wanting to address a sense of incompleteness through an expression of the feminine. In real life, Merton experienced a close, romantically charged relationship with a young nurse (Margie Smith, ‘M.’ in Merton’s writings, specifically the journal Learning to Love) in 1966. Biographers such as Shaw have sensationalized the event. According to Shaw, the romance is critical to an understanding not just of Merton, but of modern humanity: ‘Merton’s saga reflects a confusion in all of us’ (iv). For Labrie, on the other hand, Merton understood that ‘it was important for him, caught up in his own feelings as he was, to see himself as she, through her notes and letters, had come to see him and so thereby fill out the picture of his own reality’ (229). Merton’s encountering of this young woman triggered a series of poems (Eighteen Poems). Although unpublished as a sequence in his lifetime, Merton had agreed to a small number of finely printed and produced booklets of these poems by his friends Victor and Carolyn Hammer. New Directions Press published 250 copies of Eighteen Poems in 1985. The entire sequence was not available in a widely published volume until the New Selected Poems in 2005. In them, various divisions including those of contemplation and human connection, male and female, and poetry and prayer were once more raised. Whatever the ethics and ‘sin’ involved in the relationship, the poems seek to embody and memorialize Merton’s desire. Waldron sees the poem as a quasisacramental act: he attempted to enflesh [M.] in his poems … . As a priest he is endowed with the power of transubstantiation. As an artist, he is gifted with the talent to capture M.’s beauty, her love for him and his love for her; in a poetic transubstantiation, he creates his holy book of poems. (The Exquisite Risk of Love 4–5)

The poems signify a distinct moment in Merton’s life and poetics, and although he never explicitly allied himself with contemporary confessional poets such as Lowell, their poetic exploration of personal trauma surely had some influence on Merton’s own approach. The first of these ‘confessional’ poems, ‘With the World in my Bloodstream’, was published in The Collected Poems as part of the posthumous Sensation Time at the Home and Other New Poems. In this poem, the image of the stream changed to that of an internal flow of being and experience. Merton, unwell, is emotionally unsettled by his meeting with M., who, as a real-life nurse, is literally the figure Merton had envisaged as an embodiment of Hagia Sophia, as we have seen in the poem of that name: ‘in the cool hand of the nurse there is the touch of all life, the touch of spirit’. Merton is once again literally ‘the helpless man

Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer

199

who lies asleep in his bed without awareness and without defense’ (The Collected Poems 364). The dislocation presented in the poem is more than just physical. Merton had been in hospital with spinal problems. His blood is full of ‘questions’ despite the assertion that it also runs ‘With Christ and with the stars’ plasm’ (l. 34). It is a disquieting poem, its speaker lamenting even his ‘lost Zen breathing’ (l. 56). There is no lucent window or child’s light-heartedness. Merton’s emphasis is on question and fracture: ‘I wonder who the hell I am’ (l. 14). There is perhaps an echo here of Lowell’s despairing Miltonic appropriation, ‘I myself am Hell, in his seminal confessional poem, ‘Skunk Hour’ (Life Studies). There is little punctuation in the poem and less enjambment, so the dislocation is reinforced stylistically. In his reading of the poem, Waldron detects the echo of Eliot’s Prufrock in its uncertainty, self-questioning and the image of the prone patient which starts both poems. I would suggest that Auden’s influence is present too: the plain language, and the interweaving of setting with biographical moment may reflect this major poet’s presence in Merton’s writing. Eliot’s metrical engagements were various, but he frequently used free blank verse, a loose version of iambic pentameter. Auden, and here Merton, frequently uses a line which utilizes three- and four-beat stresses in its pared-down pulse: ‘Lends to the universal tone / A flat impersonal pulse’ (ll. 7–8) are Audenesque tetrameter and trimeter lines. Interestingly, ‘the hermit’s sensual ecstasy’ from Auden’s ‘Lullaby’ (Another Time, 1940) is essentially the paradoxical subject of Merton’s sequence. There is a connection of image as well as form between the two poets. Another poem in this sequence evokes the image of nurse and broken patient: ‘Because I am always broken / I obey my nurse (‘I Always Obey My Nurse’, ll. 1–5). This poem, with its simple lines and use of refrain, is typical of Merton’s poetry in this series and Merton’s nurse here, who ‘in her grey eyes and her mortal breast / Holds an immortal love the wise have fractured’ (ll. 19–20), does offer some hope of redemption from the brokenness, in a spark that ‘leaps from one wound into another / knitting the broken bones’ (ll. 8–9). There is the influence of Dylan Thomas, a known favourite poet of Merton, in this poem, not in the linguistic richness of Thomas’s lines, but in Thomas’s use of emphatic refrain lines. Merton’s phrase ‘And God did not make death’ in line 6, repeated with permutations at lines 14, 22, 26, 34 and 41 (Twenty Five Poems), echoes Thomas’s refrain ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ in his poem of that name. Thematically, Merton’s exploration of the ‘little spark / that flies from fracture to fracture’ (Eighteen Poems, ll. 23–4) echoes Thomas’s interest in the ‘life force’ that drives both bloom and decay in, for example, ‘The Force that through the Green Fuse drives the Flower’.

200

Poetry and Prayer

As Waldron observes, obedience for Merton would normally be a monastic commitment to follow the directions of the Abbot. Here, his obedience is to a feminine figure, who may still represent the Divine will, but certainly shifts Merton’s allegiance from the exclusively masculine structure of a Trappist monastery: ‘Merton rejects not only his abbot specifically, but also in general the masculine-dominated world in which he has for so long lived, by turning towards the anima, represented by M.’ (The Exquisite Risk of Love 26). According to Waldron, M. is the embodiment of Merton’s anima in the same way that Proverb had been in his dream eight years previously. Merton’s infatuation did not last. Its dwindling led to a number of poems expressing the agony of: bitter division ............... We are two half-people wandering In two lost worlds. (‘Evening: Long Distance Call’, ll. 29–30; 32–3).

‘Six Night Letters’ comprises the longest of Eighteen Poems, although it can itself be read as a sequence of six. Merton’s voice remains personal rather than philosophical or fictionalized. However, his figurative language is both Biblical and earthly (‘O my divided rib’, ‘Six Night Letters’ ii, l. 10). Merton struggles with the duality and separation he likens to Adam’s rib, removed from the being, and the body it was once a part of, in order to be reunited in a relationship of love between two beings (‘to be taken apart / to be together’, ll. 11–12). The implication is that being separated from a loved one requires acquiescence to a painful dividing, but that a different sort of union will ultimately occur. Merton may have been thinking about a specific human relationship, but the concept of painful divisions within the self is a wider theme, tallying with the concerns of Merton’s work overall. The resolution offered by this poem is a hoped-for one, of wish-fulfilment rather than a realistic outcome, with Merton none the less searching for a sense of wholeness. In his difficult emotional situation, Merton finds solace in writing: ‘if I write for you / I can write something,’ he admits in ‘Aubade on a Cloudy Morning’ (ll. 39–40). But this writing is neither spontaneity nor play. Instead, conflict and division are to the fore. The fourth poem in Merton’s ‘Six Night Letters’ brings the act of writing into a clear physicality. Although the nature of letterwriting signals a physical separation from the poem-letter’s recipient, the poem is in itself a focused poetic text, eschewing similes for the more sensual reality

Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer

201

of pouring ‘a little gold rum / over two blocks of ice’ (ll. 1–2) and wondering whether the poem’s recipient will be able to smell the twist of lemon scenting the paper. When more figurative language is used, in the second stanza, it acknowledges the underlying search to find one’s home and centre (‘my lost house’, l. 18), a place of focus and grace which is associated with wholeness. This is an echo of ‘Grace’s House’ in Merton’s earlier poem. And a desire for wholeness is, as Waldron asserts, very much behind Merton’s intensity of feeling for M. Identifying the relationship as signifying a Jungian mid-life crisis, he observes that the trajectory of the affair and also of Eighteen Poems show how he ‘is trying to become a complete and whole man, a “discovery” he needs more than anything else in his life’ (The Exquisite Risk of Love 125). In Waldron’s opinion, this discovery corresponds to an innate self-knowledge that, though hard-won, is the embodiment of holistic wisdom: ‘There is an authority higher than the Church’s authority, and it is the self that resides within us all’ (125). In Merton’s poetry, the romantic split and religious disobedience have paradoxically forced a direct and authentic poetic voice. Light Merton’s relationship with M. did not continue, but his quest for wholeness of self and purpose did. However, it is rather unclear whether his poetry provides any resolution of this late complication and its aftermath, a pervading sense of loneliness and division. The Eighteen Poems end with ‘For M. on a cold grey morning’, an ambivalent title rather than a hopeful one. The New Selected Poems which made the sequence widely available for the first time is In the Dark before Dawn, a title that does not promise a resolution to night-time anguish. ‘Six Night Letters: iv’ identifies ‘the dark woods’ of self-division, but other Merton poems return with renewed emphasis to imagery which invokes not dark, but light. In the long sequence of lyric and prose poetry Cables to the Ace (1968), a work Merton was writing around the same time as Eighteen Poems, Section 75 indicates a continuation of Merton’s quest. The section reads: I seek you in the hospital where you work. Will you be a patch of white moving rapidly across the end of the next hall? I begin again in every shadow, surrounded by the sound of scandal and the buzzer calling all doctors to the presence of alarm. (The Collected Poems 445)

202

Poetry and Prayer

The ‘patch of white’ is probably a nurse, as indicated by the hospital location. But this ‘patch of white’ could also signify pure light, moving as it does through a window frame along the walls of a building. Such light offers an intangible insight, a touch of grace in the home of the broken (‘the hospital where you work’), though such grace will not necessarily adhere to structures and hierarchies. This light moves rapidly, and is not a permanent fixture. The subsequent section, also in the form of a prose poem, seems to refer even more explicitly to Merton’s relationship, as he writes, ‘surely a big bird with all the shades of light will beat against our windows. We will then gladly consent to the kindness of rays and recover the warm knowledge of each other we once had under those young trees in another May’ (446). Hypothesizing the future, Merton’s text still returns to the past. The text attempts a synthesis of memory and desire in its verbal tableau, and also a synaesthetic fusion of light and bodily sensation, as though its participants could bask in the bird-borne rays. The section returns to the big bird: ‘It is a big bird flies right out of the center of the sun’ (446). Cloaked in parentheses, the bird lingers in the memory as an important vehicle of light. It is perhaps the Holy Spirit, perhaps an angelic presence, perhaps the holistic self longed for by Merton, the poet, monk and human being. Light moves swiftly across the hospital walls, but a subsequent entry in Cables to the Ace (no. 80) offers by contrast how Christ-borne light in a natural setting is a calm and benign event: ‘Their branches bear his light / Without harm’ (ll. 4–5). Light and illumination, in the sense of understanding and transformation, is an important image for Merton, and here some kind of healing is again offered. Light, sunlight or white light especially, is a blend of all colours, a unitive fusion of refracted rays or fractured psyches. Merton’s late poetry shows great complexity and linguistic experimentation, and I would hesitate to locate a single dominant strand or image within it. However, in the slightly earlier collection Emblems of a Season of Fury (1963), the poem ‘O Sweet Irrational Worship’ – the title recalls the poem of the same title by the American poet e.e. cummings – suggests that this light-enabled merging can take place within the poet, who remains distinctly genderless in this lyric: ‘By ceasing to question the sun / I have become light’ (ll. 3–4). There is a unitive perspective in the poem, and also a Keatsian negative capability. Merton the poet and Merton the contemplative have transcended the normal boundaries of individual identity to become light. This use of light is the appropriate point on which to end an investigation into divisions and differences in Merton’s poetics. It is also an example of the ‘self-effacement that opens onto the social virtues of love, compassion, and solidarity’ (Fredman 192).

Thomas Merton’s Poetry and Prayer

203

Beyond names or gender, beyond questions, the speaker, rooted in nature and the elements, has become light and spontaneously generates ‘lighted things’ (l. 8) and acts of ‘foolish worship’ (l. 31). These ‘lighted things’ could be poems, or prayers, or acts of compassion, perhaps transcending them all. Works Cited Auden, W.H. Another Time. London: Random House, 1940. Cooper, David D. Thomas Merton’s Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Fredman, Stephen, ed. A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. —. ‘Neo-Paganism, Buddhism and Christianity’. In Fredman ed., A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, 191–211. Labrie, Ross. Thomas Merton and the Inclusive Imagination. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Lentfoehr, Therese. Words and Silence: On the Poetry of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, 1979. Lowell, Robert. ‘The Verses of Thomas Merton’. Commonweal 42 (22 June 1945): 240–2. —. Life Studies. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959. The Marian Library and International Marian Research Institute. ‘Index of Thomas Merton’s Marian Poetry’. Thomas Merton’s Marian Poetry. 4 April 2011. Accessed 27 August 2013. http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/resources/ poetry/merton.html#toc. Merton, Thomas. Thirty Poems. New York: New Directions, 1944. —. A Man in the Divided Sea. New York: New Directions, 1946. —. ‘Poetry and the Contemplative Life’. Commonweal 46 (4 July1947), 280-6. 27 April 2014. Accessed 1 September 2014. https://www. commonwealmagazine.org/poetry-and-contemplative-life. —. Figures for an Apocalypse. New York: New Directions, 1948. —. The Tears of the Blind Lions. New York: New Directions, 1949. —. Original Child Bomb: Points for Meditation to be Scratched on the Walls of a Cave. New York: New Directions, 1962. —. Emblems of a Season of Fury. Norfolk, CT: James Laughlin, 1963. —. Cables to the Ace, or Familiar Liturgies of Misunderstanding. New York: New Directions, 1968. —. The Geography of Lograire. New York: New Directions, 1969.

204

Poetry and Prayer

—. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 1972. —. The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, 1977. —. ‘Message to Poets’ (1964). The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, 371–4. —. The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton. Ed. Patrick Hart. New York: New Directions, 1981. —. ‘Nature and Art in William Blake: An Essay in Interpretation’ (1939). The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, 387–453. —. ‘Poetry and Contemplation: A Reappraisal’ (1958). The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, 338–54. —. ‘Poetry, Symbolism and Typology’ (1953). The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, 327–37. —. Letter to ‘My Dear Friend’ (1963). The Road to Joy: The Letters of Thomas Merton to New and Old Friends, 90. —. The Road to Joy: The Letters of Thomas Merton to New and Old Friends. Ed. Robert E. Daggy. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1989. —. Learning to Love: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six: 1966– 1967. Ed. Christine M. Bochen. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. —. Turning Toward the World: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Four: 1960–1963. Ed. Victor A. Kramer. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. Norris, Kathleen. In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton. Ed. Lynn R. Szabo. New York: New Directions, 2005. Shaw, Mark. Beneath the Mask of Holiness: Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair that Set Him Free. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Sutton, Walter. ‘Thomas Merton and the American Epic Tradition: The Last Poems’. Contemporary Literature 14.1 (Winter 1973): 55–6. Thomas, Dylan. Eighteen Poems. London: Sunday Referee and Parton Bookshop, 1934. —. Twenty Five Poems. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1936. Waldron, Robert G. The Wounded Heart of Thomas Merton. New York: Paulist Press, 2011. —. Thomas Merton: The Exquisite Risk of Love: The Chronicle of a Monastic Romance. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2012. Woodcock, George. Thomas Merton, Monk and Poet: A Critical Study. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.

Chapter 12

W.H. Auden and the Deep Language of Poetic Prayer Hester Jones

A Christian frame of reference and, in particular, an Anglican understanding and aesthetic, can be observed as present in both explicit and implicit forms in much of what W.H. Auden wrote, both in his prose and in his poetry, although much of this has been rightly characterized as somewhat reticent and reserved in its expressions of faith-commitment. Indeed, in terms of committed observance, his faith, which was formed in the context of a devout Anglo-Catholic family, seems to have retreated when he was an adolescent, and remained residual only, especially while at Oxford and finding himself at the centre of great social and cultural developments. Only when confronted by a number of circumstances and experiences, personal, public and even world-wide, was he to question more extensively and seriously the primacy of these social and cultural values. As the critic Arthur Kirsch and others discussed quite fully and with some agreement, during the 1930s Auden gradually came to recognize that the political challenge posed by fascism could not be met by political and social means alone. Following this realization, he was also deeply shocked to witness the closing of the churches in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, an experience that seems to have brought home to Auden the value he himself placed in religious witness and in Christian revelation. Furthermore, his meeting with the novelist and poet Charles Williams, whose personal charisma seemed at least in part to have stemmed from a mystical understanding of the workings of divine grace through the centuries, impressed him deeply and, it may be hazarded, contributed to his understanding of the power of prayer, whether expressed in poetry or within personal devotion. Finally, again at the personal level, it has been suggested with some conviction that the death of Auden’s mother Constance and the breakdown of his relationship with Chester Kallman were also contributing elements to the poet’s return to the faith of his childhood. In addition, these

206

Poetry and Prayer

experiences of cultural doubt and personal losses at a profound level seem to have fed into a mystical experience that was, at least in his own account of it, formative, leading to an intense desire to channel earthly passions into a more distanced but no less generous and dedicated love of one’s neighbour: ‘agape’, so to speak (Carpenter 22–6). However, readers disagree to a greater extent about the nature of Auden’s ‘religious’ writing and the forms it finds to express that belief – or whether, indeed, it can be justly regarded as religious writing at all. Richard Ellmann remarks that it ‘tends towards a recognition of general guilt rather than of individual ecstasy’, for example (122), while Humphrey Carpenter, Auden’s biographer, mentions the ‘leap of faith’ that requires an acceptance of something more than reason, and that perhaps arises in Auden, as in other poets of the time, out of a more general dissatisfaction with the rational humanism of mid-twentieth-century cultural life, as well as out of a response to the personal experiences mentioned above (Carpenter 282–4). However, as Gareth Reeves, among others, has pointed out, following his reading of the theologian Kierkegaard, Auden began to see the life of faith as one in which existential choices must be made, and therefore a life that is at odds with the reality of what the poet calls the ‘fait accompli’ of poetry (Reeves 191). Following Matthew Arnold’s observations, it had become possible to see poetry as an alternative to religious expression. T.S. Eliot’s voice in this period dominated religious writing, but his emphasis on mystical transport and his inclinations towards self-abnegation are in some respects very alien to Auden’s more worldly and life-affirming stance. For Eliot, poetry could itself become the place in which religious allegiance is affirmed and the tensions between body and spirit momentarily resolved, but in which the poet would not seek to change the world and its shortcomings in any direct manner. But, as Mendelson has affirmed, W.H. Auden does not straightforwardly renounce the desire to use poetry for a kind of social engagement. Rather – and I would agree with the emphasis suggested by Stan Smith here – Auden differentiates himself from the impulses to quietism present in Eliot and other artists of the 1940s, who similarly welcomed the insights of Evelyn Underhill and others regarding the place of mystical encounter in contemporary society. Auden seemed, indeed, to view their seriousness and ascetic desire for self-renunciation as revealing a lack of proper self-regard and also displaying a want of humorous distance from the self ’s ambitions for transcendence. Auden’s earlier experience of mystical union, as he described it, remained a formative and crucial one, shaping the direction of his thoughts and belief, and it is in this context of both personal need and mystical experience that his writing about prayer is formed. But it is also important to

W.H. Auden and the Deep Language of Poetic Prayer

207

acknowledge the equal engagement with social experience and therefore with worldly living that remained part of Auden’s sensibility and poetic language (Smith 176; see also Sharpe 33–8). Following Charles Williams’s lead, I suggest, Auden gravitated towards a strongly incarnational theology, in which personal redemption was understood as won through the fallen, bodily exchanges of human beings, expressed in the doctrine that Williams called co-inherence, or the mutual bearing of burdens most perfectly expressed for Williams in the Eucharist: ‘He in us and we in Him’ (154). It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that Auden’s writing about prayer is not, at least at first glance, mystical or highly spiritualized, though it is an important aspect of his writing and sometimes overlooked. In 1970 he wrote an essay entitled ‘Work, Carnival and Prayer’, in which prayer is defined as the giving of attention to something or someone other than the self – a kind of wakefulness, an awakening to the reality of the world beyond our own desires, passions and fantasies, an awakening to the real. Thus defined, prayer, though not often explicitly present, is at the heart of much of Auden’s writing. Drawing on Ortega y Gasset, Auden places attention at the centre of identity and, consequently, regards petitionary prayer as of less importance (except in so far as prayer’s expressing of our desires may reveal the poverty of our attention to the real). These desires may, however, be transformed from mere petitions into prayers by words of self-offering and self-surrender. In this form, much of his poetry becomes a working towards prayer, even the most apparently secular or hedonistic. ‘Love feast’, for example, describes the ‘love according to the gospel / of the radio-phonograph’, but none the less, despite this demotic context, it concludes with an incorporation of Augustine’s prayer: ‘I’m sorry I’m not sorry … / Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet.’ Descent into personal repentance may ask more of the speaker than he can manage, but he is lifted into appropriate words by a co-inherence in the body of the Church. In this way, prayer here and elsewhere in Auden’s work arises out of the immediate and the given, and in prayer the individual seeks to return to that given immediate world with the eye of blessing. In doing this, Auden’s language of prayer is strongly incarnational. There is, however, a further context worth mentioning. William Portier and Charles J.T. Talar, following Nicholas Lash, have recently written of the ‘Catholic Renaissance’ that was taking place in the early twentieth century or in the first stages of Auden’s career (Portier and Talar 1). As Lash points out, in this movement, a number of significant figures turned to the thought and writing of earlier centuries for examples of spiritual leadership, and Talar adds to his list other figures, including the one-time Jesuit and humanist Henri Bremond. Bremond may not be an eminent figure, but he had remarkable influence, both

208

Poetry and Prayer

upon other writers on mystical prayer and upon some literary figures, among them T.S. Eliot. This chapter, therefore, proposes that Bremond is worth consideration, and in particular suggests a number of ways in which he may have contributed to influencing W.H. Auden’s poetic language of prayer. Two aspects of Bremond’s work and life seem of significance in this regard. Firstly, he turned to François Fénelon, a late seventeenth-century bishop, and championed his place in the notorious debate with the powerful contemporary rival theologian and bishop, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet over the place of quietist, mystical prayer in Catholic practice. Fénelon had supported the witness of a female mystic, Madame Guyon, derided and dismissed by the religious establishment. In his account of this controversy, ‘Prayer at Twilight: Henri Bremond’s Apologie pour Fénelon’, Talar points to Bremond’s own friendship with another priest who had suffered temporary excommunication, George Tyrrell, and, it seems to me perceptively, suggests that this friendship may have contributed to Bremond’s interest in Fénelon. But clearly Bremond conducted a more extensive engagement with Fénelon’s work and its significance, since he dedicated himself to energetically advocating and endorsing it, and demonstrated the wholeness and integrity of Fénelon’s spiritual and theological perspective. Talar also reminds us that just as Fénelon turned to Guyon’s mystical insights from a place of spiritual darkness, so too Bremond reached out to the mystical from an arid wasteland, an absence of joyful faith. Perhaps it was this compassionate and felt understanding of weakness, of the fragility of spiritual revelation, that also drew Bremond to the humane Christian hellenism of Fénelon, in contrast to the more rigorous and austere Augustinianism of Bossuet (Talar 39–61). Secondly, Bremond’s Prière et poésie, first published in 1926 and translated into English the following year with the title of Prayer and Poetry, follows Fénelon’s humanist engagement with literature and develops a parallel between mystical prayer and poetry. In his account of Bremond, Henry Hogarth gives this work short shrift. He describes it as a ‘safe’ book, and concludes that Bremond ‘does not offer a criterion to distinguish the mystic experience from the poetic, except by means of the adjective “supernatural” which he does not explain’. For this reason, he suggests that Bremond ‘went too far in suggesting that the essence of poetry is divine’ (Hogarth 135–6). But this reading seems to me a little unjust. The essay is wide-ranging and at points idiosyncratic, but it is not lacking in individuality or character, and it identifies the difference between poetry and prayer very clearly. Both may apprehend the real, though the poet, in his rush to communicate it, ‘only gets hold of it superficially’, and consequently mishandles it. Perhaps this may seem to be judging poetry adversely according to a standard that is not appropriate to it, but Bremond is trying to identify

W.H. Auden and the Deep Language of Poetic Prayer

209

the sublime and transcendent nature of mystical encounter, in comparison with which earthly responses may seem inadequate or faltering, while also making a valuable and, in its time, significant claim for the place of poetry in religious and spiritual discourse. In Every Changing Shape, an account of the relation between mystical writing and experience, a later writer, the Catholic post-war poet Elizabeth Jennings, by contrast with Hogarth’s critical judgement, describes Bremond’s book as ‘witty and engaging’, ‘daring and revolutionary’. She discusses the work towards the end of this study, alongside the essay on prayer by Thomas Gilby, and uses it as a way of foregrounding her own argument in support of contemporary poetry’s role in articulating the mystical life of the individual. Responding to these two figures, she suggests that such poetry articulates: the whole of man transcribing or responding to the most important function of life – knowing by loving and loving by knowing, grasping the whole of an experience not to possess but be possessed, using the senses and emotions not denying them, releasing the mind from cold abstractions to free it for direct and clear knowledge. (215)

Such contemplative unity, ‘knowing by loving’, grasping not to possess but be possessed, in a similar way celebrates its understanding of poetry as ‘a way of loving knowledge which is not very different in kind from the mystic’s knowledge’ (215, 222). The understanding that Jennings, writing in the 1960s, voices with such power, shares common ground with Bremond’s incarnational approach, directing us back to the terms of Bremond’s description of mystical prayer itself. Drawing on Paul Claudel’s distinction, that is, Bremond establishes a contrast between the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ which belongs in the ‘vacuum’ in the depth of our being, its haecceitas related to the individualizing principle: ‘At rare moments elect souls themselves reach the very bottom [oh surely never!]’, but of this moment little may be said because ‘consciousness of our deepest being’ is beyond us. While acknowledging that words such as ‘deep zone’, ‘point’, ‘heart’ or ‘centre’ are but metaphors to indicate the encounter between God and self which characterizes prayer, Bremond returns constantly to the metaphor of depth, even concluding that Shakespeare is a religious writer, on the grounds that in his work we ‘descend deeper into the heart’ (9, 185). It is clear, I think, even from this very brief summary of Bremond’s essay and its impact on a later Catholic poet, that certain concepts and concerns are uppermost in it. A focus falls on the search for collaboration, for a revitalizing of

Poetry and Prayer

210

both anima and animus, a more effective working together of the rational and the intuitive within the self. Secondly, it will be clear, too, that prayer and such a discovery of wholeness (called, as seen, the individualizing of the self ) comes about within an encounter in the depths of the self. However, the meaning of this key term, ‘depth’ and its cognates ‘deep’ or ‘the deep’, is not unproblematic. Terry Eagleton in the 1990s and, more recently, Jonathan Dollimore (64), have both discussed the association of the term in the past with a signified mystery, in such a way as to question its claim to valuable meaning. Eagleton, for example, has written: ‘the traditional metaphysical mystery was a question of depths, absences, foundations, abysmal explorations; the mystery of some modernist art is just the mind-bending truth that things are what they are, intriguingly self-identical … post-modernism preserves this self-identity, but erases its modernist scandalousness’ (133). Eagleton seems to suggest here that the term ‘deep’ implies the existence of a remote if indeterminate ultimate truth, but cannot go further than such a gesture. Post-modernist understanding baulks at the work of reference, instead accepting the immediacy of ‘things as they are’. However, in approaching the poetic articulation of prayer of Auden, and in suggesting that he was perhaps informed by those such as Bremond, who linked the language of prayer with the place of the deep, I would suggest that a language of depth has more complexity and contradictoriness within it than these theoretical positions concede in their association of the term with ‘authenticity’ and ‘sincerity’. Indeed, the theologian Catherine Keller has also recently explored this rich complexity of the term, suggesting its importance for poets and other writers, in her work Face of the Deep.1 Again more recently, Michael Doylen, in a thoughtful and nuanced response to Dollimore’s interrogation of the term ‘deep’, has also in part taken issue with his ‘hollowed’ reading of Oscar Wilde’s letter De Profundis and suggested that for Wilde the idea of depth held more potential for complex self-individualization and construction than Dollimore recognizes (Doylen 547–50). Auden’s poetry clearly owes much to Wilde, in particular owes a debt of influence in its response to the latter’s appropriation of an aestheticized language of Christian katabasis, by which Wilde’s entry into the abyss of subjection may become instead a descent into the depths. In this way, Auden, perhaps more like Wilde and less like Bremond, tends to play down and to demystify prayer. None the less in his essay on prayer he often approaches a point of almost mystical transcendence,

I discuss these issues at greater length in Jones, ‘The Language of the Deep: Symbolism and its Place in Twentieth-century Religious Poetry’. 1

W.H. Auden and the Deep Language of Poetic Prayer

211

when saying that prayer is essentially a matter of what is heard. And in this hearing, the self ’s tight boundaries are opened to the eternal. It is perhaps less of a surprise, therefore, that in 1964 Auden also introduced a collection of mystical writing edited by Anne Freemantle with the title The Protestant Mystics and that in this introduction he returned to his account of conversion in the early poem ‘A Summer Night’, pointing to the experience which inspired it as a central factor in his own conversion. Anthony Hecht, drawing on Mendelson’s discussion of the episode in Early Auden, indicates the more secularized nature of the poem, in contrast to the prose account given later, and especially Auden’s words: I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly – because, thanks to the power, I was doing it – what it means to love one’s neighbour as oneself … . I had felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it. (Hecht 53, quoting Freemantle 30; see also Mendelson, Early Auden 362–6)

This experience included a time of repentance but, arising out of this, also a powerful and lasting experience of being at one with others. Hecht contrasts this ‘undeniable drama’ of the prose account with the ‘resolutely secular’ and generalizing character of the poem, remarking on the absence of ‘anything explicitly religious at all’, and rightly identifies an ‘expressly selfish luxuriance’, concluding: ‘whatever this is, it is not a vision of agape’ (54–5). Tony Sharpe also sees the poem as not fully persuasive (81). However, such reticent holding back from anything that might cheapen the language of prayer, and the poem’s clear-sighted vision of the context of prayer, does not straightforwardly exclude a religious purpose. Indeed, it is of a piece with Auden’s method in understanding and representing the depth of prayer’s encounter, the openness to the other that is required, and the listening that distinguishes it. Auden’s poem looks back to Matthew Arnold’s of the same title, in which prayer and its place in an individual’s life is explored by means of a series of polarized possibilities. While Auden’s begins in the washed-out pallor of a perhaps narcissistic loneliness, in which moonlight sheds an emptying, bleaching light, Arnold’s projects an epiphanic ‘deep’, in which ‘Headlands stood out’ as ‘clearly as at noon’ (ll. 14–15, Arnold 268). This memory, provoked by a moonlight that is then perceived as ‘calm’, leads to a challenge to the self, to decide whether to pray: ‘Still to be what I am, or yield and be / Like all the other men I see’ (ll. 25, 34–6, Arnold 268). The assonance between ‘yield’ and ‘be’ offers a self-defeating

Poetry and Prayer

212

passivity that the speaker regrets, but seems unable to relinquish. The delusion of individualism is thus contrasted with the slavery of the many. The poem’s final section seems almost able to entertain the possibility of a softer alternative, only to dismiss this also: I will not say that your mild deeps retain A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain Who have longed deeply once, and longed in vain – But I will rather say that you remain A world above man’s head, to let him see How boundless might his soul’s horizons be, How vast, yet of what clear transparency! How it were good to abide there, and breathe free. (ll. 83–90, Arnold 271)

The passion of the remembered moment is brought into ironic contrast with the empty disillusion of the present through the word ‘deep’, bridging as it does the ‘moonlit deep’ of the opening section, the ‘mild deeps’ and ‘long’d deeply once’ at its close, offering some hope of a reconciliation and rest. Auden’s ‘A Summer Night’ is divided into six-line stanzas, with an alternating tetrameter/trimeter form that may (according to John Fuller) derive from Christopher Smart, though for my part this form and the use of apocalyptic, Edenic imagery are also cognate with an aesthetic and language that one could call Marvellian.2 Auden’s poem is preoccupied with its desire for, and unease with, individualism and dares to imagine self-loss and belonging to a community which is not hidebound by conformity or subjection. I would differ in emphasis from Hecht, however, and suggest that it is, in fact, the articulation of prayer (as often at the poem’s end) that allows Auden to imagine a reconciling of social and personal desires. And, although the word ‘deep’ does not, in fact, occur in the poem, it is again an imagining of deeps that makes this possible. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker is oriented towards the solitary genius, his feet pointing to the moon, and self-congratulatory (‘Lucky’) in that he is not one of the ‘congregated’ many (ll. 7, 4, Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 69). The moon and his feet (often for Auden a pun on poetic feet, as ‘leaves’ in line 4 puns on the books in which he is immersed) both indicate a speaker rapt in a solitary, poetic and sexualized fantasy that evacuates reality The title ‘A Summer Night’ is used in Auden’s Collected Shorter Poems (69); Mendelson’s text (The English Auden 136–8) has no title, and contains numerous variants from Auden’s revised version. Peter Robinson gives a detailed account of these differences and their context (29–40). 2

W.H. Auden and the Deep Language of Poetic Prayer

213

of its substantial being. But the experience of mystical transcendence is not presented in opposition to this illusory state; rather, it is the beginning of a process of awakening (in verse 3 he sits, not lies) that unfolds through the poem’s acknowledged complacencies and nostalgias. To begin with, the cocky, complacent and aggressive ‘drives’ (‘through a land of farms’) are replaced by a vision of the self: Equal with colleagues in a ring I sit on each calm evening Enchanted as the flowers The opening light draws out of hiding With all its gradual dove-like pleading Its logic and its powers. (ll. 11, 13–18, Collected Shorter Poems 69)

Feminine line endings signal the relinquishing of ego defences, as ‘the flowers’ appear before the ‘opening light’ is perceived; grace (‘dove-like pleading’ as well as ‘powers’) operates in the unknowing of darkness, unifying in its descent masculine and feminine capacities. The encounter is one of passivity (‘Enchanted’). Its purpose, furthermore, is understood subsequently as a memory supporting hope in a later time of trial. And while Arnold’s poem balks at prayer or wonders about what it should pray for, Auden’s works itself into a state in which prayer, organic and fragile, is rooted and immersed within an awareness of private selfishness and cosmic disaster, seeing this none the less as an inevitable prelude to a release into ‘opening’ attentiveness and an Edenic vision of the being sought within prayer as a transforming power over the becoming of time and war. By contrast with this emerging vision, the moon’s clinical (butcherlike) gaze is blank and superficial.3 The speaker fully implicates himself in the indifference of the fortunate, indifferent to the abyss of the suffering which lies beneath the ‘jolly picnic on the heath’, as ‘New Year Letter’ puts it, confessing himself to be wedded to personal ‘content’ and unaware of the scope of the ocean of suffering beyond.4 Yet, as this momentary penitential acknowledgment is made, the poem shifts through apocalyptic visions to an appearance, fragile as a resurrection meeting, of ‘shy green stalks’ through which the poems ‘delights’ 3 The moon ‘climbs the European sky … Into the galleries she peers / And blankly as a butcher stares’ (ll. 31, 34–5, Collected Shorter Poems 70). 4 ‘... the snarl of the abyss / That always lies just underneath / Our jolly picnic on the heath’ (‘New Year Letter’, part 2, Collected Longer Poems 100). ‘Soon, soon, through dykes of our content / The crumpling flood will cause a rent’ (‘A Summer Night’, ll. 49–50, Collected Shorter Poems 70).

214

Poetry and Prayer

and private pleasures are offered not as sacrifice, but as seeds for transformation and new life: May these delights we dread to lose, This privacy, need no excuse But to that strength belong.

In this renewal, and as often for Auden, Edenic innocence is revisited: As through a child’s rash happy cries The drowned parental voices rise In unlamenting song. (ll. 57, 61–3, 64–6, Collected Shorter Poems 70–71).

Many echoes resound here, particularly the tone and cadence and linguistic landscape of Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’, with its ‘Grassy Deeps’ (l. 391, 90) that yield a vision of a ‘more decent Order’ (l. 766, 103) achieved as much by the prayer of cloistered nuns previously inhabiting the House as by the efforts of the artist.5 The drowned parental figures also recall the familial reunions of The Tempest and its renewal of the aged by the promise of the young.6 Auden is imagining, in a manner comparable with that of Marvell, the strength of a theology of belonging (‘which to that strength belong’) that accepts and incorporates the ‘delights’ that are of a piece with animal passions and that can also lead to the narcissistic (‘in his glass’) violence of the murderer.7 In this sense, sin is seen as the bedrock of prayer, but it is not beyond transformation. As an account of a mystical experience, the poem is downbeat and understated, to say the least. But what Auden is working with is the incorporation of this ‘privacy’, 5 ‘A Nunnery first gave it birth. / For Virgin Buildings oft brought forth’, Marvell writes. One of his ‘Suttle Nuns’ explains, ‘Our Orient Breaths perfumed are / With insense [sic] of incessant Pray’r’ (ll. 85–6, 94, 109–110, Marvell 80). 6 ‘Upon Appleton House’ similarly brings out the implication that deeps may be places of drowning: ‘To see Men through this Meadow Dive, / We wonder how they rise alive. / As, under Water, none does know / Whether he fall through it or go. / But, as the Marriners that sound, / And show upon their Lead the Ground, / They bring up Flow’rs so to be seen, And prove they’ve at the Bottom been.’ (ll. 377–84, Marvell 89). 7 The poem’s last stanza asks that the delights may ‘calm / The pulse of nervous nations, / Forgive the murderer in his glass’ (ll. 68–70, Collected Shorter Poems 71). Marvell’s nun maintains: ‘Nor is our Order yet so nice, / ‘Delight to banish as a Vice. / Here Pleasure Piety doth meet; / One perfecting the other Sweet. / So through the mortal fruit we boyl / The Sugars uncorrupting Oyl: / And that which perisht while we pull, / Is thus preserved clear and full’ (ll. 169–76, Marvell 82).

W.H. Auden and the Deep Language of Poetic Prayer

215

with its limitations to imaginative extension, its particular shortcomings and its poverty of attention, of which the mystical moment is emblematic, into a satisfactorily intercessory form of poetic prayer, one which succeeds by virtue of its apparent ‘belonging’ within an increasingly secularized readership. Perhaps this is why the poem at this stage in Auden’s career clearly imagines the watery deeps as a turning-point and point of transformation, but unlike both Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ and Arnold’s poem, Auden’s avoids using the word. In other poems by Auden, however, the word ‘deep’ and its cognates are often used to indicate a medium or being that is both ensconced within the world of time and also suggestive of something other and apart. I have discussed elsewhere several examples of Auden’s using the word in this way – in poems such as ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’, a quatrain poem dated November 1937, and ‘Lady Weeping at the Crossroads’, written in 1940.8 In the latter, Auden envisages the call of the ocean, the immensity of death with its ‘cry’ to the self, which the self in flight both seeks and seeks to find refuge from. In response to grief, the answer comes: Run until you hear the ocean’s Everlasting cry; Deep though it may be and bitter You must drink it dry. (ll. 13–16, Collected Shorter Poems 172)

We have already mentioned that Auden’s Christian thinking was coloured by his reading of Kierkegaard, and that he was in particular struck by Kierkegaard’s image of the self suspended over fathoms of emptiness. In this poem, Auden rhymes ‘abyss’ with ‘kiss’: ‘Push on to the world’s end, pay the / Dread guard with a kiss’ (ll. 21–2, Collected Shorter Poems 173); by doing so, he points up the pathos and the courage of love’s leaps and quests, attempted despite the knowledge of death. He is alert to, yet still invokes, the illusions and dramas of love, and he is clear, too, how these lead so easily to violence and oppression of the other person. But love, whether for God or another person, cannot ignore the yawning abyss beneath the picnic on the heath. It is a question of how it may be imagined or incorporated. And here, as often, an answer is found in the generous risk of ordered words, whose freedom and self-giving is expressed through a God-directed song.

The first line contains a comma after ‘Lady’, as does the title in Auden’s list of contents; the title above the poem itself has no comma (see Collected Shorter Poems 11, 172). 8

216

Poetry and Prayer

In Auden’s 1941 sequence of four sestinas, ‘Kairos and Logos’, by contrast: ... sown in little clumps about the world, The just, the faithful and the uncondemned Broke out spontaneously all over time, Setting against the random facts of death A ground and possibility of order, Against defeat the certainty of love. And never, like its own, condemned the world Or hated time, but sang unto their death: ‘O Thou who lovest, set its love in order.’ (ll. 31–9, Collected Poems 307)

The faithful oppose the random facts of death, the abyss beneath the picnic, with ‘A ground … of order’. The word ‘ground’ confirms Auden’s sense that this order does not condemn the world, but resides within it and is founded upon it. The sestina’s revolving form – reusing in each six-line stanza the same six rhyme-words – articulates here the poem’s sense of an order which is not lost, but continually returns to something immanent. Here again are echoes of Marvell’s ‘Appleton House’ and perhaps of his ‘Bermudas’, with its voyagers’ ‘falling oars’, which amid the apocalyptic reversals of war and disorientation, amid ‘the huge sea-monsters’ that ‘lift the Deep upon their Backs’ (Marvell 11), keep and redeem time. In other shorter poems, we can observe a shift from the upheaval and constraint, as well as exhilaration of worldly passion and of erotic love, to the beautiful order, depth and openness of prayerful attention that is given both to the self and to other people. Often the image of the leap becomes a focus for such a shift, clearly drawing on the reading of Kierkegaard mentioned earlier. This can be seen, for example, in the poem ‘Leap Before You Look’, which though employing the sestina form, none the less uses a comparable dense and repetitive rhyme scheme that works around and with the rhyme-words ‘leap’ and its half-rhyme ‘here’. The word ‘leap’ may connote risk and blindness, but it also brings within its grasp antithetical rhymes such as ‘keep’, ‘heap’ and the more troubling rhyme ‘cheap’, with its suggestions of worldly immersion. I think it is the gently persistent rhymes, however, the work of the poetic hand, that reassure us that love, no less than poetry, brings order. Auden’s essay reminded us that prayer can be known by its freshness, and the poem keeps this sense of divine newness in our minds with its revolving rhyme scheme. Here, prayer is not explicitly apparent, but the final verse turns the language of erotic love into

W.H. Auden and the Deep Language of Poetic Prayer

217

something more profound and partially prayerful. The reticence at this point is a mark of the responsiveness of the speaker’s attention to the world he addresses. Other poems, however, do make the shift from erotic or solitary reflection into prayer more explicit, and so more marked. ‘Five Songs’, for example, as often in a manner and language that are strongly reminiscent of both the fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the late, wrecked world of The Tempest, reflects on the transience of earthly power, darkly warning its exalted admiral in the first verse: ‘Salt are the deeps that cover / The glittering fleets you led’. In the fifth and final verse, the focus moves to a more stable register and the landscape is that described as opening out under the eye of the Moon, ‘Watched by great still spaces, / White hills, glittering deeps’. The poem’s opening warning becomes thus a more fervent and more idealistic prayer for a blessing not only on the self, ‘One especial’, but also on ‘friends everywhere’ (Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 271, 274). Again, Auden, through echoing phrases such as ‘glittering fleets’ and ‘glittering deeps’, constructs a landscape that is all-encompassing, deathly and perhaps susceptible to the illusions of the imaginary. It is easy, that is, to view this prayer as removed from worldly realities, blind or indifferent in the moment to the impossibility of the reunions and blessings of yet parted ‘friends’. One can view the ‘eye single’ as expressing a desire on the speaker’s part for a unity of experience and vision that is denied fulfilment on Earth. Yet at the same time, the poetic prayer not only brings with it the hope that such a reunion might be envisaged, but also expresses a momentary glimpsing of the ‘glittering deeps’. In these imaginary spaces, prayerful vision may achieve realization, if only for a moment. I have explored elsewhere the extent to which the language of this deep place, inscribed above all in the ‘New Year Letter’, owes much to the work of Charles Williams, and in particular to his writing on forgiveness ( Jones, ‘In solitude for company’). Kathleen Bell has recently pointed out the overlap in terms of the two poets’ representations of the body and its place in the spiritual life. In ‘New Year Letter’, that depth of pain and loss is once again revisited and perhaps imagined in the image of the ‘reservoir of darkness’ into which the speaker drops pebbles, a little like petitionary prayers.9 The darkness of that imaginary state, however, and the willingness to re-enter its depths again, make possible the expression of a desire for wholeness, implied through the symbol of the ‘Unicorn among the cedars’. Auden writes in a sequence of poetic apostrophes: ‘The derelict lead-smelting mill … points … The finger of all questions. There … I dropped pebbles, listened, heard / The reservoir of darkness stirred’ (Collected Longer Poems 113–14). 9

218

Poetry and Prayer O Ichthus playful in the deep Sea-lodges that forever keep Their secret of excitement hidden, O sudden Wind that blows unbidden,

including the address, ‘O Source of equity and rest’. It culminates in a prayer for forgiveness which as often steps back from personal language and instead looks to appropriated and liturgical words: Send strength sufficient for our day And point our knowledge on its way, O da quod jubes, Domine. (Collected Longer Poems 129–30)

Auden makes use of a triple rhyme in these lines, whose steady beauty perhaps offers something of a release from the antagonistic antitheses – between body and soul, between rational knowledge and mystical intuition – suffered by the voice of the poem. Instead, they tentatively offer in the uniting of the Latin phrase and the English words a prayer that also in its form partly provides the deliverance, the raising of heart and mind, which the poem seeks. Its interlocutor, Elizabeth Mayer, was a translator and editor and one of Auden’s long-standing New York friends. She becomes the poem’s guide and inspiration, a genius loci and a presence which is ‘learned peacefulness’. She provides for the speaker a way of prayerful being in the world which he keenly desires. Her influence is, at least, sought. Mayer is asked to intercede so that a blessing may be given to the speaker himself and accepted as a sign of deliverance and wholeness. Auden’s emphasis on the requirement for an attentive consciousness, his recurrent focus on an awaking from illusory beliefs about the self and from the imprisonment of the passions, may seem a little solemn. This, though, would be a misleading emphasis on which to conclude this chapter. As at the end of ‘New Year’s Letter’, prayer and play are seen as co-existent, both sources of wholeness and of redemption. This movement is developed and perfected in a more extended way in the later long poems, for example ‘Horae Canonicae’ and ‘The Sea and the Mirror’. I hope I have begun to suggest, through a brief consideration of some moments in these shorter poems, a persistent engagement in Auden’s creative work with a language of prayer that locates it amid, rather than apart from, the ordinary, the contradictory and the troubled parts of life. Furthermore, a preoccupation with depth and that deep noticeable in Bremond’s work on prayer as well can be seen recurring, in this reconfigured way, in Auden’s poetic language of the deep.

W.H. Auden and the Deep Language of Poetic Prayer

219

This becomes, in fact, a motif by which he may imagine a uniting of body and spirit, a place in which the self may apprehend wholeness, both personal and social, in a world of conflict and disunity. Works Cited Ahrens, Rüdiger and Klaus Stierstorfer, eds. Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 12/13. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Arnold, Matthew. The Poems. Ed. Kenneth Allott. Longmans Annotated English Poets. London: Longmans, Green, and co., 1965. Auden, W.H. Collected Shorter Poems: 1927–1957. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. —. Collected Longer Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1968. —. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1994. Bell, Kathleen. ‘“If/Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead”: Forgiveness and the Body in Auden’s Post-conversion Poems’. In Grafe ed., Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period, 84–102. Bremond, Henri. Prayer and Poetry: A Contribution to Poetic Theory. London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1927. Carpenter, Humphrey. W.H. Auden: A Biography. London: Allen and Unwin, 1981. Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Doylen, Michael, R. ‘Wilde’s De Profundis: Homosexual Self-Fashioning on the Other Side of Scandal’. Victorian Literature and Culture 27.2 (1999): 547–66. Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain: Essays 1975–85. London: Verso, 1986. Ellmann, Richard. Eminent Domain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Freemantle, Anne, ed. The Protestant Mystics. Intro. W.H. Auden. London: Mentor Press, 1964. Fuller, John. W.H. Auden: A Commentary. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Grafe, Adrian, ed. Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period. London: Continuum, 2008. Hecht, Anthony. The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W.H. Auden. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Hogarth, Henry. Henri Bremond: The Life and Work of a Devout Humanist. London: SPCK, 1956.

220

Poetry and Prayer

Jennings, Elizabeth. Every Changing Shape: Mystical Experience and the Making of Poems. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1961. Jones, Hester. ‘“In solitude for company”: Forgiveness, Memory, and Depth in W.H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror’. Literature and Theology 27.4 (December 2013): 414–25. —. ‘The Language of the Deep: Symbolism and its Place in Twentiethcentury Religious Poetry’. In Ahrens and Stierstorfer eds, Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics 12/13, 352–66. Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2002. Kirsch, Arthur, ed. The Sea and the Mirror. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Marvell, Andrew. Miscellaneous Poems. London: Robert Boulter, 1681. Mendelson, Edward. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939. London: Faber and Faber, 1977. —, ed. Early Auden. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Portier, William and C.J.T. Talar. ‘The Mystical Element of the Modernist Crisis’. In Talar ed., Modernists and Mystics, 1–22. Reeves, Gareth. ‘Auden and Religion’. In Smith ed., The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden, 188–99. Ridler, Anne, ed. The Image of the City and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Robinson, Peter. In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Sharpe, Tony. W.H. Auden: Life and Contexts. London: Routledge, 2007. Smith, Stan. W.H. Auden (Rereading Literature). Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. —, ed. The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Talar, C.J.T., ed. Modernists and Mystics. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009. Talar, C.J.T. ‘Prayer at Twilight: Henri Bremond’s Apologie pour Fénelon’. In Talar ed., Modernists and Mystics, 39–61. Williams, Charles. ‘The Way of Exchange’. In Ridler ed., The Image of the City and Other Essays, 147–54.

Chapter 13

Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer Dana Greene

What are the continuities and discontinuities between poetry and prayer, and who is it who can most appropriately explore their relationship – a poet, a literary critic, a theologian, a historian of spirituality, a philosopher? As a biographer my contribution to this discussion could be suspect since biography seems remote from both poetry and prayer. But if lives matter, both in their living and their telling, then biography may offer insight into the creation of poetry and prayer and their similarities and dissimilarities. Denise Levertov was a poet who spent her life in search of the ineffable. While writing about her life and work, I have found that biography, like poetry and prayer, can both inspire wonder and cause reflection on what Levertov called ‘the eternal questions’ (Poems 1960–1967 31–3). Furthermore, Levertov’s life reveals that poetry can be a practice that can prepare one to pray. Poetry may be, as the Edwardian Evelyn Underhill attested, the royal banner that goes before prayer, a phenomenon to be trusted as ally (114). It may be precursor of what Simone Weil defines as prayer – namely, paying attention to God (66). For Levertov, poetry and prayer are forms of primary speech rooted in wonder which allow for discourse between the self and the other. Unlike most poets, she wrote both poems and poetics, and as a consequence she offers insight into her vocation and her understanding of her craft. My purpose here is to mine her life and her texts in order to illustrate her contribution to an understanding of poetry and how it is relates to and is different from prayer. Levertov was Essex-born, and shaped by the English countryside and her solitary childhood there. Hence she belongs to England. But she also belongs to America, having come there when she was 26 years old, and later naturalized as a citizen. She claimed none the less to belong neither to England nor to America, and would, I think, find it ironic that the United States Postal Service honoured her with a commemorative stamp and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC included a portrait of her in an exhibition of American poets. She called herself an air plant, a pilgrim who belonged nowhere. The only

222

Poetry and Prayer

descriptor she allowed was one she gave herself: poet in the world. If she had a home, she said it was language itself, what she called her Jerusalem. Levertov denied that her life story mattered. Her motto might have been Ars longa, vita brevis. What was important to her was her work, her more than twenty books of poetry, including lyric, nature, political and religious poems, and five volumes of essays on poets and poetic theory. And yet Levertov’s Solomonic choice of work over life is refuted by her own statements. She insisted that everything she wrote came from her life experience: ‘I have always … written out of my own experience’ (Reid 74), and again, ‘I have always tended to reflect in my poems the places and experiences of my life’ (Pacernick 90). She called her poems ‘testimonies of lived life’, and acknowledged that ‘life and poetry fade, wilt, shrink, when they are divorced’ (Levertov, Poet in the World 112). There was nothing shrinking, wilting or fading about Levertov’s life, engaged as she was with the great issues of the second half of the twentieth century. And yet she maintained that it was the inner life which was the most important area for exploration. In her essays and poetry, in her voluminous notebooks, diaries and letters, she left ample evidence of that inner life. Given that Levertov’s life and work may not be well known, I want to make a few comments about the shape of her 74 years. Levertov was born in Ilford in 1923, the youngest daughter of a Russian Hasidic Jew who converted to Christianity and subsequently became an Anglican priest and scholar of religion, and a Welsh mother, a painter and avid gardener, a ‘pointer-outer’, whom Levertov always credited with fostering her poetic vocation. Both Paul Philip Levertoff (his Christian name) and Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff were orphans and exiles. He was disowned by his Russian Jewish family when he became a Christian, and she lost both her parents at a young age. Through her father’s ancestral line, Levertov – she changed the spelling of her name to Levertov when she was in her mid-twenties – was related to the eighteenthcentury Rav of Northern White Russia, Zalman Schneour, founder of Habad, an off-shoot of Hasidism. Through her mother she claimed a link to the Welsh Methodist tailor and poet Angel Jones of Mold. Levertov’s self-narrative was that she was destined to be a poet, given that there was what she called ‘a taut line’ between these ‘illustrious ancestors’ and herself. She claimed to have written her first poem when she was five years old, and by the age of 12 she knew she was a poet. Full of self-confidence, she sent a clutch of poems off to T.S. Eliot, then editor of Criterion, who encouraged her to keep on writing. Her solitary life – the absence of any formal schooling, the influence of a literate and scholarly family, freedom to roam the countryside and haunt museums alone – allowed her time for reflection. Her first poem was

Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer

223

published when she was 17, and at 23 she could boast of a first book of poetry. She was influenced in her vocation by Rainer Maria Rilke, from whom she absorbed a sense of being a pilgrim, the importance of inner experience and the need for solitude. From Keats, Wordsworth and Tennyson she learned her craft. And Cezanne, with his continual repetition in painting Mount Sainte Victoire, inspired persistence in her vocation. During the Second World War she worked in hospitals as an aide, then while travelling in post-war Europe, she met and married an American GI, Mitchell Goodman, and moved to New York City, where she gave birth to a son. During the 1950s, the Goodmans lived a Bohemian and peripatetic life, moving from New York to Provence, to Mexico, and back to Greenwich Village. Their finances were meagre, and Levertov felt her creativity was stultified. But during this period, she and Goodman read Martin Buber, were encouraged by William Carlos Williams, and became associated with the so-called Black Mountain poets, including Charles Olsen, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley. In the early 1960s, Levertov taught at various colleges and universities, gave readings throughout the United States, and began to reflect on her craft. She was at that point author of six volumes of poetry. But the deepening engagement of the United States in Vietnam swept her and Goodman up into the anti-war movement which dominated their lives for almost a decade. Levertov’s activism derived from her poetic vocation. As a poet in the world, she believed she had a prophetic role, a responsibility, as she said, to awaken sleepers (Poems 1972–82 183). She was intellectually and emotionally consumed by the anti-war effort. She travelled to Moscow in 1970, to Hanoi in 1973, was arrested several times, and encouraged her students and readers to resist the war. The Federal Bureau of Investigation kept a file on her and her husband. The consequence of this preoccupation with war frayed Levertov’s psyche and exacerbated problems in her already fragile marriage. By the end of the war, she filed for divorce and terminated her friendship with Robert Duncan, whom she had claimed as her mentor. Fearing the loss of her perception as a poet, she wrote metaphorically that a cataract had formed over her inner eye. By the late 1970s, Levertov’s life had taken a decisive turn. From about age 13 she insisted that she was an agnostic, and certainly her husband and her artistic friends were either a-religious or anti-religious. But with her divorce finalized, the death of her devotedly religious yet prudish mother, and her own psychological turmoil, Levertov felt a need for realignment. It was in the process of writing poems that she experienced a shift from full-scale religious doubt to openness towards some kind of belief. While her poetry continued to reflect engagement with the world – concern for environmental destruction,

224

Poetry and Prayer

unjust wars, Latin American militarism, senseless murders, and exploitation of the poor – some religious themes began to appear in her work. By the end of the 1980s, Levertov moved to the Pacific Northwest and it was there that she affiliated with the Catholic Church. It was at this same point that she came to understand that she wanted to write a different kind of poetry. The poet’s goal, she claimed, ‘is to live with a door of one’s life open to the transcendent, the numinous’ (Levertov, New and Selected Essays 241). Elsewhere she wrote: more and more what I sought … is a poetry that, while it does not attempt to ignore or deny the ocean of crisis in which we swim, is itself ‘on pilgrimage’, as it were, in search of significance underneath and beyond the succession of temporal events: a poetry which attests to a ‘deep spiritual longing’. (New and Selected Essays 4)

Levertov died in 1997, leaving behind a body of work, her ‘testimonies of lived life’ which she hoped would endure. In her first book of poems, The Double Image (1946), Levertov set out a theme which would pervade all of her subsequent writings, an exploration of both the wonder and brokenness of life, as she put it, its fears and possibilities. She saw life double. This double image was poignantly explored in a later poem: ‘Joy is real’, she wrote, ‘torture is real; we strain to make a bridge between them and we fail or almost fail’ (Poems 1972–1982 65). Early on, Levertov maintained that there was an order in reality and the task of the poet was to discover that order and communicate it. Poems were ‘analogies, resemblances, natural allegories’ of that order. She wrote: I believe poets are instruments on which the power of poetry plays. But they are also makers, craftsmen: It is given to the seer to see, but it is then his responsibility to communicate what he sees, that they who cannot see may see, since we are ‘members one of another’. (Poet in the World 3)

In one of her early poems, Levertov playfully describes how the poet works, comparing this process to canine behaviour. She writes: Let’s go – much as that dog goes, intently haphazard. .........................................– dancing edgeways, there’s nothing the dog disdains on his way, nevertheless he

Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer

225

keeps moving, changing pace and approach but not direction – ‘every step an arrival.’ (Collected Earlier Poems 55)

The resulting poem transports the reader overland to a magical place, the islands, hence the poem’s title, ‘Overland to the Islands’. Only once does Levertov compare the poet to a pooch; more frequently, the poet is for her a pilgrim, one who is open, expansive, engaged, on a journey to some transcendent place. Levertov had many mentors. Three early ones were Hopkins, Rilke and Keats, all of whom influenced her craft and her commitment to a poetic vocation. From Hopkins she borrowed the notion of ‘inscape’, a thing’s intrinsic, inner form, a manifestation of incarnation. For Levertov, the poet searches for ‘inscape’ and encounters it through paying attention. It was Rilke who strengthened her commitment to paying attention, the primary requisite of the poetic life. She quotes him: If a thing is to speak to you, you must for a certain time regard it as the only thing that exists, the unique phenomenon that your diligent and exclusive love has placed at the center of the universe, something that the angels serve that very day upon that matchless spot. (Poet in the World 97)

Later, in describing the process of poem-making, she gives priority to reverence and attention. She writes: ‘from Reverence for Life to Attention to Life, from Attention to Life to the poet’s highly developed Seeing and Hearing and from Seeing and Hearing … to the Discovery and Revelation of Form, and then from Form to Song’ (Poet in the World 55). Levertov borrowed Keats’s notion of ‘negative capability’, insisting that what is required of the poet is a profound capacity for receptivity, which she called contemplation. She describes the poem as a ‘temple’, a place in which ‘epiphanies and communion’ take place. There the poet, whom she calls ‘priest’, sees and then, because he sees, communicates, making him prophet, one who awakens sleepers. She writes: ‘as the poet stands open-mouthed in the temple of life, contemplating his experience, there come to him the first words of the poem: the words which are to be his way into the poem’ (Poet in the World 8). Contemplation is not merely observing a thing, but doing this in what she calls the ‘presence of a god’. By this she means that the poet’s individual experience is transformed, made into something which is universal. The poem is then an ‘autonomous’ structure, a new, independent reality accessible to others (Levertov, New and Selected Essays 240).

226

Poetry and Prayer

Central to poetic creation for Levertov – indeed, to all artistic expression – is the faculty of imagination, a quality she continued to reflect upon over the course of her life. She defined imagination as the human’s perceptive organ which ‘synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct’, and which is key to both poetic creation and compassion and makes it possible to experience God (New and Selected Essays 246). She wrote: The imagination of what it is to be those other forms of life that want to live [and by this she means both forms of natural and human life] is the only way to recognition; and it is that imaginative recognition that brings compassion to birth. Man’s capacity for evil, then, is less a positive capacity, for all its horrendous activity, than a failure to develop man’s most human function, the imagination, to its fullness, and consequently a failure to develop compassion. (Poet in the World 53)

It was precisely such reasoning that led Levertov the poet to become Levertov the social activist. She was clear about the order of her development. And yet it would be exactly the tension between being poet and prophet which would bring her to a nadir in the late 1960s. Subsequently, Levertov identified imagination as a ‘perceptive organ’, one: that penetrates through the meaning of appearances to being itself. And later still she suggests that imagination can lift affliction by illuminating it and making it more comprehensible, separating the affliction from the self. Finally, she contends that imagination is the faculty through which humans can apprehend mystery and she adds that the ‘celebration of mystery probably constituted the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings’ (New and Selected Essays 246).

Certainly, her awareness of mystery was fuelled by her father’s Hasidic background and deepened by her reading of Buber. The inscape of Hopkins, the disinterested intensity of Rilke, and the negative capability of Keats each brought her closer to the apprehension of the mystery. Her language attested to its presence. She spoke not only of the poet as priest and the poem as a temple, but of hymns and psalms, of pilgrimage and communion, of a destiny and of praise as the impulse of the soul. Although she sometimes used this religious language, in her early poems its meaning was literary and aesthetic, not religious. When asked to define religion, she said it was a response to the numinous: The impulse to kneel in wonder … The impulse to kiss the ground … The sense of awe. The felt presence of some mysterious force, whether it be what one calls

Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer

227

beauty, or perhaps just the sense of the unknown – I don’t mean ‘unknown’ in the sense of we don’t know what the future will bring. I mean the sense of numinous, whether it’s in a small stone or a large mountain. (Packard 49)

Although she recognizes poetry’s inability to change history, Levertov would attest that it can change the individual. It can increase a sense of being alive and enlarge one’s experience. It creates a kind of chemical change in a person. Even if one forgets the poem afterwards, the body does not forget (Smith 80). In one of her final essays, Levertov writes that poetry reveals the unity of ‘the trembling web of being’ (New and Selected Essays 153). In unprecedented times when the fate of this web hangs in the balance, poetry helps one survive. It gives witness, and like prophecy, it ‘transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes’. Poetry stimulates the imagination, quickens a love of life, and helps one find the energy to stop what she called ‘the accelerating tumble … towards annihilation’ (143–53). A sense of awe and wonder are present in Levertov’s early poems. In ‘Matins’, for example, she calls on ‘Marvelous Truth’ in its many guises, to ‘confront us’ to: dwell in our crowded hearts our steaming bathrooms, kitchens full of things to be done, the ordinary streets

She petitions ‘Marvelous Truth’ to ‘Thrust close your smile / that we know you, terrible joy’. And what is ‘Marvelous Truth’? It is what she called the authentic: That’s it, that’s joy, it’s always a recognition, the known appearing fully itself, and more itself than one knew. (Poems 1960–1967 59–62).

In the poem ‘O Taste and See’, she turns Wordsworth’s line ‘the world is too much with us’ on its head and claims instead that ‘the world is / not with us enough’. She encourages us to ‘taste and see’. The way through to the extraordinary world of marvellous truth and authenticity was to take it into oneself, to:

228

Poetry and Prayer bite, savor, chew, swallow, transform into our flesh. (Poems 1960–1967 125)

The way through to the vision was through engagement with life itself. She ends this collection of poems with three ‘runes’: know your world; know yourself; know that if ‘you would grow, go straight up or deep down’ (155). Although Levertov’s sense of vocation sometimes dimmed, it never disappeared. In the poem ‘The Thread’, published in 1961, she speaks of her sense of being guided and led: Something is very gently, invisibly, silently, pulling at me-a thread or net of threads … the tug of it when I thought it had loosened itself and gone. (Poems 1960–1967 50)

And in ‘City Psalm’ she alludes to life’s double image and to her apprehension of some blessing or mercy found not behind but within reality itself: The killings continue, each second pain and misfortune extend themselves … injustice is done knowingly … ......................................................................... … I have seen not behind but within, within the dull grief, blown grit, hideous concrete facades another grief, a gleam as of dew, an abode of mercy ......................................................................... Nothing was changed … ......................................................................... but that as if transparent all disclosed an otherness that was blessed, that was bliss. I saw paradise in the dust of the street. (Poems 1960–1967 222)

Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer

229

By 1977, Levertov’s life had changed through the deaths and estrangement of family members. The solidarity she once experienced in war resistance had passed. Now, as a woman alone, craving intimacy, she sought out many lovers, with unsuccessful consequences. It was at that point in the process of writing a long experimental poem, based on the structure of the mass, that she experienced some kind of turning. The language of ‘Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus’ was stunning. ‘Dim star’, ‘spark of remote light’, ‘guttering candle’ were words reminiscent of her Hasidic heritage. The poem was agnostic in intent, but included a Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei (Poems 1972–82 266–73). The Kyrie opens with a petition to the ‘deep, remote unknown’ to ‘have mercy on us’ because we live in terror of what is known and unknown. The Gloria follows, praising the sun and snow, the night, the day. The Credo attests to both belief and doubt: I believe the earth exists, and in each minim mote of its dust the holy glow of thy candle. .................................... … I believe with doubt. I doubt and interrupt my doubt with belief. Be, belovéd, threatened world.

The Sanctus is a great hosanna to the ‘unknown’, the ‘unknowable’, and the Benedictus, a hymn of praise to the spirit, to all that is, to that which bears the spirit within it. This portion of the poem concludes with a statement of hope: The word chose to become flesh. In the blur of flesh we bow, baffled.

In the concluding Agnus Dei, Levertov presents the Lamb of God, the innocent, defenceless creature, as the one who takes away the sins of the world. She asks her readers: Is it they who must hold this ‘shivering God’ to their ‘icy hearts’?

230

Poetry and Prayer

She rallies those who can respond, those who are yet human, to shield this defenceless lamb: So be it. Come, rag of pungent quivering, dim star. Let’s try if something human still can shield you, spark of remote light.

Months later, she spoke of how writing this poem had changed her: when I had arrived at the Agnus Dei, I discovered myself to be in a different relationship to the material and to the liturgical form from that in which I had begun. The experience of writing the poem – the long swim through waters of unknown depth – had been also a conversion process. (New and Selected Essays 250).

This process was gradual, and would continue for another decade. Throughout the 1980s, Levertov began to ‘shop around’ for liturgical communities in which she felt comfortable and to develop what she called her ‘do it yourself theology’. Ultimately, she made a Pascalian wager: to live as a Christian in order to become one. In 1989, she finally settled into a Catholic community in Seattle, claiming to have thrown in her lot with the likes of Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Oscar Romero, but all the while considering herself an unorthodox Christian, differing as she did on any number of theological and pastoral issues. She received counsel from both Franciscan and Jesuit clergy, made friends with the likes of Sister Luke Tobin, one of the few women who attended the Second Vatican Council, and in 1992 she completed the Spiritual Exercises. As a poet, she particularly resonated with how imagination was used in the Exercises to conjure Gospel events and the emphasis they placed on observing physical detail. In a later interview, she said: I was really amazed at how close the Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola were to a poet or novelist imagining a scene. You focus your attention on some particular aspect of the life of Christ. You try to compose that scene in your imagination,

Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer

231

place yourself there. If it’s the Via Dolorosa, you have to ask yourself, are you one of the disciples? Are you a passerby? Are you a spectator that likes to watch from the side …? You establish who you are and where you stand and then you look at what you see. (O’Connell)

Evidence of Levertov’s long journey to religious commitment is found in her poetry. Beginning as early as the 1980s, after she finished ‘Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus’, she began to write poems with explicitly Christian themes. In ‘The Servant-Girl at Emmaus’ she recounts the meeting of a Moorish kitchengirl and the ‘Christ’, and in ‘Candlemas’ she recalls the response of the aged Simeon, who, when presented with the infant Jesus, immediately understood his significance: With certitude Simeon opened ancient arms to infant light. Decades before the cross, the tomb ................................................ he knew new life. (Breathing the Water 65, 67)

In ‘St. Peter and the Angel’, she recalls Peter’s miraculous escape from prison with the help of an angel and his sending forth on mission with an understanding that: He himself must be the key, now, to the next door, the next terrors of freedom and joy. (Oblique Prayers 79)

Imagination allowed Levertov to enter into the meaning of these religious personages, but it also offered her images which unravelled what she called her theological ‘stumbling blocks’. (New and Selected Essays 242). Until those conundrums were removed, her life of prayer was truncated. She wrote: As to my more substantial stumbling block, the suffering of the innocent and the consequent question of God’s nonintervention, which troubled me less in relation to individual instances than in regard to the global panorama of oppression and violence, it was through poetry – through images given me by

232

Poetry and Prayer creative imagination while pondering this matter – that I worked through to a theological explanation which satisfied me. (251)

In the process of writing her poems on Julian of Norwich, Levertov was given the images and metaphors which allowed her to move beyond her impediment to belief, what she called her ‘throbbing … stealthy cancer’. From Julian, Levertov learned the meaning of Jesus’ life, and especially his suffering. Levertov asks: ‘Why single out the agony of Christ? What is unique in his suffering? Others have suffered torture for a longer time. Julian knew the difference.’ She saw Jesus’ ‘oneing’ with the Godhead, opening him to the pain of ‘all minds, all bodies … from first beginning / to last day’. He was ‘King of Grief ’, enduring within history ‘the sum total of anguish’. ‘Every sorrow and desolation / He saw, and sorrowed in kinship’ (Poet in the World 68–9). In the poem ‘St. Thomas Didymus’, Levertov confronts her own doubt. She recognizes herself as twin of Thomas the Doubter, and like him, she needs to put her hand in Jesus’ wound. The revelation given her at that moment is not of shame or pain, but of light streaming into her, unravelling the knot of unbelief that had bound her for so long: I witnessed ............................. my question not answered but given its part in a vast unfolding design lit by a risen sun. (A Door in the Hive 101–3)

It was these images of poetic imagination, not the argument of intellect, which brought Levertov to faith and made it possible for her life of prayer to deepen. With her major theological conundrums now set aside, Levertov’s poetry reflects an increased sense of awe and humility. God is addressed as ‘You’, and humans as ‘dustmotes in the cosmos’, who hunger: to offer up our specks of life as fragile tesserae towards the vast mosaic … to be, ourselves, imbedded in its fabric, as if, once, it was from that we were broken off. (A Door in the Hive 107)

Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer

233

But prayer does not come easily. In the poem ‘Flickering Mind’, Levertov acknowledges her own limited ability to pray: ‘Lord, not you, / it is I who am absent’. Although her secret joy may be to steal alone to sacred places, like ‘a darting minnow’ she continues to elude God’s presence. She asks: How can I focus my flickering, perceive at the fountain’s heart the sapphire I know is there? (A Door in the Hive 64)

In 1993, four years before her death, Levertov published a volume entitled Evening Train. She claimed that everything in that volume was a prayer. She recognized that: Writing poetry, that is ‘receiving it’, is a religious experience. At least if one means by this that it is experiencing something that is deeper, different from, anything that your own thought and intelligence can experience in themselves. Writing itself can be a religious act, if one allows oneself to be put at its service. I don’t mean to make a religion of poetry, no. But certainly we can assume what poetry is not – it is definitely not just an anthropocentric act. (Estess 96)

The prayer-poems of Evening Train explore the human experience of God. Living in the shadow of Mount Rainer, Levertov uses the mountain as the defining image in many of these poems, comparing it to God. The mountain, like God, has many guises. ‘Majestic’, ‘luminous’, ‘obdurate’, ‘unconcerned’, it is ‘massive’, but ‘ethereal’, a beckoning ‘mirage’. In ‘Morning Mist’, she describes the mountain as a ‘white stillness / / resting everywhere’, ‘absent’, much as God is Deus absconditus (Evening Train 5). Her relationship with the mountain is not intimacy or communion, but awe. It speaks in ‘a vast whisper’, and is hidden in ‘veils of cloud’ (14, 94, 96, 97). Many of the poems of Evening Train are directed to the ineffable; others reflect the doubt which plagued Levertov. In ‘The Tide’, she speaks of the ebb and flow of faith and of the God she calls ‘Giver’. She asks: Where is the Giver to whom my gratitude rose? In this emptiness there seems no Presence. (Evening Train 117).

But in ‘Suspended’, she returns to the simple language of need, doubt and gratitude:

234

Poetry and Prayer I had grasped God’s garment in the void but my hand slipped ......................................................................... Though I claw at empty air and feel nothing, no embrace, I have not plummeted. (Evening Train 119)

In her last volume of poetry, Sands of the Well, published one year before her death, Levertov explores the human quest for God. These poems are the fruit of both her poetic gift and her experience of faith. In ‘The Conversion of Brother Lawrence’, she tracks the dialogue of this Carmelite monk with God. In the midst of a life of drudgery, Lawrence, in joyful ‘steadfast attention’, carries on an ‘unending “silent secret conversation”’ with God (Sands of the Well 111). In the poem ‘Sands of the Well’, she conjures an image of sifting golden particles of sand which descend in a well, and then asks: Is this the place where you are brought in meditation? (Sands of the Well 124–5)

In other poems, she alludes to being rubbed to a finer substance and then suspended, upheld by God’s love, which is ‘not mild, not temperate’, but a: vast flood of mercy flung on resistance. (Sands of the Well 127–8)

Among her posthumously published poems, the most self-revelatory is ‘First Love’, which defines Levertov’s lifetime desire for ‘secret communion’. In autobiographical lines, she confesses: Perhaps through a lifetime what I’ve desired has always been to return to that endless giving and receiving, the wholeness of that attention, that once-in-a-lifetime secret communion. (This Great Unknowing 8–9)

Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer

235

Although Levertov may have tasted ‘communion’ in political solidarity, erotic expression and friendship, those experiences were fleeting. Her lifelong desire for endlessness and intimacy was realized in her experience of writing poetry. Giving and taking was at the heart of the poetic craft, and it was her way into intimate communion with the numinous, what she came to call God. Poetry offered her images to move beyond theological impasses to belief, and allowed her to glimpse, if only episodically, the mystery which she had known since childhood. Poetry brought her to a place where prayer was possible. For Levertov, poetry and prayer provided the opportunity to experience the mystery inherent in life itself. Although she did not equate the two, she is clear that poetry, like prayer, derives from a primordial language of wonder and awe. Both rely on receptivity, a capacity to receive the gift of inspiration or of grace. Both begin with the ability to pay attention. Having read Simone Weil, she likely resonated with her conclusion that paying attention to an object brings about a self-forgetfulness, a suspension of thought which leaves one available and empty. By redirecting one’s energy away from the self, one is brought into the presence of the other. For Levertov, poetry, like prayer, spurs communion between the self and the other. Both are characterized by emptiness – absences, silences and spaciousness. Poetry is sparse, takes up little space on the page; prayer as well is a kind of empty space, a clearing. Prayer and poetry attempt, to one degree or the other, to name the ineffable through the use of analogy or metaphor. Imagination is a principal tool of engagement for both. Poetry, like prayer, feeds the human spirit, gives life and offers the possibility of greater compassion. Both are vocational. Levertov believed her vocation was to create a bridge to the transcendent. Is not that what the pray-er hopes to do as well? Finally, both vocations require persistence, a turning again and again to vocational demands. Although Levertov appreciated these continuities, she was clear that the poet and what she referred to as the mystic were not identical. They differed both in their intent and in the consequence of that intent. The mystic – the one who prays – has God as an object and desires only to love God. The mystic’s selfoffering leads to transformation of the person. The poet, on the other hand, has as a desire to come into the presence of the thing itself, to have that experience purified and transformed, and to express that experience in words. The mystic and the poet both desire transformation, the former of his or her life, the latter of his or her work. In her poem ‘Contrasting Gestures’, Levertov wrote: (though mystics desire submersion to transform them ..............................................................

236

Poetry and Prayer And artists want not themselves transformed but their work. The plunge itself their desire, a way to be subsumed, consumed utterly into their work). (Evening Train 100)

Recalling the distinction between poet and mystic made by Henri Bremond, Levertov wrote: One truly incompatible endeavor, I think, is to try to be a … mystic and be an artist (especially a poet) … . These are two quite different modes of being & although a … mystic may write beautifully (e.g., St. Teresa) that’s just a secondary & inessential occurrence. The mystic really strives to eliminate language, the poet strives to make things out of language, the material he/she adores. Just as the mystic may happen to write well, so the poet may be a person of radiant virtue – but that’s merely incidental. (Note to Marlene: Poetry vs. Church, privately held)

As poet, Levertov did not seek self-transformation, but she was clearly able to recognize it. In ‘Translucence’, one of her last poems, she describes the result of mystic transformation. She speaks here of the unconscious light in holy faces. These faces are: not quite transparent, more like the half-opaque whiteness .................................................................. which permits the passage of what is luminous .................................................................. I perceive that in such faces, through the translucence we see, the light we intuit is of the already resurrected .................................................................. They know of themselves nothing different from anyone else. This great unknowing is part of their holiness. (The Great Unknowing 48)

Levertov described transformation in others, and although her intent as poet was not personal transformation, she spoke of inhabitation as she created poems, making her work analogous to prayer. The profound sense of gratitude

Denise Levertov: Poetry as a Way to Prayer

237

engendered by her work led her to attest that poem-making could be a religious act. It was work that ‘enfaithed’ (New and Selected Essays 247–57). This neologism, to ‘enfaith’, involved a process which strengthened the capacities for prayer, especially for paying attention, for receptivity and for imagining, enabling one to enter into and honour the mystery. Poetry was Levertov’s way to deepen her experience of primary wonder, wonder that was there in her beginning and in her end. Works Cited Brooker, Jewel Spears, ed. Conversations with Denise Levertov. Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Colclough, Anne Little and Susie Paul, eds. Denise Levertov: New Perspectives. Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2000. Estess, Sybil. ‘Denise Levertov, 1977–78’. In Brooker ed., Conversations with Denise Levertov, 87–100. Levertov, Denise. The Poet in the World. New York: New Directions, 1973. —. Collected Earlier Poems 1940–1960. New York: New Directions, 1979. —. Poems 1960–1967. New York: New Directions, 1983. —. Oblique Prayers: New Poems. New York: New Directions, 1984. —. Breathing the Water. New York: New Directions, 1987. —. A Door in the Hive. New York: New Directions, 1989. —. Evening Train. New York: New Directions, 1992. —. New and Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1992 —. Sands of the Well. New York: New Directions, 1996. —. This Great Unknowing: Last Poems. Ed. Paul Lacey. New York: New Directions, 1999. —. Poems 1972–1982. New York: New Directions, 2001. O’Connell, Nicholas. ‘A Poet’s Valediction: Denise Levertov, 1923–1997’. Poets & Writers 26, no. 3 (May/June 1998). Pacernick, Gary. ‘Interview with Denise Levertov’. In Colclough and Paul eds, Denise Levertov: New Perspectives, 85–92. Packard, William. ‘Craft Interview with Denise Levertov, 1971’. In Brooker ed., Conversations with Denise Levertov, 35–51. Reid, Ian. ‘“Everyman’s Land”: Ian Reid Interviews Denise Levertov’. In Brooker ed., Conversations with Denise Levertov, 68–75. Smith, Maureen. ‘An Interview with Denise Levertov, 1973’. In Brooker ed., Conversations with Denise Levertov, 76–86.

238

Poetry and Prayer

Underhill, Evelyn. Essentials of Mysticism. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007. Weil, Simone. ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God’. Waiting On God, 66–76. —. Waiting On God. New York: Fontana, 1959.

Index Aaron 141 Abel 134, 155 Adam 151, 153, 154–5, 158, 159, 160, 162, 164, 194, 200 Adorno, Theodor 163 Albertazzi, Stefano 59, 62 Allchin, A.M. 108, 109, 113, 177–8 Allen, Leslie C. 96–7, 99n, 100n Ambrose, St 71 Anderson, Bernhard W. 95 Arnold, Matthew 4, 158, 206, 211–12, 213, 215 ‘A Summer Night’ 211, 213, 215 ‘Dover Beach’ 158, 159 attention (attentiveness) 1, 7, 28, 44, 53, 54, 132, 139, 157, 176, 178, 207, 216, 221, 232, 235, 237 as centre of identity 207 as hospitable listening 132 as ‘inscape’ 225 common to poetry and prayer 1, 7, 44, 235, 237 in reading and in praying 176, 178 prayer as attention 44, 53, 157, 221 prayerful attention 178, 216 to God’s presence in prayer 28, 234 Auden, Constance, née Bicknell 205 Auden, W.H. 9, 11, 157, 199, 205–19 ‘A Summer Night’ 211–13 ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’ 215 ‘Five Songs’ 217 ‘Horae Canonicae’ 218 ‘Kairos and Logos’ 216 ‘Lady Weeping at the Crossroads’ 215 ‘Leap Before You Look’ 216 ‘Love Feast’ 207 ‘New Year Letter’ 213, 217, 218

‘The Sea and the Mirror’ 218 ‘Work, Carnival and Prayer’ 207 and prayer 207, 210–11, 213, 216–17, 218 and ‘the language of the deep’ 205–19 influence of Bremond on 207­­–8 influence of Kierkegaard on 215, 216 poetry and prayer in 218–19 Auerbach, Erich 115n Auffret, Pierre 99 Augustine, St, of Hippo 20, 42–4, 47–8, 51, 53, 207 Confessions 42, 43 On Christian Teaching 47–8 on prayer 43, 44 Bachelard, Gaston 78, 79, 86, 87 his ‘open ears’ 86 homo aleator 87 homo faber 87 The Poetics of Space 86 Baez, Joan 188 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 77n, 84, 170, 171–2, 179 and the silence of Holy Saturday 170, 171–2 Barberi Squarotti, Giorgio 115n Barsotti, Don Divo 59, 62 Beckett, Samuel 141 Bell, Kathleen 217 Benedict, St, of Nursia 48 Berlin, Adele 96, 99, 101, 109, 110, 113 Bernard, St, of Clairvaux 116, 126, 128 Berrigan, Dan 188 Bialik, Hayim Nahman 45, 46, 51, 53 and the barrier of language 46

240

Poetry and Prayer

on poetry and prayer versus the ‘domain of logic’ 46, 51 Bianchi, Enzo 6 Le Poesie di Dio 6 Bible 49, 95, 96, 106, 112, 132, 134, 141, 153, 154 Genesis 151, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 160, 181 Exodus 106, 107n, 112, 141 Numbers 106 1 Kings 162–3 1 Chronicles 96n 2 Chronicles 106 Nehemiah 106 Psalms 8, 9, 41, 46, 48–9, 52, 55, 95–113, 118, 134, 142, 155, 156–7, 160, 161, 164, 226 Psalm 22: 164 Psalm 42: 155, 160 Psalm 50: 156–7 Psalm 108: 142 Psalm 145: 8, 95–113 as poetry 98–108 as tĕhillâ (prayer of praise) 95 authorship of 96 and monastic liturgy 49–50 as a distinctive poetics of prayer 48­–9 poetry and prayer in 95–113 Proverbs 98n Song of Songs 62, 154 Isaiah 138 Joel 106 Jonah 106 Matthew 47 Luke 47, 132, 161 John 71, 87, 143 Romans 51 1 Corinthians 84, 135, 171 2 Corinthians 48, 159 Ephesians 166, 179 1 Peter 159 Blake, William 10, 187 on the connection between poetry and contemplation 189 Block, Ed 1, 84

Booij, Thijs 96n Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 208 Bremond, Henri 1–2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 17, 18–27, 36–7, 207, 208–11, 211, 218, 236 Prayer and Poetry 1, 3, 17n, 18–25, 208–10 animus and anima 20–21, 22, 23, 210 Eliot’s criticism of 24–5 how grace operates 20–21 inspiration 19, 21 poet as ‘a broken-down mystic’ 24 poetic experience as a gift of God 22, 23 poetry, differences from mysticism 22–3 poetry, similarities with mysticism 1–2, 18–19, 23 psychological study 18 reading poetry poetically 19, 23 reception of 24 influence on Elizabeth Jennings 209 influence on W.H. Auden 207–10 interest in François Fénelon 208 la poésie pure 18 metaphor of ‘depth’ 209 theoretical study of poetry and prayer 1–2, 17, 18–25 Brockington, Alfred Allen 2 Brown, William P. 95, 98n Buber, Martin 223, 226 Bugliani Knox, Francesca vii–viii Burrows, Mark S. vii, 6-7 Burton-Christie, Douglas 49 Cage, John 188 Cain 134, 155 Calle-Gruber, Mireille 80, 81n Caproni, Giorgio 12 Carpenter, Humphrey 206 Carson, Anne 52 Cassavant, Sharron Greer 4 Cato, of Utica 119 Celan, Paul 51, 52, 53, 61

Index Die Gedichte 52, 53 Certeau, Michel de 77, 81n, 82–3 The Mystic Fable 82–3 Cezanne, Paul 223 Chadwick, Henry 42–3 Chapman, Dom John 26 Chaucer, Geoffrey 134 Chrétien, Jean-Louis 132, 136, 138 The Ark of Speech 132, 136, 138 ‘hospitable listening’ 132 Cixous, Hélène 77, 79, 80–81, 82, 86, 87, 88–90 ‘“Magnetizing the World”: An Interview with Hélène Cixous’ 80 Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing 79, 88 and Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises 88–90 poetic way of knowing 79 writing process as ‘a quest’ 80, 81 Clark, Timothy 79n, 80 Claudel, Paul 20, 209 Claudius, character in Hamlet 9, 131–9, 141 and the Pharisee 132–3 in prayer (Hamlet III, iii, 36–98) 9, 131–9 Clifford, Richard J. 99n, 101 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 60–61 Biographia Literaria 60 Conley, Verena Andermatt 77, 79, 80, 81 Cooper, David D. 190 Costanzo, Nerina 115n Countryman, L. William 17 Coverdale, Miles 156–7 translation of Psalm 50 156–7 Cranmer, Thomas 52 Crashaw, Richard 193 Creeley, Robert 223 Czerniawski, Adam 164, 165n, 166n Dante Alighieri 8, 9, 115–29 Divina Commedia 115–29 Paradiso 9, 115, 116, 117, 120, 122, 124–8 VII. 94–120: 125–6 XVII. 121–35: 117 XXIII. 41, 44: 126

241

XXX. 57: 126 XXXIII.1–39: 120, 124–45, Purgatorio 9, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 122–5 XI. 1–24: 116, 122–5 XVII. 91–102: 119n XXVII. 142: 121 XVIII. 55–63: 121 meditation on the Lord’s Prayer 116, 122–5 as a prophetic work 115–16 prayer and prophecy in 128–9 prayer in 116, 122 prayer of intercession in 116, 126–9 story of 118–21 sufficiency versus satisfaction in 124 David, the psalmist 96, 134, 142 Day, Dorothy 230 Deane, John F. 35n DeClaissé-Walford, Nancy 96, 99, 101, 105, 110 depth, deep or the deep 3, 5, 7, 8, 20, 21, 22, 23, 29, 31, 32, 42, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 78, 80, 86, 87, 90, 209, 210, 211, 212, 214n, 215, 218, 230 W.H. Auden on 215, 218 Gaston Bachelard on 86, 87 Henri Bremond on 20, 21, 22, 209, 218 Hélène Cixous on 79, 87, 88 Jonathan Dollimore on 210 Michael Doylen on 210 Terry Eagleton on 210 Ignatius of Loyola on 9 Catherine Keller on 210 Face of the Deep 210 ‘language of the deep’ 11, 212, 215, 217–18, 224, 228 Denise Levertov on 230 Karl Rahner on 5, 29, 31, 32, 42, 78, 87 I.E. Watkin on 3 Oscar Wilde on 210 Descartes, René 52 Dickinson, Emily 7, 43–4, 51, 53, 54, 55, 58–9 ‘Prayer is the little implement’ 43–4, 58–9

242

Poetry and Prayer

her poetry at the threshold of prayer 58 Dollimore, Jonathan 210 Domin, Hilde 44–5, 50, 51 ‘Lyrik’ 44–5 on poetry and prayer 44–5 Donne, John 8, 50, 51–2, 53, 54, 63, 73, 192 ‘A Valediction of my Name, in the Window’ 192 ‘Holy Sonnet XIV’ 53, 63 prayer, sermon on 50–51 Doud, Robert E. 30n, 32 Doylen, Michael 210 Duncan, Robert 223 Eagleton, Terry 77n, 210 Egan, Harvey 80, 85n Elijah 162–3 Eliot, T.S. 19n, 24–5, 73, 137, 162, 188, 199, 206, 208, 222 Four Quartets 73, 137 influence on Auden 199 poetry and prayer 73 Ellmann, Richard 206 Emerson, Ralph 7, 67–8, 71, 75 spirit and nature 67–8, 75 Empson, William 4, 68–9, 71 Some Versions of Pastoral 68 spirit and nature 68–9 Endean, Philip 28–9, 30–31 Esau 163 Eve 154, 155, 158, 194 Fénelon, François 11, 208 Ferlinghetti, Laurence 188 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 71 Fredman, Stephen 187, 188, 202 Freemantle, Anne 211 The Protestant Mystics 211 Fritz, Peter Joseph 30n Frost, Robert 25–6, 69–71 ‘Education by Poetry’ 69 ‘Mowing’ 70–71 on metaphorical thinking 69, 71 on spirit into matter 70–71 Fuller, John 212

Gallagher, Michael Paul 34n Garret, Cynthia 6 Genet, Jean 88 Gilby, Thomas 209 Ginsberg, Allen 188 God 4, 5, 7–10, 12, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 44, 51, 57, 58, 59–60, 61, 62, 64, 74, 78, 79, 88, 97, 101–13, 116, 119, 121, 122, 126, 131, 136, 138, 140, 141, 147, 151, 152, 153, 156–7, 162, 165–6, 169, 171–2, 176, 178, 179, 194, 233 absent 61, 62, 144, 152, 178, 233 and poetry 58 and prayer 21, 29, 44, 57 apprehension of the presence of 22, 79 as Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) 194 hidden 1, 51, 151,152 in Psalm 50: 156–7 in Psalm 145: 101–13 incomprehensibility of 29 ineffability of 233 journey into 116, 119, 121, 122, 126 mystery of 5, 33, 35, 78 poetry and prayer in relation to 28, 59–60, 62, 64, 74,88, 165–6 self-communication of 5, 20, 29, 30, 31 silence of 131, 136, 138, 140, 141, 153,162, 169, 171–2, 176, 178, 179 Goldingay, John 96, 97, 98, 99, 113 Goodman, Mitchell 223 Grandmaison, Léonce de 1, 22 Greene, Dana vii, 11 Griffiths, Richard 6 theoretical study of poetry and prayer 6 Grou, Père 21 Grünbein, Durs 41 Grzegorzewska, Małgorzata vii, 9 Guardini, Romano 1, 3–4, 5, 57 Prayer in Practice 1, 4 Prayers from Theology 4 Rilke’s Duino Elegies 3–4 on the poet as visionary 4

Index theoretical study of poetry and prayer 3–4 Guibert, Joseph de 20–21 Guyon, Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte, 208 Halik, Tomas 155, 160, 161–2, 163–4 Dotknij ran [‘Touch the wounds’] 155, 160, 162 Night of the Confessor 216 on prayer 155, 160, 162 Hamlet, character in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet 131, 137 Hammer, Carolyn 198 Hammer, Victor 194, 198 Heaney, Seamus 35n, 72 ‘Exposure’ 72 heart 1, 5, 6, 20, 21, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 42, 51, 52, 55, 57, 63, 82n, 85, 86, 87, 88, 209, 218 and poetry 86 depths of the 87, 88 hidden centre of the human person 32 prayer as voice from depth of the 42, 51, 55 raising heart and mind to God 27, 29, 57, 218 silence of the 30 Hecht, Anthony 211, 212 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 26, 71 Heidegger, Martin 77–8, 79, 80, 81–2, 84, 88, 90 Elucidations 79 Henry, Michel 143 Herbert, George 9, 10, 45, 54, 73, 139–46, 157 ‘Denial’ 9, 139–42 ‘Dialogue’ 157 ‘Easter’ 142, 143 ‘Easter Wings’ 143–4 ‘Love (III)’ 54 ‘Paradise’ 143 ‘Thanksgiving’ 143 ‘The Collar’ 144, 146 The Temple 142, 143

243

on the task of poetry 139 poetry and prayer in his works 9, 145–6 Hilary, St, of Poitiers 71 Hines, Mary E. 84 Hitler, Adolf 163 Hofstadter, Albert 77–8n Hogarth, Henry 208, 209 Hölderlin, Friedrich 4, 79n, 82 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 7, 10, 25, 35n, 55, 62, 72–3, 74–5, 84, 187, 192, 225, 226 ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ 72 ‘I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, not Day’ 62 Journals and Papers 72 ‘Patience, Hard Thing! The Hard Thing But To Pray’ 74–5 ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe’ 192 ‘The Windhover’ 74 ‘inscape’ 72–3, 225, 226 hospitality 83, 132, 136, 139, 158n Hughes, Ted 34 ‘A Word about Writing in Schools’ 34 Poetry in the Making 34 imagination 1, 5, 6, 42, 47, 51, 61, 79, 87, 89, 192, 226, 230, 231, 232, 235 as a source of poetry and of prayer 47, 235 definition of 226 poetic imagination 5, 6, 47, 51, 192, 232 reading with 87 incarnation 31, 32–3, 68, 69, 71–2, 73, 74–5, 85, 142, 143, 152, 207, 209, 225 in poetry and prayer 68, 69, 73, 74–5 incarnational language 32–3, 71, 72, 207 Ignatius of Loyola 25, 33–4, 57, 73, 75, 78, 79, 81n, 82n, 84, 87, 88, 89–90, 230–31 Spiritual Exercises 25, 33–4, 57, 73, 75, 79, 84, 89–90, 231–2 as subversive 89 compositio loci 73 interior descent 79 rules for discernment of spirits 90 intuition 1, 2, 20, 189, 218

244

Poetry and Prayer

Isaiah 138 Jacob 152, 163–4 James, William 71 Jasper, David 79, 84 Jeannet, Frédéric-Yves 81 Jennings, Elizabeth 209 Every Changing Shape 209 Jerome, St 71 Jesus 32, 35, 47, 59, 71, 89, 132, 139, 143, 156, 161, 169, 195, 231, 232 John, St, of the Cross 12, 19, 154, 191 Jones, Angel 222 Jones, David 26 Jones, Hester vii, 11, 210n, 217 Jones, Mary McAllester 87 Joyce, James 88 Julian of Norwich 137, 188, 195, 232 Kafka, Franz 87–8 Kallman, Chester 205 Kant, Immanuel 26, 46, 71 Keats, John 202, 223, 225, 226 Keble, John 12 Kehl, Medard 84n Keller, Catherine 210 Face of the Deep 210 Kerouac, Jack 188 Kierkegaard, Søren 11, 182n, 206, 215, 216 influence on Auden 215 Kimelman, Reuven 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 105, 106, 107n Kirsch, Arthur 205 Kirwan, Michael 4 Kleist, Heinrich von 87 Knowledge 2, 3, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 28, 79–80, 201, 209, 218 poetic ways of knowing 22, 79–80 rational knowledge 20, 22, 24, 218 real knowledge 2, 19, 20, 24, 209 Kowalik, Barbara 156, 161 Krieger, Murray 4 Labrie, Ross 195, 197, 198 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 42, 44

on poetry and prayer 42, 44 Lagerkvist, Pär 61 Lash, Nicholas 170–71, 207 Law, Sarah viii, 10–11, 34 Lax, Robert 188 Leavis, F.R. 4 Leclercq, Jean 48, 49 Lentfoehr, Therese 188, 194 Levertoff, Beatrice Spooner-Jones 222 Levertoff, Paul Philip 222 Levertov, Denise 9, 11, 34, 157, 158n, 188, 221–37 ‘Altars’ 158n ‘City Psalm’ 227 ‘Contrasting Gestures’ 235–6 Evening Train 233, 234, 236 ‘First Love’ 234 ‘Flickering Mind’ 157, 233 ‘Mass for the Day of St Thomas Didymus’ 229, 231 ‘Matins’ 227 New and Selected Essays 224, 225, 226, 227, 230, 231, 237 ‘O Taste and See’ 227 ‘Overland to the Islands’ 225 ‘St. Peter and the Angel’ 231 ‘St. Thomas Didymus’ 232 ‘Sands of the Well’ 234 ‘Suspended’ 233 ‘The Conversion of Brother Lawrence’ 234 The Double Image 224 The Poet in the World 11, 224, 225, 226, 232 ‘The Servant-Girl at Emmaus’ 231 ‘The Thread’ 228 ‘Translucence’ 236 and Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises 230 Catholicism of 230 conversion process in 223–4, 230 her poetry as way to prayer 221–35, 235 incarnational mysticism of 188 life and works of 221–4 mentors of 225 on imagination 226

Index on Julian of Norwich 188, 232 on poetry and prayer 233, 235 on poetry as religious experience 233, 237 on the differences between mystics and artists 236 on the meaning of poetry 227 on Thomas Merton 188 religion of 226 Levinas, Emmanuel 47 Lewis, Alan E. 171, 172, 181 Lewis, C.S. 157 Liebreich, Leon J. 99, 101n, 104, 110 Lindars, Barnabas 99, 101, 103n Lispector, Clarice 79, 87 Logos 71, 86, 140, 143, 179, 216 Lonsdale, David viii, 6, 34n Lord’s Prayer 47, 116, 122, 164 Louis, Brother (later Father), see Merton, Thomas love 20, 29, 32, 60, 144, 200, 216, 234 love poems and prayer poems 60 Luzi, Mario 12 Macbeth 134, 137 McDonagh, Enda 6, 18, 34–5, 36 The Gracing of Society 18 Vulnerable to the Holy in Faith, Morality and Art 35 on the analogies between poetry and prayer 34–5, 36 Macinante, Alessandra Paola 12 McKenzie, Tim 158 McLauchlan, Richard viii, 10 Macquarrie, John 36n Maréchal, Joseph 1, 22, 36 Marion, Jean-Luc 132, 133–4, 139, 144–6, 155 Prolegomena to Charity 132, 133, 134,139, 155 Maritain, Jacques 3, 5, 24 Maritain, Raissa 3 Marmion, Declan 84 Martz, Louis 27 Marvell, Andrew 212, 214–15, 216 ‘Upon Appleton House’ 214, 215, 216

245

Mayer, Elizabeth 218 Mays, James Luther 102 Medici, Lorenzo de’, the Elder, called the Magnificent 62 memoria 43, 49 Mendelson, Edward 206, 211, 212n Merton, Thomas 9, 10–11, 27, 187–203, 230 ‘Aubade on a Cloudy Morning’ 200–201 ‘Aubade: The Annunciation’ 193 Eighteen Poems 198–201, 202 ‘Evening: Long Distance Call’ 200 ‘Grace’s House’ 196–­7, 201 ‘Hagia Sophia’ 193–5 ‘Message to Poets’ 196–7 ‘Nature and Art in William Blake’ 189 ‘O Sweet Irrational Worship’ 202 ‘Poetry and Contemplation; A Reappraisal’ 190 ‘Poetry and the Contemplative Life’ 189 ‘Poetry, Symbolism and Typology’ 189 ‘Six Night Letters’ 200 ‘Song for Our Lady of Cobre’ 192 ‘The Blessed Virgin Compared to a Window’ 192–3 ‘The Poet, to his Book’ 190 ‘To the Immaculate Virgin, on a Winter Night’ 193 ‘With the World in my Bloodstream’ 198–9 children in his poetry 196 dual vocation 190, 191 influence on Auden 199 influenced by Dylan Thomas 199 light imagery in 202 mysticism and contemplation in187, 188 on the conflict between the poet and the contemplative 188, 190,192 on the similarities and differences between poetry and prayer 189–92 poetry and prayer in 10–11 poetry of the feminine in 193–5 metaphor 20, 32, 47, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75, 193, 209, 232, 235 Michelangelo Buonarroti 63

246

Poetry and Prayer

Migliorini Fissi, Rosetta 115n Milton, John 69, 75, 199 Montgomery, James 115n Moses 141, 152 Mother of God, Mary 152, 161, 192–3, 194, 196 Murry, John Middleton 4, 18n Narcissus 160 Nash, Roger 6 The Poetry of Prayer 6 Noon, William T. 5, 6, 17, 25–8, 33, 36, 162 Poetry and Prayer 17, 25–8 his criticism of Bremond 26 on the similarities and dissimilarities between poetry and prayer 27–8 theoretical study of poetry and prayer 17, 25–8 Norris, Kathleen 188 Nuttall, Anthony David 9 Ó Murchadha, Felix 146 O’Connell, Nicholas 34, 231 O’Connor, Flannery 61 O’Donohue, John 146 Olsen, Charles 223 Ophelia, character in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet 135–6 Ortega y Gasset, José 207 Pacernick, Gary 222 Packard, William 226–7 Parini, Jay viii, 7 Pascal, Blaise 20, 230 Paul, St 48, 51, 84, 135n Pearl, Chaim 99n, 110, 112n Perotti, Pier Angelo 115n Peter, St 231 Petre, Maud 17 Petrocchi, Giorgio 117n Phillips, D.Z. 151 Pieper, Josef 45 Plato 52 poetry 42, 71–2 and mysticism 1, 2, 3, 18–19

Alfred Allen Brockington on 2 Jacques Maritain on 3 Nathan Scott on 5–6 Edward Shillito on 3 Evelyn Underhill on 3 I.E. Watkin on 2–3 and phenomenology of the flesh 143 and the reader 19 and the theology of the word 31–3 from a theological perspective 18 Enda McDonald 18 Karl Rahner 18, 28–33, 84–5 Hans Urs Von Balthasar 84 Hilde Domin’s idea of 44 listening to 86 of Psalm 145: 98–108 poetic word 86–7 transforming power of 87, 227 poetry and prayer 1–6, 11–12, 17–25, 26–33, 34–5, 36–7, 41–55, 57, 58–64, 68, 73, 74, 75, 77–90, 221–37 and the dynamics of the Spiritual Exercises 73 as cognate forms of expression 7 common traits of 1, 7 attention 54, 139, 157, 176–9, 207, 221 depth of the heart 5, 6, 7, 35, 42 desire 52, 53 , 207, 234, 235 language of the incarnation 68–9, 71, 73 longing 5, 6, 7, 29, 51, 52, 224 wonder and woe 235 differences between 5, 23, 27–8, 35, 57 goal of 74–5 in W.H. Auden; see Auden in Dante’s Divina Commedia 8–9, 115–29 Paradiso XXXIII: 8–9, 116, 126–9 Purgatorio XI: 116, 122–6 in Emily Dickinson’s poetry 58–9 in George Herbert; see Herbert in Hamlet (III, iii) 9, 131, 134–8 in historical perspective 46–55

Index The Book of Common Prayer 50 early Christians and poetics of prayer 48 late modernity 51–3 medieval Christianity 49 monastic prayer and poetry 48–9 Reformation 50 in Denise Levertov; see Levertov in Thomas Merton; see Merton in the Psalms; see Psalms in R.S. Thomas; see Thomas kinship between 1, 8, 20–21, 23, 27, 35, 41, 42, 45, 47, 51, 69, 73, 74–5, 77–90 theoretical studies of by Henri Bremond; see Bremond by Richard Griffiths; see Griffiths by Romano Guardini; see Guardini by William Noon; see Noon by Nathan Scott; see Scott the language of 7, 35, 41, 46, 51 Pol Pot 163 Poulain, Augustin 22 Pound, Ezra 188 praise 108–111 prayer, 28–30, 57 and love poems 60 and silence 157 and the Holy Spirit 29–30 as a setting for conflict 155 as dialogue 153–4, 156, 158 W.H. Auden on 207 Augustine on 43, 44 ‘cathedral prayer’ 49–50 definition in the Cathechism 57 Emily Dickinson on 44, 59 John Donne on 50 sermon on ‘Prayer’ 50 in Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises 57 monastic prayer 48–9 of Holy Saturday 171–2 prayer in the darkness 62–3 spontaneous prayer 50 Simone Weil on 44 Pulci, Luigi 12

247

Rahner, Karl 4–5, 6, 7, 8, 18, 28–33, 36–7, 42, 57, 77, 78–9, 80, 83–6, 87, 90, 162 ‘Anonymous Christians’ 78 Foundations of Christian Faith 37 On Prayer 29 ‘Poetry and the Christian’ 5, 31, 32, 33, 77–8, 84, 85, 86–7, 90 ‘Priest and Poet’ 5, 80 Spiritual Writings 29 ‘The Task of the Writer’ 31 ‘Theology and the Arts’ 30 his theology of grace 30–31, 36 on ‘anonymous piety’ 79 on the kinship between poetry and Christianity 78, 85 on the poetic word 86 on poetry and prayer 33 on prayer 28–30 Reek, Jennifer ix, 8, 39n Reeves, Gareth 206 Reid, Ian 222 Rensberger, David ix, 8 Richards, I.A. 4 Rilke, Rainer Maria 3–4, 223, 225, 226 Duino Elegies 3–4 Robinson, Peter 212n Romero, Oscar 230 Rorty, Richard 71 Różewicz, Tadeusz 9–10, 151, 163–7 ‘bez’ (‘without’) 164–6 comparison with R.S. Thomas 163–7 Salsano, Fernando 115n Sappho 52 Satan 118 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 71 Schneour, Zalman 222 Scott, Nathan A. 5–6 theoretical study of poetry and prayer 6 Scrivano, Riccardo 115n Seybold, Klaus 98n Shakespeare, William 9, 68, 131, 133, 136, 137, 139, 146, 164, 209 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 217

248

Poetry and Prayer

Hamlet 9, 131, 135, 137–8, 147 The Tempest 217 and George Herbert 139 Shaw, Mark 189, 198 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 19 Shillito, Edward 3 Sidney, Philip 8 silence 139, 169–81 Simeon 231 Singleton, Charles 117n Smart, Christopher 212 Smith, Margie (‘M.’) 198, 200, 201 Smith, Maureen 227 Smith, Stan 206, 207 Snyder, Gary 188 Society of Jesus ( Jesuits) 17, 74, 78, 85n, 89 Spadaro, Antonio ix, 38n, 39n spirit 68–71, 73, 74–5, 86 Stalin, Joseph 163 Steiner, George 169, 170n Stevens, Wallace 25, 50–51 Surin, Jean-Joseph 82–3 Sutton, Walter 188 Suzuki, D.T. 187 Swift, Jonathan 68, 69 Sykes, Stephen 170 Talar, C.J.T. 18, 207–8 ‘Prayer at Twilight: Henri Bremond’s Apologie pour Fénelon’ 208 Tennyson, Alfred 223 Teresa, St, of Avila 236 Testori, Giovanni 60, 62 Theorold, Algar 17 Thiessen, Gesa Elsbeth 30n, 77n, 78, 83, 85, 86 Thomas, the Apostle 232 Thomas, Dylan 199 ‘The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’ 199 Thomas, Edward 158 Thomas, Kunjana 173n Thomas, M. Wynn 180 Thomas, R.S. 9, 10, 53, 151–68, 169–85 ‘Don’t ask me’ 163

‘Present’ 158, 161 ‘Sea-watching’ 173, 174, 176, 178 ‘Silence’ 152, 158 ‘Sonata in X’ 158 ‘The Absence’ 152, 164, 166 ‘The Combat’ 164 ‘The Gap’ 153, 156 ‘The Hand’ 156 ‘The Listener in the Corner’ 158 ‘The Other’ 158, 159 ‘The Owl’ 158, 159 ‘The Prayer’ 162, 182 ‘The Presence’ 152, 153, 156, 160–61 ‘The Tool’ 155, 156, 159, 166 ‘The White Tiger’ 167 ‘The Woman’ 156 ‘The Word’ 159 ‘Waiting’ 179–80 and George Herbert 157 and Holy Saturday 169–70 and the Psalms 157 poetry and prayer in 9–10, 23, 151–68, 169–85 poetry reading as prayer 174–5, 185 Tillich, Paul 118 Tobin, Sister Luke 230 Took, John ix, 8-9 Tsvetaeva, Marina 88 Tyrrell, George 208 Underhill, Evelyn 2–3, 206, 221 Essentials of Mysticism 221 Mysticism 2 ‘Poet and Mystic’ 3 Practical Mysticism 2 Vallone, Aldo 115n Virgil 118 Waldron, Robert G. 6, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201 on poetry and prayer 6 Ward, Jean ix–x, 9–10 Watkin, E.I. 2, 3 Weil, Simone 44, 53, 54, 146, 221, 235

Index on attention 54, 221 Westermann, Claus 96 Whitman, Walt 188 Wilde, Oscar 67, 210 De Profundis 210 Williams, Charles 11, 205, 207, 217 Williams, Rowan 172, 178, 181 Williams, William Carlos 188, 223 Wiman, Christian 53–4, 55 Every Riven Thing 53–4 ‘Love Bade Me Welcome’ (essay) 54 ‘Small Prayer in a Hard Wind’ 54 Winterson, Jeanette 42 Wisdom, Holy 194

249

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 41 Woodcock, George 188 Word, the 3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 23, 32, 44, 71, 86, 142, 143, 144, 145, 171, 172, 176 theology of the Word 30–33, 80 word 8, 11, 32, 45, 144, 145, 171 poetic word 5, 8, 12, 31, 32, 33, 85, 86 power of the 23, 29, 80 Wordsworth, William 223, 227 Wright, Frank Lloyd 53 Wujek, Jakub, S.J. (translator of the Bible into Polish) 165n Yeats, W.B. 25, 179