Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period 9781474211369, 9780826498649

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Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reproduce copyright material as follows: Faber and Faber Ltd for extracts from `Nones' and `The Shield of Achilles' from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, `On Installing an American Kitchen in Lower Austria' from Homage to Clio by W. H. Auden; for `The Shield of Achilles', copyright 1952 by W. H. Auden, `The Geography of the House', copyright # 1965 by W. H. Auden, `In Praise of Limestone', copyright 1951 by W. H. Auden, `Homage to Clio', copyright # 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden, `Whitsunday in Kirschstetten', copyright # 1962 by W. H. Auden, `Nocturne', copyright # 1974 by the Estate of W. H. Auden, from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House; `The Platonic Blow' copyright by the Estate of W. H. Auden; twenty-one lines from `The Storm', from Selected Poems 1954±1992 by George Mackay Brown, reproduced by permission of John Murray Publishers; Faber and Faber Ltd. for excerpts from `East Coker' and `Little Gidding' in Four Quartets, Collected Poems 1909±1962 by T. S. Eliot, excerpts from `East Coker' in Four Quartets, # 1940 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc., excerpts from `Little Gidding' in Four Quartets, # 1942 by T. S. Eliot and renewed 1970 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Inc.; sixteen lines from `Metamorphosis Section ii' in For The Unfallen by Geoffrey Hill (Penguin Books, 1992; OUP Inc.) copyright # Geoffrey Hill, 1992; three lines (p. 80) from The Triumph Of Love by Geoffrey Hill (Penguin Books, 1999), and for the US, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, copyright # Geoffrey Hill, 1998; fifteen lines from section XLIX and thirteen lines from LVII from Orchards of Syon by Geoffrey Hill, reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press, a member of Perseus Books Group; `The Bugler's First Communion' pp. 43±5 from The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins edited by Robert Bridges

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(1918), by permission of Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Province of the Society of Jesus; extracts from Elizabeth Jennings, Collected Poems 1953±1985, Carcanet Press Ltd (1987 [1986]), by kind permission of David Higham Associates on behalf of the copyright holder; two lines from `The Anathemata' by David Jones (1952), by kind permission of Oxford University Press, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd; quotations from the poetry of D. H. Lawrence reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli and Pollinger Ltd. Copyright # The Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli; `The Bird' from Collected Poems by Edwin Muir (Faber and Faber; OUP for the US); quotations from the poetry of Kathleen Raine used by permission from The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine, Golgonooza Press, Ipswich (UK), copyright # 2000; `Simone Weil at Ashford' reproduced here from The Poems of Rowan Williams (Perpetua Press: Oxford, 2003 [2002]); Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK, 2004) by kind permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury, # Rowan Williams 2002; an extract from W. B. Yeats, `The Second Coming', by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Grainne Yeats. I wish to thank Anna Sandeman, Colleen Coalter, Ian Howe (copyeditor), Anya Wilson and all at Continuum; Dr Andrew Harrison for his work on the early stages of the manuscript; Rene Gallet, Etienne Grafe, Annick Johnson, Maureen Moran, Cathy Phillips and Paul Volsik; and my wife Natacha for her encouragement and exemplary patience.

Notes on Contributors Editor

Adrian Grafe is a graduate of Oxford and Paris VII, and has been a senior lecturer at the English Faculty of the Sorbonne ± Paris IV since 1998. He published Hopkins: la profusion teÂneÂbreuse (Lille: Septentrion Press) in 2003 and is the author of articles, reviews and papers on various aspects of the poetry of the period covered by the volume.

Contributors Kathleen Bell is a senior lecturer in English at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. Her doctoral thesis was on ideas and beliefs in the work of W.H. Auden 1927±47. She subsequently became the first editor of the W.H. Auden Society Newsletter. Roland Bouyssou is Emeritus Professor of English at Toulouse Le Mirail University. He is the author of a major doctoral thesis on the Soldier Poets of the First World War, and translations of poems and extracts from the correspondence of Wilfred Owen, and is preparing a volume of translations into French of war poems by some twenty-five English First World War poets. Michael Edwards is a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Previously professor at Warwick and Essex Universities, he has been Professor for the Study of Literary Creation in English at the ColleÁge de France in Paris since 2002. He is the author of numerous books of criticism and poetry. These include Towards a Christian Poetics (Macmillan, 1984); Poetry and Possibility (Macmillan, 1988); Of Making Many Books (Macmillan, 1990); Rivage mobile, poems in English and French (Arfuyen, 2003); Shakespeare et l'úuvre de la trageÂdie (Belin, 2005). Andrew Harrison completed his PhD on D. H. Lawrence in 2000 at the University of East Anglia, UK. He has taught at this university and at the

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universities of Nottingham and Warwick. In addition to numerous articles and reviews on Lawrence, he has published D. H. Lawrence and Italian Futurism (2003) and has co-edited (with John Worthen) a Casebook of essays on Sons and Lovers for Oxford University Press (2005). He edits the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, and he is currently lecturer in English Literature at the Institute for Linguistics and Literature at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. Annick Johnson is an alumna of the Ecole Normale SupeÂrieure, and holder of three degrees, one in English, one in theology, and another in philosophy. She is the author of a doctorate on `Kathleen Raine: Poetry and Transcendence', and is interested in the relation between poetry and mysticism, on which she has written various articles. Andrew McKeown is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Poitiers. He is the co-editor of Larkin's Poetics of Resistance (L'Harmattan, 2006). He has contributed to journals and other works devoted to modern British poetry. His publications include `Religion and Ambiguity in the Poems of Philip Larkin' (2002) and `Philip Larkin or the Law of the Father' (2004). Claire Masurel Murray is an alumna of the Ecole Normale SupeÂrieure. She has previously held a teaching post at Trinity College Dublin and a research fellowship at Harvard. She has taught at Paris III since 2003, and is currently working on a PhD in English literature (on `The Catholic Imagination in Fin-de-sieÁcle Literature: Aestheticism and Decadence'). Emily Taylor Merriman recently completed her doctorate in Religion and Literature at Boston University, and is now associate professor at San Francisco State University. She has a BA from Balliol College, Oxford, a degree in education from London University, and an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Boston University. Her doctoral dissertation was on Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott and Charles Wright. She has two essays on Gerard M. Hopkins forthcoming, one in the Hopkins Quarterly on Hopkins and rhyme, and another in a volume entitled Augustine and Literature. Maureen Moran is Professor of English Literature at Brunel University, London where she has been both Head of Department and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature and culture. She has published on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walter Pater, Victorian women writers, and other novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has been awarded the Russel B. Nye Award from the Association of Popular Culture for her article on Victorian attitudes to witchcraft. Most recently her article on images of martyrdom in Victorian literature and art appeared in Victorian Literature

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and Culture. She is currently involved in two projects: one, a book about Catholic sensationalism in Victorian literature, and the other, a book on the Victorian period for the Continuum Press series on British Literature and Culture. Catherine Phillips is Fellow in English at Downing College, Cambridge. Her publications include editions of the poetry, and selected letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a biography of Robert Bridges, an edition of the manuscripts of a play by W. B. Yeats and the co-editing of a volume on John Donne in the Critical Heritage series (Routledge). She is currently completing a book on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Art and co-editing the correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins for a complete edition of his work to be published by the Oxford University Press. David Rudrum teaches at the University of Huddersfield. He is the author of numerous papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, and has edited a volume of essays on that subject: Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates (Palgrave, 2006). He is currently preparing a book on modernism and solipsism. David Summers studied Renaissance Literature at the University of Washington in Seattle, specializing in Shakespeare and Spenser. He is the author of the monograph Spenser's Arthur and articles on Shakespeare. He has taught at several independent colleges in America, including Whitworth College, Seattle Pacific University and ± currently ± at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. While his primary scholarly interest is in Shakespeare, he has taught courses on the role of faith and doubt in English literature, and on High Modernism. Daniel Szabo teaches at Paris VII, and recently defended his doctoral thesis there, on `Paradises Lost in the poetry of two Anglican poets: T.S. Eliot and R.S. Thomas'.

Introduction Adrian Grafe

This book sets out to examine the interaction between religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Many different types of poetics may be seen to be at work during this period, along with various kinds of religious awareness and poetic expression: religious experience has a crucial influence on the language of poetry, and the latter is renewed by religious culture. The religious dimension has been a decisive ± and all but overlooked ± factor of English poetic expression of the last hundred years or so. The aim of the present volume is to draw attention to this, and to fill a gap in serious criticism of the poetry under discussion. The religious and mystical dimension of the poetry of the period is borne out by the focus on, among other things, grace and purgation, the tension between time and eternity, redemption and the demands of eschatology, immanence and transcendence, and conversion and martyrdom. How do church practice and ritual, architecture and liturgy, play into the poetry of the past one hundred and thirty years? English poetry's post-war espousal of a low-key, anecdotal approach, in which commitment in any form is a difficult proposition, has ± with some notable exceptions ± shared an uneasy relation to the high seriousness and mastery of ideas involved in the writing of religious poetry. The current age may be a profoundly secular one, but it has never been the task of poetry simply to reflect the cultural or social tendencies of the poet's own time. In spite of the prevailing cultural climate, many of the most powerful voices in modern poetry have, in Philip Larkin's famous phrase, surprised `a hunger in [themselves] to be more serious'. These poets have wrestled with, questioned and exploited the feeling and language of religion if only, in some cases, to reject religious belief. The chapters of this book generally follow the chronological order of the

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poets, from Hopkins, whose revolutionary ode of 1875 inaugurates modern English poetry, to Rowan Williams. This chronological approach highlights at least one of the trends in the poetry under discussion in the volume, that towards a growing freedom in the expression of religious awareness. No apology is necessary for the frequent reference made in this volume to Hopkins, Eliot and Hill, arguably the three greatest poets ± and possibly critics of poetry ± of the period in question; and it is one of the major arguments of this book, and surely no accident, that all three seek, through innovative poetics, specifically to express modes of religious awareness never or hardly ever before considered in English poetry. Catherine Phillips, who alludes here to all three of these writers, examines the relationship between stylistic echoes of Hopkins and the religious ideas being expressed in other poets. Analysis of passages where these echoes of Hopkins occur in poems by Geoffrey Hill, George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir reveals that not only is the diction important but rhythm and rhyme seem necessary in recreating sensibility. At its best, as in Hill, concise allusion that brings to mind the central ideas of Hopkins's poem amplifies the religious effectiveness of a later poem. Hopkins's poetry was grounded in Catholic belief which was, if unorthodox in certain respects, both deeply held and rigorously grounded philosophically, as Phillips shows. In contrast, Claire Masurel-Murray throws light on the representation of the aesthetic dimension of Catholicism in slightly later Victorian poetry, and attempts to account for the emphasis that fin-de-sieÁcle poets laid on the beauty of the ritual as opposed to belief. The question of the sense of religious reality, then, arises not only with regard to those poets who show some degree of the Hopkinsian influence, but especially in relation to the Decadents, who saw the Catholic liturgy itself as a work of art. Maureen Moran sets out to show how the poetry of one fin-de-sieÁcle writer in particular, Francis Thompson, responds with special intensity to this Catholic aesthetic of sensation. With its highly wrought symbolic ornamentation, exotic technical elaborations and stylistic virtuosity, Thompson's writing has its own baroque fervour, like the religious ritual, hymns, prayers and sermons prevalent in Catholic worship of his day. In the same chapter, the link between poetry and the shape and techniques of liturgy and ritual is also considered in relation to the work of two later poets, David Jones and Elizabeth Jennings. Unlike the fin-de-sieÁcle poets whose embracing of their sensationalist aesthetic in a spirit of cultural resistance reinforced their communal

Introduction

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identity, Lawrence is shown by Andrew Harrison to have longed for a communal life from which he felt excluded. The question of the influence on D. H. Lawrence of the biblical stories, nonconformist hymns and practice he encountered in his childhood is brought to bear on a reading of two early poems. These show the young poet yearning for a religious certainty he could not feel. The sometimes fraught relationship between religious poetry and the Bible is exemplified, according to David Rudrum, in Eliot's `Hollow Men' and Yeats's `The Second Coming'. Indeed, Rudrum shows how these modernist versions of the Biblical vision of the Apocalypse depart from conventional Christian iconography and, in so doing, reinvigorate one of the most powerful forms of religious poetry. David Summers brings the insights of contemporary phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion to bear on his reading of Four Quartets and his interpretation of Eliot's experience of the transcendent, eternal moment witnessed by an attending self. In so doing, Summers is able to highlight what is specifically religious in Eliot's approach to moments of heightened awareness. Kathleen Bell brings a philosophical edge, too, to another Anglican poet, Auden's keenly felt sense of the holiness of the body and belief in the resurrection of the flesh. Auden's conversion (or return) to Anglican Christianity in 1940±1 coincides with a signal change in his work as sexual love (including homosexual love) becomes a cause for celebration rather than for guilt. Auden's celebration of the sexual element of human love is grounded in a religious view of the body and its reminder of both the goodness of creation and the limits to human life when set beside the Unconditional. Bell builds on other critics to look in greater detail at some of the ways in which Auden's poetry draws on his Christian understanding of the body to meditate, especially in dialogue with the thought of his friend Hannah Arendt, on human responsibility in the world. Annick Johnson undertakes to explore the evolution of the poetry of Kathleen Raine who, for her part, was more concerned, through her engagement with Blake and the Neo-Platonic tradition, to voice the unity of all things and all beings, eternal realities that speak to the soul and make it aware of itself through a poetic vision more spiritual than religious. That spiritual awareness gives a particularly suggestive power to Raine's perception of the natural world, through which spiritual realities can be reached. In a different mode, it is a cluster of different sacrificial traditions which inform David Jones's long war poem, In Parenthesis. Yet Jones, too, as

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Roland Bouyssou shows, reaches beyond the immediate context to the reality which does not change. To David Jones, the `reality' of war lies in sacrifice and he `constructs' his poem into a sacrificial liturgy, aimed at achieving renewal and redemption. Redemption ± though not, perhaps, renewal ± is harder to find in the more inward-looking art of R. S. Thomas. Daniel Szabo portrays Thomas as the poet of presence in absence, striving to communicate with a God who seems absent: the poet finally answers the silence of God with his own silence as he paradoxically proclaims language's failure. Andrew McKeown chooses to highlight the humour and grim irony that Philip Larkin shares with Thomas. Sceptical when it came to religion, as about so much else, Larkin described himself as an `Anglican agnostic'. McKeown argues that it is possible to consider Larkin as both religious and unreligious as a poet. Especially in some of Larkin's recently published early poems, points of religious consciousness are couched in self-defeating comic form, so that expression and repression coexist and come to form part of the darker, death-dreading side of his work. A fuller and more flamboyant expression of religious awareness is to be found in the work of another Anglican poet, Geoffrey Hill, possibly thanks to his reading ± and teaching ± of Hopkins. Emily Taylor Merriman's broad and fruitful consideration of Hopkins's influence reveals Hill's debt to Hopkins's metrical theories and practices. Indeed, Hill himself speaks of how Hopkins combines metrical, religious and psychological stress. Merriman also reveals Hill's debts to Hopkins's sacramental vision of the natural world. An examination of how the poetics and the theologies, even the `poetical theologies', of this modern poet have been affected by Hopkins's religious outlook and literary language offers illuminating perspectives on what is distinctive about modern religious experience, as does the presence of the French philosopher Simone Weil in modern English poetry, whose thought and outlook are shown by the volume editor to have been congenial to poets as apparently different as Eliot and Hill, and who was the leading exponent of religious metaphysics in the period covered by the volume. Their response to Weil, and her own response to the poetry of Herbert on the one hand, and the theology of the kenosis on the other ± a theology central in its turn to both Hopkins and Hill ± lead to an extended exploration of a poem by Rowan Williams, about Simone Weil's dying days. Williams's poem drives to the heart of what contemporary poetry has to say about religious despair and, perhaps, hope. Finally, Michael Edwards's piece is as much epilogue as closing

Introduction

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chapter, to the extent that, if it takes as its starting-point a specific moment in Four Quartets, and takes up again ideas adumbrated in previous chapters, such as the over-riding presence in the period of Hopkins as religious poet, or the `intolerable' nature of some religious experience, it is, in reality, a reflection on the situation facing the Christian poet writing in the global language that is English in the first decade of the new millennium, by a critic and philosopher who is also himself a poet of religious awareness. While everyone agrees on the essential inspiration of English poetry in the fourteenth century, for example, or, even more relevantly, in the seventeenth, no single critical work has, to my knowledge, explored this dimension of modern English poetry ± not, at least, with such a broad range of poets or wealth of interpretations. The present volume is designed specifically to rectify this critical oversight in the light of current scholarship. One aspect of the book, in particular, is worth stating from the outset: the analysis of, and multiple references to, the work of Hopkins, Eliot, David Jones and Geoffrey Hill, show how much religious awareness has contributed to the development of poetic modernism. The poetry discussed ± and celebrated ± in the following pages is as much an expression of joy as of doubt and despair, silence and anguish. And poetry of religious awareness has not only to do with the poet speaking to or communing (or failing to commune) with God; it is concerned with reaching out and speaking to other men and women. The experience offered by such poetry, for the poet and the reader alike, may become, then, a source both of ecstasy ± which, as Pater memorably said, is `success in life'1 ± and of understanding.2

Notes 1 2

See infra Chapter 3, p. 30. `Ecstasy and Understanding' is the title of Chapter 6 of Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004 [1990]).

1

Gerard Manley Hopkins as religious conduit in Geoffrey Hill, George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir Catherine Phillips

T. S. Eliot was a writer much concerned with the importance of religion for European culture, particularly during the late 1930s and 1940s, when his poems included the Four Quartets and his essays, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948). Both are heavily influenced by his reactions to the Second World War. In an appendix to the latter volume, written with the necessity of reconciliation between European states in mind, Eliot asserted that, `if Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes'. It is not only a question of religion, he explained, but that the same heritage also enfolds European art as it has evolved, the Roman law underpinning contemporary legal systems and our codes of morality. The institutions of the Christian Church have conserved classical and Middle Eastern traditions, transmitting them throughout Europe across national boundaries. The commonality of that cultural heritage he considered in danger and he urged men of letters to preserve the unity it gave Europe beyond what all `political and economic organisation, however much goodwill it commands, can supply'.1 Eliot himself tried very hard in his Four Quartets to convey to what he evidently considered to be a post-Christian era the central truths of his Christian faith. To do this he blended religious passages with the philosophical paradoxes of the workings of time, juxtaposed with numerous questions about the health of individual minds and nations and the English language. Stephen Spender suggests that in Four Quartets the religious symbolism and the poetic symbolism tend to coincide.2 He gives as an example the section from `Little Gidding' in which Eliot remembers the dead on both sides of the War of the Roses and reflects that what we inherit from the victors has been taken from the defeated. Then,

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although the next lines appear as a generalization, Eliot seems to have had a much more specific example in mind: what `we' inherit is `a symbol . . . perfected in death'. Spender interprets that symbol as `the crown which the dead Richard III lost at Bosworth' and which was placed on the head of Henry VII. Spender sees this as a poetic symbol being absorbed within the religious, since the crowning of Henry VII is, of course, the dawn of the Tudor dynasty that was ultimately responsible for the establishing of the Church of England, to which Eliot had converted in 1927 and which he saw as so necessary to European reconciliation. In the Four Quartets, there are sections where the music of the poetry incorporates not just religious, symbols and historical significance but the rhythms of books central to Anglicanism; for example, in `East Coker'. Here the early lines are prosaic and apparently slack in thought, dispelling the resonance of `house' as family lineage that the first phrase, `houses rise and fall', suggests and dwindling to a casual listing of the possible fate of buildings: crumbling, being extended or removed, destroyed or restored. However, the passage becomes more musical and resonates with symbolic significance as it moves closer to the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer as, for example, in the phrases `ashes to ashes' and `there is a time . . .' from Ecclesiastes, or, as Donald Davie points out, from the Book of Common Prayer, `Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon the earth; where the rust and moth doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven; where neither rust nor moth doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal.'3 Contemporary with his poetic writing, Eliot made his most relevant prose statement of the preservation of religious culture in his essay, `The social function of poetry' (1945). Primarily concerned with the necessity of reuniting the European nations, he comments on the importance of maintaining relation between past and present through poetic language. Despite widespread acknowledgement that the decline of religious belief was a matter of note, people seemed unaware, he thought, that what he called `religious sensibility' was also at risk. This is not just a matter of factual knowledge but a loss of contact with the past: `A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can still understand; but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it become meaningless' 4 and with it, that broad cultural heritage he saw as the bedrock of European unity. Eliot's political concern is now fought out in different political and cultural arenas but the idea of using poetry as a conduit for religious sensibility remains relevant and interesting. Poets can, of course, keep

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going back to biblical or liturgical texts and incorporate them, as Eliot does, and keep them alive in that way. However, there is another possibility. What if a writer echoes the work of a poet of intense belief, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins: one who does not primarily model his verse on religious texts, but fills his poems with private religious experience? Can private religious feeling be transposed between poets? In Hopkins Variations, a collection of the accounts of fifty-five Hopkins scholars, several of the writers assert the identity of feeling in Hopkins's poems with the music of his language. This is not a matter of individual words but of their conjunction in particular rhythmic phrases, something which has the potential to fulfil Eliot's assertion of poetry's ability to conserve feelings. Joaquin Kuhn, for example, refers to the way in which Hopkins's poems occupy `a borderline area between language and music. Such use of words has the strength of conceptualization and reference that language involves, but it adds associative tones and unique forms of . . . dynamic variation, tempo and . . . rubato that music deploys'.5 Another contributor, Lionel Adey, believes that Hopkins's work incorporates the experience of profound religious belief regardless of sect: it is `deep calling to deep'.6 And a third, Francis Fennell, remarks that the feeling conveyed by the sounds and `rhetorical power' of particular pieces of poetry can be communicated even in verse in languages one cannot understand. Not all poets, he says, have such power but he cites the Russian, Andrei Voznesenski, as one and, among the few English poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose rhythms and sounds he finds make certain phrases and lines `literally unforgettable'.7 Hopkins's relationship to religious verse is perhaps surprising in two ways. He was a Jesuit priest, busily working in communities up and down the British Isles, yet he was aware of a great deal of contemporary writing and art. He was also independently if not idiosyncratically minded, making such innovative use of rhythm and rhyme that an audience for his verse did not materialize until the full flood of Modernism in the 1920s. For Hopkins the external world was `news' of God and he saw in his ecstatic response to his surroundings communication with Christ immanent in the features of the physical world. An extremely scrupulous sensibility kept him anxious about whether his delight in nature, which he described with microscopic observation in language ingeniously distorted to communicate through sound as well as lexical meaning, was for its Christian implications or simply for its own beauty. Although many of his poems take the form of Petrarchan sonnets, combining natural observation with teasing out of its Christian relevance in a manner frequently

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compared to the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, Hopkins did write some longer poems, including two on shipwrecks. The first, and both technically and theologically more significant of these is `The Wreck of the Deutschland'. This describes the marooning of a German passenger ship on sandbanks near the mouth of the Thames, leading to the drowning of a quarter of the passengers and crew, including five nuns, in the cries to God of one of whom Hopkins finds a religious harvest of souls recalled to their Christian faith as they fell to the power of the waves. Various sections of the `Wreck' have evidently stuck in poets' minds. Looking at echoes of these in the poems of Geoffrey Hill and George Mackay Brown might enable us to test Eliot's proposition that religious sensibility can be conveyed from work to work by seeing whether Hopkins's religious fervour remains active in its new settings. A test poem with which one might start is the second section of Geoffrey Hill's `Metamorphosis', which runs: Through scant pride to be so put out! But feed, feed, unlyrical scapegoat; Plague shrines where each fissure blows Odour of laurel clouding yours. Exercise, loftily, your visions Where the mountainous distance Echoes its unfaltering speech To mere outcry and harrowing search. Possessed of agility and passion, Energy (out-of-town-fashion) Attack every obstacle And height; make the sun your pedestal. Settle all that bad blood; Be visited, touched, understood; Be graced, groomed, returned to favour With admirable restraint and fervour.8 For the Unfallen, the title of Hill's first collection, in which the poem appears, contains many poems with titles that refer to earlier works: `The Re-Birth of Venus' to Botticelli's painting, `Drake's Drum' to Henry Newbolt's poem, and `Metamorphosis', in part to Ovid. Hill's poem has

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five sections. The interpretation I propose, certainly not the only one of his meaning in the second section, stresses the relationship of this poem to `The Wreck of the Deutschland'.9 The admirer of Hopkins's poems is alerted to possible intertextuality by the poem's final lines, which recall the striking last lines of both parts of `The Wreck'. Hill urges Christ, not to visit, touch and understand us but to be touched, visited and understood. The poem opens with an exclamation that, like many of Eliot's phrases, plays with ambiguity: he blames Christ's `scant pride' for having him `so put out!' but he then addresses Christ as `unlyrical scapegoat', settling the ambiguity between `put out' meaning `disconcerted' and `physically ejected' as primarily the latter. Hill may call Christ the `unlyrical' scapegoat to distinguish him from Greek divinities whose advice was communicated through riddling, poetic oracles. (Plato, of course, had compared poets to the oracles, considering both to be empty vessels through which divine inspiration flows.) Christ had with `scant pride' come to earth in the lowliest of guises, something that Hopkins referred to as `the incredible condescension of the Incarnation . . . that our Lord submitted not only to the pains of life, the fasting, scourging, crucifixion etc. . . . but also to the mean and trivial accidents of humanity'.10 The address to Christ identifies him in ways that are elaborated by combined reference to the final stanza and to stanza 25 of `The Wreck', in which one of the muses to which the speaker appeals for inspiration is Christ on the cross: `Breathe, body of lovely Death', an equivalent of Hill's `unlyrical scapegoat'. This early manifestation of Christianity is called upon in Hill's poem to feed upon and ultimately to plague the Greek religion of poetic oracles that it supplanted, from the `shrines' of which flow the perfume of `laurels', the plant used for poetic wreaths. Hugh Haughton writes of Hill's `methodical search for appropriate historical sites and prototypes for his poetry, his need to locate his poems in, or derive them from, specific historical circumstances, usually of political or religious extremity'.11 In `Metamorphosis' Hill would seem to be talking about the early development of Christianity. Within such a context, the second stanza might be seen to refer to the Hill of Calvary, where Christ is urged to `exercise . . . his visions', words that will echo in the lives of others in later ages and, ultimately, to such `outcry' and `harrowing search' as might be exemplified in Hopkins's nun in stanza 24 of `The Wreck' who `Was calling ``O Christ, Christ, come quickly'':/The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.' Hopkins describes the nun as a latter-day Mary because her cries give Christ presence in the world in the only way possible after his death and resurrection.

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In Hill's third stanza, in a style reminiscent of Pound's `Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', Christ is praised for his `passion' and his `agility', perhaps referring to his visiting of the `last-breath penitent spirits' before his ascent to Heaven, suggested in the advice to `make the sun' his `pedestal'. Besides referring to the Athanasian Creed, the stanza may draw on Hopkins's description of Christ in his stanza 33, with its `passion-plungeÁd giant risen, / The Christ of the Father compassionate'. Also relevant may be the appeal in stanza 35 to Christ to `be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimsoncresseted east', hence making `the sun' his `pedestal' in a superimposed, emblematic image of Apollo riding the sun and that pun, beloved of the Renaissance, of the `sun' and the `son'. Hill's final stanza catches that striking inversion Hopkins uses when he asks God not to be merciful, not to accept our adoration but to `make mercy in all of us . . . be adored, but be adored King'. The change from the expected phrasing is in keeping with the exploration throughout `The Wreck' of how God operates within each individual in the world now that Christ is risen. Similarly, Hill's prayer, `Be . . . touched, understood', may draw on Hopkins's address to God in stanza 1, `Over again I feel thy finger and find thee' and his assertion in stanza 5, `His mystery must be instressed, stressed; / For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.' Hill's inversion makes sense in the light of his final line, which prays that Christ be `graced', returned to favour with `fervour' but also `restraint' in settling the `bad blood' of religious feuding. The inversion and ideas seem to develop Hopkins's `Make mercy in all of us, out of us all / Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King' and the sentiment of the last two stanzas in which he envisages Christ's Second Coming: `Not a doomsday dazzle . . . / Kind, but royally reclaiming' his people. Perhaps Hill is referring in the final stanza of his poem to the gradual spreading of Christianity after Christ's death. There is more objectivity, more of a sense of religious history in Hill's poem than in `The Wreck of the Deutschland' but Hill's choice of the pattern of the invocation recalls the most intense parts of Hopkins's poem. It is not that Hill is saying the same thing as Hopkins but that he has such a grasp of Hopkins's thought and poetic music that if, in this series of deliberately intertextual poems, `The Wreck' is recalled, the echo brings with it a religious feeling that transfers to its new context, amplifying what is there. The two poems deal with different phases of Christianity but both explore the nature of Christianity in a world without Christ's physical presence. The complex interconnections between the two poems produce not just a web of ideas but a continuity of feeling that is far more difficult to describe.

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Ecstasy and Understanding

George Mackay Brown, whose love of the music of Hopkins's verse led him in 1961 to do a year's postgraduate work on the Jesuit, opens his Selected Poems 1954±1992 with `The Storm'.12 This too seems to draw on `The Wreck of the Deutschland'. Brown's poem is an account of how a man, shipwrecked off the coast of Rousay, found peace as a monk of Eynhallow. Brown spent large parts of his adult life away from his beloved Orkney and described himself during happier parts of his study as being like a monk in a small bare room, absorbed by the life in his mind. Like `The Wreck of the Deutschland', `The Storm' is a story of salvation born out of the despair of a shipwreck, but in Brown's poem there is only one man who is recalled to God. `The Storm' opens with the exclamation, `What blinding storm there was!' `Blinding' is an unusual adjective to describe a storm. Did Brown have in mind Hopkins's vivid description of the nun in the storm that wrecked the Deutschland, `the rash smart sloggering brine / Blinds her' (`Wreck', 1089)? Brown's speaker compares the flashes of lightning to `the leap and lance of nails', which brings to mind Hopkins's account of his heart that he calls `dovewinged . . . To flash from the flame to the flame' of God and his reference to St Francis marked by the intensity of his vision with `the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his Lovescape crucified'(180); Brown's `Lurching . . . over the lambing hills' seems to combine the sudden lurch of the capsizing Eurydice that Hopkins catches in his rhythm (`The Loss of the Eurydice', 41) with the contrast he draws in `The Wreck' between himself `at rest . . . On a pastoral forehead of Wales' and the nuns in the storm. Here the phrasing recalls Hopkins and does not entirely make sense in its new context. For instance, the climax of the description of the wreck in which the storm `flung us, skiff and man (wave-crossed, God-lost) / On a rasp of rock!' recalls Hopkins in its internal rhyme, compact, hyphenated words and alliteration. Hopkins's language is suggested in stronger and weaker echoes throughout the rest of the poem: clouds are `rampant' as are Hopkins's waves; `chancel lights' are said to `stain' the shore breakers as Hopkins's God `unchancels' the expelled nuns. However, the comparisons called up do not assist the later poem's meaning and although `The Storm' is also Christian, it does not seem to me to need or gain anything from Hopkins's `Wreck'. Nor do I believe that the comparison that the echoes call up is to Mackay Brown's advantage since they drown his own voice, which is unsurprising given that the poem is one of Brown's first and an appearance of ventriloquism has often been produced by poets' admiration of Hopkins. The language of Hopkins (and of Hill) is intrinsically richer, partly because it is closer to symbolism, telling more than the story of one

Hopkins as religious conduit in Hill, Mackay Brown and Muir

13

man and that greater generality alters the quality of the feeling involved. Read intertextually, the two poems of Hopkins and Hill further amplify and complicate the meaning of each other. One of Mackay Brown's friends and another admirer of Hopkins was the unbeliever Edwin Muir, whose early poem, `The Bird', tests Eliot's theory a stage further.13 `The Bird' draws most obviously on Hopkins's `The Windhover' with its analogical comparison of the mastery of the bird and its visibility in the world with that of God. Also influential upon Muir's poem are Hopkins's `Caged Skylark', `Henry Purcell' and the dovewinged heart of stanza 3 of `The Wreck of the Deutschland'. `The Bird' starts out as a much less serious poem than Hopkins's `Windhover', comparing a bird `walking upon the air' to a schoolboy, who runs and loiters, leaps and springs, `pensively pausing' and with a sudden change of mind, turning `at ease on the heel of a wing-tip'. Hopkins's lines describing the characteristic flight of the kestrel compare it to a chevalier on a horse who `rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing / in his ecstacy!'14 The image metamorphoses into that of a skate gliding across a pond: `As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend'. Hopkins characteristically concentrates upon the essential strokes or lines with which an artist would seek to convey that aspect of the natural world. He understands the movements of the observed kestrel with ornithological precision, choosing for his verb to describe the bird's relation to the wind, `rebuff', which captures its unique skill of matching its speed to that of the wind into which it flies so that it can remain almost stationary in the air. The first tercet then voices the observer's comparison of the mastery of flight achieved by the bird with Christ's immeasurably greater command of everything. The tone in Muir's poem is closer to Hardy than Hopkins, in that the treatment of the bird is more mundane although, in the final line, Muir suggests that the bird's springing upwards is like the soul. As in Hopkins's sonnet, much of the poem is given to describing the bird, but the image of the falcon as chevalier, or minion, is gone. In its place is the picture of what at times seems to be a crow or, at other times, a seagull, which delicately `walks' in the air that forms a `perfect' floor for its `strong-pinioned plunging and soaring'. Both writers are fascinated by the security with which birds move in the air but the perception of the significance of the bird at the heart of `The Windhover' is changed, at least for this reader, in Muir's poem to the practical question about the position of the bird's legs `walking' on the air. The wonder Hopkins's observer feels for the kestrel as one of God's creations that tells us analogically about Him, is evident in all the closely scrutinized details. Muir's poem, by comparison, lacks the

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precision of observation and rigorous logic of Hopkins's descriptions; for example, the `air' is both the `floor' for the bird's `so delicate walking' and a `resilient and endless floor' within which it plunges and soars and springs upwards. The inexact observation of the natural imagery suggests insufficient belief by the poet in the reality of the `soul' to lead him to fashion a coherent symbol. Were Muir's starting point a winged soul in which he believed, and for which he was trying to create a visual emblem, he would have had to bring together his details with far greater care. The result seems to come very close to realizing on an individual level Eliot's fear of the loss of meaning of a religious word through a loss of veneration of its significance.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6 7

8

9

10

11

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 122±3. Stephen Spender, Eliot (Glasgow: William Collins Sons and Co., 1975), 152. Donald Davie, `Anglican Eliot', in Eliot in his Time, ed. A. Walton Litz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 192. `The social function of poetry', in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957, fifth impression, 1969), 25. Hopkins Variations, ed. Joaquin Kuhn and Joseph J. Feeney (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph's University Press and New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), xx. Lionel Adey, `Why Hopkins matters to me', in Hopkins Variations, 46. Francis L. Fennell, `Hopkins's poetry: I cannot choose but hear' in Hopkins Variations, 293. Geoffrey Hill, For the Unfallen: Poems 1952±1958 (London: Andre Deutsch), 34. `The Wreck of the Deutschland': for all quotations see Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, 2002), 110±19. To E. H. Coleridge, 22 January 1866. Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. C. Abbott (revised second edition, London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 19. ` ``How fit a title . . .'': title and authority in the work of Geoffrey Hill', in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, ed. Peter Robinson (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), 132.

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13

14

15

George Mackay Brown, Selected Poems 1954±1992 (London: John Murray, 1996), 1±2. Edwin Muir, The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir, ed. Peter Butter (Aberdeen: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1991), 119±20. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, 132.

Works Cited Brown, George Mackay (1996), Selected Poems 1954±1992. London: John Murray. Davie, Donald (1973), `Anglican Eliot', in Eliot in his Time, ed. A. Walton Litz. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eliot, T. S. (1948), Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. London: Faber and Faber. Eliot, T. S. (1957, fifth impression, 1969), `The social function of poetry', in On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber. Gardner, Helen (1978), The Composition of Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber. Haughton, Hugh (1985), ` ``How fit a title . . .'': Title and authority in the work of Geoffrey Hill', in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, ed. Peter Robinson. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hill, Geoffrey (1959), For the Unfallen: Poems 1952±1958. London: Andre Deutsch. Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1956), Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. C. Abbott, revised second edition. London: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1986, 2002), The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, Joaquin and Joseph J. Feeney (eds.) (2002), Hopkins Variations. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph's University Press and New York: Fordham University Press. Muir, Edwin (1991), The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir, ed. Peter Butter. Aberdeen: The Association for Scottish Literary Studies. Spender, Stephen (1975), Eliot. Glasgow: William Collins Sons and Co.

2

From the beauty of religion to the religion of beauty: Catholicism and aestheticism in fin-de-sieÁcle poetry Claire Masurel Murray

In the 1890s, Roman Catholicism became something of a trend in literary circles in England, especially among the writers and artists related to what is often called `the Decadent Movement', members of the Rhymers' Club in London and contributors to magazines like The Yellow Book and The Savoy. A number of them even chose to be received in the Roman Church. Frederick Rolfe, also known as Baron Corvo, became a Roman Catholic in 1886. John Gray, generally remembered as an important figure in the Wilde circle and author of an icon of nineties verse, Silverpoints (1893), underwent two conversions in 1890 and in 1894, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1903. Ernest Dowson, often cited as the best lyric poet of the Victorian fin de sieÁcle, converted in 1891, the same year as his fellow poet and friend Lionel Johnson. Aubrey Beardsley, art editor of The Yellow Book, whose ink drawings created a visual style for the Yellow Nineties, became a Catholic in 1897. Oscar Wilde was received in the Church on his deathbed in 1900, and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, who produced several volumes of undistinguished verse, in 1911. Catholicism appears as a theme, major or minor, in the works of all these writers, but Catholic subjects and motifs also crop up in the works of Decadent poets whose biography does not reveal any personal allegiance to the Catholic creed, such as Arthur Symons or Theodore Wratislaw, underlining the wider influence of the Roman faith in the literary world at the time. This attraction to Catholicism can be traced back to the Tractarian Movement of the 1830s and 1840s (and the crucial event of Newman's conversion in 1845), and to the Ritualistic revivalism of the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, with its emphasis on a more sacramental spirituality and visually rich liturgy. There is a strong connection between the two

Catholicism and aestheticism in fin-de-sieÁcle poetry

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successive movements, as the importance given by Ritualists to the symbolic and aesthetic aspects of faith ± colour, ritual, music, processions, Eucharistic worship ± can actually be interpreted as an attempt to embody in forms and actions the Tractarian ideas of the previous generation. It is precisely this picturesque, aesthetic appeal of the ritual that fascinated the Decadent poets of the 1890s, who in Yeats's words, liked the idea of `A world full of altar lights and golden vestures, and murmured Latin and incense clouds'.1 What exactly is the nature of the aesthetic dimension of Catholicism as it is pictured in fin-de-sieÁcle poetry? The emphasis that Decadent poets lay on the beauty of the ritual as opposed to the dogma sets them apart from early-twentieth-century Roman Catholic writers like G. K. Chesterton or Hilaire Belloc, who showed a deep interest in doctrine and theology. Finde-sieÁcle writers are rather indifferent to the intellectual or moral aspects of Catholicism. For them, religion is more about beauty and aesthetic emotion than about beliefs and rules, and their works tend to blur the distinction between mystical experience and poetic vision. This might explain why they favoured poetry over other literary genres, and why within poetry they chose the short poem over longer, more discursive forms. The short poem is probably the aptest form for evoking an aesthetic epiphany, and for fin-de-sieÁcle poets religious experience is first and foremost an epiphanic and an aesthetic experience. In that sense, the poets that this article deals with are heirs to Walter Pater and to the Aesthetic Movement of the 1870s, with its emphasis on individualism, sensibility and the non-utilitarian nature of art, running counter to high-Victorian optimism, utilitarianism and the belief that art should be moral. For them, what matters in the work of art is not its `message', but its sheer beauty and the emotions and sensations it elicits. In the same way, what matters in religion, and particularly in Catholicism, is its poetry. This vision goes back to Romanticism: the notion that Christianity is a `beautiful' rather than a `true' religion is a central notion in Chateaubriand's GeÂnie du Christianisme (1802), in particular. The idea of the beauty of religion was passed on to the Decadents through the major influence of Walter Pater. In the fourth section of his novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), Marius, a young pagan man, discovers Christianity. His initiation to the Christian faith is not an intellectual process; it passes through a series of impressions and emotions, as he hears the community singing in the church, discovers Christian funeral ornaments in the catacombs, or attends the celebration of Mass. He is drawn not to a system of belief, but to what Pater describes as `the aesthetic charm of the catholic

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Ecstasy and Understanding

Church, her evocative power over all that is eloquent and expressive of the better mind of man, her outward comeliness'.2 For Pater, the Catholic liturgy is not so much the expression of a living faith as a form of aesthetic experience ± an idea which had a significant impact on fin-de-sieÁcle poetry. The reason why the poets of the fin de sieÁcle, who mostly came from Protestant backgrounds, turned to Catholicism to find that aesthetic sense, is probably related to the very nature of the Catholic liturgy. While in the Protestant tradition the central event of worship is the reading of the Word (and the preaching on the Word), Catholicism considers that liturgical symbols have a crucial role in introducing spiritual realities into the visible and perceptible world. Signs play a vital part in Catholic worship because it is through the ritual that Grace is made present to the faithful. It is precisely this sensory, even sensuous, dimension of Catholicism, that appealed to fin-de-sieÁcle poets, and from which some of them drew their inspiration. In the poetry of the period, the use of Catholic imagery expresses a reaction against what is perceived as the ugliness of modernity. Roman Catholicism is represented as a sort of aesthetic utopia, a self-contained world built in dialectic opposition to Victorian Britain, which is seen by Decadent writers as eminently materialistic and vulgar. The creation or re-creation of parallel worlds through poetry is a means of escaping contemporary reality and representing through the lyrical mode a form of lost beauty. The Roman Church is one of these fantasized worlds standing in nostalgic opposition to the grim reality of industrial Britain. The contrast between the inside of a convent or church, characterized by its beauty and peace, and the noise and meaninglessness of the outside world is a frequent motif in Decadent poetry. It is a particularly obvious feature in Ernest Dowson's works. Three of his poems, `Carthusians', `Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration' and `Benedictio Domini' revolve around a contrast between the inside and the outside, purity and corruption, beauty and ugliness. `Carthusians' and `Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration' are poems about monastic life, representing the convent and the monastery as entrenched spaces, antithetically opposed to the hustle and bustle of modern daily life. `Benedictio Domini', which describes the Catholic ceremony of benediction (the worship of the consecrated bread in the monstrance) is built upon a series of oppositions between the quiet dimness of a Catholic church in London and the racket of the city: Without, the sullen noises of the street! The voice of London, inarticulate,

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Hoarse and blaspheming, surges in to meet The silent blessing of the Immaculate. Dark is the church, and dim the worshippers, Hushed with bowed heads as though by some old spell, While through the incense-laden air there stirs The admonition of a silver bell. Dark is the church, save where the altar stands, Dressed like a bride, illustrious with light, Where one old priest exalts with tremulous hands The one true solace of man's fallen plight. Strange silence here: without, the sounding street Heralds the world's swift passage to the fire: O benediction, perfect and complete! When shall men cease to suffer and desire?3 The clear but irregularly placed caesurae, marked by commas, create a broken rhythm which conveys the deafening bustle of London in the first three lines, while the fourth line, regular and unbroken, creates a sense of order and peace. The vocabulary of noise in this first stanza stands in sharp contrast with the lexical field of silence (`silent', and further down `hushed' and `silence') in the description of the church. The poem also stages elements of the Catholic liturgy which are recurrent in fin-de-sieÁcle poetry: the dimness and the incense, which could be interpreted as religious versions of the decadent topos of the veil (they share with the veil the function of concealing and revealing the mystery at the same time), the music (which is here reduced to the sound of a bell), the beauty of the sacred space of the altar, `Dressed like a bride, illustrious with light', standing out in the darkness of the church, the fascination for the Eucharistic mystery, described as `The one true solace of man's fallen plight'. These elements can be found in a number of poems of the period, such as `Palm Sunday' by Theodore Wratislaw, which evokes the celebration of Palm Sunday Mass in a Catholic Church in London: The clouds of incense mounting in the air, The heavy fervent smell, Palm branches waving by the altar-stair, While we redeemed from hell,

20

Ecstasy and Understanding We knelt together humbly, she and I, Before the red-stained East, To seek for mercy for our sin, as high The purple-vestured priest Held up the chalice to the face of God, And a long silence fell, Three times and as the wine became God's blood Thrice rang the smitten bell. Then like two slaves regaining liberty, When the long mass was done, With prayer and sadness left behind us, we Emerged into the sun, Forgot what hearts had felt or eyes had seen And gave ourselves to mark Friends' faces as we talked and strolled between The toilettes of Hyde Park.4

Significantly, the part of Mass that Wratislaw chooses to represent here is the Elevation, when the priest raises the host and the chalice for the faithful to adore. That choice betrays the same fascination as Dowson's for the sacrament of the Eucharist, perceived as a highly theatrical moment. In the first three stanzas, we find the same sense of awe as in `Benedictio Domini', made dramatic by the incense, the liturgical vestments of the priest, the bell. This sense of awe stands in ironic contrast with the impression of frivolity and also of relief from the solemnity of the Eucharistic mystery in the last two stanzas. The poem conveys a purely aesthetic vision of Mass, which is presented as a source of ephemeral emotions, forgotten as soon as the two characters leave the church in the same way as they would leave the theatre after the performance of a play. These texts show how mysticism and aestheticism become one in the dreamlike Catholicism of the Decadents. Religion and art merge to become the two sides of the same reality in the pageant of Catholic rituals. Fin-de-sieÁcle poets were particularly sensitive to the importance of signs, gestures and symbols in Catholic liturgy, in which material elements convey a sacramental significance that is made actual each time the rite is performed. This interest in the symbolic and dramatic aspects of Catholicism sometimes led them to grant more importance to the aesthetic

Catholicism and aestheticism in fin-de-sieÁcle poetry

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dimension of the sacrament than to its religious meaning. The magnificence and splendour of the ritual are emptied of their sacred dimension, and the liturgical symbol loses its deictic function. It does not point any longer to something beyond itself, but becomes self-sufficient and is considered first and foremost for its aesthetic qualities. The dissociation between the ritual and its religious significance is pushed to an extreme by Oscar Wilde in De Profundis (1905), when he suggests the possibility of a liturgy for non-believers, a Mass that would be pure drama: I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith.5 Mass loses its sacramental meaning here. It is nothing more than a series of theatrical gestures, but these gestures must nevertheless be preserved, even for the sceptic, the agnostic or the atheist, because of their aesthetic truth. Wilde dreams of a Catholicism in negative, devoid of transcendence: this is underlined by the insistent use of negations (`those who cannot believe', `no taper', `no dwelling') and of privative prefixes and suffixes (`faithless', `unblessed'). In Wilde's vision of religion, the central elements of Mass (the bread, the wine, the altar, the chalice) are not the vectors of transubstantiation, but the elements of a great work of art. He sees Mass as a sort of pagan pageant, which can be compared to the tragedies of the ancient world, and can be appreciated without the filter of faith: When one contemplates all this from the point of view of art alone one cannot but be grateful that the supreme office of the Church should be the playing of the tragedy without the shedding of the blood, the mystical presentation by means of dialogue and costume and gesture even of the Passion of her Lord, and it is always a source of pleasure and awe to me to remember that the ultimate survival of the Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to art, is to be found in the servitor answering the priest at Mass.6 By highlighting the importance of dialogue, costumes and gestures in the liturgy, as well as their dramatic symbolism, Wilde gives a fundamentally theatrical definition of Mass. What strikes him are the verbal exchanges

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Ecstasy and Understanding

between the priest and the acolyte, which remind him of the dialogue with the chorus in Greek tragedies, but also and significantly the dramatization of the sacrifice, which turns the `shedding of the blood' into a `mystical presentation'. Wilde's theatrical vision of religion is epitomized in his Roman poems, written in Italy in 1877, which reveal his fluctuating attraction to Roman Catholicism when he was a student at Oxford. In the third section of `Rome unvisited', he imagines the whole pageantry of a papal procession in the Vatican. A pilgrim from the northern seas ± What joy for me to seek alone The wondrous Temple and the throne Of Him who holds the awful keys! When, bright with purple and with gold, Come priest and holy Cardinal, And borne above the heads of all The gentle Shepherd of the Fold. O joy to see before I die The only God-anointed King, And hear the silver trumpets ring A triumph as He passes by! Or at the altar of the shrine Holds high the mystic sacrifice, And shows his God to human eyes Beneath the veil of bread and wine.7 The poem, particularly the last stanza, illustrates Wilde's fascination for the Eucharist and its sacrificial dimension, which also appears in the excerpts of De Profundis quoted above. It also mixes Christian and pagan imagery in a manner that is characteristic of fin-de-sieÁcle literature. The images of the temple, where the pagan godhead dwells, and of the throne, symbol of secular kingship, associated with the secular lavishness of the procession with its profusion of ornamentation, are superimposed on the Christian vision of the Good Shepherd. Catholic Rome thus becomes the space of a possible reconciliation between Christianity and the splendours of Ancient Rome. Interestingly enough, though, Rome remains `un-

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visited', as the title indicates. Wilde never reached Rome, where he was supposed to go on a pilgrimage. He went to Greece instead, having been convinced by his friend and tutor Mahaffy that Hellenic Paganism was preferable to Popery. The poem is not based on a memory nor on the description of an actual scene; it is a dream of Roman splendours. Catholicism in fin-de-sieÁcle poetry is an aestheticized faith, made of images and fantasies rather than facts. Wilde's praise of the theatricality of Catholicism highlights the distance that separates the Decadents' vision of religion from that of their Romantic predecessors, who saw in nature the most beautiful of liturgies. For the Romantic poets, the natural world was the space where God could speak directly to man, where the soul could meet its creator. For the Decadents, on the contrary, the most powerful spiritual experience lies in rituals rather than in man's communion with nature. For them, the mediation of art is at the heart of religious experience. The Catholic liturgy is beautiful not because it imitates nature, but because it is theatrical, ritualized, artificial. It interposes the mediation of symbols between man and nature. In his poem, `A Crucifix', dedicated to Ernest Dowson, John Gray turns the crucifixion into the subject of an aesthetic meditation through a series of artistic and literary representations: A gothic church. At one end of an aisle, Against a wall where mystic sunbeams smile Through painted windows, orange, blue and gold, The Christ's unutterable charm behold. Upon the cross, adorned with gold and green, Long fluted golden tongues of sombre sheen, Like four flames joined in one, around the head And by outstretched arms, their glory spread. The statue is of wood; of natural size; Tinted; [. . .] A poet, painter, Christian, ± it was a friend Of mine ± his attributes most fitly blend ± Who saw this marvel, made an exquisite Copy; and, knowing how I worshipped it, Forgot it, in my own room, by accident. I write these verses in acknowledgement.8 The poem enacts a number of aesthetic shifts: it is the imitation of a poem by Paul Verlaine describing the reproduction of a representation of Christ

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Ecstasy and Understanding

on the cross. Therefore, four works of art lie between the reader and the subject that is represented: the original crucifix, the copy of that crucifix by Verlaine's friend, Verlaine's poem, and Gray's poem. The poem stresses the aesthetic choices made by the artist: the past participles (`painted', `adorned', `tinted') underline the transformations that the artist made to his subject-matter. In the end, the poem is less about the crucifixion than about art. When the poet writes `I worshipped it', he is not speaking about Christ on the cross, but about the work of art, which thus becomes an object of worship in itself. This reversal, which turns art into a new religion, was illustrated by the statement made by the poet and critic Arthur Symons when he wrote in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, published in 1899, that art had become `a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of a sacred ritual'.9 This vision is the logical conclusion of the Decadents' aesthetic vision of religion, which cancels the differences between faith and art, and equates the artist and the priest. From the Decadents' perspective, the poet is a sacerdotal figure, set apart from his fellow men to enact the sacramental mysteries of artistic creation. Lionel Johnson claimed that Newman had told him one day: `I have always considered the profession of a man of letters as a third order of the priesthood.'10 His poem `Walter Pater' is an illustration of the decadent myth of the priestly artist. Gracious God rest him! he who toiled so well Secrets of grace to tell Graciously; as the awed rejoycing priest Officiates at the feast, Knowing, how deep within the liturgies Lie hid the mysteries. [. . .] Scholarship's constant saint, he kept her light In him divinely white: With cloistral jealousness of ardour strove To guard her sacred grove, Inviolate by worldly feet, nor paced In desecrating haste.11 Images from the Catholic liturgy are transposed here to describe Pater's art, and turn Pater into a priest-figure. Johnson is sensitive to the mysterious dimension of the Catholic ritual, the `secrets of grace' and `mysteries' of which appear to him to be particularly apt to describe the art of his master. The correlation between religion and aesthetics is emphasized at the

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beginning of the poem with the triad `gracious', `grace' and `graciously', which points simultaneously to divine grace and to the beauty of art. In the same way as the priest, marked by the seal of his ordination, is endowed with religious powers that place him above the rest of humanity, the artist must also have been ordained and the mysteries of art set him apart from his fellow men. The poet is priestly because he too enacts a form of transubstantiation through his art, turning ephemeral impressions into eternal beauty. In his essay on Rimbaud in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Arthur Symons sees in the Eucharist an image of the work of art, and compares the artist's imagination to the priest's power to transform the bread into the body of Christ: `Is it not tempting, does it not seem a devotion rather than superstition, to worship the golden chalice in which the wine has been made God, as if the chalice were the reality, and the real presence the symbol?'12 The blurring of the distinction between religion and art, which results in a purely aesthetic vision of Catholicism in fin-de-sieÁcle poetry, also leads to a sacred vision of the artist's role. For the Decadents, the supreme value is not so much religious as aesthetic. The Catholic liturgy is not only a source of inspiration and an inexhaustible pool of images, but also a work of art per se, in which the sacramental mystery of faith gives way to the mystery of poetic creation.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6 7 8

W. B. Yeats, quoted by Ian Fletcher, The Collected Poems of Lionel Johnson, Second and Revised Edition, ed. Ian Fletcher (New York: Garland, 1982), xviii. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985 [1885]), 123. Ernest Dowson, The Poetical Works of Ernest Christopher Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower (London: Cassell and Co. Ltd, 1934), 18. Theodore Wratislaw, Caprices (London: Gay & Bird, 1893), 16. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings (London: Penguin Classics, 1986), 154. Ibid., 167. Oscar Wilde, The Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 1948), 711. John Gray, The Poems of John Gray, ed. Ian Fletcher (Greensboro: ELT Press, 1988), 31±2.

26 9

10

11

12

Ecstasy and Understanding Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899), 10. It is in reality a pseudo-quotation of Newman, in one of these imaginary conversations of Johnson's that Yeats mentions in Autobiographies (1922) (London: Macmillan, 1926), 376: I was often puzzled as to when and where he could have met the famous men and beautiful women, whose conversation, often wise, and always appropriate, he quoted so often, and it was not till a little before his death that I discovered that these conversations were imaginary. [. . .] His favourite quotations were from Newman, whom, I believe, he had never met, though I can remember nothing now but Newman's greeting to Johnson, `I have always considered the profession of a man of letters a third order of the priesthood!' and these quotations became so well-known that at Newman's death, the editor of The Nineteenth Century asked them for publication. Lionel Johnson, The Poetical Works of Lionel Johnson (London: Elkin Mathews, 1926), 287±8. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899), 69.

Works Cited Dowson, Ernest (1934), The Poetical Works of Ernest Christopher Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower. London: Cassell and Co. Ltd. Gray, John (1988), The Poems of John Gray, ed. Ian Fletcher. Greensboro: ELT Press. Johnson, Lionel (1926), The Poetical Works of Lionel Johnson. London: Elkin Mathews. Johnson, Lionel (1982), The Collected Poems of Lionel Johnson, Second and Revised Edition, ed. Ian Fletcher. New York: Garland. Pater, Walter (1985 [1885]), Marius the Epicurean. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Symons, Arthur (1899), The Symbolist Movement in Literature. London: Heinemann. Wilde, Oscar (1986), De Profundis and Other Writings. London: Penguin Classics. Wilde, Oscar (1948), The Works of Oscar Wilde. London: Collins. Wratislaw, Theodore (1893), Caprices. London: Gay & Bird. Yeats, W. B. (1926 [1922]), Autobiographies. London: Macmillan.

3

The heart's censer: liturgy, poetry and the Catholic devotional revolution Maureen Moran

In `The Sere of the Leaf', the late Victorian Catholic poet, Francis Thompson, contrasts the elated, ecstatic voice of the `Singing-soul' to the pathos of nature's dying beauty in Autumn. The consoling `rhymes . . . [that] roll from the bell-tower of thy soul' consecrate human grief by transforming it into an act of spiritual worship. To express this insight, Thompson draws on a familiar vessel in Catholic ritual ± the swinging thurible on a chain. In this container, incense is burned on hot coals to honour God, sacred objects and those present at the service. Through a metaphor drawn from this devotional practice, Thompson conflates human discontent and sorrow, religious awareness, and poetic utterance: The heart, a censered fire whence fuming chants aspire, Is fed with oozeÁd gums of precious pain; And unrest swings denser, denser, the fragrance from that censer, With the heart-strings for its quivering chain.1 Traditionally, liturgical ritual binds together creature and Creator, the material and the transcendent through artefacts, words and actions. Similarly, in Thompson's poem, the liturgical symbol of the censer conflates poetic expression (the `fuming chants') and ritual devotion. It articulates a mystical awareness of the Divine by enacting a joyously painful immolation of self in God's infinite glory. As Thompson's image demonstrates, liturgical ceremonies and devotions have inflected Catholic poetry in Britain from 1875. Some of the different ways in which poetic ritualization serves to mediate religious experience and aesthetic practice can be illustrated by a focus on the Victorian Catholic devotional revolution, a movement which fore-

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grounded liturgy as poetry, and religious awareness as emotive and theatrical. This new and distinctive mode of devotional activity ± which I have termed elsewhere the `New Catholic Baroque'2 ± can be traced in the stylistic and thematic approaches of Catholic poets of the period and reverberates still in some twentieth-century Catholic writing. The New Catholic Baroque was an important factor in differentiating Catholic identity in Victorian Britain. But it also shaped views of poetic form, function and practice, and its characteristic features are visible in the work of a number of late Victorian Catholic poets, including Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson. For them, the poetic expression of spiritual feeling was shaped by liturgical form and principles. Moreover, this poetry±ritual link continues to be an important point of reference in the work of other Catholic writers in the twentieth century, including David Jones and Elizabeth Jennings. For Catholics, liturgical ceremonial in its broadest sense ± public, official prayers and rites as well as more popular, local forms of devotional practice ± is a complex expressive act with a number of effects. It unifies the faithful in a single-minded focus on the glorification of God. It communicates intellectually, insofar as ritual draws on and symbolically represents specific doctrinal beliefs. But ritual also heightens and articulates personal spiritual awareness. It stimulates the emotional assent of the devotee to the presence of the transcendent and eternal divinity within creation. As worship, ritual implies God dwells among His community of faithful, in their persons, their actions and their words. Luxurious material artefacts and dramatic gestures are a `textual' record of an intimate and personal engagement between the human believer and the Creator. At the same time, in their richness, beauty, mystery and dignity, the Italianate arts of worship that became popular in nineteenthcentury Catholic Britain put special emphasis on God's infinite grandeur which lies beyond human understanding; and they signify the devotee's desire to pay homage to this majesty. Indeed, contemporary theorization of poetry as performance can just as well be applied to such elaborated liturgical practice. From this angle, both poet and ritual participant suffuse their respective texts `with the person and their relation to the listener'.3 The similarities between poetry and Catholic ritual were integral to characterizations of the Church of Rome throughout the nineteenth century. Different theories of poetic art are evident in the various defences of Catholic styles of worship mounted by Victorians. Shortly after his conversion in 1845 Newman, for example, used the parallel to distinguish between the limitations of Anglican belief and the full satisfactions of the Roman Catholic Church, that `most sacred and august of poets'.4

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Adopting a Romantic view of poetry as centred in and expressive of the subjective domain, Newman locates the `poetic' nature of the church in the effects of her liturgy. He praises both its stimulus `for the imagination' and its embodiment of religious emotion.5 For him, the rich symbols and images central to devotional practice enable the expression of a spiritual feeling that `will not bear words'.6 Roy Rappaport has argued that ritual, in form and performance, adds `something that the symbolically encoded substance by itself cannot express'.7 Newman captures exactly this point when he insists that the very essence of the Church is inseparable from her devotions. She `is poetry; every psalm, every petition, every collect, every versicle, the cross, the mitre, the thurible, is a fulfilment of some dream of childhood, or aspiration of youth'.8 Just as a poem integrates sensuous form and intellectual meaning to explore and articulate feelings hidden at the deepest level of self, so the ceremonial apparatus of Catholicism embodies, heightens and gives utterance to the mysterious religious awareness of participants, their `delicate feelings' in the presence of the divine.9 By defining the `being' of the Catholic Church as poetry, and that poetry as ritual, Newman implies spiritual awareness can only be realized, deepened and expressed through the stimulation of feeling and imagination by sensuous words, concrete actions and material artefacts. A similar fascination with the relationship between Catholic devotional practices and poetry can be traced in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Even the agnostic aesthete, Walter Pater, made a case for the poetry±ritual link, although his concentration on the sensuous beauty of high Anglican Ritualism replaced Newman's interest in doctrine and feeling. For Pater, the impact of ritual was dependent on its delightful physicality, suggesting a further dimension of the human psyche engaged by the arts of worship. In his controversial collection of essays on the Renaissance, Pater locates the value and `wisdom' of `the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake' in its `power of giving pleasure by its form, as distinct from its matter'.10 Art, above all forms of human culture, promises a `special, a unique, impression of pleasure'; the receptive temperament could be `modified by its presence' and brought to a state of `blitheness and repose' that is `at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom'.11 Twenty years later, Pater applied these criteria to the devotional practices of the high Anglican Church of the Holy Redeemer in Clerkenwell. Writing to the vicar, Edward Vincent Eyre, Pater draws attention to ritual as material sensation, `very touching and attractive':

30

Ecstasy and Understanding What a help to the people who live about it such a Church as yours, so fair and cheerful and full of light, with its round of beautiful services must be! Religion, I sometimes think, is the only way in which poetry can really reach the hard-worked poor . . . One is reminded of the Franciscan movement in Italy long ago. That too . . . bequeathed to those who have leisure to think about such things, a world of beautiful religious art.12

Here, the poetry±ritual link is one which implies that aesthetic feeling and religious experience occupy a similar psychological domain. The temperament that can be moved by beautiful formal properties possesses a `spiritual' sensitivity. Even if belief wavers or is indistinct in its object, religious ritual, like artistic objects, provides an experience that draws perceivers outside themselves to a `quickened sense of life', a `quickened, multiplied consciousness'.13 This transcendent ecstasy, Pater maintains, is `success in life'.14 And certainly the ecstatic, too, has its place in Victorian Catholic devotional life. Pater's contemporary, the Catholic poet Francis Thompson, was equally sensitive to the sensuous and emotional impact of Catholic devotional arts, describing ritual as `poetry addressed to the eye'.15 Significantly, his comment reminds us of a fundamental Catholic view of liturgy as `communicative, performative, and metaphorical'.16 Like any good poem, ritual articulates meanings and values. But Thompson's comparison of ritual to poetry also suggests that poetry conveys spiritual awareness dramatically ± that is, through enactment. Today, critics understand the performative value of ritual as integral to its unique meanings and effects. Rather than being a symbolic way of presenting `the material embodied in liturgical order', `the manner of ``saying'' and ``doing'' is intrinsic to what is being said and done'.17 Metaphor is an important part of this process of dramatization. In both religious ceremony and poetic expression, metaphor actively conflates difference and yokes opposites. By reconciling the literal and the abstract, the temporal and the infinite, the concrete and the divine through material form, metaphor both mimics and realizes the transcendent Creator's immanence in His creation. Poets like Hopkins and Thompson draw on this understanding of liturgical ritual in their virtuoso techniques as well as themes. Like the style of Catholic ceremonial and devotions in the period, their poetry communicates spirituality through a paradoxical emphasis on physicality, on luxuriant sensuousness and the theatrical. It enacts the complexities of religious awareness through shocking metaphors and analogies; and it

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expresses faith as a state of psychological intensity, of a `multiplied consciousness' characterized by emotional extremes ranging from the ecstatic to the self-negating. The showy interpenetration of sense, feeling and belief is characteristic of the ceremonial revolution in English Catholicism from the 1840s. Unlike the restrained devotional practices of Catholics in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, or the reserve of Church of England worship, these new rituals prioritized flamboyance, fervour, exciting spectacle and extravagant material array. The glamorous devotions were of the kind Victorian travellers to Italy had long encountered and dismissed as meaningless pantomime or `mummery'. To some tourists, like Charles Dickens, these arts of worship encapsulated the seductive, mesmerizing dangers of popery. In his 1846 travel book, Pictures from Italy, for example, he identified the `torpid, listless system' of Catholicism with a High Mass at which `officiating priests were crooning the usual chant, in the usual, low, dull, drawling, melancholy tone'.18 To the more flippant observer, these ceremonials offered a chance to enjoy the exotica of foreign superstition. In Rome, British Protestants regularly intruded on major ecclesiastical celebrations, using `every dodge to obtain admission to the more famous churches, and then behav[ing] horribly, refusing to kneel, chattering, sniggering ± a champagne cork was heard to pop during one consecration'.19 When imported to England from mid-century with the encouragement of mission priests and Ultramontane clergy like Nicholas Wiseman, however, such ritual gave a distinctive, international edge to Catholic culture.20 It appealed especially to middle-class converts keen to establish a clear identity by asserting an outward-looking commitment to the authority of Rome. Religious awareness seemed more real and momentous when dramatized in liturgical ceremonies like Quarant' Ore (Forty Hours Devotion). With its display of the consecrated Eucharistic Host in the golden sunburst of a jewelled monstrance, this devotion demonstrated God's tangible habitation amidst His creation expressed in the distinctive Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation. Sanctuary lamps, elaborately decorated altar furnishings, colourful vestments and actions such as genuflections, reverences and incensing of the altar certainly implied the radiant presence and transcendent grandeur of the Divinity present in the sanctuary, but also simultaneously honoured that presence in magnificent styles of worship. The new ceremonials and devotions also provided a telling framework for the development of a culture of spiritual pathos. For instance, the

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popular Lenten service of the Stations of the Cross literally recapitulated the events of Christ's passion and crucifixion through procession, devout kneeling before a representation of each event such as the Scourging at the Pillar, and specific prayers of repentance and sorrow. Newly composed hymns, such as Frederick Faber's `From Pain to Pain', encouraged an intense emotional response to Christ's majesty, suffering and sacrifice. By exhorting those in the congregation to `[s]ee how His Precious Blood / At every Station pours!', the verse positions the faithful as personal participants, rather than passive members of an audience.21 These devotions place religious awareness on a human, rather than abstract, level. Instead of reserve and reverence, they encourage the explicit expression of feeling: intense pity for Christ's suffering, shame for the human sin that caused it, and a yearning for personal forgiveness. Public and private retreats of the period, with their meditations on human unworthiness and the physical torments of hell, similarly conflated horror, guilt and desire. Through such devotional activities, religious awareness coupled an abject self-disgust with a desire for self-annihilation in the Divine presence that could absolve and redeem. Gerard Manley Hopkins's private notes for a retreat in 1883 are typical of this pattern among fervent Catholics of the time. He records that `an old and terribly afflicting thought and disgust drove me to Fr Kingdon' and further that `I have much and earnestly prayed that God will lift me above myself to a higher state of grace, in which I may have more union with him, be more zealous to do his will, and freer from sin'.22 With its strong imaginative appeal to the senses, its dramatic juxtapositions of the debased and the Infinite, and its emotional intensity, Catholic worship in Victorian Britain expresses a sensibility akin to that of Counter-Reformation baroque culture. Like its seventeenth-century counterpart, the aesthetic form of the Victorian New Catholic Baroque ± be it verbal or visual ± makes use of the ornamented, mannered and theatrical to express a kind of `sensual mysticism'.23 As well as the `spiritualization of sense',24 Catholic baroque culture in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries is infused by the luxuriance of erotic love and selfabandonment. An oscillation between abject self-exposure and possession by the mysterious Other enacts the painful joy of human connection with the Divine. Religious awareness in baroque devotional culture entails an ecstatic surrender to a `genuinely personal relationship with Christ' that engulfs the devotee in an excessive `rapture of surrender'.25 The themes and distinctive, overwrought style of this New Catholic Baroque aesthetic suffuse the poetic idiom of both Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis

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Thompson, suggesting that the operational practices of Catholic devotions that structured their experience of faith also structured their poetic practice. In his essays, Thompson establishes overt parallels between devotional acts and art, including poetry, because both seek to integrate sensory beauties and invisible realities. In `Form and Formalism', for example, he argues that the Incarnation is the rationale for sensuousness both in worship and in the artefact. Material sensation is central to communicating understanding through feeling: `Theology and philosophy are the soul of truth; but they must be clothed with flesh, to create an organism which can come down and live among men . . . truth is bound to give itself a definite shape.'26 Similarly, when he describes poetry as an `ally' of religious awareness, Thompson sees an encounter between the self and the unfathomable Other as central to both art and spirituality. Poetry should enter `into the complexity of human sensation' and describe `under a veil of artistic beauty, the amazing, the unfamiliar, and even the portentous phenomena which it encounters'.27 The core of both Hopkins's and Thompson's poetic practice is the enactment of this interrelation between sensuous beauty and an overwhelming experience of the numinous. Appealing to strong emotion as the central feature of religious awareness, their poetic expression of spiritual insight draws on the rich imaginative resources of Victorian devotional experience. Gerard Manley Hopkins's `The Bugler's First Communion' exemplifies these qualities through stylistic technique and tone as much as through subject matter. Based on an incident when Hopkins was a curate in Oxford and served as chaplain to the nearby military barracks, the poem both describes liturgical ritual ± the First Communion ceremony of the boy bugler ± and is an act of devotional practice, a prayer for the youth's spiritual health and salvation. Drama, emotional intensity and a lush sensuousness underpin its spiritual vision. Rather than a distanced and abstract meditation on the value of the Eucharist to the soul, the poem records the experiential effects of encountering God in sacrament and in the example of another's piety. Like the new baroque ceremonials of Hopkins's day, these effects emphasize personal participation in acts of worship. The performativity central to Catholics' devotional life in the period is deeply embedded in the very structure of this poem. As priest, the poet physically brings Christ to the bugler lad in the form of a communion wafer. As prayerful petitioner, he bombards heaven with pleas for the youth's spiritual well-being. As recipient of inspiration and grace, he is

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spurred to faithful service. Even the choice of language dramatizes spiritual awareness as an invigorating and energetic engagement with the Divine and His innocent creatures. Verbal forms sketch the nature of that relationship at the same time as they echo ritualized gestures, popular hymns, prayers and devotional petitions. Words such as `begged', `knelt', `fetched', `march', `teach', `tread', and `serve'28 mark faith as an active dedication to doing God's will rather than an easy sentimentality or intellectualized philosophy. Indeed, Hopkins's hope for the soul of the youth ± that it `[h]ies headstrong to its wellbeing of a self-wise self-will!' ± combines images of an impulsively driven journey with the notion of a dedicated soul coming into full self-realization as `Christ's darling' (ll. 24, 14). Dramatic linguistic effects also add to the theatricality of the lyric. The opening of the poem strikes a tone of chatty immediacy. The casual initial gesture ± `over the hill / There' ± quickly gives way to verbal theatrics, including repetition that signals the emotional intensity to come. `This very very day' of the First Communion implies a breathless, stammering excitement as the poet recalls this significant staging-post in the journey of a soul. A sense of rapture is deepened by the choice of superlatives (`sweetest') and phrases of amazement: `[n]othing else is like it, no . . .' (l. 29). These, together with images of totality, such as `overflowing / Boon' (ll. 6±7) and `locks love ever' (l. 45), imply the generous excess of God's care for His creation and the devotee's heartfelt admiration and gratitude for it. The passion of an epiphanic religious experience, too, is enacted through linguistic and auditory distortions. As W. H. Gardner noted, reversal of word order is more than mannered poetic effect.29 Several different thoughts peel off from the same initial base in lines 37±40, so that language becomes almost two-dimensional as the poet tries to impart the nature of `[t]hose sweet hopes' and what prompts them. Apart from the playfully strained opening rhymes of the second stanza (`boon he on' and `Communion'), an abundance of alliteration, internal rhyme, assonance, elisions, archaic and newfangled compound words, exclamations and assertions perform, rather than describe, the soul-excitement which the devotee experiences. Equally sensational is the rich sensuality that pervades the poem through an accumulation of vivid metaphors, another connection with the baroque sensibility that pervaded Catholic liturgical ceremonies of the day. The reality of spiritual experience is rendered literally tactile in a series of eccentric conceits. The supple, graceful body of the boy ± a `limber liquid youth' (l. 22) ± matches a malleable soul responsive to the touch of

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God's grace embodied in the priest's teaching. It is the lad's will that succumbs, but it is a succulent fleshliness that communicates this faith; he `[y]ields tender as a pushed peach' (l. 23). Lengthy metaphoric strands embracing the Gothic, the grotesque and the idealized are also developed as a way of defamiliarizing the conventional struggle of a soul torn between good and evil. The bugler is imagined initially as an innocent child-soldier, a brave `darling', then in regimental fashion as part of `a dexterous and starlight order' (l. 16), and finally as the contemporary version of the legendary, chaste, chivalric hero, `our day's God's own Galahad' (l. 40). Pitted against this vision is one of military danger and potential disaster. Enemies amass from without in the form of demonic horror. The poet imagines an army of devils ± `the hell-rook ranks' (l. 18) ± that seek to molest and damn the bugler's soul. Even more threatening, because more subtle and insidious, is the prospect of a gradual slide from grace when distracted by worldly temptation: `may he not rankle and roam / In backwheels though bound home?' (ll. 42±3). The mixture of the colloquial and the formal is another means by which Hopkins dramatizes, rather than describes, his own religious awareness in a way that approximates the effects of the new Catholic arts of worship. The priestly haste ± `[t]o his youngster take his treat!' (l. 11) ± is consistent with the tone of some popular devotional rhetoric of the day.30 The accessibility of the majestic deity present in the Eucharist is certainly suggested by the familiar childlike term `treat', but so is the poet's own awareness of its benefits, expressed as an infectious, heart-lifting enthusiasm for the rare and delightful food of the sacrament. On the other hand, the shocking boldness of the poet's aggressive petitions to preserve the spiritual innocence of the lad ± `pleas [that] / Would brandle adamantine heaven with ride and jar' (ll. 45±6) ± has a Miltonic resonance. This verbal assault re-establishes the momentous responsibility and care that the priest exercises for his flock as Christ's mediator on earth. At the same time, it rewrites the relationship between man and his God. Here is no craven subordination of creature to Creator, but a confident dealing. A predilection for naked, fierce emotion as a mark of religious awareness is also a characteristic of New Catholic Baroque ceremonial incorporated in Francis Thompson's poetic style. An overt appeal to emotion through pathos and shock gives a particular nuance to spiritual reality as experienced by a Catholic congregation in the nineteenth century in its hymns, sermons and devotional guidebooks. The same nurturing of extravagant emotional feeling is evident in `Orient Ode', for example. This

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poem enacts both ritual (the Holy Saturday Vigil service before Easter Sunday) and the poet-speaker's passionate impressions that make religious awareness a felt reality. The structure of the poem is based on an extravagant elision of the Incarnation and natural processes ± of Son and Sun ± both arousing a voluptuous, barely contained wonder about the power that sustains the world and brings it to fruition. The steady accretion of metaphors wittily entwines nature and Catholic ritual as a means of celebrating the mystery of Christ as Divine and Human, Infinite yet captured in both historical time and Eucharistic sacrament. Fantastic shifts and reversals drive the emotional logic of the poem, finally transforming mundane reality into an exuberant Christ-centred agape. Following the devotional sensibility of his time, Thompson embeds amazement as part of religious awareness by overturning conventional expectations. Instead of using metaphors of the natural world to convey the power and majesty of the Divine, Thompson offers a seemingly sacrilegious reversal by employing the detail of Catholic religious ritual to suggest the magnitude of a purely natural glory. Lusciously sensual descriptions of the Catholic Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament build to a crescendo of praise for the sun, an `orbeÁd sacrament confest / Which sprinkles benediction through the dawn' (ll. 6±7). With twilight a `violetcassocked acolyte', Day serves as priest to lift the so-called sacramental solar presence aloft for adoration `[w]ithin the flaming monstrance of the West' (ll.11,15). From this seemingly blasphemous pantheism, Thompson deftly mingles the profane and sacred, the earthly and spiritual to give fresh insight into the spiritual mystery of the Incarnation and its redemptive impact on the whole of creation. Myths of the Sun's origin become simultaneously the narrative of Christ, Son of Man and God, and both are mysteriously united in a vast survey of explanations that account for the cycle of existence. Myth, biological facts, history, religious rite, Biblical song and Catholic doctrine, analogies of the natural and the supernatural, all are crushed and conflated to a single point. This magnificent compendium, the poetic equivalent of baroque architectural structure rooted in natural solidity and splendour but leading the eye and mind wonderingly to infinity beyond, results in a sudden moment of epiphany. What follows is a cosmic song rapturously celebrating Christ's penetrating and constant presence, ` ``Lo here! lo there! ± ah me, lo everywhere!'' ' (l. 211). The ecstatic realization elicited by this strange, compacted metaphoric range becomes the aesthetic parallel to the believer's ecstatic realization of the `fact' of the Incarnation and the reality of God's redemptive purposes. And

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Thompson's interjected `ah me' ensures that a link is sustained between an intellectual assent and an intimate, emotional avowal of wonder. The enthusiastic cultivation of emotional empathy with the Incarnate Christ was balanced in Victorian Catholic devotions by an equivalent emphasis on self-exposure as part of an authentic spirituality. In hymns and prayers priority was given to expressions of naked self-appraisal and self-reproach counterbalanced by the erotic depiction of a desiring God, yearning for His creatures and pursuing the soul through its process of spiritual struggle and recovery. Thompson displays an ingenious baroque inventiveness in yoking these two emotional extremes in his perennially popular ode, `The Hound of Heaven'. The effectiveness of this poem, like the impact of Catholic ceremonial, largely stems from its evocative sensuousness and its theatricality. The poem literally makes God's interaction with His beloved creation a tangible connection. Physical sensations of sight, sound and touch ensure Divine Power is dramatized and not just described as in the relentless underlying rhythm which sounds the pursuing Lord's unhurried, `unperturbed' footsteps. The structure of the poem is also inflected by the conventional economy of Victorian Catholic devotional experience which privileges self-abjection as a means of opening space for Divine desire and compassion. Thompson's use of a baroque emblem series to depict the `resisting soul' emphasizes spiritual discovery as a process of self-exposure, self-annihilation and saving selfdisgust. A kaleidoscope of personae projects the increasingly desperate state of a soul who would reject God. The speaker is variously styled as a wilful fugitive and outlaw, a perverse hedonist seeking gratification from nature's beauty, an infantile creature, and a degraded hero, like the rebellious Samson brought low by waning powers and withered fame. Gradually, the speaker's strategy of disguise becomes an act of selfemptying through a catalogue of increasingly surreal images that reduce human personality to damaged object. As wood he is burned to form God's charcoal drawing stick. He is dankly stained by the rancid `tear-drippings' of his despair. He is the discarded rind of bitter fruit fit only for the rubbish. Yet paradoxically, lost esteem, the annihilation of egotistical selfhood, and finally self-loathing become the valued currency that buys a heavenly ransom. It is in self-confessed defeat that God loves His creature best for only then can He possess the soul entirely: `Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, / Save Me, save only Me?' (ll. 168±70). These few illustrations suggest how Catholic poetry from 1875 to the turn of the century embraced the Victorian devotional revolution to find new ways of expressing the direct personal experience of religious faith. The

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unconventional, baroque technique of Thompson and Hopkins becomes a specialized version of ritual performance, dramatizing the otherwise inexplicable awe inherent in a connection with God's inexpressible Being. Their radical stylistic methods ± demanding a close attention and response through eye, ear, emotion and intellect ± implicate the reader aesthetically, if not spiritually, in this poetic performativity. Their poetry, like the New Catholic Baroque devotions, invites more than the passive observation of traditional pieties. But modernity, with its urgent secular imperatives, its scepticism, and its taste for social action instead of meditation and worship, fractured the radical cohesion of religious and aesthetic expression achieved in the poetics of the New Catholic Baroque. Catholic poets in the twentieth century responded to this separation of aesthetic purposes and religious awareness by returning in different terms to religious ceremonial as a resource to express both spiritual and artistic insight. The convert, poet and artist, David Jones, developed his symbolist aesthetic in relation to the concrete significations of liturgical ritual and art. The ceremonial of the Mass, with its sensuous `golden warmth'31 and harmonizing effect on participants, offered him a model for art that connected past with present, the traditional and public with the personally expressive. From the performative element of religious ritual is derived Jones's confidence in sign-making as the central human impulse and hence, `the very essence of all poetry and, by the same token, of any religion worth consideration'.32 Catholic ritual's attention to concrete detail underpins his view that artistic form ± made freely and without thought for practical usefulness ± is the essence and conduit of all human and divine creative energy. Without the embodying sign which re-presents a profound reality beyond the discursive, religious doctrine is meaningless: `No artefacture no Christian religion'.33 All form-making ± liturgy or poem ± `causes man's art to be bound to God',34 in a vision that unifies `the reality of matter and spirit'.35 Poetry is thus itself, like devotional practice, a model of `what was done on the Hill [of Calvary], [which] was unmistakably and undeniably a signmaking and a rite-making and so an act of Ars'.36 In his poetry Jones, like Hopkins and Thompson, exploits the potential of religious ritual as both metaphor and performance. In Parenthesis is pervaded by direct references to the liturgy that provide oblique commentary on the ugliness, disruption and desolation of the Great War for the men in the trenches. But these allusions also suggest ahistorical meanings embodied in a soldier's experience. The Latin prayers of the Good Friday Tenebrae service, for example, open Part 7. Prefacing the still moments before the men leave

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the trench and begin the assault, the incantation dignifies their ghastly fates, uniting them as a sign of self-sacrifice to the Crucifixion and all the wasteful war deaths of the past. Mundane actions like breaking camp (Part 1) take on the precise gestures of liturgical ritual; and a dying soldier grotesquely mimics a man slowly kneeling to pray (Section 7), both parody and enactment of sacred self-sacrifice. Jones also captures something of the baroque flavour of Catholic devotional services in the breathless accumulation of detail. Allusions to myth, legend and the classical, Biblical and Welsh past in In Parenthesis are intoned through the rhythmical cadence of liturgical chant to re-present one man's war as the archetypal experience of the innocent and the aggressor bound together throughout human history. The soldier, Dai, projects himself into many past scenarios of violence and destruction, acquiring, by imagination, the status of ritual participant in events that have a resonant status in Western cultural tradition. Uniting Old Testament events and Arthurian legend, for example, he witnesses and enacts events that signify humanity's capacity for heroic nobility and savage brutalization of the innocent. On the one hand, he metamorphoses into the invisible companion of the innocent Abel discovered by the murderous Cain and subsequently into the psalmist-shepherd David, soothing King Saul through his music while searching for smooth slingshot stones like those that destroy Goliath. Moreover, at the same time the speaker is ritual participant, he is also ritual artefact, becoming the sacred spear that pierced Christ's side on Calvary, and was later used by King Arthur's knight, Balin, in the maiming of the holy Grail king, Pellam.37 Similarly, in The Anathemata, where the liturgy of the Mass acts as a structuring `syntax'38 for the free associations of the worshipping poetspeaker, prehistory, vast geological developments, past myths and religious rites, all dramatized through different voices, are recalled, re-shaped and re-presented to suggest the dominant human desire for signs that enact, not abstractly conceptualize, the meaning of existence. Jones provides a modern revision of Thompson's `Orient Ode' with his amalgam of diverse images that coalesce on the Eucharist as the supreme art-rite that redeems and consecrates humanity. The primitive man decorating his cave, the mediaeval craftsman, the priest, the Welsh bard, and Christ are united as makers of meaning through the devotional rite that structures the poem. Like the repetitive forms of ritual, these many voices ultimately focus on the single story of `Son of Mair, wife of jobbing carpenter'.39 As the supreme sign and supreme art-work, He ennobles both liturgy and poetic practice as redemptive forms.

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Such ritualization of religious poetry seems the opposite of the antiRomantic, logical and plain-speaking technique of the Catholic Movement poet, Elizabeth Jennings. For her, poetic expression of spiritual understanding focuses almost entirely on personal feelings about belief rather than on faith's universal dimensions. Religious verse should, she argues, reveal `a personal relationship between man and God' that mingles the awesome and the intimate.40 Yet, in her poetics of aesthetic `humanization',41 Catholic ceremonial and devotional practices still have a role in the expression of spiritual awareness. In `Harvest and Consecration', for example, the ritual of the Mass again functions as metaphor for natural and spiritual cycles of growth, fruitfulness and consumption. It is `close / To how a season feels which stirs and brings / Fire to the hearth . . .'42 But it is also act: the vehicle by which God again inserts His presence into human history and time: `God in a garden then in sheaves of corn / And the white bread a way to be reborn'. Finally, ceremonial performance regulates the speaker's own spiritual feelings. Beneath the flamboyant display is also the needful reality of suffering and death as the route to new life, embodied supremely in Christ's Sacrifice. Jennings's style avoids the ornate exuberance of Hopkins and Thompson. Instead, she evokes liturgical ritual to tell, not of God's inspiring majesty, but of God's power embodied in momentous simplicity. This is why it nourishes `[o]ur faith in fruitful, hidden things'. By tempering excitement with solemnity, liturgy both informs and deepens ± and thus safeguards ± spiritual ecstasy. Jennings also uses the drama, language, objects and actions of devotional practices to convey the religious feeling of abjection, of private pain, guilt and yearning, that were so prominent a feature of the New Catholic Baroque in the previous century. In `A Requiem', for example, she acknowledges that ceremonial, not doctrine, is what touches the heart and stimulates self-examination: `It is the ritual not the fact / That brings a held emotion to / Its breaking-point'. Devotional form, which calls for participation in its routines, is the calm, the solemn thing, ... That teaches me I cannot claim To stand aside. For this reason, ceremonial becomes central to a spiritual epiphany that focuses on sorrow and mortification for sins of omission and neglect. In `Towards a Religious Poem' contemporary devotional practice has a more

Liturgy, poetry and the Catholic devotional revolution

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widespread significance. Jennings's low-key style seems at one with the downgrading of ceremonial display and performance following the reforms of Vatican II. Stripped of sonorous Latin, great music and elaborate ornamentation, ritual now suggests a spiritually impoverished as well as aesthetically starved society. Gone is what ritual should make present: `Love has somehow slipped by / What once throbbed in an occupied sky'. Expressing the numinous is an act of poetic austerity, even silence, for in a profane, unspiritual age God seems all absence and invisibility: `Christ in this age you are nameless, / Your praises and slanders have sunk / To oaths . . .' For Jennings, like the other Catholic poets considered here, the familiar liturgical practices embedded in English culture from the Victorian devotional revolution persist, though as a shadowy subtext in the poetic expression of a more hesitant faith. Embedded in her poetry as image, event and springboard for meditation, ritual and devotional practice now suggest a belief that is more fragile than vociferous, more uncertain desire than exuberant affirmation. Indeed in `A Serious Game', the New Catholic Baroque ceremonial now seems outmoded, fit only for childish pastimes, to be copied with `[a] toy oven' for a tabernacle and `[a] toy train on a string' for a thurible. But even in this gentle mockery, ritual is never infantilized nor its insights disdained. The child's dream of `[p]rayer rising up and up to the fragrant stars' is to be admired. As Thompson and Hopkins perceived in their stylistic extravagance, pure imagination recovers the real heart of ritual as the display and evocation of God's awesome and intimate presence: `There in the shining box lay always before me, / And swung on my thurible censing'.

Notes 1

2

3

4

Francis Thompson, The Works of Francis Thompson (London: Burns & Oates, n.d. [1913]), I. All citations from Thompson's published poetry and prose are taken from this 3-volume edition. See Maureen Moran, Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007) for an extended discussion of Hopkins and Thompson on this topic. Peter Middleton, `Poetry's Oral Stage', in Performance and Authenticity in the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 224. John Henry Newman, `John Keble', in Essays Critical and Historical (5th edn) (London: Pickering, 1881), II, 442.

42 5 6 7

8 9 10

11 12

13 14 15

16

17 18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25 26 27

Ecstasy and Understanding Ibid. Ibid. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 30. Newman, `John Keble' 443. Ibid., 442. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (4th edn) (1873; London: Macmillan, 1893), 253, 244. Ibid., xi, x, 245. Walter Pater, Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Lawrence Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 142. Pater, The Renaissance, 253. Ibid., 251. Quoted in Thomas J. M. Burke, `The Poet of Liturgy', Orate Fratres, 18 April 1943 (www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/POETLITU.TXT) The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, ed. Richard P. McBrien, et al. (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), 781. Rappaport, op. cit., 37, 38. Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (London: Chapman & Hall, n.d.), 70. K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation: 1846±1886 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 370. Friedrich Heyer, The Catholic Church from 1648 to 1870, trans. D. W. D. Shaw (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1969), 144, 177±9. Frederick William Faber, Hymns (2nd edn) (London: Burns & Oates, 1861), 83. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Christopher Devlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 253. Rene Wellek, `The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship', Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), 81. Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies on the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966), 204. Ibid., 138, 142. Thompson, Works, III, 71. From a notebook entry, quoted in Paul van Kuykendall Thomson, Francis Thompson: A Critical Biography (New York and Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), 253.

Liturgy, poetry and the Catholic devotional revolution 28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42

43

Gerard Manley Hopkins, `The Bugler's First Communion', in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges (London: Humphrey Milford, 1918, 43±5). Quotation of works in copyright, by kind permission of Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Province of the Society of Jesus. W. H. Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844±1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), II, 301±2. The Oratorian, Frederick Faber, was one of those who favoured the language of colloquial familiarity, addressing the Virgin Mary as `dearest Mamma' (Bernard Ward, The Sequel to Catholic Emancipation: The Story of the English Catholics Continued Down to the Re-establishment of Their Hierarchy in 1850 (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1915), II, 256). Quoted in Elizabeth Ward, David Jones: Myth-Maker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 19. David Jones, `Use and Sign', The Dying Gaul and Other Writings, ed. Harman Grisewood (London & Boston: Faber and Faber, 1978), 183. David Jones, `Preface', The Anathemata: fragments of an attempted writing (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 31. David Jones, `Art and Sacrament', in Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings, ed. Harman Grisewood (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 160. Quoted in Elizabeth Ward, David Jones: Myth-Maker, 36. David Jones, `Art and Sacrament', 168. David Jones, In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 79±80. David Jones, The Anathemata, 49. Ibid., 207. Elizabeth Jennings, Christianity and Poetry (London: Burns & Oates, 1965), 13. Ibid., 16. Elizabeth Jennings, Collected Poems 1953±1985 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986).

Works Cited Burke, Thomas J. M. (1943), `The Poet of Liturgy', Orate Fratres, 18 April (www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/POETLITU.TXT). Dickens, Charles (n.d.), American Notes and Pictures from Italy. London: Chapman & Hall.

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Faber, Frederick William (1861), Hymns (2nd edn). London: Burns & Oates. Gardner, W. H. (1969), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844±1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, II. London: Oxford University Press. Heyer, Friedrich (1969), The Catholic Church from 1648 to 1870, trans. D. W. D. Shaw. London: Adam & Charles Black. Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1918), Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Robert Bridges. London: Humphrey Milford. Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1959), The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Christopher Devlin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoppen, K. Theodore (1998), The Mid-Victorian Generation: 1846±1886. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jennings, Elizabeth (1965), Christianity and Poetry. London: Burns & Oates. Jennings, Elizabeth (1986), Collected Poems 1953±1985. Manchester: Carcanet. Jones, David (1937), In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu. London: Faber and Faber. Jones, David (1952), The Anathemata: fragments of an attempted writing. London: Faber and Faber. Jones, David (1959), `Art and Sacrament', in Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings, ed. Harman Grisewood. London: Faber and Faber. Jones, David (1978), `Use and Sign', in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings, ed. Harman Grisewood. London & Boston: Faber and Faber. McBrien, Richard P., et al. (eds) (1989), The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism. New York: HarperCollins. Middleton, Peter (1999), `Poetry's Oral Stage', in Performance and Authenticity in the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 215±53. Moran, Maureen (2007), Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Newman, John Henry (1881), `John Keble', in Essays Critical and Historical (5th edn). London: Pickering, II, 421±55. Pater, Walter (1893), The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (4th edn). London: Macmillan. Pater, Walter (1970), Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Lawrence Evans. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Praz, Mario (1966), The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies on the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.

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Rappaport, Roy A. (1999), Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, Francis (n.d. [1913]), The Works of Francis Thompson. London: Burns & Oates. 3 vols. Thomson, Paul van Kuykendall (1961), Francis Thompson: A Critical Biography. New York and Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons. Ward, Bernard (1915), The Sequel to Catholic Emancipation: The Story of the English Catholics Continued Down to the Re-establishment of Their Hierarchy in 1850, II. London and New York: Longmans, Green. Ward, Elizabeth (1983), David Jones: Myth-Maker. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wellek, Rene (1963), `The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship', in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 69±127.

4

Hymns in a man's life: the Congregational chapel and D. H. Lawrence's early poetry Andrew Harrison

In August 1928, D. H. Lawrence wrote an essay entitled `Hymns in a Man's Life'; it is one of a series of late autobiographical pieces in which the author re-visits his early years, openly mythologizing the conflicts of his youth.1 Here, Lawrence looks back to his religious upbringing in the Nonconformist Congregational Chapel in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, and he separates off (in startling fashion) his childhood love of the Nonconformist hymns from his critical and dismissive attitude to religious doctrine. While he celebrates the sense of wonder created by the hymns, he also asserts the ease with which he discarded the articles of faith (salvation, heaven, virgin birth, miracles ± even ideas of right and wrong).2 The essay is, like others in the same cluster of late writings, an attempt to re-imagine the past: to re-shape it, stressing what seems most important to the author of 1928, who had just published Lady Chatterley's Lover (and would soon write Apocalypse).3 The lens of 1928, however, considerably distorts the issue of Lawrence's troubled break with orthodox religion, and with all the trappings of Chapel life. Lawrence claims to have overcome what he terms `christian dogma' by the age of sixteen (i.e. by the end of 1901), when in fact the period of questioning and disillusionment came much later, in the autumn and winter of 1907 (when he was twenty-two), and the process was decidedly more angst-ridden than he suggests. My concern here is firstly to examine the kinds of early religious experience, uncertainty and anxiety which this essay glosses over, and then to look at the evidence for his troubled relation to organized religion in two relatively unknown early poems. The biographical record suggests that, in Lawrence's day, Eastwood Congregational Chapel (an impressive Gothic Revival building situated on Albert Street, off the Nottingham Road) was the focus of a broad

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intellectual and literary culture among the upper tier of miners' families in the town. The Protestant denominations in the Midlands of that time were split along complex class lines. Primitive Methodists, with their emphasis on revivalism and salvation, met in the Pentecost Chapel; they drew their numbers from among the working classes (matching political activism to religious radicalism). The Church of England, by contrast, was seen as riven by what Lawrence termed `snobbish hierarchies of class'. The Congregational Chapel was politically liberal; it fostered a sense of belonging and an exclusivity based rather upon its proud intellectual tradition than on distinctions of class (though its members tended to come from the more upwardly mobile miners' families). Its puritan values were, however, scrupulously middle-class: hard work and abstinence were understood to open up ways out of working-class life into the respectable careers of the clerk or the teacher. The Lawrence family was traditionally Church of England (as a young man, Lawrence's father, Arthur Lawrence, had sung in the Brinsley Choir); Lawrence's mother, Lydia, came from a Wesleyan family, but she gravitated towards the Congregational Chapel when she married and settled in Eastwood ± it provided a degree of culture in an environment otherwise barren of it. In `Hymns in a Man's Life', Lawrence would stress his gratefulness for his Congregational upbringing. The Congregationalists `still had the Puritan tradition of no ritual', he writes, `but they avoided the personal emotionalism which one found among the Methodists';4 the Chapel allowed for a childish sense of wonder at religious mysteries, whilst also allowing (and even encouraging) his later questioning of Biblical teachings. He was grateful that his Sunday School teacher, one Mr Rimmington, had heartily encouraged him as a young boy to sing hymns, and he was glad that the Chapel used the Bristol Hymn Book,5 with its many martial hymns, and not the popular Gospel Hymns of the American evangelist Ira Sankey (credited to him and to his missionary collaborator, Dwight Moody). He mentions hymns like `Christian Courage' by William Fisk Sherwin and `Soldiers of the Cross' by George Duffield, which, he says, avoided the sentimentality of the hugely popular `Lead Kindly Light' and `Abide with Me'.6 He abhorred the personal appeal to pity in Sunday School teaching (remembering his experience as a seven-year-old asked to identify with Christ's suffering), much as he came to oppose the Church's crusading approach to social issues like drunkenness and temperance in the non-denominational `Band of Hope' society his mother supported. He grew up with a firm understanding of the sometimes surprising forms which Christian zeal could assume, and he was apt to put such extremes to

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good comic use in his later years. There is a wonderful account left by his friend Achsah Brewster of a train journey they shared in June 1928 between Florence and the Swiss Alps: in an empty compartment, they `began to sing hymns. Lawrence knew all the Moody and Sankey revival songs, the Salvation Army tunes, every word of all the verses. One followed another in growing dramatic effect, until the climax was reached in ``Throw out the life-line''. He [Lawrence] stood up and threw out an imaginary lasso to the drowning souls, hauling them in strenuously'. Brigit Patmore remembers him in the same year singing a hymn much loved by Earl Brewster, Achsah's husband: `[t]hrowing back his head [and chanting] . . . in a horrible falsetto: Oh to be nothing, nothing / Oh to be nothing, nothing . . . and [he] put diabolic yearning into it, repeating it again'.7 Yet the Congregational Chapel also provided a crucial intellectual context to Lawrence's early life. Central to his broader participation in the life of the Chapel were the two ministers whom he describes as good, honest men in the essay `Getting On':8 the Reverend J. Loosemore and the Reverend Robert Reid. The latter, a close friend of Lawrence's mother, was the Congregational minister at Eastwood from 1897 to 1911; in 1899, he founded the Congregational Literary Society, of which Lawrence was a member. According to the account left by his childhood sweetheart, Jessie Chambers, Lawrence was also a keen participant in the Society's meetings. Papers delivered at these meetings were surprisingly eclectic, ranging from `literature, politics and music (both sacred and secular) to geography, history and travel. At an annual cost of one shilling, the 3±400 members could have heard, in the first year, papers on Burns, Thomas Hood, Browning, early English drama, Goldsmith, Tennyson and Longfellow'.9 The meetings brought Lawrence into contact with two Eastwood freethinkers who would play a significant part in his intellectual and emotional growth: the local politician and advanced Socialist William Hopkin, and Alice Dax, a radical suffragist with whom he would later have a brief affair. The turning point in Lawrence's relation to orthodox religion occurred with his going up to Nottingham University College for teacher training in September 1906. His personal reading during the initial year at the university led to a first thorough questioning of Biblical teachings and the articles of faith. As Jessie Chambers wrote in her memoir of Lawrence, `such things as the Virgin Birth, the Atonement, and the Miracles we talked out and discarded as irrelevant to the real matter of religion'.10 In October 1906, Lawrence had contacted the Reverend Reid to ask if he

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(Reid) might give Lawrence private Latin classes to enable him to enrol on an Arts degree as an extension of his teaching course; as it turned out, he received help elsewhere, but a year later (in surviving letters of 15 October and 3 December 1907) he wrote to Reid setting out the grounds for his confirmed religious scepticism. Reid's wide-ranging intellect, his compassion and his willingness to debate the religious issues of the day made him a suitable sounding board, in spite of any fear that might have accrued from Reid's friendship with Lawrence's mother. The October letter freely states the extent of Lawrence's reading in modern writings on theology and in scientific work running counter to the Biblical accounts of Creation. Lawrence draws on the work of Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Ernest Renan, J. M. Robertson, Robert Blatchford, Philip Vivian and R. J. Campbell, noting that these authors have seriously modified his religious beliefs; he asks Reid for the nonconformist attitude to the articles of faith he had summarily discarded in his conversations with Jessie Chambers. His parting shot is to wonder, in light of his reading, how the accepted religious doctrines can have changed so markedly throughout the ages, and why social and intellectual progress seems always to have originated among people antagonistic to the Church.11 The December letter seems to be written in response to a lost reply from Reid; it would appear that Reid had sensitively noted Lawrence's avoidance of writings which might be deemed directly hostile to Christianity. Reid's implicit sympathy with Lawrence's earnest questioning of religion allows for the free expression of the extent of his predicament; it was the first time that Lawrence had revealed himself to anyone on the subject. Interestingly, Lawrence describes his temperament as mystical and introspective, and he explains that an earlier belief in election and miraculous conversion had been defeated by the absence of a Road to Damascus experience. His ailing religious conviction has been further shaken by the witnessing of social inequality, and his religious sensibility has grown into a metaphysics of relatedness to Mankind in dialogue with his fringe involvement in Nottingham Socialist circles.12 He writes that a sense of religion must be achieved slowly and painfully, and will always be subject to modification. He asserts that Socialism itself is a religion, like all fervent politics; he does not believe in any materialist doctrines, but neither can he believe in the divinity of Jesus, and he struggles to understand how any just deity can oversee the inequalities which separate Whitechapel from Belgravia.13 If the tone and manner of this December letter seem a little gauche, tainted to a degree by what Lawrence terms arrogance and `the wilfulness

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of youth', the sentiments are clearly deeply felt and honest. The bitterness of the experience is felt some years later, when, in a letter of 9 April 1911, he writes with admirable sensitivity and understanding to his younger sister Ada of her anguish over her loss of faith in the wake of their mother's death in December 1910. He again notes how much pain and courage is required to discover one's own creed and to renounce shared faith in favour of isolated convictions: he offers philosophy as a means to new understanding, and he wearily suggests that he will attend Chapel once more when he marries, though he no longer distinguishes between religions, seeing the same movement towards God in both Christians and Buddhists.14 By this time, Lawrence's attitude could be termed `religious without religion'.15 He was an agnostic rather than an atheist, but his agnosticism was always sufficiently marked by metaphysical yearning to elude such easy classification; in a letter of April 1914, he would famously describe himself as `a passionately religious man' whose `novels must be written from the depth of [his] religious experience'.16 Though he did not attend Chapel with any regularity after his mother's death (and he married in July 1914 at Kensington Registry Office), the habits of mind of Congregationalism stayed with him throughout his life. In Lawrence's writings we can trace the complex transformations of early religious experience as it comes up against the resistance of modernity. The Congregational emphasis on individual insight instead of authority; the self, not the group; and the power of revelation and sudden transformation are all features central to Lawrence's mature metaphysic. Even the emotional appeal of religion, about which he declared himself so suspicious in 1928, is perhaps implicit in his January 1913 statement that his `great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect'.17 His lifelong involvement with biblical stories, symbols and language has recently been discussed in some detail in a full-length study by Terry R. Wright.18 In particular, Wright focuses on Lawrence's adoption and development of biblical personae in his letters and in the biblical charades which he loved to act out, his insistence on the nonunitary, composite nature of the Bible, his recuperation of corporeal aspects of the Old Testament, and ± most significantly ± his critique of an inflexible and ascetic approach to the Bible through subversive or reaccenting allusion and parody. Given the importance of the Congregational Chapel in Lawrence's early life, and the extent of his immersion in religious language and experience, the scarcity of references to organized religion and the Chapel in his early writings is striking. Even in his most autobiographical novel,

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Sons and Lovers, references are very abbreviated. The young Congregational minister, Mr Heaton, comes to call on Mrs Morel, and her second son attends a service with his mother and Clara Dawes,19 but religion hardly assumes the role in Paul Morel's daily life that it had in the life of its author. It is as if the strictures of organized religion, and the sense of community which the Chapel fostered, are transposed almost entirely onto the figure of Mrs Morel. The death of the mother brings with it a sense of dereliction and nihilism which carries the full force of Lawrence's religious disillusionment; the feeling is realized in the language of scientific materialism which so troubled the author in 1907. The Chapel, with its religious and social values, cohered almost solely in the figure of Lawrence's mother, so that `his rebellions against his mother, Reid, chapel and college, and his rebellion against Christianity, all seem to have been aspects of each other'.20 In the final years of her life, he attended Chapel largely to please her; mostly he did so with a due sense of deference and filial affection, but there is at least one reported incidence of him (in the spring of 1908) ridiculing the Reverend Reid in quite savage fashion before her.21 He had grown to dislike the middle-class underpinnings of Chapel life; he found distasteful his mother's reverence for `Chapel Men' like Henry Saxton, a Sunday School Superintendent, deacon of the Chapel, and owner of a successful grocer's shop. In `Getting On', an essay of 1927, Lawrence describes his mother's tender regard for men like Saxton, behind whose respectability Lawrence saw nothing but impudence, self-righteousness and vulgarity.22 Resentment towards the all too human social values implicit in the teachings of the Chapel must have fuelled his spirit of rebellion; it is strongly felt in the early poem `Weeknight Service', his own (rather inferior) version of Keats's sonnet `Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition'. In Lawrence's homage, church bells `clamorously' call the beleaguered congregation to prayer ± `like spattering shouts of an orator endlessly dropping / From the tower on the town, but endlessly, never stopping' ± while the surrounding countryside seems moved only to indifference or faint contempt. The act of rebellion was an important part of Lawrence's movement away from the atmosphere of home; it allowed him to assert and explore his intellectual independence, but this assertion was tinged with a strong sense of loss, and a feeling of nostalgia, not only for his mother and all she stood for, but also for a much-needed (but largely unavailable) sense of community. Lawrence was capable of expressing nostalgia for these aspects of his Chapel days, as he does in a letter to his old Eastwood friend Gertrude Cooper on 23 January 1927. Here, he imagines the congregation

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`warbling away' in Eastwood Congregational Chapel, and he recalls with great clarity the `sugary' feeling created in him and his childhood friends by the concluding vesper verse, which was sung immediately before their exit into the dark streets.23 The soothing lines of this `emotional vesper' are reproduced in the unfinished novel Mr Noon: `Lord keep us safe this night / Secure from all our fears / May angels guard us while we sleep / Till morning light appears.'24 The moving connection between organized religion, community and maternal feeling is firmly established in what is perhaps the only early poem with a strong claim to represent the Congregational Chapel of Lawrence's childhood and youth. `Eastwood ± Evening' is the first (and hitherto unpublished) manuscript form of a poem which was later revised and re-titled `The Little Town at Evening'.25 It was written between 1906 and 1908, during Lawrence's time at Nottingham University College: the period when Lawrence's reading was confirming his alienation from his mother's beloved Chapel. In the first version of the poem, the speaker hears the church clock strike eight, and he listens to the church bells drowning out the cries of children playing in the surrounding fields. The restfulness of the houses beneath the watchful church is compared to the sleepiness of a brood of chicks beneath a mother hen; the sense of safety and protection stands in marked contrast to the speaker's feeling of alienation, but where the revised version of the poem concludes with the speaker's retrospective wish for inclusion in the life of his home town (and a questioning of the motives behind his exclusion), the speaker in the first version feels the chill of the night air and simply notes, without the plaintive appeal, how the protective wings of his birthplace are closed against him. The less sentimental, more subtly elegiac tone of `Eastwood ± Evening' sets the restlessly observant speaker over against the boisterously unaware children and the quiet houses symbolic of the restful residents sleeping soundly beneath the solemn and unruffled presence of the Chapel. It is uncertain whether the bells are calling the congregation to evening prayer, or whether they mark the end of a service; the important point is that, in spite of the sense of inclusion which they portend, they create an actual feeling of exclusion in the speaker. The imagery of the hen with her chicks in this first version is rather too insistent and blandly conventional, but it serves to emphasize a maternal quality in the church as it lays claim to the affections of the townspeople on this misty (early autumn) evening. The roofs of the houses seem to clamour for protection, creeping to rest, and only the speaker's garden (in which he stands and watches the scene) seems

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set apart from the sleepfulness. The mention of the lawn in the first version, and the description of some red lilies, is missing from the revised text. In the first version, the speaker's situation as an observer is underscored by our firm sense of his exposed physical presence in the garden: the lawn smoulders, and the red lilies are like the undying embers of a passion very different from religious certainty. The setting here would seem to anticipate the crucial scene from Sons and Lovers in which a pregnant Mrs Morel is turned out into the night by her husband, after a violent argument; her quasi-religious experience of communion with the white lilies in her garden connects Mrs Morel to her unborn son, as if they shared the same acute sensitivity to surroundings and the same animosity to the father.26 The intertextual comparison foregrounds the tragic dimensions of the speaker's inability to feel such an unspoken closeness to maternal care: in `Eastwood ± Evening', the lilies emphasize his very alienation from mother and Chapel and community. The same connection between mother, home and Chapel is felt in the first version of the frequently anthologized poem `Piano', which immediately follows `Eastwood ± Evening' in the manuscript notebook, and here we move from the experience of a mourned exclusion from community and faith to a sad (even guilty) sense of its inevitability. In the well-known final version of this poem, the speaker hears a woman singing in the dusk, to the accompaniment of a piano; it reminds him of his childhood and his mother playing hymns on the piano in the family parlour on Sunday evenings. The nostalgia completely negates the present day, as the speaker weeps like a child for the past.27 The first version, however, is very different indeed; like the first version of `The Little Town at Evening', it yields far less to nostalgia, stressing instead the irreparable loss of oneness with the mother, and with the Sunday evening hymns.28 Where the final version of the poem leaves the nostalgia uppermost and the memory of the mother triumphant, this early version (written whilst she was still alive) balances the mother and her hymn-playing over against the memory of his sister's songs of love, and the insistent, erotic `wild Hungarian air' sung to him in the present by a fullthroated woman, with her soul, arms and bosom bared, her physical presence (and the ravaging glamour of the music) threatening to overwhelm the recollection of his mother's `little poised feet' and gliding fingers. The speaker's language poignantly insists on the primacy of the memory of his mother, but the insistence seems paper-thin. While the speaker of the final version cries like a child for the past, this speaker seems thoroughly wrapped up in the present, guiltily recalling rather more innocent Sunday evenings spent with the family (in the protective haze of the Chapel), but realizing

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how even that imagined Eden contained the serpent in the heart of his besotted sister. In its simplest form, the realization of difference from home and Chapel and community marks a familiar rite of passage out of adolescence into adulthood, but these poems rest upon a radical and painful kind of cultural estrangement which we can view as a crucial element in Lawrence's formation as a writer. The speakers of `Eastwood ± Evening' and `The Piano' are both insinuated in the fabric of the Chapel and unavoidably outside it; they see the attractions of a faith which connects one to a community, and to one's own family history, but in the act of seeing they underscore their inability to inhabit either in a wholly satisfactory manner. The experience of watching his own family and community from the vantage point of this double bind ± reflecting on his own place within them, and outside them ± was central to Lawrence's developing sense of artistic vocation, and he was aware of the pain for himself, and the cruelty to others, which it would entail. In an important sense, his movement away from Chapel, and the certain values and community it represented, towards `the impersonal, deliberate gaze of an artist',29 constituted a first experience of exile in the life of a writer whose career would subsequently be shaped by his status as an outsider.

Notes 1

2 3

These essays of 1928±9 have all recently been made available in the standard Cambridge Edition of Lawrence's works, in the volume Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). They are (in chronological order of composition) `[Return to Bestwood]', `Getting On', `Which Class I Belong To', `Hymns in a Man's Life', `Myself Revealed (Autobiographical Sketch)', and `Nottingham and the Mining Countryside'. Late Essays and Articles, 132. Lady Chatterley's Lover was privately published in July 1928; Apocalypse was written between November 1929 and January 1930. Both books are informed by a thoroughly sceptical (even openly dismissive) understanding of orthodox Christianity. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Lawrence would describe a drive through the grim mining town of Tevershall, with its `Congregational chapel, which thought itself superior, [but] was built of rusticated sandstone and had a steeple, but

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4 5

6

7

8 9

10

11 12

13 14 15 16

17

55

not a very high one' (152); Apocalypse is his deconstructive rewriting of the Book of Revelation. Late Essays and Articles, 133. The Bristol Hymn Book was the common name given to the Collection of Hymns Adapted to Public Worship (Bristol, 1769, 9th edition, Norwich, 1814). `Christian Courage' by William Fisk Sherwin (1826±99) was published in Bright Jewels for the Sunday School (New York, 1869); `Soldiers of the Cross' by George Duffield (1818±88) appeared in The Psalmist (1858). `Lead Kindly Light' and `Abide With Me' were extremely popular hymns written by John Henry Newman and Henry Francis Lyte (1793±1847) respectively. The hymns are `Throw Out the Life-line' by the Reverend Ufford and Georgiana M. Taylor's `Oh to be Nothing, Nothing'. See D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, III, ed. Edward Nehls (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 216±17 and 259. Late Essays and Articles, 28. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 3±4. Jessie Chambers, D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record by `E.T.' (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935), 84. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, 36±7. Lawrence's interest in Socialism developed through his friendship with William Hopkin. Hopkin was `a noted socialist who, though once secretary of the Eastwood Sunday School Union, had broken away in 1900 and was now [in 1907] a notorious agnostic'. John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885±1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 178. At Nottingham University College, Lawrence was a founder member of a socialist group entitled the `Society for the Study of Social Reform'; he began reading the socialist journal New Age in 1908. When he delivered a paper entitled `Art and the Individual' to a meeting of the newly founded Eastwood `Debating Society' on 19 March 1908, he did so at Hopkin's house, to an audience with decidedly Socialist sympathies. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, 39±41. Ibid., 255±7. John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885±1912, 175. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, II, ed. James T. Boulton and George J. Zytaruk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 165. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, I, 503.

56 18

19

20 21

22 23

24

25

26 27 28

29

Ecstasy and Understanding Terry R. Wright, D. H. Lawrence and the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 44 and 370. John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885±1912, 177. See the quotation from David Chambers in John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885±1912, 176. See `Getting On', in Late Essays and Articles, 27±32. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 634. D. H. Lawrence, Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 49. The manuscript is Roberts E317, poem 8, currently held in the Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham. See Warren Roberts, A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 3rd edition, revised by Paul Poplawski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). `The Little Town At Evening' was first published in The Monthly Chapbook, July 1919; it is reprinted in Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), 48. Sons and Lovers, 34. Complete Poems, 148. The manuscript is Roberts E317, poem 9; the poem is printed in Complete Poems, 943. Lawrence uses the phrase to describe young Paul Morel's detached attitude towards Baxter Dawes in Sons and Lovers, 224.

Works Cited Boulton, James T., ed. (1979), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boulton, James T., and Zytaruk, George J., eds. (1981), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boulton, James T., and Vasey, Lindeth, eds. (1989), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume V. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, Jessie (1935), D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record by `E.T.' London: Jonathan Cape. Lawrence, D. H. (1993), Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Lawrence, D. H. (1993), Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (2004), Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1984), Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawrence, D. H. (1992), Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nehls, Edward, ed. (1959), D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, Volume III. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Roberts, Warren (2001), A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence, 3rd edition, revised by Paul Poplawski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worthen, John (1991), D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885±1912. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Terry, R. (2000), D. H. Lawrence and the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5

Slouching towards Bethlehem: Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Apocalypse David Rudrum

In December 1999, an exhibition opened at the British Museum entitled `The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come'.1 Amidst the widespread millennialism regarding the last days of the twentieth century ± at the time we were haunted by the threat of the end of the world in the form of the dreaded millennium bug ± it seemed a particularly appropriate opportunity to reflect on one of the most influential religious texts of all time: the revelation of St John, and particularly, his graphic vision of the apocalypse. The exhibition was in many ways dominated by the Usual Suspects: Albrecht DuÈrer's four horsemen, William Blake's watercolours, Michelangelo's Last Judgement, as well as an impressive collection of stunning medieval manuscripts and seventeenth-century woodcuts. But more provocatively, it also contained a number of contemporary versions of the trope of apocalypse, ranging from Hollywood films to papier maÃche effigies of nuclear holocaust from the Mexican Day of the Dead. These artefacts showed how, as the twentieth century evolved, the trope of the apocalypse was reinvented many times, resurfacing, for example, under the guises of proletarian revolution, nuclear destruction, environmental disaster and, of course, the much-vaunted millennium bug. Nevertheless, the exhibition at the British Museum demonstrated that none of these secular mutations has managed to supplant the biblical apocalypse, and no matter how new and modern the various threats of global destruction may seem, we nevertheless tend to cast the idea of the end of the world in ancient, religious, biblical terms. As Frank Kermode puts it in his ambitious study of apocalyptic literature The Sense of an Ending, `the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world'.2 The Book of Revelation still exerts a fascination over us, and

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indeed has exerted a fascination over some of the most important of twentieth-century poets. This is certainly the case in both T. S. Eliot's `The Hollow Men' and W. B. Yeats's `The Second Coming'3 ± two of the most highly canonical pieces of modernist verse in the English language, and both examples of the poetry of apocalypse. These poems were written within a few years of each other ± `The Second Coming' was published in 1920, and `The Hollow Men' in 1925 ± at a time when an apocalyptic sense of the end of an era was every bit as tangible as it was at the close of the twentieth century. Both poems were written in the aftermath of the First World War, and the inconceivable scale of this unprecedented slaughter was frequently described by writers, painters, and even some early film-makers as apocalyptic: No account of apocalyptic thought and imagery in the twentieth century can ignore the pervasive impact of the Great War, which seemed to many the loosing of Revelation's four horsemen, or in some sense `the battle of that great day', Armageddon. Henceforth Apocalypse would be refigured in terms of the Western Front's sea of mud and labyrinth of trenches; carnage on an unimagined scale, now mechanized.4 Furthermore, in the aftermath of the First World War, there was also a plague that swept across the whole world: a global pandemic of Spanish influenza, which is estimated to have killed up to 30 million people worldwide ± a number that dwarfed the casualties of the war. The idea of a biblical pestilence, another horseman of the apocalypse, suggested itself to many observers. And, of course, the success of the Russian revolution in 1917 was described by many commentators as an apocalyptic event ± depending on political viewpoint, it represented either the coming of the Antichrist, the destruction of God's church and the overthrow of His anointed king, or else it represented a chance to build a new Jerusalem, on Earth as it is in Heaven, having overcome a thousand years of Satan's tyranny. In short, the sense of an apocalypse had become a very common trope in the modernist era. Writers as disparate as D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, and Willa Cather5 were among those in the modernist period who shared what Frances Carey has called the `apocalyptic intuition of living on the brink of a new era'.6 Following a distinction sketched by Kermode in The Sense of an Ending, it is helpful to differentiate between two variations on the same

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apocalyptic theme ± two different apocalyptic modernisms. Kermode distinguishes the apocalyptic perspective of `anti-traditionalist modernism' from that of `traditionalist modernism'.7 While both share an emphasis on the `breaking down of pseudo-traditions, the making new on a true understanding of the nature of the elements of art',8 this is in some ways a superficial similarity between two otherwise divergent modernisms. On the one hand, Kermode associates the apocalypse of `antitraditionalist' modernism with the avant-garde. This is essentially an optimistic, utopian modernism. The number of avant-garde artistic movements ± like futurism, suprematism, surrealism and so forth ± that called for the end of the old world, or the coming of a new world, is almost infinite. Though Kermode does not elaborate much on this, these avant-garde movements were apocalyptic in the sense that they hoped to sweep away the evils of a corrupt, decadent society and establish in its place a utopian New Jerusalem, a new art and a new way of life that would, at least implicitly, be like heaven on earth. A good example of this kind of apocalyptic modernism is represented by Ernst Bloch's writings in The Spirit of Utopia.9 However, as opposed to the optimism of this avant-garde vision of apocalyptic modernism, Kermode also describes a second, rather bleaker kind of apocalyptic modernism, which he calls `traditionalist', and associates with so-called `high' modernism. Writers of this kind believe, like most prophets of the apocalypse, that the end of the world, or at least the violent end of an era, is about to occur, but is being preceded by an age of decadence, a time of decline, a time of profanity and contempt for the sacred and for the traditional order. It is generally a time of apostasy and of false prophets, in which things have deteriorated so far that the end must be nigh. Of course, these writers ± such as Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis ± generally believe that they are now living in exactly this bleak, doomed period, and that it is only a matter of waiting for the inevitable catastrophe. Many of them even seem to think that the bloodshed and destruction associated with this catastrophe will actually be a good thing ± a way of purging society, and thereby renewing it. Kermode suggests certain linkages between this outlook and the politics of fascism, to which many of these writers seem at least in some measure to have subscribed.10 It is to this kind of apocalyptic modernism that Yeats and Eliot belong. Of all the varieties of traditional religious verse, the genre of apocalypse is arguably the most intensely passionate. Neither Yeats nor Eliot can altogether escape the influence of the apocalyptic tone. `The Second Coming' is suffused with the very `passionate intensity'11 it decries in

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others, epitomizing the fervour with which most prophets of the apocalypse denounce other prophets as false. `The Hollow Men' also suggests a moment of ecstatic vision: rather than kissing, trembling lips pray `to broken stone'.12 Clearly, though, this moment of passionate devotion undermines itself ± it may describe a pious fervour, but it is dedicated to one of the fallen idols of the Book of Revelation. The tone that suffuses `The Hollow Men' resounds more clearly with an emotion that is more closely associated with the apocalypse: that of fear. The speaker clearly dreads the `Eyes' he `dare not meet in dreams',13 eyes associated with sunlight, just as Jesus is described in Revelation as having `eyes like unto a flame of fire'.14 Fear is also apparent when the speaker, who inhabits `the dead land', the `cactus land', the `hollow valley', pleads that he may be spared `that final meeting' in `the twilight kingdom'.15 This recalls a well-known passage from the Book of Revelation: And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.16 Unlike Eliot's fragmented verse, Yeats's poem resembles a traditional dream vision or revelation.17 It draws on some of the Bible's standard apocalyptic imagery, particularly when describing the onset of destruction attendant on the second coming, and the beast of Yeats's revelation: `A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun'.18 And yet Yeats can also be said to depart quite dramatically from some of the most basic features and conventions of the apocalyptic genre: there is no ensuing vision of Christ in majesty, no New Jerusalem, nor even an overcoming of the beast. The `blood-dimmed tide is loosed',19 but this is not a redemptive suffering. Indeed, Christ and Christianity appear to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution, having `vexed to nightmare' the past two millennia.20 In this sense, Yeats, like so many writing after the Great War, describes an apocalypse without salvation. This is a crucial point because, theologically speaking, redemption is what gives apocalypse its point, its meaning. The sense of an apocalypse without salvation is, if anything, even stronger in the bleak, empty world of `The Hollow Men'. The dreaded eyes which were associated with Christ are imaged as the star and rose of

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`death's twilight kingdom'. The star and the rose ± symbols so closely connected with Christ ± are the hope, Eliot tells us, of `empty men' alone.21 Of course, without the idea of redemption, the traditional idea of apocalypse is, perhaps, radically compromised. The bleak nihilism with which many modernist writers anticipated the apocalypse is actually very far removed from its theological spirit. But that is partly the point: by departing from the conventional features of apocalyptic literature, the modernist reinvention of the apocalypse constitutes both a challenge to and a reinvigoration of one of the most powerful forms of religious poetry. Nowhere is this process clearer than in the way Yeats and Eliot set out a new apocalyptic temporality. The traditional understanding of apocalypse is dependent on a traditional understanding of time, as Frank Kermode demonstrates in The Sense of an Ending. According to Kermode, our conception of chronology, involving as it does a movement from beginning to ending, is inherently apocalyptic. Kermode even goes so far as to diagnose an apocalyptic structure in the rhythm of the clock itself: `Tick is a humble genesis, tock a feeble apocalypse'.22 Even if this is an oversimplification, the point remains that the concept of apocalypse is intimately wedded to the concept of time, and other writers on the subject of apocalyptic literature concur with this. Lois Parkinson Zamora, for example, in a study that maps the apocalyptic aspects of recent American fiction, invokes Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope ± the novelistic interrelation between space and time ± and describes the chronotope of the apocalypse as inexorably linear.23 Stephen O'Leary's book Arguing the Apocalypse presents an analysis of apocalypse as a rhetorical strategy. The rhetoric of apocalypse offers `a solution to the problem of evil' which `is accomplished through discursive construction of temporality'.24 Literary critics seem to agree not only that the trope of apocalypse depends on our understanding of time, but also that it involves a very traditional understanding of time as linear progression from start to finish. It seems that writing the apocalypse inevitably entails a teleological, eschatological, end-weighted temporality. This, I contend, is one reason why the genre of apocalypse is such a perfect candidate for reworking and rewriting in the modernist era. There are few constants in modernist literature, but one of its unifying themes involves taking issue with straightforward, linear views of time. From Marcel Proust and James Joyce to Henri Bergson or even Albert Einstein, rethinking the nature of time itself is a quintessentially modernist endeavour, and so the genre of apocalyptic literature, involving a fairly old-fashioned concept of time, is unsurprisingly an obvious target for

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modernist poetry. In what follows I hope to demonstrate how both Yeats and Eliot, in very different ways, reinvent the trope of apocalypse precisely by taking issue with the ideas of telos, and ending, that define the concept of time in apocalypse. Their poems exhibit a characteristically modernist distrust of linear, chronological, teleological time, and by removing this temporal paradigm from the equation, they each inaugurate a vision of a new kind of modernist apocalypse. The Book of Revelation offers much encouragement for those, like Yeats and Eliot, who wish to deconstruct a chronological, teleological temporality. In it, for example, an angel declares in the name of `Him that liveth for ever and ever' that there will `be time no longer' ± an inherently paradoxical statement, which seems in and of itself to undermine a traditional understanding of time.25 Nevertheless, despite hints like these of an apocalyptic temporality at odds with our commonsensical notion of time, traditional apocalyptic writing tends, almost invariably, to be narrated either in the future tense, as a prophecy of something to come, or in the past tense, used to describe a vision of the end. Writing about another modernist classic, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and specifically its adaptation into Francis Ford Coppola's movie Apocalypse Now (in which, by coincidence, Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz recites `The Hollow Men'), the deconstructive critic J. Hillis Miller observed: `As is always the case with apocalypses, the end is announced as something always imminent, never quite yet. Apocalypse is never now.'26 Jacques Derrida echoes this view: `The coming is always to come', he declares.27 As against this, it is worth noting that both Yeats and Eliot describe their apocalypses in the present tense. The presence of this tense betokens a very different kind of temporality from that of traditional apocalyptic writing. To begin with Yeats, it seems fairly clear that `The Second Coming' challenges both the teleology and the eschatology of the traditional apocalypse. Whereas Kermode, in agreement with most critics on the subject, observes that `apocalyptic thought belongs to rectilinear rather than cyclical views of the world',28 `The Second Coming' seems to suggest just the contrary. It describes a second coming, a repetition, which is described in terms that clearly suggest a cyclical view of the event: `its hour come round at last'.29 This circularity is emphasized in the very first line of the poem, with the image of the falcon `Turning and turning in the widening gyre'30 as it circles the falconer, and, later, its counterpart, the `reeling' birds of the desert circling the beast.31 The sense of an ending in Yeats's apocalypse does not involve closure, but the opening up of a new

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cycle: the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem is in a sense going there not to be born, but to be born again. This is why the modernist apocalypse in `The Second Coming' might well be called the `cyclical apocalypse'. Yeats scholars will doubtless attribute this cyclical view to the belief system Yeats sketched out in A Vision. If we take him at his word, his belief in the interaction of gyres, in the past and the future intersecting as the apex and base of the cycles of history meet, led him at one point to conclude that the end of an age would take place some time in 1927. Though there is indeed much in this poem that points towards this belief system, there is no critical consensus as to how seriously he actually took this prediction, and in any case, the vision of a cyclical apocalypse has implications that go beyond Yeats's more esoteric ideas. It ties in with many broader currents in modernist thought: Ezra Pound's harking back to the cyclical time of the pagans, or Wyndham Lewis's vorticism, for instance. But I think it chimes most closely with the notion often associated with Nietzsche, of ewige Wiederkehr, eternal return, a notion that is not only at odds with traditional Christian theology, but which threatens to rob the apocalypse of its very meaning. Notwithstanding the verses of the Book of Revelation where Jesus declares (no fewer than four times) `I am Alpha and Omega', `the first and the last', `the beginning and the ending',32 it seems all but impossible to reconcile Yeats's characteristically modernist vision of the cyclical apocalypse with the teleology and eschatology with which we seem unavoidably to conceptualize the end of the world. Indeed one could object, with good reason, that a cyclical apocalypse is not an apocalypse at all. As the greatest philosopher of the age, Ludwig Wittgenstein, put it, `The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves'.33 A cyclical apocalypse, in which the end is another beginning, is a vision of the apocalypse reminiscent of the film Groundhog Day, an eternal return of the same in which repetition quickly descends from a first-time tragedy into a second-time farce. Viewed this way, there is in fact a good basis to Kermode's comment that `Apocalypse is part of the modern Absurd'.34 The gyre of Yeats's apocalypse recalls T. E. Hulme's observation that the `symbol of the wheel' is a `symbol of the futility of existence'.35 Whereas traditional apocalypse involves either tragedy (destruction and misery) or comedy (the happy ending of salvation), Yeats's cyclical apocalypse seems to reject both, turning our sense of an ending into a sense of a new beginning. Eliot, on the other hand, does not appear to have had much patience

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with the cyclical conception of time: famously, his poem `East Coker' inverts the commonplace `In my end is my beginning' to `In my beginning is my end'.36 The end as Eliot sees it is not a new beginning. It is barely even an end. The apocalypse Eliot envisions is hardly an apocalypse at all. The wrath of God does not materialize, and so for Eliot, things do not so much fall apart as simply peter out: the world ends `not with a bang but a whimper'.37 This, perhaps, is a sort of anti-apocalypse, and much of Eliot's imagery underscores this. In a passage from the same poem (ll. 25±8), the distant voices singing in the wind are in stark contrast to the voices in the Book of Revelation, which describes, for example, a `great voice as of a trumpet', a `voice as the sound of many waters', a `loud voice, as when a lion roareth', and a `voice of mighty thunderings'.38 As for the fading star, which recurs throughout the poem as `the twinkle of a fading star' and the `valley of dying stars', this image is also at variance with the biblical apocalypse. In the Revelation of St John, stars ± particularly falling stars ± are dramatic images, associated with crucial stages of the end of the world, as in `the stars of heaven fell to earth', or `there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon . . . the fountains of waters', or `And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit'.39 Eliot's stars that simply fade away instead of crashing to earth with a bang, like his distant voices on the wind, are perfectly consonant with his vision of the earth simply fizzling out with a whimper. His vision chimes quite closely with what Marina Benjamin has called the `silent apocalypse'. The silent apocalypse `forces us to abandon preconceived ideas about bangs and explosions . . . it invites us to imagine what an apocalypse could potentially be if it lacked almost all external signs. If it were not heralded by trumpets, . . . flagged in by extravagant pyrotechnics'.40 Besides describing the silent apocalypse, there is also a sense in which Eliot, like Yeats, is taking issue with traditional apocalyptic temporality. It is worth pointing out that he offers not a prediction or a prophecy ± not `This is the way the world will end' ± but a present-tense, descriptive statement ± `This is the way the world ends'.41 Instead of an end-weighted, teleological apocalyptic temporality, this is a present-tense apocalypse, raising the possibility of what Anson Rabinbach has called `the negative theology in which the apocalypse is not an event in the past or future but a constant presence where redemption is no longer manifested in the world of human affairs'.42 In other words, where Yeats's `The Second Coming' depicts a cyclical apocalypse, Eliot's `The Hollow Men' could be said to postulate `apocalypse now': that is, a silent, ongoing, present-tense apocalypse.

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In light of this view, J. Hillis Miller's observation that `Apocalypse is never now'43 needs revising. This kind of apocalypse, the apocalypse of negative theology, is experienced as the unfolding of a bleak, terrible, futureless present, a kind of negative Ereignis, as it were, by definition incomplete, and therefore fragmentary and partial. It is a curiously nonteleological, ongoing apocalypse, requiring a new conception of time that jettisons Kermode's `sense of an ending' altogether. As Franz Kafka put it in one of his notebooks, `Only our concept of Time makes it possible to speak of the Day of Judgement by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session'.44 The silent, ongoing apocalypse, having done away with teleology and eschatology, leaves us waiting in a time of perpetual catastrophe for an end that will never come. Perhaps this is the `paralysed force' of Eliot's poem,45 condemning the hollow men to dwell forever in the shadow that falls between the abstract and the real.46 But can such a view really be called `apocalyptic', since, after all, it abandons the sense of an ending or a telos, which surely lies right at the heart of the very idea of the apocalypse? Where the vision of the silent, ongoing apocalypse leads, is to a leafless tree by a country road, where two shabby figures, Vladimir and Estragon, wait forever in despair for the salvation of a second coming which might not even be a second coming, since there might not have been a first. Theirs is a messiah who may or may not come, and who may bring meaning and redemption to their suffering, but is just as likely not to (`One of the thieves was saved,' says Vladimir. `It's a reasonable percentage').47 Against this vision, though, it is worth pointing out that for Eliot, at least the world actually ends, albeit with a whimper instead of a bang. It is in this sense that, at least for Kermode, Eliot `was a poet of apocalypse, of the last days and the renovation, the destruction of the earthly city as a chastisement of human presumption'.48 But insofar as Eliot is implying that humanity is not even worth dignifying with one last final dramatic exit, and that instead the world simply dwindles away to nothingness, he is in a sense adopting a doubly apocalyptic strategy, foretelling an end to the traditional apocalypse itself. It is worth dwelling on this strategy, which might at first seem like trumping our sense of an ending with a simple double negative ± the end of the end, perhaps. Things, however, are more complex than this. As Derrida asks, in `Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy': `But then what is someone doing who says to you: . . . there is not, there has never been, there will not be apocalypse, ``the apocalypse is disappointing''? There is the apocalypse without apocalypse' ± which is exactly what Eliot is describing in `The Hollow Men'.49

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This, I contend, is what makes `The Hollow Men' a truly apocalyptic poem ± perhaps one of the most apocalyptic of poems, at least of modern times. It amounts to an apocalypse of the apocalypse. We could describe the poem as anti-apocalyptic, were it not for the fact that it derives so much of its apocalyptic force from foretelling an end ± an end to the traditional apocalyptic worldview. Perhaps `The Hollow Men' belongs to that tradition of modernist culture that derives its impact from an inherently paradoxical, self-negating clause: just as Duchamp's urinal proclaims an end to the art establishment from the hallowed precincts of the art gallery, or Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus heralds the end of philosophy from the pages of a philosophical work, so too `The Hollow Men' is a poem prophesying the end of poems prophesying the end. This is a quintessentially modernist gesture, overturning the eschatology, teleology, and even perhaps the ontology on which so much of the traditional conception of religious belief itself has been based. It may very well seem that seeking to liberate the structure of time itself from a sense of closure or ending is a gesture that challenges and defies the very basis and possibility of apocalyptic literature. And yet, by the same token, it nevertheless also marks a reinvigoration ± or, better, a modernist reinvention ± of one of the most powerful forms of religious poetry.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

For details, see the accompanying book The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, ed. Frances Carey (London: British Museum, 1999). Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (new edn) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28. For `The Hollow Men', see Collected Poems 1909±1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 87±92. For `The Second Coming', see Yeats's Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares, appendix by Warwick Gould (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1989), 294±5. Ian Christie, `Celluloid Apocalypse', in The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, ed. F. Carey (London: British Museum, 1999), 325. Thomas Mann's novel Dr Faustus allegorizes the triumph of fascism in apocalyptic terms; Willa Cather's short story `Lou, the prophet' centres on a preacher foretelling the day of judgement; D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is full of motifs taken from the Book of Revelation, while his Apocalypse was ± aptly enough ± the last book he ever wrote. Frances Carey, `The Apocalyptic Imagination: between Tradition

68

7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33

34

Ecstasy and Understanding and Modernity', in The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, op. cit., 278. Kermode, op. cit., 103. Ibid., 111. See especially the second part of the book, entitled `Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse'. Kermode, op. cit., 111. Yeats, `The Second Coming', l. 8. Eliot, `The Hollow Men', ll. 49±51. Ibid., l. 19. The Book of Revelation, Ch 2 v 18. Eliot, op. cit., l. 39; l. 40; l. 55; l. 29, ll. 37±8. Revelation, Ch 6, v 15±16. Indeed, the etymological origin of the word `apocalypse' comes from the Greek root `Apokalupsis', meaning `unveiling', and hence a revelation. Yeats, op. cit., ll. 14±15. Ibid., l. 5. Ibid., l. 20. Eliot, op. cit., ll. 62±5. Kermode, op. cit., p. 45. See Lois Parkinson Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary US and Latin American Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4. Stephen O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 14. Revelation, Ch 10 v 6. J. Hillis Miller, `Heart of Darkness Revisited', in Joseph Conrad ± Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, ed. R. C. Murfin (New York: St Martins Press, 1989), 221. Jacques Derrida, `Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy', in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. H. Coward and T. Foshay (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 54. Kermode, op. cit., 5. Yeats, op. cit., l. 21 ± emphasis mine. Ibid., l. 1. Ibid., l. 17. Revelation, Ch 1 v 8 and v 11; Ch 21 v 6; Ch 22 v 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell), 56. Kermode, op. cit., 123.

Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Apocalypse 35

36

37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44

45 46 47

48 49

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T. E. Hulme, `A Notebook by T.E.H.', New Age (23 December 1915), 188. See T. S. Eliot, `East Coker', Collected Poems 1909±1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 196±204; l. 1. Eliot, `The Hollow Men', ll. 97±8. Revelation, Ch 1, v 10; Ch 1, v 15; Ch 10, v 3; Ch 19, v 6. Revelation, Ch 6, v 13; Ch 8, v 10; Ch 9, v 1. Marina Benjamin, Living at the End of the World (London: Picador, 1998), 211. Eliot, `The Hollow Men', l. 97. Anson Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 9. Miller, op. cit., 221. Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), 169. Eliot, `The Hollow Men', l. 12. Ibid., ll. 72±3; ll. 78±9; ll. 83±4. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 13. Kermode, op. cit., 112. Derrida, op. cit., 66. In characteristically deconstructive fashion, Derrida answers his question ± inasmuch as he answers it at all ± with another question: `But what reading, what history of reading, what philology, what hermeneutic competence authorizes one to say that this very thing, this catastrophe of the apocalypse, is not the catastrophe described, in its movement and its very course, in its outline, by this or that apocalyptic writing?' (Derrida, op. cit., 67). In the case of `The Hollow Men', it is precisely this `catastrophe of the apocalypse' that gives the poem its apocalyptic status.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel (1986), The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber. Benjamin, Margaret (1998), Living at the End of the World. London: Picador. Bloch, Emmanuel (2000), The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Carey, Frances (1999), `The Apocalyptic Imagination: between Tradition

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and Modernity', in The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come. London: British Museum, 270±96. Christie, Ian (1999), `Celluloid Apocalypse', in The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come, ed. F. Carey. London: British Museum, 320±40. Derrida, Jacques (1992), `Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy', in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. H. Coward and T. Foshay. Albany: SUNY Press, 25±71. Eliot, T. S. (1974), `The Hollow Men', in Collected Poems 1909±1962. London: Faber and Faber, 87±92. Hulme, T. E., `A Notebook by T.E.H.' New Age, 23 December 1915. Kafka, Franz (1970), The Great Wall of China. New York: Schocken Books. Kermode, Frank (2000), The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (new edn). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, J. H. (1989), `Heart of Darkness Revisited', in Joseph Conrad ± Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, ed. R. C. Murfin. New York: St Martins Press, 209±24. O'Leary, Stephen (1994), Arguing the Apocalypse: a Theory of Millennial Rhetoric. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rabinbach, Anson (1997), In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1980), Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch. Oxford: Blackwell. Yeats, W. B. (1989), `The Second Coming', in Yeats's Poems, ed. A. Norman Jeffares, appendix by Warwick Gould. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 294±5. Zamora, Lois Parkinson (1995), Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary US and Latin American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6

`The unattended moment': selfhood and the experience of the transcendent in Four Quartets David Summers

T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets could be considered the English poetic text par excellence of modern religious experience. Among other things, these poems address the inadequacy of even poetic language to give voice to the transcendent; the role of tradition and history in the religious experience of each individual; the struggle between modernity's spiritual scepticism and the lived experience of spiritual insight; and the tense dialectic between the apophatic via negativa and more cataphatic paths toward experiencing God. Eliot calls certain experiences `the unattended / Moment', the word `unattended' in this context denoting, at a basic level, a state of consciousness relaxed and (therefore) heightened, and unexpected, as in the French word inattendu which may have inspired it.1 We sometimes assume such mystical experiences come only as a result of the isolation and sensory deprivation of the cloistered saint, but in the Quartets these moments are represented as intense encounters between an ordinary self and a real-world phenomenon, inviting us to examine this poem through a phenomenological lens. But what is a self, ordinary or otherwise? This is a vexed postmodern question. What happens when so-called real-world experiences impact on a self in such a way that it is left believing that something extraordinary, even perhaps transcendent, has just taken place? Eliot's poetic account of `unattended moments' in Four Quartets bears remarkable cohesion with the idea of `saturated phenomena' as advanced by Jean-Luc Marion; indeed, Book IV of Marion's Being Given could serve as a running commentary on Eliot's Four Quartets. However, writing from this side of the postmodernist divide, Marion seems compelled to let go of the very notion of transcendence that is the raison d'eÃtre of Four Quartets, so while Eliot and Marion are describing the same experience, their

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metaphysical assumptions seem to lead to quite different understandings of that experience. What sort of phenomenon-experiencing Self does Eliot propose to us? Paul Ricoeur's concept of `narrative identity', advanced in Time and Narrative: III and in Oneself as Another, is useful in understanding the evolving, time-resisting but always time-bound, `pilgrim-subject' of the Four Quartets. Ricoeur's idea of narrative identity delineates a Self that is under continual re-inscription, a revising which accommodates several forces, including the accidents of life-as-it-is-lived as well as the everevolving definitions of ourselves that are offered back to us by Others who matter to us. In reaction to these accidents and incidents, these appraisals that cannot be dismissed, Ricoeur also posits a more durable, reflective, narrative-generating idem-identity ± one that is constantly improvising meaning out of experience.2 This is the consciousness that remembers and is present at both moments in the common observation `I am not the man I used to be'. Eliot's Quartets clearly figure forth a Self under intense reflexive examination, an examination always cast in terms of its encounters with experienced phenomena, but a self that is durable in a sense that allows it to remember, to suffer and to love. The concept of the ever-changing self, the ipse-identity, recognizes the undeniable truth that he who leaves the station and he `who will arrive at any terminus' (`Dry Salvages') are not the same, but without the durable self, both pilgrimage and redemption would be impossible. Ricoeur's model of selfhood is entirely suited to narratives of pilgrim souls. By definition, pilgrims desire change, and they believe change comes about through experience rather than the anchorite cell. But they also must assume some durable part of the self that reaps spiritual benefit from these hard-won changes. Four Quartets represents a complex pilgrimage ± vacillating between moments of angst and ecstasy, between an apophatic negation of self and attempts at a meaningful reconstitution of identity through commitment, belief, love and even doubt. Images of this pilgrimage, comprised by a poem the reading of which is also a pilgrimage, are located in moments such as the meandering around to the garden pool at Burnt Norton, the journey down an English country lane to East Coker, the voyages of the fishermen in `Dry Salvages', and of course both in the sad trek of Charles I to Little Gidding and in the `dawn patrol' walked by Eliot himself in the final quartet. In the final analysis it is the record of a `progress of the soul'.3 In that, as in so many things, Eliot's poem of pilgrimage and transcendence is a modernist response to Dante. As has often been noted, we hear the echo of Dante's grand spiritual

Selfhood and the experience of the transcendent in Four Quartets 73 pilgrimage throughout the Four Quartets. It is found explicitly in the line `In the middle way, not only the middle of the way / But all the way, in a dark wood' of `East Coker' II, coming tellingly at the close of a passage lamenting the `intolerable wrestle with words and meanings', and the challenges of writing poetry in the shadow of powerful but suspect ancestral voices. Dante's shadow permeates `Little Gidding', from the figurative language of Part I to the rhyme scheme and `familiar compound ghost' of Part II to the multifoliate rose of Part V. Indeed, Eliot's entire canon of major poems is, to some degree, a modernist replication of Dante's Divine Comedy, beginning with the parody of Inferno in `Prufrock', through The Waste Land's series of postcards from Dis, all the way to the merest hint of Paradiso as the goal of the pilgrimage begun in `Ash Wednesday' and revisited at `Burnt Norton'. `Little Gidding', despite its vision of the fire and the rose becoming one, is not Paradiso ± unlike Dante, Eliot never gets that far. The final section of Four Quartets mirrors the last few books of Purgatorio, an earth-bound prospect from which the potential, always future, aim of the pilgrimage can be vaguely glimpsed. There is confidence in the glimpse that `we shall not cease from exploration'. Four Quartets, then, delineates an account of a purgatorial pilgrimage. Like the Divine Comedy, presents to us encounters with the dead, the many ghosts around which Craig Raine shaped his recent discussion of the poem. Not all of Eliot's transcendent `moments in and out of time' are explicit encounters with the dead, but many are, and the experience in the rose garden at Burnt Norton is, and this experience serves as a template for all such experiences of `too much reality' alluded to later in the poem. The transcendent moment in the rose garden is a double experience. Part of it is perception of form, a version of the sublime in which the fragmentary ± the broken and empty pool, the burnt house ± is supplemented to a point of overwhelming excess. Part of it is temporal, in which the subject is allowed a glimpse of what the simultaneity of Time ± the topic of the opening lines ± might look like. The effect is that of a brief communion with the eternal, and with the dead, whose ghosts moved `as our guests, accepted and accepting', drawing Eliot's pilgrim-persona into a fleeting pavane of past and present. As Dante uses his encounters with the dead to find those truths that will serve to redeem his own spiritual defects, so too does Eliot's pilgrim. The diseases of the soul addressed are different in Four Quartets than they are in Purgatorio, since the religious paradigms of the respective centuries bear little resemblance to each other. Dante has a relatively easy go of it, having

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only to deal with Seven Deadly Sins for a readership still comfortable with such language and concepts, while Eliot has to deal with all the soulshrivelling conditions of the modernist moment. What both of these elements, formal and temporal, share is an Idealist set of metaphysical assumptions: the broken pool is less real than the pool filled with water out of sunlight; the moment in time, isolated as `present only', is less real than the moment of past, present and future together, the moment in which `we move, and they'. Indeed, it is more reality than humankind can bear. The end these moments serve, however, is the very reflection and remembering that constitutes the idem-identity's function; apprehending the `reality' of the `moment in the rose garden' of `Burnt Norton', which is both in and out of time. This same reconstituting of meaning through temporal reflection pertains to self-understanding, as in the enigmatic passage where the speaker claims to be at once the same and to know himself, and yet is `someone other', in the Dawn Patrol episode of `Little Gidding'. Remembrance and self-knowledge are only available to the durable self; ghosts are the quintessence of that durability. And yet, `Dry Salvages' provides a caveat about change as linear pilgrimage, where development is seen as `a means of disowning the past'. Of course this is not a dismissal of the progress of the soul. Indeed, it is a rejection of the `Burnt Norton' II cynicism regarding ancestors and age, marking as it does at least one insight that comes with the wisdom of age, and is not to be taken ironically. The totality of the Quartets affirms the possibility of spiritual illumination or at least insight, and the matter at stake in the above passage is the danger of abstracting the present from its ultimately narrative context: `disowning the past', as it were. Here, I think Eliot is fully in agreement with Ricoeur and so-called virtue ethicists such as Alasdair MacIntyre, that the meaning of any moment and any action must be grounded in narrative. Any action is intelligible only once it is resituated in a before and after. We are left with a pilgrim-self under radical and continuous reconstituting, but one which also carries with it the understanding that `many generations' are involved when meaning is reconstituted, not just the `experience of one life'. This suggests a continuity of Selfhood to accompany the instability of a Self always rewriting itself. The rewriting of the Self is necessitated by the encounter with each new experience. But not all experiences are created equal, according to Eliot, and Jean-Luc Marion seems to concur in his theory of `saturated phenomena'. One of the primary features of the pilgrimage delineated in Four Quartets is that it is mapped by occasional and isolated `unattended

Selfhood and the experience of the transcendent in Four Quartets 75 moments'. I have already mentioned several of these framed by Eliot, but the fullest account of these `phenomenal-events' is found in `Dry Salvages', II and V. These moments of perception apprehend the `point of intersection of the timeless with time'. While we ordinarily associate such visions only with mystics and saints, we are told here that these moments are, in the final analysis, not the product of a holy occupation, but a gift `given and taken'. True, they may correspond to a life lived in a particular way, a life of `ardour and self-surrender', but for the uncloistered pilgrim of this poem, these moments come as an `unattended moment, the moment in and out of time'. The forms of the phenomena are stark in both their ordinariness and their diversity: they are natural as well as artificial ± wild thyme or winter lightning being as likely a source as music. But they all share their concentration on perception. These accounts posit a transaction between the subject and object, and sometimes this transaction can be so profound as to blur and undoubtedly alter the identity of the perceiver. The experiences of music itself ± `you are the music' ± like all moments in and out of time, are not themselves durable, nor can they ever be entire and unto themselves. They are, and can only be, `hints and guesses' of something only half-understood, only half-perceived. In other words, for Eliot, such moments are transcendent rather than the experience of something immanent in the thing itself. On this point, Eliot and Marion seem to differ markedly. However, as for the experience of these phenomena themselves, Eliot's catalogue of intense experiences, from smelling thyme on a walk in the country4 to this remarkable description of an encounter with music, align more or less with Marion's `saturated phenomenon', a concept described in his magisterial book, Being Given. It is suggestive that Eliot uses the language of givenness in the passage discussed above, although it may be that he and Marion are indeed using the term somewhat differently. Marion is very cautious to disclaim a transcendent Giver beyond the phenomena; Eliot has no such qualms. God is mentioned rarely in Four Quartets, only once directly, but the divine and the eternal are not an embarrassment to Eliot in these poems. Incarnation in `Dry Salvages' V may refer in part to the subject who experiences both time and timelessness, but it is capitalized because of its archetypal correspondence to the sacramental Incarnation of Christ. Nevertheless, Marion's discussion of the phenomenology of such experiences may illuminate the event Eliot's poem represents to us. First, Marion stresses the centrality of `givenness' to phenomenology. Whereas Husserl reduced phenomena to ideal categories, and Heidegger reduced

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phenomena to Being, Marion posits a further reduction to givenness, driven by the conviction that phenomena must first present themselves via intuition to subjects who do not properly constitute the apparition of the phenomenon, but `receive' it. `What shows itself first gives itself ± this is my one and only theme'.5 For Marion, phenomenology ± whose first principle now must be `so much reduction, so much givenness'6 ± is a method only insofar as it designs its own disappearance; we attend to a phenomenon, or reduce it to Givenness, only to reveal the necessity of not reducing, or constituting, or objectifying at all, but to merely receiving what the phenomenon gives. Thus the intense attention of reduction, when it has completed its task, gives way to pure reception through inattention. There are clearly implications for the self in this approach: as soon as the reduction has suspended and givenness is accomplished without reserve or limits, the I must renounce every claim to the synthesis of objects or the judgment of phenomenology. In the realm of givenness, it no longer decides the phenomenon, but receives it; or else, from `master and possessor' . . . [it becomes] its receiver.7 This Marion calls a `radically new posture of the figure and the function of the I', the function of `being gifted', which must be kept in mind in any consideration of the `saturated phenomenon'. This concept is a response to Kant's approach to delimiting intuition received from an object as either adequate to it, in terms of several defining horizons, or deficient. Marion asks if we cannot imagine ± under the conditions of genuinely receiving ± the possibility of a third relationship between intuition and concept, or intuition and phenomenon, that being one of Excess. He believes Kant himself flirted with this idea in his discussion of `the aesthetic idea', which Kant says, `occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought' to emerge, and about which `no language fully attains to or makes intelligible'. At this point Marion summarizes the project of advancing his version of the aesthetic idea, the `saturated phenomenon': I must describe the characteristics of a phenomenon that, in contrast to the majority of phenomena, poor in intuition or defined by the ideal adequation of intuition to intention, would receive a surplus of intuition, therefore of givenness, over and above intention, the concept and the intended . . . such a saturated phenomenon will no doubt no longer constitute an object (at least in the Kantian sense) for it is not

Selfhood and the experience of the transcendent in Four Quartets 77 self-evident that objectivity has enough authority to impose its norm on the phenomenon. What shows itself gives itself before being objectified, and it would never even become an object if it was not first given, be it only in a basic and humble way. We must therefore follow as far as possible the hypothesis of a phenomenon saturated with intuition.8 Following Kant, Marion explores what the implications would be for such a phenomenon with regard to its situation in the horizons of quantity, quality and according to its relations to other experiences. Each of these finds resonance in Eliot's objects of the `unattended moment'. With regard to Quantity, the saturated phenomenon is unforeseeable. Kant says that in any phenomenon there is either a commensurate value between the parts and whole or there is a deficiency in the whole. Objects that always find adequation between the parts and whole are predictable through extrapolation, but should an object ± in its totality ± supersede its parts, such excess would never be predictable. The very unforeseeability of the thing, says Marion, demands a reaction of amazement. Eliot's insistence in the Four Quartets on representing amazement in encounters with various kinds of rather mundane objects is in line with this notion of excessive quantity and unforeseeability. The moment in the rose garden at `Burnt Norton' is the archetype within the poem of such events. A neglected garden, a drained pool, a shaft of sunlight ± these scenes reveal alchemy producing amazement (an event unstageable, unpredictable and unrepeatable). This too is the essence of the vision of Eliot's ancestors in `East Coker', and the `unimaginable Zero summer' of `Little Gidding'. In terms of Quality, Marion says the `saturated Phenomenon' is unbearable: [T]he intuition saturating a phenomenon attains an intensive magnitude without measure . . . Before this excess, not only can perception no longer anticipate what it will receive from intuition; it also can no longer bear its most elevated degrees. For intuition, supposedly `blind' in the realm of poor or common phenomena, turns out in radical phenomenology, to be blinding. The gaze cannot any longer sustain a light that bedazzles and burns. The intensive magnitude of intuition, when it goes so far as to give a saturated phenomenon, cannot be borne by the gaze, just as the gaze could not foresee its extensive magnitude.9

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Such a description is reminiscent of classical and romantic descriptions of the Sublime ± or of Abbot Suger's famous explorations of the spiritual function of the Beautiful. Clearly this sort of overwhelming bedazzlement was of enduring interest to the post-conversion Eliot. A line he wrote originally for Murder in the Cathedral turns up again wholesale in the opening tableau of the rose garden at Burnt Norton, after the exposure to the transcendent has been given and has receded. The perfect connection between `reality' and `intuition' is perhaps akin to Kant's principle of adequation, but in Eliot and Marion, `the filling goes beyond itself: it goes to the brink, then too far. Thus the glory of the visible weighs down with all it has, that is to say it weighs too much. What is here weighty to the point of making one suffer is named neither unhappiness, or pain, nor lack, but indeed success ± glory, joy'.10 There is one last element in Marion's sketch of the saturated phenomenon: it is without relation ± absolute. `It evades any analogy of experience.' For a poet as allusive as Eliot, to prohibit analogy would present some difficulty. Certainly, the moment in the rose garden is not only unstageable and unrepeatable but also unprecedented in any specific sense. However, in the Quartets, as in all of Eliot's poetry, images are situated in a network of traditional and analogical meanings. The Four Quartets are laced with the language, signs and metaphors of religious devotion and doubt, wide-ranging as they may be, from Julian of Norwich to the Bhagavad-Gita. More than anything else, they are haunted by the presence of the Divine Comedy. But these antecedents are the cultural associations from which poetry can never be free and isolated. As Eliot argued about Dante's language, they contextualize the poetic attempt to represent this experience of phenomenon, not the phenomenon as such. Marion's `absolute' element in fact relocates our phenomenological event in time: Event, or unforeseeable phenomenon (in terms of the past), not exhaustively comprehensible (in terms of the present), not reproducible (in terms of the future), in short, absolute, unique, coming forward. It will be said: pure event. As a result, the analogies of experience concern only the fringe of phenomenality ± phenomena of the type of objects constituted by the sciences, poor in intuition, foreseeable, exhaustively knowable, reductible ± while other levels (first of all historical phenomena) would make an exception.11 Every moment in time is, of course, uniquely new, but the magnitude of

Selfhood and the experience of the transcendent in Four Quartets 79 some events pushes them past analogy. For instance, all historical events of magnitude are not only unique but in a sense unknowable in their actuality and entirety. Perhaps this is why moments like Charles I's retreat from Naseby become such powerful and evocative moments in Eliot's account of pilgrimage. The grace found in Four Quartets is in the suggestion that such magnitude can be found in utterly mundane moments, unworthy of historical notice. The `sudden illumination' described in `Dry Salvages' II cannot be equated with `a very good dinner' but good dinners are not excluded from possibly being such `moments of happiness'. They may or may not be as absolute as the Battle of Austerlitz, but they may be just as capable of bedazzlement. Moments of happiness and insight come unexpectedly, and they take one out of oneself. It is the return to oneself, however, and recollection of experience that allows the pilgrim soul to find meaning in experience. Having the experience but missing the meaning demands that through recollection and reflection the experience is moved `beyond any meaning we can assign to happiness'. As has been noted, the unbearable element of Marion's analysis should not be called either happiness or pain, but rather Joy or Glory. `Dry Salvages' locates this strange Joy firmly in an ethical context, as the pilgrim soul looks past the wild thyme and the winter lightning and even the very good dinner to compassion for the suffering of other people, who `change, and smile: but the agony abides'. Suffering has its own transcendent permanence, in oneself as well as in others, but it is in bearing witness to suffering in others ± that is, in receiving suffering (astonishingly, like a gift!) as a phenomenon of its own ± that it too can become transcendent. In our own suffering we struggle to alleviate it, and that struggle forces upon us the focusing energy of resistance, denying us the insight of meaning. But often in the suffering of others we are helpless to do more than bear witness. Even in these moments, perhaps especially in these moments, the unbearable and the unforeseeable agony become the Dry Salvages themselves, a landmark that can help lay a course or that can cause a wreck, but which is in itself `what it always was'. For Marion, saturated phenomena give us an experience of something immanent to the phenomenon, contained within the phenomenon itself and not reliant on the nature of the perceiving subject, nor in a transcendent Other being made manifest in the transaction. It is effectively a one-way street. In an effort to write pure and postmodern philosophy, Marion is careful to disclaim any attempt to read into his theory of the `saturated phenomenon' and of Givenness, a transcendental Giver: things give themselves. Eliot, however, feels free to situate in his poem a

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transcendent Giver ± an obscure and absconded Giver, perhaps, but something Other and Beyond that haunts the metaphysics of Four Quartets. In the Quartets, unattended moments are `hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses' ± they are not ends in and of themselves, nor are they autonomous things-unto-themselves, but rather they are pointers to another, and that Other is the Incarnation of the Logos. Eliot's epiphanies are Icons of the Invisible, which Marion classes among his `versions of the saturated', and which directed much of his earlier work. But despite Marion's reticence about the transcendent giver, he does let Incarnation slip into his discussion of saturation in this echo of the Gospel of St John: [T]here would appear a phenomenon saturated to the point that the world (in all senses of the word) could not accept it. Having come among his own, his own do not recognize it; having come into phenomenality, the absolutely saturated phenomenon could find no space for its display. But this denial of opening, therefore this disfiguring, still remains a manifestation.12 At the end of Being Given, Marion suggests where this all might lead, particularly by raising the question of ethics. If we subject-I's are in fact `gifted receivers' from all the alterity around us, could this be a route to reclaiming the dignity of terms such as gratitude and love as the foundations of moral agency? Eliot has no doubts on this topic: the path through Little Gidding, a place where `prayer has been valid', leads ultimately to questions of right `action'. And those actions, he argues, are always grounded in the same transcendent Love that Dante found in his beatific vision of the ultimate saturated phenomenon. Moody finds the object of this Love, as it resides in the pilgrim Soul, somewhat obscure, but Raine seems to feel it is of a piece with Eliot's other religious writings, which betray an `unbiddable intransigence of sincere belief'.13 Love is less the feeling inside that moves the pilgrim to search than it is the absolute and ideal goal of the pilgrimage, it is the beatific vision. On this point, Eliot stands with Dante, his essential medievalism well intact. A further point on which Eliot and Marion may differ lies in the reaction of the pilgrim-subject to these encounters with saturated phenomena. There are suggestions in Marion that the perceiver should become increasingly (entirely?) passive as eventually even the need for reduction is done away with. In other places, he suggests, as his translators have pointed out, that the event is `endless' in that `its hermeneutic can never be completed'.14 Eliot's pilgrim-persona, on the other hand, engages

Selfhood and the experience of the transcendent in Four Quartets 81 in a relentless struggle not only to understand the meaning of the experiences, to grasp the unknowable Other that is hinted at in these fingerposts, but also to find language to express the experience of having a hint and a guess given to you. On the question of purifying the dialect of the tribe so that our language can at least suggest the ineffable, Four Quartets comes closest to Dante's Purgatorio. Recall the lines from Canto Four, where Dante describes seeing something so `saturated' that it `holds the soul strongly turned to it, time passes, and we do not notice its passage'.15 This is just one of the many moments in which Dante's own `intolerable wrestle with words' anticipates Eliot's ± it is the nature of the beast for poets of transcendence. In the Inferno the lament is always about the impossibility of the language to be commensurate with the poet's imagination, as it is in the Paradiso, but in the Purgatorio, the problem is not just about what the imagination wishes to embody forth, but this struggle with both language and time. Heaven and Hell are eternal, but Purgatory is measured; time passes there, people change, and smile. So the purgatorial nature of Four Quartets pulls together the problem of the poetics of ineffability and the frustrations of an imagination moving through time. In the final analysis, Four Quartets represents experiences of phenomena that are remarkably similar to the saturated phenomena advanced by Marion, but the poems are oddly resistant to postmodern analysis. They are so explicitly `about' the absent Absolute that to invoke that which haunts the texts is simply to play into Eliot's hand. Some readers are more than happy to do just that, but it doesn't feel much like the text is being deconstructed. In a sense, it anticipates postmodern concerns about the slippage of language, but it so often proclaims this slippage that it must be seen as one of the tenets of reality Four Quartets advances. To deconstruct the central claims of the Four Quartets then would entail positing the presence of clear affirmations of the capacity of language to contain the ineffable. In a way, Four Quartets comes pre-deconstructed since, as Craig Raine has wisely pointed out, `the admission of failure is a deliberate theme of Four Quartets'.16 The aporia of that `deliberate theme', one supposes, would lead to a kind of success. Four Quartets also anticipates its stylistic critics who complain of its prosaic passages and moments of flatness ± `the poetry does not matter'. And yet, of course the poetry does matter, as it did for Dante and Milton, and every great poet of transcendence. It is easy enough to say, as many have, that Paradise Lost is, given its stated purpose of justifying the ways of God to Man, a quite magnificent failure. But with the Four Quartets, the theme is ineffability and

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half-knowledge, which insulates it from both the presumptions of Milton and Dante, but also from their grandness. It takes up Dante, but must write Dante small, for a rather sad and faithless epoch. While the poetry admits its failure to find language adequate to the extraordinary glimpses of transcendence it takes as its incidental object, as a record of the progress of a soul through a modern landscape of disenchantment, Four Quartets succeeds rather well.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16

Cf. infra, Chapter 14, p. 178±9. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 140±68. David A. Moody, `Four Quartets: music, word, meaning and value', in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. A. David Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 146. On this particular experience, cf. infra, Chapter 14, p. 176±7. Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 3. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 199. Ibid., 203. Ibid., 204. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 211. Craig Raine, T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 95. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies in Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner & Vincent Berrand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), xv. Robert M. Durling, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Purgatorio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 65. Raine, op. cit., 108.

Works Cited Durling, Robert M. (2003), The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Purgatorio. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Selfhood and the experience of the transcendent in Four Quartets 83 Eliot, T. S. (1971), The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909±1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Eliot, T.S. (1950), `Dante', in Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Marion, Jean-Luc (2002), Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marion, Jean-Luc (2002), In Excess: Studies in Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner & Vincent Berrand. New York: Fordham University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1984), After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd Edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Moody, A. David (1994), `Four Quartets: music, word, meaning and value', in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. A. David Moody. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Raine, Craig (2006), T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1988), Time and Narrative: III, trans. Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1992), Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shaw, Philip (2006), The Sublime. New York & London: Routledge.

7

`If / Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead': forgiveness and the body in Auden's post-conversion poems Kathleen Bell

The centrality of the body in mainstream Christian theology has often been a source of discomfort to believers. Despite the credal statement `I believe in the resurrection of the body' recited at Anglican services, it is probably fair to suggest that most Christians believe only in the persistence of something they term `soul' or `spirit'. Early dualists, such as Gnostics and Manichaeans, regarded the body as a source of evil while even the anti-Gnostic Irenaeus seems to believe in the persistence of a soul which takes shape from its bodily habitation, rather than resurrection of the flesh that so visibly suffers and decays. But this belief was at the core of Auden's regained Christianity when he returned to Anglican worship after his move to the United States, his relationship with Chester Kallman and the beginning of World War II. His meditation on the Italian landscape, `In Praise of Limestone', links a belief in the resurrection of bodies to belief in the forgiveness of sins; both are introduced with the conditional `If' indicating that both equally require a deliberate act of faith. The syntactic repetition links them with the pairing towards the end of the subsequent sentence; this offers `faultless love' (presumably the love of Christ which is an essential part of redemption) and the afterlife that resurrected bodies may achieve.1 This linking indicates how important the body is in Auden's post-conversion poetry. Bodies are everywhere: as metaphorical landscape and literal home to microscopic creatures, as everyday companion, erotic object and subject of abuse and torture. Such contemplation is almost always linked to his theological outlook and a concern to act and write ethically. Auden's determined focus on the body is observed by Humphrey Carpenter, Auden's first major biographer, and discussed ± briefly in

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relation to religion ± in Edward Mendelson's Later Auden. Both treat Auden's attitude to his homosexuality as a key question and are surprised that, as a Christian, he has few problems with his sexuality. Mendelson mentions a key figure ± Charles Williams (poet, novelist, critic and theologian) in this context. Recent critics also make significant points; Richard R. Bozorth, whose chief concern is Auden as homosexual poet, helpfully observes that some poems, notably the `Epithalamium' for Rita Auden and Peter Mudford, `The Common Life' and `In Praise of Limestone', use homosexuality to signify what is universally human in a religious context.2 Meanwhile Arthur Kirsch, in Auden and Christianity, examines Auden's view of the body in relation to Augustinian theology and is particularly clear on Auden's post-conversion belief that eros (sexual love) finds fulfilment in Christian agape. However, while Kirsch's study refers to Auden's concern with the material substance of bodies it does not explore this in any detail; perhaps Kirsch also tries too hard to make his subject consistent when identifying a Christian Auden in the pre-Christian poems. Mendelson locates Auden's changed relation to the body in 19483 and this is certainly a point at which his concern with substance became apparent. However, physical elements in the long wartime poems, especially The Age of Anxiety, in which the characters traverse a metaphorical landscape resembling a human body, suggest that Auden's conversion in 1940±1 is the real turning point4 ± and the change from the 1930s poetry is startling. A high percentage of Auden's poems of the 1930s are love poems, although the political concerns of the time obscured this element for a while.5 While love and sex permeate the 1930s poems, bodies and their gendered characteristics barely register, laying the poems open to a heterosexual reading. Arguably the most significant work of this period is the sequence Auden sent to Isherwood in late 1934, although its significance may have been missed because the poems involved have never been published consecutively.6 The sequence entwines love with wider political concerns, ending with the image of a flood, analogous to the impersonal flood of history in Auden's birthday poem for Isherwood of the following year.7 But love and beauty, identified with mortality, guilt and corruption, endanger the progress of history. The sequence begins: `Turn not towards me lest I turn to you: / Stretch not your hands towards your harm and me'8 and includes the warning, set against the background of the Reichstag fire trial, that love is deaf to political and ethical imperatives ± the poet hears `The voice of love saying lightly, brightly ± / Be Lubbe, be

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Hitler, but be my good / Daily, nightly.'9 This leads to the reflection that the beautiful beloved possesses `The power that corrupts.'10 Freud and Plato are the chief sources for Auden's attitude. According to John Pudney, Auden was familiar with Freud's work in his schooldays.11 He probably had some knowledge of Plato at this time since his father was involved in the Birmingham Classical Society. By the 1930s, Auden's reading of Freud synthesized disparate elements while drawing on other psychoanalytic theorists.12 According to Auden at this period desire derived from the Id and had to be governed and socialized; ideally it should be transformed by displacement and rejection into the constructive Eros of which Freud writes in Civilization and its Discontents ± the force that binds societies together for their own good and counters Thanatos, the death instinct of societies.13 But Auden's understanding of Freud was also inflected by his reading of Plato. At times he alludes to the charioteer of the Phaedrus, in which the ill-managed horse represents the unruliness of the body,14 and to the Symposium in which Diotima's speech, recounted by Socrates, treats the love of a beautiful boy as the necessary starting point for the soul's ascent to love of absolute beauty. For Freud and Plato ± as Auden read and interpreted them in the 1930s ± nonconsummation or sexual rejection is the path to good; the erotic impulse must be transcended or sublimated so that the wrecking and dangerous potential of beauty can be bypassed.15 At most there can be a small period of tenderness, as when the lover gazes down on the sleeping beloved (`Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful')16 and wishes him well. In wider political terms, for Auden in the 1930s, sexual desire and the body represent the selfish individualism that prevents necessary political action in a time of crisis; apart from occasional moments of unselfish tenderness, Auden makes little distinction between sexual desire and the desire for individual salvation, instanced by the reference to Plotinus and the flight of the alone to the Alone in The Dance of Death17 and the suggestion in `September 1, 1939' that society is at risk because individuals desire `to be loved alone'.18 Particularly towards the end of the 1930s and at the very beginning of the 1940s, Auden counterbalances the selfishness of the individual with two things: the innocence of the beasts, beautiful in their unawareness of themselves in time,19 and the idea of neighbourhood, a solution to aloneness which he interprets variously as `We must love one another or die',20 an ideal dinner party21 and a community of choice.22 Both were to remain important to him. Conversion added the idea of Christian communion, the value of the unique individual and transformation through the redemption and resurrection of the body.

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While the pre-Christian poems are concerned with the group as the `right field of force'23 ± the place where constructive connections are made between humans ± the Christian Auden has to reconsider not just the individual in its various manifestations but also the physical body, its desires and natural actions. This means more than merely accepting physical desire and its accomplishment. Auden's first major postconversion poems, For the Time Being and The Sea and the Mirror, treat sexual desire largely within a heterosexual context. There are gay and camp references for those in the know while poems dealing with marriage allude implicitly to Auden's relationship with Chester Kallman. (Auden wore a wedding ring at this time and the biographical note on dust jackets described him as `married'.) Such physical references as there are lack specificity, allowing the reader space to interpret them in relation to a range of sexual possibilities.24 In The Age of Anxiety, Auden, for the first time, introduces a major character who is evidently gay. While Malin's desires are unsatisfied, the context of the long poem finds nothing more sinful in Malin's desires than in those of the other three characters, who are likewise unsatisfied. The treatment of unsatisfied desire has changed from the 1930s; there is no suggestion the planned consummation is wicked or dangerous.25 When, in `The Masque', the four characters prepare for young Emble to spend the night with the older Rosetta, they celebrate an improvised rite resembling marriage. Emble's drunken sleep which prevents consummation is a disappointment. Auden as narrator not only approves the possible sexual encounter but offers it as a plausible symbol of `the peace and affection of which the whole world stands so desperately in need'.26 At first the word `seems' maintains an ironic distance from the desires of the characters but finally the narrator declares that this casual attraction `was of immense importance' (my emphasis), although its precise import is never quite explored. If anything, therefore, the failure of the sexual encounter is to be seen as representative of human failings. This leads Rosetta and Malin to contemplate other failures from their past, placing themselves firmly within history; through this, each turns to the faith ± Jewish and Christian respectively ± of their past, present and future. The Age of Anxiety is a Christian poem with minimal Christian references, drawing its title from the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. However, its focus is more grounded in the work of Charles Williams, who also uses the human body as landscape in his two volumes of Taliessin poems.27 Williams's influence on Auden, from their first meeting at the Oxford University Press offices in 1937, has been acknowledged by Kirsch and Mendelson; Auden carried from that meeting a sense of human

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sanctity which he later proclaimed a key element in his return to Christianity. Alice Hadfield's biography of Williams refers to a correspondence with Auden during the war; while it is unlikely that any letters have survived, it is reasonable to assume that their topics included Williams's literary and theological concerns at the time. Ideas about the body ± especially the potential for grace through the erotic body ± occur frequently in his writings. Reinhold Niebuhr's theology of the same period asserts the resurrection of the body, but differs in seeing sensuality as a product of the relation of the fallen spirit to nature.28 While Auden, as Kirsch observes, occasionally echoes the distinction Niebuhr makes between flesh and body, he is usually closer to Williams, frequently echoing a favourite quotation from Julian of Norwich which links sensuality to Redemption, `In the self-same point that our soul is made sensual, in the self-same point is the City of God ordained to him from without beginning.'29 Williams further suggests in a 1941 article that the Fall affected the soul, mind and spirit but not the body. The body, being natural, remained innocent, in the image of God, and the means to salvation. Williams writes, `It was that power in him which we call the soul that sinned. It was not the power which we call the flesh. It was therefore the ``supernatural'' which sinned. The ``natural'', as we call it now, did not.'30 This is further elucidated in Williams's writing on Dante, which stresses that God as Love is the motive force in Dante's substantial desire for Beatrice.31 This is, I think, the key to understanding the treatment of the body in Auden's post-conversion poems. In particular, he does not write more confidently of his homosexuality despite being a Christian but because he is a Christian. His acceptance of the physical body as innocent (because incapable of sin) is a counter to the heresies of Manicheans and Gnostics, who regard flesh as either inherently evil or transitory and therefore irrelevant. For Auden Christianity is a religion of human substance: God was made flesh through the Incarnation. Ursula Niebuhr's essay recalling Auden notes this emphasis in Auden's 1944 review article `Augustus to Augustine', which distinguishes between classical and Christian thought, arguing that in Christianity `there is nothing intrinsically evil in matter; the order of nature is inherent in its substance'.32 These elements of Auden's belief were particularly important in his decision ± an existential choice ± to return to the Anglican church of his childhood. Faced with fascism in Europe, Auden sought a standpoint which declared absolutely that the Nazis and their methods were wrong. At a very early stage he was concerned with the ill-treatment of bodies,

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and Christianity, as explained by Charles Williams, with its focus on the body, stated clearly that torture, for instance, was always wrong. Hatred of the mistreatment of bodies runs through Auden's work from the 1939 book Journey to a War in which photographs of two sets of barely identifiable human remains are labelled, respectively, `The Innocent' and `The Guilty'. Later, in `The Shield of Achilles', the three executed men are described in terms which evoke the crucifixion: A crowd of ordinary decent folk Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke As three pale figures were led forth and bound To three posts driven upright in the ground. The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others.33 The metrical shift at the line `The mass and majesty of this world' underlines the almost simultaneous evocation of other-worldly and worldly kingdoms. For a moment the `majesty of this world' seems to hint at the kingship of Christ but the worldly power is removed two lines later ± this `majesty' `lay in the hands of others'. This central scene is not just the crucifixion of Christ but any scene of public torture watched without intervention by `ordinary decent folk'. While the execution of three figures recalls the crucifixion, no distinction is drawn between any of the nameless three; all suffer shame and are robbed of human dignity through the maltreatment of their bodies.34 This distinction between self and body is one that Auden visits elsewhere. In the poems of the late 1940s and early 1950s the body is mortal but not guilty.35 A similar, happier separation between self and body can be found in the opening poem of `Horae Canonicae', composed before `The Shield of Achilles'.36 The day, in which the crucifixion is to be enacted or re-enacted, commences in a moment of sinlessness on waking when the individual is nameless, outside history and disembodied, `for the will has still to claim / The adjacent arm as my own.' Sinfulness comes not through association with the body, however, but by the day's first act of will. With the act of breathing comes wishing and a return to the fallen condition marked by two literary references: to the title of Milton's Paradise Lost and the line from Shakespeare's Henry IV Part II, `We owe God a death.' The act of will which claims the body returns the waker to his fallen state. The innocent body is no equal but a compelled

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accomplice; while the name, representing consciousness and will, implicates the self in history and responsibility.37 The sequence `Horae Canonicae' continues through `Terce', `Sext' and `Nones' to imply that it is the specifically human element of mind that makes the crucifixion possible and thus causes guilt followed by a flight from the truth.38 But in all this the innocent body enacts a divinely given order. At the conclusion of the day, the rhythm of the flesh restores order by natural bodily processes as `essential fluids / Flow to renew exhausted cells'. The late poem, `A New Year Greeting' is addressed to `Yeasts, / Aerobics and Anaerobics' and other creatures for whom Auden's body is their territorial landscape,39 playfully suggesting the human landscape as an image of a fallen world, whose apocalypse will arrive as the poet, at death, faces his own day of judgement. Meanwhile the poem `The Geography of the House' in the sequence about Auden and Kallman's home in Kirchstetten, takes the lavatory as its subject. Modern plumbing is praised (Auden had no wish to live without modern conveniences) but the poem's main focus is the act of excretion as primal pleasure and moral metaphor. Within the poem's wider Christian context, indicated in references to Luther, St Augustine and an unspecific prophet (although praise is also given, camply, to Mrs Nature) excretion reminds the poet of his bodily origins by offering a physical exemplar of his art. Artists, the poem proclaims, spend their lives trying to produce a `De-narcisissus-ized en- / -during excrement.' Meanwhile the meanness is imaged as the `Constipated miser' and the phrase `Bowels of compassion' offers an image of ideal kindness.40 The body may be physically imperfect in these ruminations but it is not sinful. Indeed, its reminder of animal nature leads to humility. The later poems share the idea that human bodies ± insofar as they can be separated from mind, spirit, will and soul ± are in a state of prelapsarian innocence in which human beings are drawn together. Auden insists that Christianity focus on the substantial; a faith in which `God is edible' allows its adherents to `call a fine / Omelette a Christian deed.'41 This is both playful and serious; the act of feeding echoes Christian generosity and various meals (including the Last Supper) recounted in the gospels. Within this framework, the mutual sexual acts of the body may also be deeds of creaturely innocence which carry sacramental echoes. Kirsch's account of `Ferdinand to Miranda' points out that while the poem deals with forgiveness and innocence it is also, as Auden wrote to Isherwood, a poem that `describes fucking in completely abstract words'42 ± though with a marital setting and abstract language. Harder to deal with is the

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deliberately pornographic poem, `The Platonic Blow', circulated privately and published unofficially in various underground magazines in the 1960s. There is no authoritative text and the poem is not included in the Collected Poems but it is undoubtedly an Auden poem, published against his wishes, and written in about 1948.43 Like the published poem `The Memorial for the City',44 the poem imitates Charles Williams's late poetic style and echoes his concern for the body. In this way it matches the problem of content ± how to write an effective pornographic poem ± with the problem of style (how to use the internal rhymes and combination of abstraction with precise physical references that are features of Williams's poetry). Readers of the appropriate gender and sexual orientation must judge for themselves whether it achieves the end which, according to Auden, is the test of successful pornography: causing an erection in the majority of its male readers. However, a theological approach makes it possible to identify important elements in the poem which counter Manichean heresies; these work by relating the body to key Christian elements and detailing the encounter in a manner which is not guilty but celebratory. The poem begins with an encounter between the narrator (to some extent identified with the poet) and a young working-class man with whom he appears to have little in common, a Polish-Irish mechanic to whom the poet is in obvious senses a social superior. But in Christian terms, the mechanic, Bud, manifests the grace of God in two ways: he is, sexually, exceptionally well-endowed and he is also childlike and innocent ± `Like a little boy' and, when he undresses, `shameless'45 (in the context of the poem he is free of the shame which is an effect of the Fall). Thus the worldly hierarchies are at once inverted; it is the older, wealthier, more articulate poet who seeks out the beautiful, inarticulate innocent. Our eyes met. I felt sick. My knees turned weak. I couldn't move. I didn't know what to say. In a blur I heard words, myself like a stranger speak `Will you come to my room?' Then a husky voice `O.K.'46 The young man's name is no accident. In his poem `Herman Melville' Auden has seen Evil as `helpless like a lover'47 before the Handsome Sailor whose only flaw is a stammer. But in this version of Billy Budd the poet stands for Claggart and sexual pleasure replaces the culminating deaths.48 The mechanic is the boy next door ± literally the poet's neighbour ± who immediately accepts the poet's invitation. Undoing the fly of his jeans, the poet releases and admires the young man's penis (`a work of mastercraft'

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suggests the role of the Creator God) which is described as `A royal column, ineffably solemn and wise.'49 The adverb `ineffably' is important here, since it refers to qualities which, like religious truths and experiences, are beyond speech. The poet kneels to take the young man's penis in his mouth ± the action is both practical and humble ± when the young man pushes him gently away and, for the greater pleasure of the poet, undresses, approaching him as an equal ± `We aligned mouths.' The poem invites us to marvel at the generosity of the young man as well as his innocent enjoyment of pleasure; the phrases `all his pores open to joy' and `I adored the grace / Of the male genitalia' allude not merely to transitory pleasure but to Christian joy and grace. And Bud's exclamation `O Jesus!' as he `melted into what he felt'50 immediately prior to the moment of ejaculation is both naturalistic and religious; melting into the world of sensation is a transitory return to lost innocence. Thus the young man's `hot spunk'51 becomes the gift of innocence to experience in the mutuality of pleasure ± a secular grace and blessing mirroring the experience of the Mass. The theology of Irenaeus, one of Auden's favourite early Fathers of the Church,52 asserts that the incarnation would have occurred even if the Fall had not happened; in some ways the innocence of Bud ± like his namesake, Melville's hero ± takes the reader back to the possibilities of joy in the flesh in an unfallen world. Meanwhile the mutual sensuality between unlike but equal partners evokes the City of God.53 This poem may not be central to Auden's work, but it does help clarify Auden's thought and aids interpretation of such major poems as `In Praise of Limestone'. The sexual element in the poem is clearest in the earlier, 1952, version which sees the landscape as a fit background for `the nude young male who lounges / Against a rock, displaying his dildo',54 anticipating the later passage ± immediately after the credal references to forgiveness of sins and resurrection of the body ± which includes in its transformations the `modifications of matter' into `Innocent athletes'. Though punctuation and syntax are uncertain here, these seem to be made, like Bud and like fountains, `solely for pleasure' as representations of the blessed.55 Auden's celebration of the body is closely linked to his sense of political responsibility and, in the 1940s and early 1950s, the assertion of the sinless body was central to his perspective on the world. But while Auden values and celebrates the pleasure-giving possibilities of bodies, he remains concerned with the body's parallel ability to suffer, and this propels Auden back into the world of social responsibility and political action. In 1945, Auden visited Germany as a member of the US Bombing

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Survey. This experience affected him deeply but he said and wrote little about it.56 Reinhold Niebuhr asked him to undertake a commission while there ± to find out, if he could, what had happened to Niebuhr's friend, the Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer subsequently became a major influence on Auden's Christianity, inspiring the existential poem `Friday's Child'.57 The knowledge of Bonhoeffer's fate ± imprisoned for helping Jews to escape to Switzerland and executed for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler ± served to remind Auden further of what bodies could suffer and the consequent need for political action. While Auden warns against the direct involvement of poets in politics, warning that catastrophe is for poets a source of valuable material, the poems in which he suggests his capacity for submission to a conquering army or oppressive regime often have the effect of provoking readers into opposite declarations of resistance, if necessary. `The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning' shows the poet collaborating with a new regime and adapting the love poem on which he is working to lines in praise of the new totalitarian leader. Auden's ironic approach, instanced by the couplet `Some epithets, of course, like lily-breasted / Need modifying to, say, lionchested'58 can still evoke the attacks it anticipates as critics are liable to argue that the poem praises dishonesty and collaboration. The attacks are, however, part of the point.59 This assertion, like that in `Thanksgiving for a Habitat' that, in the event of war, the poet will `of course / assume the submissive posture'60 takes up the ironic posture proclaimed in `We Too Had Known Golden Hours'61 and invites the reader into an intelligent, thoughtful and questioning relationship with the poems. A similar irony and indirectness can be found in Auden's response to the writings of the political theorist Hannah Arendt. Auden reviewed Arendt's book The Human Condition in laudatory terms; he later became a friend of Arendt although the relationship was sufficiently distant for Arendt to be taken aback when Auden suddenly proposed marriage to her late in his life. The Human Condition is, like most of Arendt's work, concerned with human relationships to the world of shared experience and political action. She divides humans into three categories: animal laborans whose chief concern is with necessity and whose leisure is concerned with consumption; homo faber who fabricates durable goods which are sold or exchanged in the marketplace; and the man of speech and action who takes the risk of engagement in the public realm with unpredictable outcomes. Auden approved of much of what Arendt said. However, his Christian concern with the body would seem to elevate the animal laborans. In most of his response Auden sidesteps this by eliding the animal laborans with the

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mass and contrasting the mass with the individuality of human bodies.62 A more serious problem is the treatment of homo faber, since Auden himself falls into this category as a fabricator of poems who sells his work. Auden's immediate engagement with these theories, at a personal level, is evident in the poem `On Installing an American Kitchen in Lower Austria', later part of the sequence `Thanksgiving for a Habitat'. The first text took its epigraph from Brecht: `Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral'; later Englished into the new title, `Grub First, then Ethics'. Although the poem is dedicated to Margaret Gardiner, the Brecht quotation is a mild corrective to Arendt, reminding her that all humans are creatures of necessity, whatever their intervention in the public realm. The poem addresses her arguments, beginning as a formal lament for Thomas Telford, John Muir and Vinyian Board, who changed history without entering the public realm in the way Arendt describes. It then uses Arendt's distinction between labour and work to point out that, in the modern kitchen, the cook is no longer a toiling prisoner of others' necessity. The new kitchen insists that `banausics' ± a Greek term revived by Arendt in her discussion of homo faber63 ± can be liberals and a cook who makes a fine omelette may be a `pure artist',64 unconcerned with the commercial or utilitarian value of his creation and protected, by the wonders of modern technology, from the degradation of the body that the Greeks despised. Auden's adjustment to Arendt is a minor one since he implicitly accepts her view that the means±end relationship to which the term refers must never be set up as standards to rule the world; he makes exceptions and insists on complications rather than attacking the argument as a whole. Developing from this point, Auden further confuses and complicates Arendt's categories by employing another of her key distinctions ± between power and force. Auden perceives an ideal City, scattered over the earth, whose inhabitants, without papers, are instantly recognizable to one another ± and the City's foes. Where the Power lies remains to be seen, The Force, though, is clearly with them: [. . .] all we ask for, Should the night come when comets blaze and mere break, Is a good dinner, that we May march in high fettle, left foot first, To hold her Thermopylae.65

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The City Auden envisages with its `vagabond forum' is based securely on Arendt. It is a place where political speech and action matter, created wherever in the world its citizens meet. In Arendt's account it is a place of power (in the sense of potential) opposed to force, where action and speech occur in relation to other people, with unpredictable effects and boundless consequences. The boundlessness puts it literally `beyond the pale'.66 As Arendt describes it: The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. `Wherever you go, you will be a polis' [. . .] It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly.67 References to the City in earlier poems make it inevitable that readers interpret this reference too in Christian terms, and Arendt's own early work on Augustine gives her and Auden a common basis for political philosophy. However, Auden's Christian beliefs compel him to place a greater emphasis both on individual action and on the body; he cannot simply dismiss animal laborans if flesh is both innocent and capable of resurrection. The `good dinner' is therefore not incidental but an act of Christian communion, although shared with non-Christians, including Chester Kallman, the cook of Auden's household, and Arendt herself. This city is more than the polis of friendship68 envisaged in New Year Letter, since its denizens recognize one another on first meeting but its nature is not entirely clear from the poem itself, except ± and this is vital ± that citizens find one another in opposition to the employment of force by rulers. The world of necessity and bodily pleasure ± here imaged as food ± is not merely something for which God can be praised but also the means by which citizens, who may have power, may be practically strengthened in their opposition to violent injustice. In Auden's theology and politics the body serves as the impetus to virtue and justice. The tortured body of Christ, in `Whitsunday in Kirchstetten', as in the better-known poems of `Horae Canonicae', immediately recalls political oppression ± not just in totalitarian Eastern Europe where visits to churches and to brothels are equally subject to disapproval, but also in the British Empire, whose Christianization of its

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subjects included the imposition of unnecessary shame and death from previously unknown diseases and which leaves a legacy of deserved guilt and danger: it could be the looter's turn for latrine duty and the flogging block, my kin who trousered Africa, carried our smell to germless poles.69 This sense of shared European guilt for bodily oppression enables Auden to align himself with his Austrian neighbours in the wake of World War II.70 His reflections follow the elevation of the Host, when, as Auden puts it, `the Body of the Second Adam / is shown to some of his torturers'.71 This moment in the Mass forces the visualization of enemies but also recalls what humans have in common. It implies a Christian and human imperative to resist the rule of force, even when sanctioned by government, and to believe in the possibility that the world can improve. These political reflections, for Auden, sit easily with the Catholic Mass which he attended every Sunday when resident in Kirchstetten. The body is a link to the incarnate Body of Christ and thus to contemporary victims of oppression and torture, recalling Jesus's teaching in Matthew 25: `Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.' But the body also recalls creatureliness and perfection lost in the Fall. In `Vespers' Auden identifies himself as an Arcadian, desiring a return to Eden, as opposed to the Utopian, who wishes to create the New Jerusalem on earth.72 (For Auden, the Utopian is dangerous since his desire to create the New Jerusalem on earth will always convince him that the ends justify the means.) In one of Auden's last poems, `Nocturne', he returns to an Arcadian ideal and the perfection of animals, which are finished unlike immature, neotonous man;73 for animals `can and ought are the same' and their `timely repetitions' and respect for `the privacy of others' offer humans a necessary but unattainable image of an ideal world. Their perfection is, of course, an aspect of their harmony with their bodies; as creatures they still possess `the Innocence / that we somehow freaked out of'. But by returning to the idea of animal innocence, Auden suggests that we can all, whether led by Christian hope or political ideal, learn to imagine `the Mansion of Gentle Joy' and find strength in a hostile world `to dare the Dangerous Quest.'74

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Notes 1 2

3 4

5

6

7

8

W.H. Auden, Nones (London: Faber and Faber, 1952),13, ll. 84±93. Richard R. Bozorth, Auden's Games of Knowledge: poetry and the meanings of homosexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 236±8 and 250±2. See especially Bozorth's comment on `The Common Life' which suggests that Auden treats `the model for heterosexual marriage as long-term homosexual love'. E. Mendelson, Later Auden (London: Faber and Faber 1999), 277 ff. It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that Auden's relationship with Kallman rather than his conversion was the main factor in Auden's change of attitude. However, important poems written after the relationship had been established but prior to Auden's conversion ± for example the Freud elegy and the songs dealing with the love of Slim and Tiny in Paul Bunyan (1939±41), for instance Act II Scene I, `Move, move from the trysting stone' in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings 1939±1973, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 38, like the slightly earlier elegies for Yeats and Toller ± focus on a self that is largely distinct from the body. The poems `The Dark Years' and `In Sickness and in Health' foreshadow the change of emphasis, the first asking that `the shabby structure of indolent flesh / give a resonant echo to the Word' (ll. 65±6) and the second entreating, `Force our desire, O Essence of Creation, / To seek Thee always in Thy substances' seeing the body as the means to Divine justice (ll. 84±8). While the second poem plainly alludes to Auden's relationship with Kallman (Auden started wearing a wedding ring at around this time) both share a concern with God, incarnation and human flesh. Hannah Arendt, in Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden: a Tribute (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1975), 184, characterizes Auden and Brecht as `profoundly unpolitical' writers who were thrust into politics like Robespierre by an urge to help the unfortunate; this seems an exaggeration. For details of the sequence, see W. H. Auden, The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), 423±4. (All subsequent references to this text in these notes are given as EA.) EA 155±7 `To a Writer on his Birthday' ll. 94±6 `all sway forward on the dangerous flood / Of history, that never sleeps or dies, / And, held one moment, burns the hand.' EA 146 XVIII±I ll. 1±2.

98 9 10 11

12

13

14

15

16 17

18 19

20 21

22

23 24

25

Ecstasy and Understanding EA 152±4 XXII ll. 64±6. Ibid., l. 67. Humphrey Carpenter, W.H. Auden: A Biography (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 40. E.g. Homer Lane, whose ideas Auden learned from his friend John Layard, and Georg Groddeck. The elegy `In Memory of Sigmund Freud' seems to personify Thanatos in the figure of Hate, whose clientele `think they can be cured by killing' (CP 216 ll. 25±7) and divides love into the mourning figures of `Eros, builder of cities' and `anarchic Aphrodite' (CP 218 ll. 111±2). For instance, parodically, in the dialogue between Alan Norman's feet in Act II, Scene V of W. H. Auden and C. Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin or Where is Francis? (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), 112±5. Although Auden's poems seem to indicate the virtues of chastity so that the soul may accomplish its higher purposes, neither the poems nor biographies of Auden suggest that he himself attempted chastity. EA 207 V ll. 9±10. The Dance of Death (1933) in Auden and Isherwood (1988), 100, discussed by K. Bell, `The Flight of the Alone' in Newsletter No. 3 (1989) of the W.H. Auden Society (http://audensociety.org/03newsletter.html#P50_14985). EA 245±7 XLI `September 1, 1939' l. 66. See, for instance, the first stanza of `Fish in the unruffled lakes', EA 162±3 XXXIII. EA 245±7 XLI `September 1, 1939' l. 88. As in New Year Letter, as in Elizabeth Mayer's dinner party which is in Part I a civitas of assenting minds (CP 162 l. 50) and in Part III a `privileged community' and ideal image of the `real republic' (CP 177 ll. 855±6). Outlined in the 1939 letters to E. R. Dodds and, more bleakly, in New Year Letter. CP 190 ll. 1525 ff. EA 101±6 The Orators, Ode IV l. 201. See, for instance, poems cited in footnote 1, `Canzone', the treatment of Joseph's jealousy in For the Time Being and the poems of Ferdinand and Miranda in The Sea and the Mirror. While in the sonnet sequence discussed earlier non-consummation offers an outcome that may be of public and political good, any benefit is in Malin and Rosetta's disappointed contemplations which draw them towards ideas of faith. But the primary benefit of such contemplation is individual rather than public or collective.

Forgiveness and the body in Auden's post-conversion poems 26

27 28

29

30

31

32

33

99

CP 396 The Age of Anxiety ll. 2414±5. Following Bozorth, it is possible to see the desired union of Emble and Rosetta as an instance in which homosexual encounters are presented as a model for heterosexual conduct. This is not to say that one-night stands are rare in heterosexual life but simply to acknowledge that Auden's experience was inevitably informed by homosexual `cruising'. Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars. See, for instance, Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937) (`The Fulfilment of Life'), 294: `The root of sin is in spirit and not in nature . . . Even when sin is not selfishness but sensuality, man's devotion to his physical life and to sense enjoyments differs completely from animal normality.' The same essay may appear close to Williams at times, e.g. 297: `The hope of resurrection of the body is preferable to the idea of the immortality of the soul because it expresses at once a more individual and social idea of human existence', but only Williams connects the innocent body with sensual and erotic elements. Quoted by Williams in The Descent of the Dove, 1939 and by Auden as the epigraph for `The Memorial for the City' and elsewhere. Charles Williams, `Natural Goodness' (1941) in Selected Writings, ed. Anne Ridler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 108. Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice (London: Faber and Faber, 1943) (beginning with quotation and translation), 255: A l'alta fantasia qui mancoÁ possa; ma giaÁ volgeva il mio disio e `l velle, sõÁ come rota ch'igualmente eÁ mossa, l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle. `Power failed the high imagination; but the Love which moves the sun and the other stars rolled my desire and my will, as if they were a wheel which is moved equally.' The final line is known everywhere. But the final line has a subordinate verb, and not the chief verb of the sentence. The important thing to Dante is not so much that Love moved the sun and the stars, as that Love rolled his own desire and will. [. . .] The wheel in which he rolls is the Empyrean; that is, the world of substance. W. H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose Volume II 1939± 1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 229. Ursula Niebuhr's recollections of Auden in Spender, op. cit. CP 454 ll. 34±40.

100 34 35

36

37

38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45

46 47 48

Ecstasy and Understanding Ibid. ll. 43±4. However, Auden also asserted, from the early 1940s until the end of his life, a firm belief in the resurrection of the body. According to Mendelson's dating in CP (confirmed by the publishing history) `Prime' was written in 1949 and `Nones' in 1950 (becoming the title poem of Auden's 1951 volume). `The Shield of Achilles' was composed in 1952 and `Lauds' was probably completed in the same year. Other poems in `Horae Canonicae' were probably written later. Given the history of composition, it seems sensible to consider `The Shield of Achilles' in relation to the concerns of the sequence. CP `Horae Canonicae ± 1. Prime' ll. 14, 23±4, 34±5 and 41. `We owe God a death' can be found in Shakespeare 2 Henry IV 3±2 l. 232. Ibid. `4. Nones' 481, ll. 68±70. CP 28 ll. 2±5 and 7±8. CP 527 `Thanksgiving for a Habitat ± VI. The Geography of the House' ll. 34, 39±40, 42 and 50. W. H. Auden, Homage to Clio (London: Faber: 1960), 25: `On Installing an American Kitchen in Lower Austria', ll. 63±4 (see also CP `Grub First, Then Ethics', 531). Kirsch quoting 1944 letter to Christopher Isherwood, op. cit., 63. Mendelson, Later Auden, 298. CP 450±3 composed 1949. `The Platonic Blow' ll. 13 and 64. There is no authorized edition of `The Platonic Blow' although it is widely available in a range of unauthorized publications. The sequence of the initial stanzas varies from edition to edition. I have chosen to quote and give line numbers referring to the 1965 edition, using the copy in the British Library, because this seems the most plausible of the versions I have seen. However, because of the history of the poem, which exists in a number of unauthorized editions, sometimes with spurious publication history, it is even more difficult than usual with Auden to regard any version as definitive. Ibid. ll. 9±12. CP 200, l. 24. This reading may seem surprising but it is helpful to consider `The Platonic Blow' in relation to Auden's account of Billy Budd in The EnchafeÂd Flood (pp.119±23). Although Auden is careful not to endorse what he takes to be Melville's Romanticism, he sees Billy as innocent, sinless and unconscious of guilt despite his experiences with `a certain Bristol Molly' (120). By contrast, Claggart, representing pride and the

Forgiveness and the body in Auden's post-conversion poems

49 50 51 52

53

54

55 56

57 58

101

demonic is also guilt-conscious and motivated by homosexual desire for Billy. Unable, because of pride, to acknowledge his loneliness and desire, Claggart instead sets in train the events which bring about his own and Billy's deaths. `The Platonic Blow' ll. 33 and 44. Ibid. ll. 69, 104, 110±11 and 132. Ibid. l. 136. Mendelson, Later Auden, 497. I am unable to say whether Auden read Irenaeus's works such as Adversus Haereses or commentaries on his work or both. A sense of the way Irenaeus was considered at the time can be derived from John Lawson's 1948 book, The Biblical Theology of St Irenaeus (London: The Epworth Press). Statements that might have been particularly attractive to Auden include, `Irenaeus constantly writes against the Gnostics, that the body is not the sinful element in man. The body has fellowship with the soul' (206± 7) and `Sin is wrong moral choice and not [. . .] defect of nature' (222). This is not to say that Auden regarded such encounters as sinless because in human encounters the mind, the will, the soul and the spirit would all be implicated, as they would be in both the writing and reading of `The Platonic Blow'. As he says in H. Griffin, Conversations with Auden, ed. D. Allen (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1981), `any description of the sexual act must be pornographic. Becoming conscious of it essentially changes the experience' (104). (The dates of Auden's dialogues with Griffin, which were transcribed after the event, are unclear but this passage occurs in the seventh dialogue, which was first published in 1953.) Nonetheless, it seems to me that, while pornographic by this account, the poem is a defiantly un-Manichean piece of pornography, thus answering in advance Auden's complaint about the pornography available from news-stands in `Doggerel by a Senior Citizen' (CP 638 l. 32). Text from Nones (London: Faber, 1951), 11, ll. 12±13 (emended in CP 414). Ibid. Nones, 13, CP 415, ll. 87±9. He had, apparently, planned a book, possibly to be co-written with James Stern. However Stern's account, The Hidden Damage, was written without Auden's collaboration. CP 509±10. CP 471, ll. 57±9.

102 59

60

61 62

63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73

74

Ecstasy and Understanding The poem also implicitly reminds its readers to mistrust poets' utterances on public affairs, creating a neat problem of logic as in the Paradox of the Liar expressed by Epimenides. `Thanksgiving for a Habitat ± II. Thanksgiving for a Habitat', CP 520 ll. 59±60. CP 471±2. However, as my earlier discussion of `The Geography of the House' may indicate, this poem offers a playful commentary on Arendt's treatment of bodies. I would suggest that Arendt's theories as advanced in The Human Condition are an important element of key ideas running through the sequence `Thanksgiving for a Habitat'. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 156±7: `Man, in so far as he is homo faber, instrumentalizes, and his instrumentalization implies a degradation of all things into means . . . It was for no other reason than this attitude of homo faber to the world that the Greeks in their classical period declared the whole field of the arts and crafts, where men work with instruments and do something not for its own sake but in order to produce something else, to be banausic, a term perhaps best translated by `philistine', implying vulgarity of thinking and acting in terms of expediency . . . Greek sculpture and architecture were by no means excepted from the verdict.' The echo of the term `banausic' and other phrases from Arendt's work suggest that this poem was composed as an almost immediate response to her book. Op. cit., 25, ll. 47±8. Ibid. 26, ll. 71±86. Arendt, op. cit., 190±1. Ibid. 198±9. CP 180 l. 988. CP 560 ll. 70±3. Auden was concerned to find what he had in common with collaborators, as evidenced by his poem to Josef Weinheber, CP 568±71. Ibid. ll. 55±6. CP `Horae Canonicae' 482±4. This returns to a theme from the 1930s poems; in `Our Hunting Fathers' Auden refers to the animals' `finished features' in contrast with humans. CP `Nocturne', 670, ll. 51, 54, 58, 49±50, 61 and 64.

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Works Cited Arendt, Hannah (1958), The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Auden, W. H. (1976), Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber. (Referenced as CP in the notes.) Auden, W. H. and Kallman, Chester (1993), The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings 1939±1973, ed. Edward Mendelson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Auden, W. H. and Isherwood, Christopher (1988), The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Plays, ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber. Auden, W. H. (2002), The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose Volume II 1939±1948, ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber. Auden, W. H. and Isherwood C. (1935), The Dog Beneath the Skin or Where is Francis? London: Faber and Faber. Auden, W. H. (1951), The EnchafeÂd Flood or The Romantic Iconography of the Sea. London: Faber and Faber. Auden, W. H. (1977), The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber. (Referenced as EA in the notes.) Auden, W. H. (1960), Homage to Clio. London: Faber and Faber. Auden, W. H. (1939), Journey to a War. London: Faber and Faber. Auden, W. H., MS letters to Professor and Mrs E. R. Dodds held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Auden, W. H. (1952), Nones. London: Faber and Faber. Auden, W. H. (1965), `The Platonic Blow'. New York: Fuck You Press. Bozorth, Richard R. (2001), Auden's Games of Knowledge: poetry and the meanings of homosexuality. New York: Columbia University Press. Carpenter, Humphrey (1981), W.H. Auden: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin. Dodds, E. R. (1923), Select Passages Illustrating Neoplatonism. London: SPCK. Freud, Sigmund (1930), Civilisation and its Discontents, trans. J. de la Riviere. London: Hogarth Press. Griffin, Harry (1981), Conversations with Auden, ed. D. Allen. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press. Groddeck, Georg (n.d.), The Book of the It: psychoanalytic letters to a friend. London: The C.W. Daniel Company. Hadfield, A. M. (1983), Charles Williams: An Exploration of his Life and Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirsch, Arthur (2005), Auden and Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Lawson, John (1948), The Biblical Theology of St Irenaeus. London: The Epworth Press. Melville, Herman (2003), Billy Budd, sailor, and other stories. London: Penguin. Mendelson, Edward (1999), Later Auden. London: Faber and Faber. Niebuhr, Reinhold (1937), Beyond Tragedy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Plato (2005), Phaedrus, trans. J. Rowe. London: Penguin. Plato (1999), Symposium, trans. C. Gill. London: Penguin. Spender, Stephen (ed.) (1975), W.H. Auden: a Tribute. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Stern, James (1990), The Hidden Damage. London: The Chelsea Press. W. H. Auden Society (1988 onwards), Newsletter. http://audensociety.org/ archives.html. Williams, Charles (1939), The Descent of the Dove: a short history of the Holy Spirit in the Church. London: Longman. Williams, Charles (1943), The Figure of Beatrice: a study in Dante. London: Faber and Faber. Williams, Charles (1944), The Region of the Summer Stars. London: Nicholson & Watson. Williams, Charles (1961), Selected Writings, ed. Anne Ridler. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Charles (1938), Taliessin through Logres. London: Oxford University Press.

8

Kathleen Raine's song of the living soul Annick Johnson

After her first years spent in the rural north of England and an education which made her discover and love the Romantic poets, Kathleen Raine (1908±2003) had some difficulty finding her way in the modernist landscape which characterized English poetry in the first half of the twentieth century. She first tried to fit into the canons of the time and adapt to the materialistic cultural climate, with the humility of one who thought that others had a greater claim to authority in literary matters than herself. It was after much wandering and suffering, due to her sense of isolation, and thanks to a number of providential encounters, that she came back to her initial intuition and Romanticism, with William Blake as a guide. These difficult circumstances can probably account for the time it took her to reach what she considered as poetic maturity, with the publication of her third book of poems, The Year One, in 1952. During the war years she thought she had found a haven for her thirsty soul when she encountered Catholicism and entered the Church under the influence of a few Catholic friends, including Graham Greene. Yet that period was short-lived and she felt unwilling from the start, because this conversion seemed to contradict her poetic inspiration almost as much as the materialistic trend had done before: On the night before I was to be received into the Church ± upon the Feast of the Epiphany ± my daimon visited me. I was, so he told me, doing wrong . . . can you, he asked, can you really form and fashion your imagination by those symbols to which you are about to bind yourself? And will you part from us, from the elementals who companioned your childhood, from the celestial hierarchies whose natures are free, as you were free in your childhood, and as you are ± yes ± as the poet in you is free even now?1

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This inner voice of protest of her `daimon' or spiritual inspirer made her interpret, mistakenly to my mind, her acceptance into the Catholic Church as an obligation to adhere to a new source of symbolism, and to renounce her former imaginative freedom. The experience strangely resembles the archetypal temptation in the Garden of Eden in which the serpent suggests to Eve that God forbade them to eat from all the fruit of the garden.2 Be that as it may, the poetess took the warning seriously and decided not to eat from the fruit of her former garden, with an infelicitous effect on the poems she wrote at that period, all to be found in the same book, Living in Time (1946), the second she published. It is true that her attempts at handling Christian symbolism in some of these poems were awkward. In one of them, dedicated to a Carmelite church destroyed by bombing at Kensington, she established an unconvincing parallel between the cold, windy chapels and the lives of the Virgin Mary and St Theresa of Lisieux: Rain is falling in the Lady Chapel (Mary had no shelter the night her son was born) ... The little saint of Lisieux, who felt the cold Has the east wind blowing through her room again3 It sounds as if being a Catholic implied a certain kind of piety, which here was rather artificially introduced. In the same poem, she took up an image from the great Spanish mystic Saint Teresa: `Teresa, a great lady, had a heaven in her / Like a castle, a strong and quiet house',4 trying to enter somebody else's inner life and metaphors but having stifled her own poetic voice. She certainly did not achieve the best of her capacities at that period, and she took up almost none of the poems from this book in further editions of her poetic works. To regain her former sources of inspiration, she thus felt almost compelled to move away from the Church, and found William Blake the perfect mentor who could lead her into the cultural territories of a spiritual tradition, mainly Neo-Platonic, which she had never explored before. This tradition also turned her towards India, whose spiritual and philosophical wisdom she became a great admirer of, and which she visited for the first time (and not the last) in 1982 at the age of 74. With her discovery of William Blake in 1945 and the following years, she became, as she had in fact always been, intimately convinced of the spiritual nature of man and the whole universe, which from then on she felt free and happy to express

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in a great variety of ways in her verse and critical works. This is why her poetry can be depicted, and is actually depicted by herself, as a song of the soul, reflecting an inner, spiritual reality: The poet, `once out of nature', aspires to be the voice of the soul and to speak from a knowledge not to be learned on earth of the timeless order of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is, as all know, within.5 It should be noted too that, although she moved away from the Church, whether the Protestant Church of her father and her childhood or the Catholic Church of her temporary conversion, she did not reject the Christian symbolism which was part of her cultural inheritance. On the contrary, this time she readily included it when it was in harmony with her own inner, spiritual experience. Kathleen Raine's determination to be faithful to her own poetic voice is thus a determination to express a spiritual nature of things too often ignored in the modern world: `The beautiful rain falls, the unheeded angel / lies in the street, spreadeagled under the footfall / that from the divine face wears away the smile'.6 It is interesting to mention that the idea of having an angel accompany every little drop of rain is present in the Islamic tradition. Here, however, the poet simply expresses how each element of the cosmos can be a messenger from Heaven and lift mind and soul to their divine origin, though this is sadly ignored by passers-by in modern cities. At the same period of her return to the Romantic tradition, a few but deeply felt moments of epiphany made her express in her verse her perception of `the living skein / Of which the world is woven'7 and, as Coleridge would say, to undertake `a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM'.8 She received this visionary power as a gift, the sign of a Heaven-sent mission, and through William Blake she also enriched that gift with the knowledge of the Neo-Platonic tradition, whose thread led her to William Butler Yeats, Carl Gustav Jung and Henry Corbin. The development of her poetic work is guided by that double source, inspiration and tradition, a tradition she did not only receive but also ardently defended. She chose a philosophical line of thought rather than a truly religious one out of the vast field of human culture she could have access to, but it is a tradition in which philosophy and religion, under the form of spiritual wisdom, come very close. In her initial poetic intuition, one finds the central notion that the poet, while he speaks from his soul, should at the same time be open to the world

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and give it the voice it lacks. The Spanish mystic poet Fernando Rielo expresses the same idea, relating it to the Biblical injunction made to man of giving a name to all created things and beings: `All creatures, of which man was made prince, ask the poet, once the poet is born, to utter the name, the song, the hymn of their elevation.'9 In the same way, Kathleen Raine asserts in the opening lines of her Collected Poems that the universe requires the voice of man: . . . the human word carved by our whispers in the passing air is the authentic utterance of cloud, the speech of flowing water, blowing wind, of silver moon and stunted juniper.10 Her song is the song of creation and her soul a vessel where it can be received, and expand. This is the meaning of the vision of `the sleeper at the rowan's foot' to be found in her `Northumbrian Sequence': The sleeper at the rowan's foot Dreams the darkness at the root, Dreams the flow that ascends the vein And fills with world the dreamer's brain. ... Oh do not wake, oh do not wake The sleeper in the rowan's shade, Mountains rest within his thought, Clouds are drifting in his brain, Snows upon his eyelids fall, Winds are piping in his song, ... World is resting in his dream.11 In this metaphor of the dreamer that makes the world exist while he dreams, one is led to recognize a tendency, as in Blake, to identify creation and creator, in so far as we seem to create the world we live in. This unity which exists between the inner and outer worlds is also for the poet an inextinguishable source of symbolism. Thanks to spiritual

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`organs of sense', another range of reality can be perceived beyond the material, sensitive plane: And it may be that soul extends Organs of sense Tuned to waves here scarcely heard, or only Heard distantly in dreams12 Her gift is to recapture the way in which such senses can act and relate us to another dimension and to one another: The voices of angels reach us Even now, and we touch one another Sometimes, in love, with hands that are not hands, With immaterial substance, with a body Of interfusing thought, a living eye, Spirit that passes unhindered through walls of stone And walks upon those waves that we call ocean.13 The power of re-creation of poetic language allows her to associate body and thought in one and the same immaterial reality, while the last two lines let the presence of Christ, walking on the waves of Lake Tiberiade, briefly pass through the poem. The lines that follow this redeeming presence, in the third part of the poem, read as follows: `Then, I had no doubt / That snowdrops, violets, all creatures, I myself / Were lovely, were loved, were love.'14 In this brief ecstatic instant, we understand how her poetry can express a new way of inhabiting the world, in this case with the perception of the love that is at the root of all things and requires other senses to be perceived. Again, symbolism has a great importance in this context: the visible world, indeed, becomes a reflection of higher, spiritual realities. All her life, Kathleen Raine retained this capacity to contemplate nature, not for itself only but for the wisdom it can convey, as in this poem written `In [her] Seventieth Year': Not lonely, now that I am old, But still companioned like a child Whose morning sun was friend enough, And beauty of a field of flowers Expressive as her mother's face.

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Ecstasy and Understanding So now, again, a tree in leaf, Light falling on a London wall ... A sparrow basking in the sun ± Each is the presence of the all, And all things bear the signature Of one unfathomable thought15

She expresses the beauty of nature in simple terms, and in objects familiar even to town-dwellers who do not have the memories she gathered in Northumberland, the Isle of Skye or other country places where she went as often as life offered her the opportunity to do so. And along with the beauty of nature, she describes the underlying reality that increases that beauty, giving it unity and meaning. All has come out of `one unfathomable thought' whose love she can feel in an almost physical way as: . . . the one Presence, more intimate and near Than mothering hands or love's embrace. ... Being that folds, enfolds, upholds Me while I am16 The `being' whose love she sings gives unity to all things, since they all `are', in a certain indistinctness with a pantheistic trend which the author would not deny: `All being made me, brought me here, / Consubstantial with the earth.'17 Her poetry can express other moments of epiphany in which the symbolic power is more obvious, when a stream, a tree, a stone symbolically lead to another dimension, and a bird once more becomes the image of the soul, as has happened so many times in the history of men: Strange bird across my evening sky ± Who, passing soul, your guide On that far flight Beyond earth's dwindling star?18 The bird-soul of the poem is that of Gavin Maxwell, himself also a literary author, who died in 1971 and to whom she had been united through

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Platonic love and a deep attachment to the same landscapes. This image is certainly not new, but it has the merit of ringing true precisely because it belongs to the immemorial symbolic treasure of men, what Jung would refer to as `the collective unconscious'. The art of the poetess is to make this old image new through the freshness of her own experience. Through nature, Kathleen Raine's experience can thus be said to be two-fold: sometimes it is an almost direct apprehension of eternity, or Eden, or Paradise; sometimes it is a movement that sends her from this world to another by means of the symbol. In all cases, she is in quest of a wider self than her own, and some lines often make us feel that she would like to dissolve into that unity of being which she so much praises: As sleeper wakes from sleep, I wake from waking. World's image fails and founders, mountain forms, Garden and trees, heel over into darkness. ... My face, hands, voice, language and cast of thought No longer me, or mine ± I dreamed them into being, Being that is unmade again into the night, Grows tenuous, and is gone.19 In this poem, there seems to be little distinction between the dream of the poetess and the everlasting creative mind. When she wakes to another life, the dream will disappear, but she too will disappear; she sees herself `unmade'. In many of her poems the spiritual reality of all things is emphasized because they derive from the creative mind, what she also calls `the living spirit' in each person. There is no clear transcendence of the Creator. Therefore Kathleen Raine's awareness is `spiritual', more than, strictly speaking, `religious'. Even when she felt attracted by the Catholic religion, it was above all because it represented the clearest embodiment of the Western spiritual inheritance, not so much, if we are to believe her, because the person of Christ is at its core. Therefore the clear link between man and his Creator that the verb religere implies is missing. In her praise of the spiritual wisdom of a `New Age', independent from all religions but drawing on all of them, Kathleen Raine has curiously been in harmony with one current of thought that had acquired some strength at the end of a century which, in its beginning, made her suffer for its materialism. Yet she is herself sometimes aware of the lack of the redeeming power of this spiritual wisdom, and in these hours her soul sings a song of lament.

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The pain can be that of guilt: `I have killed God / In harming lives whom love put in my power; / Unawares, yes, but not, not without guilt.'20 Apart from being a humble confession of sin these lines show the sensibility that a life in harmony with the spirit can favour, in a world in which one is always more ready to stress the lack of love received than confess the lack of love given. This guilt is to her a source of suffering from which the main way of escape she can think of is losing her own self, forgetting it for ever in a state of communion with all that is: `Why should I, one of light's innumerable multitude, / Fear in my unbecoming to be what for ever is?'21 Yet she does not claim to have embraced the whole of the mystery that encompasses her on all sides, and her song is also many times a questioning song: What, wind that bears me, Am I about to be? Will water Draw me down among its multitude? Earth shall I return to the tree? Or by fire go further From myself than now I can know or dare?22 This questioning attitude makes her remain open to what is still unknown, to other treasures to be discovered by the yearning soul, still searching and unsatisfied: `What is our lack, that / Where all is in all, yet / We seek?' These lines show that she does not pride herself with having reached a state of absolute certainty and fulfilment. Yet answers are sent to her in her quest, and the next lines of the poem recount one of her numerous, flitting moments of awareness of the divine: I heard the silence Of grass-roots, dry bracken, Sun on stone, Telling of presence.23

Notes 1

2

Kathleen Raine, The Land Unknown (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975), 193±4. `Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the fields which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God

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3

4 5

6

7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23

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said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?' (Gen. 3.1) (The Bible, Authorized Version, 1611) Living in Time: Poems (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1946): `The Carmelites', 18. Ibid. An allusion to St Teresa's metaphor of the soul as an `inner castle'. `The Inner Journey of the Poet', in The Inner Journey of the Poet (Ipswich: Golgonooza, 1976; London: Allen and Unwin, 1982). The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 2000), from Stone and Flower, 1943: `In Time', 11. References to the Collected Poems are given hereafter as CP. CP 160: `Heirloom', from The Lost Country, 1971. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII, `On the imagination, or esemplastic power', in Select Poetry and Prose (London: The Nonesuch Press, 1950), 246. Fernando Rielo Pardal, Mystery and Matter (Leuven: Fourth European Festival of Poetry, Cahier 33, Leuvense Schrijversaktie, 1982), `PoesõÂ a y mõÂ stica', 28. (Author's translation.) CP 9 : `Night in Martindale', from Stone and Flower, 1943. CP 65±6: `Northumbrian Sequence, V', from The Year One, 1952. CP 84: `Three Poems on Illusion: 2, The Instrument', from The Year One. Ibid. Ibid., 85 : `3, Exile'. CP 244±5 : `In my Seventieth Year', from The Oracle in the Heart, 1980. Ibid. Ibid. CP 193, from On a Deserted Shore, 1973. CP 67±8 : `Northumbrian Sequence VI', from The Year One. Collected Poems 1935±1980 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 274: `Whisperings of Anubis 6', from Uncollected Poems. CP 335: `To the Sun, 4', from Uncollected and New Poems. CP 169: `Falling Leaves', from The Lost Country, 1971. Collected Poems 1935±1980, 269: `Short Search for Truth', from The Oracle in the Heart, 1975±8.

Works Cited Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1950), `Biographia Literaria' (1815±17), in Select Poetry and Prose, ed. Stephen Potter. London: The Nonesuch Press. Raine, Kathleen (1943), Stone and Flower. London: Nicholson & Watson.

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Raine, Kathleen (1946), Living in Time: Poems. London: Nicholson & Watson. Raine, Kathleen (1975), The Land Unknown. London: Hamish Hamilton. Raine, Kathleen (1976), The Inner Journey of the Poet. Ipswich: Golgonooza. Raine, Kathleen (1981), Collected Poems 1935±1980. London: George Allen & Unwin. Raine, Kathleen (1988), Selected Poems (1988). Ipswich: Golgonooza Press. Raine, Kathleen (2000), The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press. Rielo Pardal, F. (1982), `PoesõÂ a y mõÂ stica', in Mystery and Matter. Leuven: Fourth European Festival of Poetry, Cahier 33, Leuvense Schrijversaktie, 27±35.

9

The sacrificial victim in David Jones's In Parenthesis Roland Bouyssou

In Parenthesis is a war poem written in the late 1920s and early 1930s by a veteran of the First World War. He drew on his experience in the trenches not far from Arras, from December 1915 to July 1916. This poem, over two hundred pages in length, is a follow-up to the poetry written during the war by such poets as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Osbert Sitwell and so many other soldiers. Sacrifice was a prominent theme in their poems, and In Parenthesis is essentially a poem about sacrifice. At the start of the war, many volunteers, Rupert Brooke included, believed in self-sacrifice as an uplifting of the soul and a heightening of the mind. Death was not only the crowning of some chivalric action, but a cleansing of man. Furthermore that sacrifice possessed a redemptive value. Brooke and his fellow soldiers had `found safety with all things undying' for war, as he puts it, `knows no power'.1 But the dreadful experience of trench warfare shattered that idealization of sacrifice. The `iron sacrifice / of body, will and soul', extolled by Rudyard Kipling in `For All We Have and Are', was exposed by the soldier poets.2 Wilfred Owen tells us that `dulce et decorum est pro patria mori' is an old lie, and in `Testament' (May 1918), Siegfried Sassoon debunks the greatness of sacrifice. David Jones neither exalts nor deprecates sacrifice; however, he retains a theme often dealt with by the previous war poets: Christ on the cross. On seeing a soldier `shouldering his load of planks' and `floundering in mirk', Siegfried Sassoon wrote in `The Redeemer' of the one who `stood before' him: `I say that he was Christ.'3 The low hills in the Somme area, on which so many died, were often compared to Mount Calvary. Now, the soldier poets retained the bloody sacrifice of Christ, but ignored His resurrection.

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Christ was no longer the redeemer, but a helpless victim, and it is with Him as a sacrificial victim that the soldier identified. Wilfred Owen saw Christ's death as the self-sacrifice of the champion of the `Greater Love', who dies with his fellow-sufferers, but neither rescues nor redeems them. David Jones takes up the image of the slain soldier-Christ, transcends the limits of the First World War, and attempts to restore the religious dimension of sacrifice by resorting to Christian or pagan rituals. In Parenthesis opens and closes with two engravings cut by David Jones himself. The first one plainly identifies the death of a soldier with the crucifixion of Christ; the second one calls to mind the slaughter of the ram Abraham sacrificed in place of Isaac and the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. Moreover, this tailpiece was called by David Jones `The Victim'. So In Parenthesis is placed within brackets: between two icons of sacrifice from the Old and New Testaments. In the last part of the poem, Jones will draw on sacrificial rites in vegetation religions, particularly on the worshipping of the Queen of the Woods. Sacrifice is the dynamic of the whole poem: its organizing and driving power. It gives shape, momentum and meaning to its `realization' and `construction' as a work of art. `Realization' and `construction' are terms borrowed from the Post-Impressionists, and particularly from CeÂzanne and Matisse. David Jones, who was a student at the Westminster School of Art, was as much a painter as a poet, and thought of poetry as analogous to painting. Actually, In Parenthesis began as a drawing with some writing to go with it; and the technique of the poem is Post-Impressionist. In Parenthesis is a `construct', as CeÂzanne would say, which aims at grasping the `reality' of war that does not change, the `inherent truth', as Matisse says, `which must be disengaged from the outward appearance of the object to be represented'.4 For David Jones, this `reality', this `truth' of war, lies in sacrifice. He does not aim at any imitation of his subject: In Parenthesis is no mimesis of war, even if a great deal of its material is drawn from a soldier's experience. Jones's art is not merely representational, because `exactitude is not truth', as Matisse says. Herbert Read has pointed out that modern painting is `a correlative for feeling and not an expression of feelings'.5 In Parenthesis is a correlative for war. David Jones could not but be aware of another correlative: the `objective correlative', defined by T. S. Eliot, who by the way wrote the preface to the first edition of In Parenthesis. `The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art', he writes, `is by finding an ``objective correlative''; in other words a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.'6 Ezra Pound speaks

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of `equations for the human emotions'. By combining the PostImpressionist method of `construction' and `realization' with the Imagist technique of the `objective correlative' and `equation', David Jones has made, not a likeness, but an `equivalence' of the First World War. In Parenthesis is a `shape in words', `a made thing with a shape'; and that shape is structured by the sacrificial march of soldiers to their immolation in Mametz Wood.7 Jones, who had converted to Roman Catholicism, was influenced by the liturgy of the Mass, as an enactment and `re-presentation' of Christ's sacrifice. That liturgy is made up of recollected words and events combined into a symbolic action. Likewise, In Parenthesis is made up of the combination of three materials. These are, first, the war experience material: `This writing', Jones writes in his preface, `has to do with some things I saw, felt, & was part of.'8 Second, there is the mythical matter, which is based on the history and culture of Britain; and third, the religious matter, both pagan and Christian. In Parenthesis is packed with facts about the life and death of infantrymen. David Jones is so precise that Part III of the poem includes a map showing the route followed by the soldiers going up in the dark to the front line. He writes: `I have only tried to make a shape in words, using as data the complex of sights, sounds, fears, hopes, apprehensions, smells, things exterior and interior, the landscape and paraphernalia of that singular time and of those particular men.'9 In Parenthesis is as realistic, even graphic, as any journal, memoir or poem about `the misery that had befallen them . . . All the evils they had ever sustained'.10 This `complex of data' might generate confusion; so it needs some `formal design'. A structural coherence is given to In Parenthesis by condensing the progress of the troops from England to Mametz Wood into the seven stages of an immolation ritual. Part I consists of a rite of admission. The march from the camp in England `initiates the liturgy of a regiment departing' and the sergeants' orders are `ritual words'. Crossing the Channel amounts to going through the gate to a sacrificial area. The war zone in France is a `waste land', not only a wrecked area, but a testing place, as in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. The soldiers are entering the field of hazards and trials. In Part II, the admission is followed by a noviciate. The newcomers get acquainted with the ways and spirit of the fighting soldier. They are instructed in tactics, and their bodies are made stronger by parades and long marches. These novices, called `catechumens', are taught by `tall guardsmen, their initiators' and prepare for their baptism of fire.11 Part III describes a rite of initiation into a chthonic mystery: the descent

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into hell. The soldiers walk to the front line down narrow, winding trenches in the dark. Symbolically, they go `past the little gate'12 to the Chapel Perilous, through `the long, and straight, dark entry'13 of the Palace of Mars, which in Chaucer is based on the description of Hades, and through the eight gates Arthur had to pass in his `Harrowing of Hades'. They reach Biez Wood and join the community of `professed' soldiers. They are like monks who after the noviciate are thought worthy to profess their vows. Jones writes: `The ritual of their parading was fashioned to austerity, and bore a new directness.'14 This `new directness' leads to the baptism of fire in Part IV. For the first time the troops are under fire; and from the trenches they can see Biez Wood, close to Mametz Wood, the place of their future immolation. Ironically this baptism takes place on Christmas Day. The last three parts of In Parenthesis make up the final stages of the immolation. Part V is a vigil. The battalion are at rest behind the lines. The mood is grimly jolly, as they know this is only a brief respite, and they are bracing themselves for the assault. The hour of their sacrifice is drawing near, and the vigil ends with an evocation of `their place of rendez-vous' with death. Part VI shows the victims' surrender.15 The troops are marching up to the front line and do not complain. Like lambs to the slaughter, they walk obediently to their death. At the very end of the poem, Jones alludes to the sacrifice of the Lamb in the Old and New Testaments and mentions the Suffering Servant from the Book of Isaiah. Like Christ, these men are `mild and meek'. The Suffering Servant has become the Suffering Soldier. The victims' immolation constitutes the seventh and last stage of this liturgy. The infantrymen are led to `death's sure meeting place, the goal of their marching'.16 That place is Mametz Wood, where most of the soldiers are wounded or killed. That wood becomes a sacred wood dedicated to the Queen of the Woods, and she hands out boughs and flowers to the dead as a sign of blessing. David Jones has selected the significant events of a soldier's experience and turned them into the conventional, paradigmatic pattern of any infantryman's story, thus creating an archetypal chronicle, which he transforms into a liturgy of immolation. Once the chaos of trench warfare has been shaped into an ordered progress, Jones combines the soldier's experience with mythical matter. According to him, `mythos', or `mythus', consists in the complex of historical, literary and religious deposits which have accumulated from the beginning of the world, and constitute the texture of our culture and civilization. He speaks of `bodies of tradition', of `our entire complex of

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heritage, pre-Celtic, Celtic, Romano-Hellenistic, Nordic . . .'17 `Mythos' is no fiction, and he writes: `The Greek ``mythos'', I understand, means a word uttered, something told',18 like the Gospels, which are the `utterance of the Word'. In Parenthesis `utters', `tells', the `mythos' of war sacrifices, as they are recorded or recalled in chronicles, laments, epic poems or legends. Hence the countless quotations from such works as Y Gododdin (a sixthcentury Welsh poem by Aneirin about the slaughter of Welsh soldiers at the battle of Catraeth), Julius Caesar's Gallic War, Nennius's Historia Brittonum, the Mabinogion, Le Morte d'Arthur, The Song of Roland and so many other works. They make the `fore-time' of this liturgy, and this `fore-time' is made one with the time of the Great War. Jones fuses together `then' and `now' and thus creates an `a-historical' time proper to a liturgy. This time fusion is no mere literary device. It corresponds to the function of the poet who is `by profession the custodian, rememberer, embodier and voice of the mythus'.19 Now, this `rememberer' is neither a historian nor a mere keeper of memories; he performs an `anamnesis'. This is a word used in the Roman Catholic liturgy: it is applied to the sacrifice of Christ symbolically enacted in the mass. For Jones `anamnesis' consists in ```re-presenting'' before God an event in the past so that it becomes ``here and now'' operative by its effects'.20 The priest performs an `anamnesis' when he says in the Eucharistic prayer: `Do this in remembrance of Me.' It is no repetition of Christ's sacrifice, but its `re-presentation', i.e. the operation of making it present, operative here and now. In Parenthesis is written not in memory, but in remembrance of all the victims who were sacrificed in wars from time immemorial. The death of men at Mametz Wood is transmuted into an `anamnesis' of the countless armies slaughtered in the past. Jones achieves a syncretic `re-presentation' of wars and the Great War. This combination of `mythos' and `anamnesis' turns In Parenthesis into a liturgy of war sacrifice. This combination has an impact on its wording. The inclusion of so many quotations and allusions in the poem may give the impression of a mosaic or juxtaposition of borrowed fragments. In fact, Jones achieves what CeÂzanne calls `modulation' or a `continuous process of reconciling multiplicity with an overall unity'.21 In In Parenthesis, the modulation consists of an interplay of verbal and literary echoes, making a composite `shape of words', and conjuring up a coherent polyphony of war memories. War experience and myth are interwoven with religious material. The latter is made up of three strands: pagan, Hebrew and Christian. They are all connected with sacrificial rites. Fertility rituals from the religions of vegetation constitute the pagan element. Sacrifices to the Norse god

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Balder, a deity embodied in the mistletoe-bearing oak, the ceremony of `carrying out Death' or `driving out Death' performed in order to bring back the `renascent cycle' of plants, or the Acorn-sprite cult, are some of the many evocations of vegetation myths in In Parenthesis.22 The great mythic figure in the poem is the Queen of the Woods, who at the very end crowns the dead with boughs and flowers in Mametz Wood. She is Diana Nemorensis, or Diana of the Wood, whose sanctuary was in the sacred grove of Nemi. Human sacrifices were offered to her for the revival of the spirit of vegetation. The Hebrew strand is made up of borrowings from the Old Testament. The soldiers are the `appointed scape-beasts come to the waste-lands'.23 The Scapegoat, David and Jonathan, Melchisedec, the Paschal Lamb and the Suffering Servant are so many representations for the modern soldier. The Christian element is naturally centred on the sacrifice of Christ, which includes the Last Supper, His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, His Passion, and His death at Calvary. The rations issued to John Ball (a private and the main character in the poem) are described as `his daily bread', he drinks from an `enamelled cup', which reminds one of a chalice, and his breakfast is `thank-worthy' or Eucharistic, as Eucharist means `thanksgiving'.24 The fear of the infantrymen before `going over the parapet' is similar to the anxiety of Jesus praying for `the cup to pass from Him'.25 Finally, Good Friday and the crucifixion are often evoked as the soldiers head for `the place of a skull' or Calvary.26 David Jones blends religious traditions, for they are concerned with sacrifice, which is an attempt at overcoming death by death so that Life can be restored. However, the question remains: are the soldiers' sacrifices `efficacious'? Does this war poem end in some restoration, redemption, or victory over death? On the face of it, In Parenthesis ends in utter despair. The soldiers are killed, and do not rise from the dead. The war offers neither restoration nor salvation. And yet all is not negative. When the Queen of the Woods hands out boughs and flowers to the dead, she ratifies their sacrifice, and rewards them with positive symbols: mistletoe, or the `golden bough', is a sign of guidance and eternity; daisies signify love; St John's wort protects one from harm; rowan, or mountain ash, wards off evil. The Queen of the Woods opens up the prospect of a renewed life. She is the life-giver and receives the victims into her kingdom. She takes those dead men beyond mortality. They are in communion with the Goddess of the `renascent cycle'. This vision of a new, living world is set forth by the Judaeo-Christian

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references. The Biblical quotations, printed in block letters on the last page of the poem, interweave sacrifice and victory. The death motif, including the evocations of the scapegoat, the Suffering Servant and the Passover Lamb, is interwoven with two manifestations of life. The first one is from Revelation, a book about the triumph of Christ at the end of time: `the standing lamb, looking like a slain one'. That lamb, slaughtered, and yet standing, alive, is now the Risen, the living Christ; and the dead soldiers will share in His Life. The second manifestation of the victory of Life appears in a quotation from The Song of Songs, a Biblical hymn to Love. In it, the bride, who stands for the Church, praises Christ, her beloved. Her love anticipates the marriage of the Lamb, that is the marriage of Christ and His people in Heaven, after the restoration of the kingdom of God at the end of the world.27 In Parenthesis finds its resolution in an afterlife. Thanks to the pagan and Christian `myths', which both assert the eternity of Life, the soldier's sacrifice reaches a positive fulfilment when death is transubstantiated into Life. Sacrifice means `making sacred'; and there is something sacred in the tragic march of these men. In Parenthesis is no glorification of war, but the dead soldiers are `glorified', as Christ was `glorified' on the cross. The Queen of the Woods and Christ offer a haven or heaven to the victims. Unlike most of the trench poets who wrote in the war or shortly after the armistice, David Jones does not merely aim at presenting the raw experience and feelings of the infantryman. He does not ignore them, but his memories `recollected in tranquillity', his wide reading and elaborate craftsmanship have enabled him to shape a liturgical artefact.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

Rupert Brooke, `1914' (`II. Safety'), The Complete Poems (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1932), 147. Rudyard Kipling, `For All We Have and Are', in Never Such Innocence: Poems of the First World War, ed. Martin Stephen (London: Everyman/ J. M. Dent, 1993), 42. Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 16. Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (London: Thames & Hudson, 1959), 44. Ibid., 46.

122 6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

Ecstasy and Understanding T. S. Eliot, `Hamlet', in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 145 [1932]. David Jones, In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), X. Ibid., IX. Ibid., X. `The Mabinogion', quoted ibid., XVII. Ibid., 44 and 65 respectively. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 131. Y Gododdin', attributed to Aneirin, ibid., 133. Quoted in John Matthias, Introducing David Jones (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 27. See note 16 to the Preface to David Jones, The Anathemata: fragments of an attempted writing (London: Faber and Faber, 1952). Quoted in Matthias, op. cit., 125, from Jones's Preface to The Anathemata. The Anathemata, `Mabinog's Liturgy', Note 1, 205. Herbert Read, op. cit., 18. See J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, XXVIII, `The Killing of the TreeSpirit' (London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1922), 296±311. In Parenthesis, 70. Ibid., 73±4. Cf. ibid., 158. Ibid., 154. See Revelation 19.7±8.

Works Cited Brooke, Rupert (1932), The Complete Poems. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. Eliot, T. S. (1972), Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber. Frazer, J. G. (1922), The Golden Bough. London & Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jones, David (1937), In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu. London: Faber and Faber. Jones, David (1952), The Anathemata: fragments of an attempted writing. London: Faber and Faber.

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Kipling, Rudyard (1993), `For All We Have and Are', in Never Such Innocence: Poems of the First World War, ed. Martin Stephen. London: Everyman/J. M. Dent. Matthias, John (1980), Introducing David Jones. London: Faber and Faber. Read, Herbert (1959), A Concise History of Modern Painting. London: Thames & Hudson. Sassoon, Siegfried (1983), The War Poems. London: Faber and Faber.

10

`For the failure of language there is no redress': R. S. Thomas, poetry and prayer1 Daniel Szabo

R. S. Thomas is often described as the poet of the rugged Welsh nature and the rugged relationship between man and God. He was known as a sombre man, rugged himself, unfriendly and almost brutal in his attitude towards the English invader. Yet he was a priest in the Church of England and wrote poetry in English. How does one reconcile his quasi-hatred of the English with his faith in a God of love? The same question is raised about his language, the work-tool that he constantly mistreats, as his feelings are more than ambivalent towards an idiom he has not consciously chosen. He therefore clings to Saunders Lewis's now famous advice: `I complained once to Saunders [Lewis] about the tension of writing in one language and wanting to speak another, and his reply was that out of such tensions art was born.'2 His language, regardless of prayer, is already problematic. When he has to talk to the Incarnate Word he admits that all languages are problematic: `How can one be dogmatic about Christ . . . ? Presumably he spoke Hebrew and Aramaic. How do I talk to a living Christ in Welsh or English?'3 In an essay called `Abercuawg', talking about a place that does not exist, he explains that the quest for this mythical place where cuckoos sing is similar to the poet's quest for the perfect poem: But through striving to see it, through longing for it, he will succeed in preserving it as an eternal possibility. How else does a poet create a poem other than by searching for the word which is already in his mind but which has not yet reached his tongue? And only through trying word after word does he finally discover the right one.4 In the eponymous poem `Abercuawg' he writes: `An absence is how we become surer / of what we want' (CP 340).

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Thomas is certainly the poet of absence, or rather of presence in absence, for absence enables the quest. Failure, fault and lack call for perseverance, faith and prayer. But they also call for suffering and struggle. Thomas refers thus to Kierkegaard: `Kierkegaard defined a poet as one who suffers. It is in his anguish that he opens his mouth, but the sound which comes out is so sweet to the ears that they press him to sing again, that is to suffer still further.'5 Whether he prays or writes, Thomas suffers. JeÂroÃme TheÂlot argues for an intimate relationship between suffering and prayer: `Only the one who suffers prays and only the one whom God does not answer suffers. God's silence is therefore the condition for the poemprayer to exist as much as that which enables the poet to stop praying.'6 However reductive this idea of prayer is, it fits Thomas perfectly. Suffering for the poet seems thus unavoidable, unless he remains silent to answer God's silence with his own silence. Reading through his entire poetical career we can find three stages in his prayer-poems: the failure of language in front of God, strife and suffering, and the final embrace of silence. `In a Country Church', written in 1955, seems to be the ideal place to begin: `To one kneeling down no word came' (CP 67). Indetermination, ambiguity and paradox can be heard in the simple words `no word came'. Whose words are they? Are they the poet's own words that do not come or God's words? Is kneeling down in a church not sufficient to receive revelation or initiate communication with the God of the Logos? `In the beginning was the Word', yet at the beginning of this poem the word is not; the word does not come, so it does not come upon the poet's lips or to his ears. The words `no word came' remind us of when God addressed His prophets in the Old Testament: `And the word of the Lord came unto Ezekiel . . . unto Samuel, Isaiah, Zechariah . . . even unto Shemaiah, Jehu, Gad, Haggai . . .' Almost all the prophets of the Old Testament hear these words at least once; this phrase appears 127 times in the Old Testament. The word of the Lord even came unto T. S. Eliot in the third chorus of `The Rock': `The Word of the Lord came unto me, saying . . .'7 But the word of the Lord came not unto R. S. Thomas. Instead it is the song of the strong Welsh wind that he hears. The wind and the `dry whisper' recall Jeremiah 4 and its destructive wind, heralding the ominous judgement of God and calling for repentance. The other whisper that the praying man hears is that of the bats which represent idolatry and fear in the Mosaic law. According to Jean Chevalier's Dictionnaire des symboles, `bats personify atheism and symbolize a person whose spiritual development is a failure.' The man in the poem seems to be tempted to listen to his own doubts since he cannot hear God's voice.

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The second stanza opens with a question: `Was he balked by silence?' The word `balk' or `baulk' refers to a `land left unploughed by mistake' (OED). This Old English meaning fits well with Thomas's love for the Welsh countryside, but the modern meaning of being hesitant in front of an obstacle is equally fitting. Is the man upset by this divine silence? Is silence an obstacle, a hindrance between God and himself? He perseveres in silent prayer and is apparently rewarded. Though he does not hear God's voice, he sees or he receives a vision of agape as he wards off the evil spirits. Is it a true epiphany or is it just a brief apparition of the sun through the stained glass window which illuminates the Christian crown of thorns? If in the first stanza language fails, if a priori prayer seems to fall through, the vision starting with the equally emblematic words for prophets (`and [I] saw') restores some kind of hope within the kneeling man. Several of R. S. Thomas's poems follow this pattern. The fault, the break between man and God, seems so gaping that nothing can fill it. The failure in communication recurs in a variety of forms. In `The Belfry', the vision is of a belfry whose etymology indicates that it should keep peace, but it actually creates foreboding, anxiety and even dread, with negative adjectives such as `grey', `gaunt', `terrible', `black' and `dumb' (CP 168). The poet compares the human heart to a tower whose bell remains dumb. Once again, the man perseveres in prayer: Always Even in winter in the cold Of a stone church, on his knees Someone is praying, whose prayers fall Steadily through the hard spell Of weather that is between God And himself. Behind `fall' we hear `fail', the prayers fall like the fallible man, they fail and `fall / Steadily through the hard spell / Of weather'. The word `spell' sounds like a bad trick God might play on man, as when He agrees to leave his beloved servant Job in Satan's hands. But, as in `In a Country Church', the poem ends on a note of hope; it is not `there are times' any more, nor `always', but `perhaps', which shows that it is not necessarily an unshakeable faith that we are dealing with but an opening of possibilities. Perhaps God is listening to the man's prayers, perhaps they do finally bring the sun and the spring flowers; `Perhaps they are warm rain / That

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brings the sun and afterwards flowers / On the raw graves and throbbing of bells.' Maybe they bring redemption and regeneration after the fall, after the desert, the frost, despair. The prayers resound like the revived bells ± the choice of diction with `throbbing' does not fail to evoke the throbbing of the heart underlining the ascendance of life over death and its `raw graves'. The sun replaces the darkness of the belfry; the throbbing of bells the ominous silence. And yet who is really convinced? Is the poet himself convinced? The failure of language can be read in his need ceaselessly to repeat the same prayer and ceaselessly to have the silence for sole answer. In the poem `In Church', the poet does not hide behind a persona any more; indeed, he starts with `Often I try' (CP 180). The opening might suffice ± it is the destiny of the poet but also of the believer and of the priest. Often, he tries to write the perfect, the ultimate poem; he tries to communicate with God, to transmit the mysterious divine love to his parishioners. But one can already read failure in these words: `I try but I fail'. The enjambement is misleading for, as often with R. S. Thomas, he raises suspense and anxiety or reveals a truth that he contradicts in the next line. Here, in fact, he tries to analyse these silences scientifically ± `Often I try / To analyse the quality / Of its silences' (my italics). Are they the silences of God whom all he can do is reify as He never speaks? No, like the `it' of `The Belfry' (`I have seen it standing up grey'), which could have had God as antecedent, here it is probably the silences of the church that he tries to analyse. `These are the hard ribs / Of a body that our prayers have failed / To animate'. The spiritual body of the church of which the building is supposed to be only a representation has remained inanimate. The living stones that the faithful are in 1 Peter 2.5 do not give any sign of life. It is also the body of Christ that our prayers fail to animate. The only movements in the church are those of the shadows and of the bats who are taking possession of the church. The only other sound is not even a prayer, as though the man had worn himself out praying and the only thing one could hear was his breath or his breathlessness: There is no other sound In the darkness but the sound of a man Breathing, testing his faith On emptiness, nailing his questions One by one to an untenanted cross. He does not speak; he does not ask questions. Instead, he nails them to `an

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untenanted cross'. The reader would perhaps expect to see the adjective `untended' as though to confirm God's neglect of the poet's prayers, but Thomas plays with that expectation and the word he chooses (`untenanted') underlines the positive absence of God. Christ is indeed not on the cross any more; he is absent for he has been resurrected. This word also echoes George Herbert's poem `Redemption', where a tenant seeks his Lord in heaven to `make a suit unto him, to afford / A new small-rented lease, and cancel th'old' but finally finds him on earth among thieves and murderers granting his suit as he breathes his last breath.8 In Thomas's poem the roles are reversed; it is Christ who is the tenant and he is not where the man in prayer thinks he is. He is dead but he is risen. Yet the paradox of the via negativa, of presence in absence, but also of undesired silence and emptiness, does not relieve the poet from his state of despair. The internal rhymes `uneasiness', `darkness' and `emptiness' which join in the final word `cross' prepare the reader for the violence of crucifixion; the violence of silence. Even the unoccupied cross, a symbol of resurrection and redemption, reflects the failure of words which need to be hammered home; nailed without being heard. In `Kneeling', once again the scene is the same: a man on his knees, in a church, trying in vain to communicate with God, `waiting for the God / To speak; the air a staircase / For silence' (CP 199). The man is like an actor whose silhouette is outlined by the spotlight: `the sun's light / Ringing me, as though I acted / A great roÃle. And the audiences / Still.' The actor is being observed, but no one answers him: `Prompt me, God; / But not yet', he says, echoing Augustine's famous `Make me chaste, Lord, but not yet'. Therefore, the poet, and maybe the priest too, does not want to be like an actor repeating divine words, Biblical prayers or even the words of the Book of Common Prayer. The word is lost since it is fallen. The word of the serpent seduces Eve; the word of Eve seduces Adam; the word of Adam puts the blame on his wife. The man and the woman hide from God; they do not want to hear the voice of the Lord any more. Words are perverted by the Fall; they are not divine, not perfect any more. `When I speak, / Though it be you who speak / Through me, something is lost'. If innocence is lost, if perfection is lost, how do we convey God's perfection? If the word is fallen, how do we pray? The last line of the poem gives us a clue: `The meaning is in the waiting' strongly echoes Eliot in Four Quartets: `But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.'9 For Thomas, the meaning lies in waiting, watching (as in keeping watch), being ready. Would he just be evading the question of the failure of language by this

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final sidestep? He seems to have identified the problem, but he is may be torn between his role as a priest who has to bring the Good News to his people and comfort souls and that of the poet trying to tell the truth ± the impossibility of communication with God in a fallen language. R. S. Thomas's poetry is created in pain and in suffering. The poet suffers from the impassibility of his God, His insensitivity and silence. Rather than accepting this failure of language and stopping writing or praying, Thomas fights on, searching for a remedy to this impossible communication. It is in strife therefore that Thomas is going to progress. In `The Combat', the poet begins his poem-prayer with invective against God: `You have no name.' Or is the poet, here, addressing the angel of God who fought with Jacob, or even the reader? How do you talk to someone you cannot name? As soon as he is born, man tries to communicate with his original cry: `the darkness from which we emerged / seeking' (CP 291). The poem refers to Genesis 32 when Jacob fought all night with the angel of God who asks for his name and then gives him another. Jacob, in turn, asks for the name of the angel, who refuses to tell him. But Jacob does not need the answer because the name of God is inscribed in his new name: `Israel', which means `he struggles with God'. Jacob is blessed by the angel because he has not given up; he has fought on. Thomas takes this story for himself: `our dislocations' is the mark that Jacob has fought as the angel dislocates his hip; in the poem, it is the mark that Thomas has fought with God. Just like Jacob, Thomas might not need an answer either; the dislocation of language symbolized all through his works by a constant use of enjambement, fragmentation and dislocation of rhythm, bears the seal of God. `The Combat' is also the linguistic struggle that Thomas carries on in his poetry. How does one write in the language of the oppressor? How can he address God in a language he does not want to love because he does not master the language he would like to speak ± Welsh: `England, what have you done to make the speech / My fathers used a stranger at my lips, / An offence to the ear, a shackle on the tongue [. . .]?' (`The Old Language', CP 25). Unlike other Anglo-Welsh poets, R. S. Thomas does not fill his poems with Welsh words. Instead, he mistreats his mother tongue, stretching it through his use of enjambment, and as Patrick Deane points out: One is struck by the overwhelming number of monosyllabic and even monomorphemic words, the rudimentary syntax (`and . . . and . . . and . . . but . . . but'), and the absence of punctuation and capital letters,

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those refiners of the brute utterance. Furthermore, pervasive use of enjambment produces in the reader a growing anxiety about the poem's continuation: each line ending raises the possibility that the statement begun may trail off into silence.10 `The Combat' is symptomatic of his use of enjambment: `We have wrestled with you all / day, the darkness from which we emerged / seeking, But who you are / does not appear.' Almost every line ends with an enjambment. The syntactic breaks, full stops and commas are in the middle of the line as though the poet were trying to prevent any comfort and ease of language to signify this linguistic dead end: `For the failure of language / there is no redress'. He writes these words in 1975, halfway through his poetic career, as though he had needed thirty years of writing at a frenetic pace to come to this conclusion; but his poetry does not stop there. Neither does his poem: But who you are does not appear, nor why on the innocent marches of vocabulary you should choose to engage us, belabouring us with your silence. (CP 291) There is nothing innocent about these `marches', nothing accidental. They are the frontier between Wales and England. The poet asks himself why God put him on this linguistic frontier which makes him suffer. The word `innocent' reminds one of `Ash Wednesday', where `Word without a word' is taken from Lancelot Andrewes to signify the Christ, the Logos, the child without word. Why does God draw us to a conversation which is only silence on his part? It is a silence that the poet experiences as violent; in `belabouring' one hears the painful labour of the woman giving birth, labour which is a direct consequence of original sin: `I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children . . .'.11 The poet's suffering and birthing pains are merely the premises of death: `We die, we die / with the knowledge that your resistance / is endless at the frontier of the great poem.' The Logos does not die; it does not exist according to Kierkegaard, since it is; man on the other hand tries to exist, to become, and tries to be. But the poet knows his attempts are bound to fail because man's language bears the indelible seal of the Fall, the fault ± or failure.

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But the poet can also fight by persevering despite failure; just as in the first poems examined, the persona is on his knees in all seasons, constantly turning towards God even if He remains silent. In `Llananno' perseverance is there right from the start: `I often call there' (CP 304). He oftens comes there; he often calls someone in silence. Llananno is a small Welsh village on the bank of the River Ithon, with its fifteenth-century church. `There are no poems in it / for me'. And yet he constantly comes back. There are no poems in the indeterminate `it', no poems in this topos, this church. There, the presence of God is felt in the unspoken, in the multiplicity of meaning. The poem is saturated by negations: `no poems', `stop', `turn down', `few', `nothing', `no intermediary', `not dazzled'. . . The via negativa which symbolizes the metaphysic of presence in absence in R. S. Thomas can be seen as a watermark in these negators. This negation ± that one can read even in the place name that titles the poem: `Llananno' ± means, perhaps, that when there is nothing, there is something and when there is silence, there is communication. There is no need for an intermediary for Thomas: `the screen has nothing to hide', the curtain of the temple has been torn, direct access to the Father has been granted. Thomas is `not dazzled', like Saul on the way to Damascus, but there is a touch of serenity that breaks out in the last lines: `so delicately does the light enter / my soul from the serene presence / that waits for me till I come next'. God ± whom he does not name in the poem, underlining the idea of the unspoken ± will be there to listen to him when he next comes to pray. Without violence this time, God's silence is accepted and Thomas understands that it is not he who waits in vain for God but it is God who waits for him in their next encounter. Yet Thomas is not done with prayer; he is not done with fighting. Since God does not seem to be hearing him, he will try to cry out in `Pluperfect'. The paradox of prayer can be found in the title of the poem. God is perfect, so there is no pluperfect ± more than perfect ± that would enable us to speak to Him as equals. Silence is golden when language fails, but the poet breaks it because there is nothing else he can do. The poet is sucked in by the echo of the dead languages and does not know what to do, where to go or what to say, so he shouts: `Where are you? I / shouted, growing old in / the interval between here and now' (CP 379). Once more, Thomas plays with his reader, with himself and, perhaps, with God, too: `Where are you? I'. The poet's existential `where am I?' can be read in this question. Time is elapsing and communication is still not established. Shouting fails as well as words, so he tries in `One Way' to whisper, once the silence is broken, once the frontier of silence has been crossed:

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This is all to no avail. If words are at fault, if they fail, then only silence is possible. For George Steiner, it is precisely the incapacity of language that reveals the presence of God: It is decisively the fact that language does have its frontiers, that it borders on three other modes of statement ± light, music, and silence ± which gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvellously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours. What lies beyond man's word is eloquent of God.12 Through failure, suffering, strife and the resignation of the via negativa, R. S. Thomas slowly comes back to one of his starting points ± silence (`no word came'). After having searched for the sentence without words and found God as the answer in `Senior': `Is there / a sentence without words? / God' (CP 387), he keeps on praying and silence answers him in `The Presence': `I pray and incur / silence' (CP 391). The verb `incur' is generally followed by something unpleasant (to incur wrath). Here, the reader is surprised by another enjambment typical of Thomas. What `I' incurs is silence but eventually this silence is not necessarily negative: `Some take that silence / for refusal.' `Some' take this silence for a refusal of communication, an impossibility of language, but Thomas does not any more. In a poem with a symptomatic title, `Revision' (CP 492), a catechumen, who could very well be Thomas himself, revises his catechism. He explains to his teacher that there are two beings; when one is present the other one is far away. The teacher tells him that this gulf `can be crossed by prayer'; the student replies: I have walked it [prayer]. It is called silence, and is a rope over an unfathomable abyss, which goes on and on never arriving.

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This prayer which repairs the fault of language is silence. He confirms this idea in `The Letter': `I gaze myself into accepting / that to pray true is to say nothing' (CLP 201). `Mass For Hard Times' (CLP 135±9) summarizes this struggle, this perseverance in prayer, this refusal of fallen words finally to accept silence as the best means of communication with God. Why repeat oneself if God is listening? That is exactly the paradox of praying to an omniscient and omnipotent God. It is the paradox of faith, but also the paradox of R. S. Thomas, the poet-priest whose faith is built principally on doubt: `faith was a plank too narrow for me to tread' (`Space Walking', CLP 311). Would he have written more than 1,500 poems had he come earlier to the conclusion that it is `words that are the kiss of Judas?' His parentheses are exhausted, and so are his prayers and his poems. To remain silent, reflecting God's silence, may finally be the solution in order to thwart the failure of language. Eventually, at the age of 82, Thomas calls one of his last poems on prayer `Silence', summarizing one last time the failure of words. The image of the dumb bell from `The Belfry' is not used for God any more, but for himself: `I was answering / his deafness with dumbness' (CLP 287).

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6

7 8

9

Abbreviations used in this chapter are as follows: CP: R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems 1945±1990 (London: Phoenix, 2000). CLP: R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988±2000 (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2004). N. Thomas and J. Barnie, `Probings: an Interview with R. S. Thomas' in Miraculous Simplicity: Essays on R. S. Thomas, ed. William V. Davis (Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press, 1993), 38. Ibid., 39±40. R. S. Thomas, `Abercuawg', in Selected Prose, ed. Sandra Anstey (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1986), 131. Thomas, R. S. `The Creative Writer's Suicide', op. cit., 135. TheÂlot, J. (1997) La PoeÂsie preÂcaire (Paris: PUF), 26±7. Translated by the author. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 169. George Herbert and Henry Vaughn, ed. Louis L. Martz, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 34. Eliot, op. cit., 200.

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11 12

Ecstasy and Understanding P. Deane, `The Unmanageable Bone: Language in R. S. Thomas's Poetry' in Davis (ed.), Miraculous Simplicity, 202. The Holy Bible, King James Version, Genesis 3.16. George Steiner, Language and Silence (revised edn) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 39.

Works Cited Chevalier, J., and Gheerbrant, A. (1997), Dictionnaire des symboles. Paris: Robert Laffont. Deane, P. (1993), `The Unmanageable Bone: Language in R. S. Thomas's Poetry', in Miraculous Simplicity: Essays on R. S. Thomas, ed. William V. Davis. Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press. Eliot, T. S. (1963), Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. Martz, Louis L., ed. (1986), George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, The Oxford Authors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steiner, George (1998), Language and Silence. New Haven: Yale University Press. TheÂlot, J. (1997), La PoeÂsie PreÂcaire. Paris: PUF. Thomas, N. and Barnie, J. (1993), `Probings: an Interview with R. S. Thomas', in Miraculous Simplicity: Essays on R. S. Thomas, ed. William V. Davis. Arkansas: University of Arkansas Press. Thomas, R. S. (1986), Selected Prose, ed. Sandra Anstey. Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press. Thomas, R. S. (2000), Collected Poems 1945±1990. London: Phoenix. Thomas, R. S. (2004), Collected Later Poems 1988±2000. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books.

11

The metaphysical joke: church going with Philip Larkin Andrew McKeown

Philip Larkin liked to say he was an agnostic but, he would add, of the Anglican persuasion.1 The qualification is typically Larkinesque, one feels: bluff and more bluff. Some might say the bluffing here has more to do with Larkin's Englishness than religion per se, giving us another `sin' to add to what is becoming an increasingly familiar list: not only Thatcherite, middle-class, parochial and nostalgic but also crypto-Anglican. In a sense, sex±race±class determinism2 brings the question to a close. But to see things this way, I would like to argue, runs the risk of oversimplifying Larkin's bluffoonery, at least in this precise context. Because to respond so singularly to an expression which is so plural is to undo the defamiliarizing knot of what is being said. In simple terms, if we call Larkin's bluff then he can become the Little Englander, but if we do so we miss something altogether more human and meaningful in his remark: we miss the joke. What I would like to concentrate on in Larkin's quip is the question of religious belief. That question is one which has produced a good deal of commentary going back to the beginnings of his published writing career in the 1950s. Notwithstanding the irreducible hues and subtleties of interpretation such commentary has produced, it is nonetheless the case that the question of Larkin and religion has tended to pan out into two `camps'. On one hand, we have the `empiricists', who stoke up the view that Larkin is contemptuous of metaphysical curiosity or longing.3 On the other hand, we have the idealists-cum-transcendentalists who see Larkin as sceptical about scepticism and propose that some texts express a desire to appropriate sacred time and place.4 The question of whether Larkin is or isn't religious, as I see it, is a false one, a sterile tug-of-war, given that the encampments around Larkin indicate that his writing is able to lean in both directions. It is true that not

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all critical approaches fall into the `is he or isn't he?' to-ing and fro-ing and it would be unfair and misleading to suggest that, say, the `transcendentalists' ignore or deny nihilistic aspects of the texts. What is more, it is also the case that recent commentators have looked more closely at the fact of co-existence and what this might mean.5 The critical debate over Larkin and religion has been intense, raising questions over how and why Larkin's meaning is appropriated, while also throwing light on the nature of his take on religion. `Owning' Larkin is a complex subject; research in this field is only just beginning to produce results.6 My intention in this chapter is to examine the nature of Larkin's religious duality from the perspective of the joking formations in which it is often contained. To do so, it might prove useful to begin by expanding our identification of the religious polarity noted in the preamble. Etymologically, `religion' points toward a sense of adherence or obligation, of being bound, typically to a set of ideological assumptions. Those assumptions are characteristically metaphysical in nature, positing an other-worldly dimension to human experience, the premise being that reality is not restricted to its material circumstances. Other-worldliness often states its case in the notion of transcendence, of attaining some other plane of experience beyond experience, this being translated into language via words such as `soul' or `everlasting life'. As I indicated above, the case has been made for a `transcendental' Larkin. Here readings have taken Larkin's work as expressing a sense of entrapment within the material world linked to a corollary desire for transcendence toward an immaterial world. Critics such as Barbara Everett and Andrew Motion7 have identified Larkin's Symbolist tendencies, inspired notably by nineteenth-century French poets such as Baudelaire and MallarmeÂ, as corresponding to this transcendentalism, giving his poems an other-worldliness. This `other' Larkin, to borrow the tag introduced by J. R. Watson in 1975 to identify a Larkin different from the so-called sceptic materialist, speaks the language of idealism. In this reading perhaps unsuspected Platonic essences extract themselves from gloomy suburban horizons;8 ubiquitous tower-block windows reflect back Pascalian visions of experience expanding endlessly into unbroken space (CP 165). This opens the door to beliefs which are meta-material. Such is the case in the 1943 poem `A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb' (CP 269). In this early text Larkin identifies the sound of the church bells as surpassing material contingencies, their resonance transcending time (stanza two). Recognizing this other-worldly ability, the speaker experiences a sense of awe which he voices in the typically religious term: `worship'.

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These are mere snippets from a much broader picture and they are not without their own problems. Certainly we can identify a `transcendental' Larkin without too much difficulty. On occasion this is even translated into adherence to the collective and institutional embodiment (at least, that is, in the West of the post-Classical era) of desire for other-worldliness: churches and the `Church'. But Larkin is an irregular churchgoer. His obedience is unsystematic and as an outsider, such as we see in `A Stone Church Damaged by a Bomb', he is irreligious and uncatholic, both etymologically and institutionally speaking. This brings us back to Larkin's desire for transcendence as the only apparent, fixed quantity in his religiousness. While this may be a problem for religious institutions it is not necessarily so for us. The transcendent urge, the will to metaphysics, has often been identified as the origin of religious belief (one thinks, for instance, of Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity) and it is in this way, irrespective of theologizing, that Larkin falls squarely into the mystics' camp. Or, to be more precise, half of him does. For, as I indicated in my opening remarks, it is also possible to read Larkin as the super-materialist champion of this-worldliness. On this side of things, Larkin is just as able to see churches as the redundant, decomposing remains of an age now overturned. In `The Building', for example, a locked church crouches defensively in a hostile urban enumeration, sandwiched between traffic and terraced houses (CP 192). The padlocking and isolation of the religious building are determined, it seems, by the material, and so secular, environment which the poet identifies as his reality. His is a world of unconsoling things grounded in time and space where trivial personal belongings (`Home is so Sad': CP 119) and rooms rented for their keeping (`Mr Bleaney': CP 102±3) map out the parameters of Larkin's universe. It is just this environment which stops religion making sense any more, a world where churches are absurdly out of place, as they are in `Money' (CP 198). What makes them absurd and out of place is the belief that the universe cannot satisfy transcendental urges, as we note when the poet lifts his gaze toward the sky only to be confronted with a vision of complete nothingness, as in `High Windows' (CP 165), or a cosmos stripped bare of metaphysical potential, as in `Sad Steps' (CP 169). What is `out there' for Larkin is nothingness and the ultimate confirmation of this belief is his way of looking at death, which he sees as all-consuming and incontrovertibly final, as in `Aubade' (CP 208). Once again, it has to be admitted that these views are only token indications of a broader picture. Again also, there are possible snags in

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interpretation. The nihilist line sees Larkin's world as bereft of transcendent possibilities. That may well be so but it is also true that even his most hard-boiled existentialism (one thinks automatically of `High Windows') can combine with distinctive other-worldliness. If we take the example of `High Windows', we note the nothingness `out there' that the poem ends on is not a linguistic reality but an unlocated, pre- or postverbal conceptualization, something which is beyond language: `Rather than words'. This transposition is a feature of Larkin's later poems (see also `The Trees': CP 166; `Love Again': CP 215) and suggests belief in nonlinguistic realities. That in itself constitutes a form of transcendent will, tending toward what is beyond the human and the empirical which, like the experience of death, surpasses the tools of human understanding and expression.9 Seen from this perspective, Larkin's reading of death as the absolute absolute points as much toward a will for transcendence, as toward an unshakeable grasp of the undislodgeably material premise of `life'. With some indication of the polarities concerned and their tendency to coalesce now exposed, we may examine more closely Larkin's way of bringing the two sides together. To do this I will focus in detail on `Church Going' (CP 97±8), Larkin's most sustained statement on religion. This text was written in 1954 when Larkin was working at Queen's University, Belfast, in Northern Ireland, and represents a synthesized account of visits to churches he had presumably made during his time in the province.10 The first two stanzas of the poem are characterized by a series of comic jests which belittle both the place and the speaker's presence in it: disrespectfully letting the door slam, mock reverence in the removal of bicycle clips (rather than hat), a spoof sermon (ll. 14±15) and the donation of an Irish sixpence. In addition to the comic performance we have a series of mock paraphrases of church furniture and artefacts (ll. 4, 5, 6), concluding with an ironic interjection about how long the building has stood (l. 8). The third stanza ostensibly marks a break in Larkin's fooling by drawing attention to the fact that in spite of his apparent dismissal of the church he is nonetheless drawn to it. This admission enables him to pursue an investigation of the significance of churches and the religion they embody. The poet wonders what will become of these places in a postChristian age. The answers he provides resume the jocular tone of the opening, suggesting, for example, that disused churches may be let out rent-free to sheep, or, in stanza four, that strange women will gather there to pick herbal remedies. In stanza five the speaker pursues his thought about the end of religion and offers waggish suggestions about who the final faithful might be:

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antiquarians (l. 41), nostalgics (l. 42) or Christmas enthusiasts (l. 43). His final surmise is that the last man out could be someone just like him and in the last two stanzas the speaker explores why that should be so. It is here that the poem begins to lose its ironic, detached, goofing tonality. True, there is still a tendency to demote the significance of the place: in stanza six the church is likened to a cold, musty barn. But increasingly the speaker moves onto more solemn ground, identifying churches as places that once gave meaning to the fundamental events of human existence, such as birth and death. The conclusion in stanza seven, notwithstanding the poet's opening demonstration to the contrary, is that churches are serious places, giving man's experience a sense of `destiny'. The final word is that churches are good for the getting of wisdom; in proof of which, the graveyards to be seen outside. In one sense, there is obvious gravitas in this statement and it comes as the ultimate caution to human vanity: death, and not the certainties of scepticism, being the only unsurpassable fact of human existence. But there is also levitas in Larkin's final flourish: the vanity that graveyards warn us against being also the vanity of belief (in God and all the rest) just as much as the vanity of unbelief. In closing, Larkin returns to his chosen ground of joking ambiguity. How are we to analyse this finely wrought joke about religion? In the first instance, `Church Going' is a comic performance. Larkin's churchgoer acts out a series of jests whose comic effect is to invalidate or demote the significance of the place he finds himself in and, of course, his own presence there, as we saw earlier in the switching of bike clips for hat. In addition, we also have a number of supporting-role clowns: the weird women with loosely occult intentions (stanza four), the old-building fanatics (stanza five) and the Christmas junkies hooked on smells and bells (stanza five). Furthermore, `Church Going' is a rich demonstration of wordplay (as the title itself suggests), with the voice of the text delivering a number of ironic paraphrases of church things, seen especially in the first two stanzas. The final focus of humour is the dual interpretation of the text's conclusion, bringing pathos and bathos together. It is possible to classify what emerges from this typology in three parts: first, the performative joke, involving personaes within the text; second, linguistic jokes, making use of substitution; third, interpretative jokes, making use of condensation. This classification can itself be conflated into two distinct categories: joking by substitution (embracing the role-playing and linguistic comedy) and joking by condensation (the final, densest joke of the poem where the `wisdom' of religion is exposed).

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These categories form the basis of Freud's theory about jokes and enable him to associate what he calls the `joke-work' with another, equally fundamental determinant of psychological life: the `dream-work'.11 For Freud, jokes, in ways similar to dreams, are the `voice' of unconscious desires working their way `out' into consciousness, negotiating as they do so inhibiting forces within the subject. This `passage' is achieved, Freud says, by adopting indirect means (substitution and condensation), the process finally justifying itself in the yield of pleasure that jokes, if they are to be jokes, necessarily entail: laughter. Freud's theory is a significant one and it enables us to make inroads into the thinking of `Church Going', inroads which are not open to commentary which nullifies the comic aspect of the piece. Substitution and condensation are both mechanisms which indicate that a symbolic order is at work, with all its power of association and allusion. It is possible to throw light on the way Larkin's symbolic order works by bringing into consideration another mockreligious piece from his writing: `The Explosion' (CP 175). In this text, composed following a television documentary he had watched with his mother over Christmas12 (a telling circumstance perhaps), Larkin imagines a mining community struck by a pit explosion. The end of the text combines both joke and dream-work mechanisms: first, a mock sermon from an invisible minister quoted `live' within the text; second, a dream vision of survivors of the catastrophe, transfigured into ethereal forms appearing `larger than in life'. `The Explosion' is very much a text about families and it comes as no surprise that Larkin presents fathers and wives as the focal actors of the recreated scene. The image of the father is an important one as it enables us to interpret the invisible voice of the sermonizing minister as a father figure, a projection of `fatherdom', so to speak, here transposed to that other sphere of paternal images: religion. The presence of wives reinforces the symbolic substitutions taking place through both joke and dream vision: that of religion standing in for parentage. If we return to `Church Going' it is possible to interpret the indirectnesses of Larkin's religious jokes as equally eloquent of questions of parentage. This is not to suggest that the poem is `really' about Larkin and his dad, with the son indulging in irreverent digs at the father he paradoxically admires (even if such a biographical reading has a ring of truth about it). What I would like to suggest is that we are able to analyse the father figure as a representation of fathers in a broader sense, of what they hand on to their heirs. By that I mean that Larkin's religious jokes point to the concept of inheritance per se, embodying all that the human subject must accept as given.

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But what is it that `Church Going' tells us we inherit? To answer that question we need to switch polarity. For the most part, `Church Going' is a playful text with a welter of quips, blithe turns and sarcasm. But there is at least one moment of solemnity, coming at the end of the penultimate stanza where the poet says he is pleased to stand in the church in silent meditation. This statement echoes loud and long because it throws into relief something that has so far in the text been spoken of only in sniggers and whispers: pleasure. On the face of things, Larkin seems to be saying the church is a source of pleasure because it provides a framework for meditation: a serious place where serious thinking may be done. But that statement is a little disingenuous, given that the church in the poem has been occupied throughout by a goofing jokester. This discrepancy leads me to believe that the pleasure generated by the church is to be found elsewhere in the text, perhaps in combination with the concept of inheritance already identified as the first stage in our synthesis of the meaning of the text. As `Church Going' narrows to its conclusion, it focuses first on a sense of obligation (l. 56), and second on a sense of appetite (l. 60). Religion, Larkin says, is the sphere in which these concepts meet and it seems reasonable to grasp this assertion as an affirmation of the inevitability, or given-ness, of desire. Perhaps this is the inheritance Larkin quirkily discloses in `Church Going'. Certainly the church he enters is alive with appetite, as seen especially in the church enthusiasts evoked in stanza five whose adjectives all bring forward the notion of sensual satisfaction. As stanza seven closes, Larkin imagines handing on the `hunger' generated by the church to an unnamed descendant, his representative (l. 45), someone following in his footsteps. To adapt the infamous `This Be the Verse' (CP 180), what Man hands on to Man is not so much `misery' as desire (with, of course, the added bonus of mirth). At the same time, it would be wrong to suggest that the appetite for religion in `Church Going' is only to be grasped for its latent meanings. Nor is it right to propose that religion is little more than a mask. For it remains a unifying focus of the text and Larkin engages with it on a number of levels, not least among which is the `serious' exegesis of how religion `works' on real human subjects grounded in time and place (stanzas six and seven). Perhaps, then, the most fitting way to conclude our synthesis of interpretation is to bring together the two threads: desire and religion. To do this I shall refer to that great despoiler of religion: Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche, religion is the prime manifestation of a fundamental confusion of human reason (or psycholo-

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gical mechanisms, we might add): that of mistaking the cause for the consequence.13 By this Nietzsche means that religion takes man's metaphysical urge as an a priori state, the cause of religion's becoming. Such, more or less, is the theory of Feuerbach (challenged by that other great materialist affirmer of the nineteenth century, Karl Marx). For Nietzsche, man's metaphysical urge is, on the contrary, the consequence of forces being denied; what he calls `life forces'. This term he uses to designate the power of instincts beyond systematic moral control, of which sexuality and instinctual drives (the famous `will to power') are a crucial part. Religion, says Nietzsche, corrupts and colonizes these forces and tells man instead that his urges are `metaphysical' (not for this world), and as such are to be postponed. It is tempting to conclude that Nietzsche's idea about religion being a distortion of the physical given-ness of human life finds a ready echo in Larkin's religious jokes, characterized as they are by substitutions of one thing for another. It is also tempting to conclude that Larkin's spoof churchgoer strikes an enlightened hammer blow to explode the mystification of human desire. In the last analysis, however, it should be remembered that Larkin's jokes represent a compromise: disavowing religion, but espousing it all the same. `Church Going' is a weighty pensum, couched in apparent lightheartedness. That levity is Larkin's hallmark and research into the significance of his sense of humour across his work has yet to be undertaken. Jokes are a difficult subject to analyse; what constitutes their essence is precisely what is lost in exegesis and Freud is no doubt right to suggest that the pleasure yield of jokes is spontaneous and is opposed to the action of reason.14 My attempt at interpretation has incontrovertibly robbed Larkin's religious jokes of their jocularity and the only way to make good that loss is to return to the texts. In `Aubade' (CP 208±9), one of the last pieces of any seriousness that he wrote, Larkin returned to the subject of religion. The tone of this late piece is markedly different from `Church Going' and what distinguishes the two is that in the later piece the jokes have all but evaporated. Some twenty years after the sniggering and sarcasm, Larkin is now at his most earnest, proposing with almost Hopkins-like intensity that religion is the failed antidote to death (stanza three). There are other antidotes to death and `Church Going' is alive with a prime example: desire. True, Larkin's religious jokes and his obliquenesses are difficult to link with. True again, desire in the early text is handled roughly and is sent through so many hoops that one is not surprised to find the subject of the poem cut off from the society (that is, desire-objects) around him. In one sense Larkin is

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unable to link with a world where, in his reductive view, men are `randy' and women are `dubious'. But he nevertheless manages to share something, something irreducibly human and a source of pleasure, if not life itself: the (metaphysical) joke.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11

12

Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 485. Tom Paulin, `Into the Heart of Englishness' in New Casebooks: Philip Larkin, ed. Stephen Regan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 160±77. Calvin Bedient, Eight Contemporary Poets (London: Oxford University Prss, 1974), 71. J. R. Watson, `The Other Larkin' in Critical Quarterly 17 (1975, 347± 60), 348. Ian Almond, `Larkin and the Mundane: Mystic without a Mystery' in New Larkins for Old, ed. James Booth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 182±89; Andrew McKeown, `Ambiguity and Religion in Philip Larkin's Poems' in L'AmbiguõÈte (Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 2002), 43±52. Raphael Inglebien, `An Enormous No!: Larkin's Resistance to Translation' in Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance, ed. Andrew McKeown, Charles Holdefer (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006), 19±36. Barbara Everett, `Philip Larkin: After Symbolism' in Regan, op. cit., 55±69; Andrew Motion, `Philip Larkin and Symbolism' in Regan, op. cit., 32±53. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber, 1990 [1988]), 144±5. All further references to the poems appear in the main text as CP followed by page numbers. For additional commentary on the Platonic aspect of the poem `Essential Beauty' see also Larkin's own `The Living Poet' in Philip Larkin, Further Requirements (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 81. Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1999). Motion 1993, 195ff. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Vol VIII, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001). Motion 1993, 394±5.

144 13

14

Ecstasy and Understanding Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 58ff. Freud, op. cit., 131.

Works Cited Almond, Ian (2000), `Larkin and the mundane: mystic without a mystery' in New Larkins for Old, ed. James Booth. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 182±9. Bedient, Calvin (1974), Eight Contemporary Poets. London: Oxford University Press. Everett, Barbara (1997), `Philip Larkin: after Symbolism', in New Casebooks: Philip Larkin, ed. S. Regan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 55±69. Freud, Sigmund (2001 [1905]), Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. VIII, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Vintage. Ingelbien, Raphael (2006), `An enormous no!: Larkin's resistance to translation', in Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance, ed. C. Holdefer and A. McKeown. Paris: L'Harmattan, 19±36. Larkin, Philip (1990 [1988]), Collected Poems, ed. A. Thwaite. London: Faber and Faber (referenced in text as CP). Larkin, Philip (2002), `The Living Poet', in Further Requirements, ed. A. Thwaite. London: Faber and Faber, 79±91. McKeown, Andrew (2002), `Ambiguity and Religion in Philip Larkin's Poems', in L'AmbiguõÈteÂ, ed. D. ThomieÁres. Reims: Presses Universitaires de Reims, 43±52. Motion, Andrew (1993), Philip Larkin, A Writer's Life. London: Faber and Faber. Motion, Andrew (1997), `Philip Larkin and Symbolism', in New Casebooks: Philip Larkin, ed. S. Regan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 32±53. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1990 [1895]), Twilight of the Idols. The Anti-Christ, trans. R. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Paulin, Tom (1997), `Into the heart of Englishness', in New Casebooks: Philip Larkin, ed. S. Regan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 160±77. Watson, J. R. (1975), `The other Larkin', in Critical Quarterly, 17, 347±60. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1999 [1921, 1922]), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

12

`Metamorphic power': Geoffrey Hill and Gerard Manley Hopkins Emily Taylor Merriman

Geoffrey Hill has written and lectured about Hopkins for more than three decades. For years he taught an entire semester's course dedicated to the poet and priest in his Victorian context, and he refers and alludes to Hopkins in his published verse.1 The two poets even share a French translator, Rene Gallet.2 In Hill's late, prolific phase, since The Triumph of Love (1998), Hopkins has exerted an increasing influence ± at once artistic and religious. Three aspects of Hopkins have particularly impressed Hill. First, there is the nineteenth-century poet's innovative use of English metrical stresses ± sprung rhythm ± which Hill discusses in `Redeeming the Time',3 an essay first published in 1973, and slightly revised for inclusion in The Lords of Limit (1984). Second, there is Hopkins's choice of words, influenced by his fascination with Victorian philology, a topic that Hill considers in `Common Weal, Common Woe,' (in the Times Literary Supplement (1989), reprinted in Style and Faith (2003)). Third, there is Hopkins's religion, including his adherence to the principle of Christian self-sacrifice, his Catholic theology and his Ignatian spiritual practices. Hill addresses these last matters most directly in his essay `Language, Suffering, and Silence', which appeared in 1999 in Literary Imagination. An understanding of Hill's Hopkinsian concerns with rhythms, words and religion, and their inextricable interrelations, can illuminate much of Hill's dense, mysterious verse. Hill's future critical publications will provide greater insight into his opinions of the poet who died in 1889, forty-three years before Hill was born (1932), but he has already established the centrality of these three interlocking concerns.4 Hill believes that Hopkins's development of sprung rhythm is at the heart of his poetry. In `Redeeming the Time' he says: `The achievement of

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sprung rhythm is its being ``out of stride'' if judged by the standards of common (or running) rhythm, while remaining ``in stride'' if considered as procession, as pointed liturgical chant or as shanty.'5 His argument about Hopkins in `Redeeming the Time' is predicated on the idea that the rhythms of the past ± seasonal and agrarian rhythms, and the liturgical rhythms that were based on them, as well as the rhythms of labour and even of everyday speech ± had been disrupted by industrialization. Hopkins `resists' this disruption. Hill also feels that Hopkins finds masterful ways to use metrical stresses ± and slacks ± in mimetic conjunction with psychological and even spiritual stress. This observation is founded on Hill's suppositions about the philosophy of language: `If language is more than a vehicle for the transmission of axioms and concepts, rhythm is correspondingly more than a physiological motor.'6 Linguistic rhythms interact with psychic, social and ethical phenomena in ways that can be intuited if not precisely measured. Hill speaks of his own poetic relationship to sprung rhythm in section LVIII of The Orchards of Syon (2002), a section that incorporates commentary on postmodern philosophy, as well as elements of spiritual autobiography and ars poetica: My mind, as I know it, I still discover in this one-off temerity, arachnidous, abseiling into a pit, the pit a void, a black hole, a galaxy in denial. Life õÂ s a dream, I pitch and check, balanced against hazard, self-sustained, credulous; well on the way to hit by accident a coup de graÃce. Intolerable stress on will and shall, recovery of sprung rhythms, if not rhythm; test of creation almost to destruction ± that's a good line; it can survive me. In denial not my words. It is essential to an understanding not only of Hill's relationship to Hopkins, but also of Hill's relationship to himself, that he, or at least his narrative persona, says here that his writing involves a quest for the `recovery of sprung rhythms, if not rhythm'. (His use of the term `pitch' has also been informed by his reading of Hopkins.)7 In `Redeeming the Time', almost thirty years earlier, he had suggested, using a phrase from

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`The Wreck of the Deutschland', `Possibly the best description of Hopkins's poetic method would be his own ``recurb and . . . recovery.'' '8 In setting about the task of `recovery', Hill aligns himself with Hopkins's `vocation' of redeeming the time9 and seeking, according to the Pauline scriptural origins of the gerundive phrase, to walk in wisdom, as opposed to the evil ways of the contemporary world. By making `sprung rhythms' plural,10 Hill reveals his predilection for sprung rhythm's juxtaposed stresses, those moments when word-forces collide and create or collapse, or both at once. While he acknowledges that it may be too late for the rhythms of his verse to match those of procession, liturgical chant or shanty, they can momentarily shock readers into a memory of those modes, or at least into the recognition that they have been largely lost. Through these apertures of recognition of loss, perhaps the heavenly Orchards of Syon, or Hopkins's Goldengrove, may be glimpsed ± still standing in splendour, somewhere. The section enacts the difficult drama of this vocation of recovery or redemption, especially given postmodern conditions that seem to offer no fixed points of stability: `a pit, the pit a void, / a black hole', in which the poet, spider-like, spins out lines in hope that they will `catch somewhere' as Whitman, another poet's soul-spider says,11 and `hit by accident a coup de graÃce'. The French expression here is both violent and redemptive, both a mercy killing of the suffering psyche and a stroke of divine presence, an acknowledgement of the poet's acceptance of `the evident signs of grace in his own work' (signs which Hill had earlier imagined as something that a poet might refuse to accept).12 `Accident' is almost a literally striking noun in the midst of `hit' and `coup,' and `pitch' and `stress': the word inserts the unconscious energy of the self, the Freudian `id', into the technical term `accent'.13 `Id' shows up earlier in the section in `arachnidous', and, visually at least, in the `void'. The `I's and `i' sounds of `My mind, as I know it, I still discover . . .' similarly announce this poem's preoccupation with the energies of self, and their difficult if fruitful relations to one another and to the Other. An `accent' is where the natural stress falls on an English word; it partly depends on which syllable receives emphasis in the word itself, and partly on the rhythm of an entire phrase or sentence. Following Hopkins's lead, although to different effect, Hill occasionally indicates by means of a visual accent the mark where an accent should fall. The marks indicate that the poet cannot trust that the reader will hear the intended rhythm aright without additional direction. They risk distracting the reader's attention, and yet they give the poet greater control over how his audience hears his

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linguistic music. The sequence Speech! Speech! (2000), a book in part about the effects of spoken rhetoric, is especially distinguished by the use of these marks, but they are also scattered through The Orchards of Syon, including here in `Life õÂ s a dream', a reference to the play by Pedro CalderoÂn de la Barca (1600±81). The theme of life as a dream resurfaces several times in Hill's long poetic extended meditation on the possibilities of an afterlife; it forms one of the threads that stitch the sections together. The `coup de graÃce' that awakens one to the realization that life is a dream is both expressed in terms of rhythm and enacted rhythmically. `[I]ntolerable stress on will and shall' invokes the disappearing traditional grammatical distinctions by which an English speaker can imply promise or obligation through choosing a different future auxiliary depending on the pronoun. It also literally places strong stress on `will' and `shall', and thereby metaphorical stress on the future of this world and perhaps the next. In this future, the writer will be dead, his id eliminated, but his poetry may live on in its recovered sprung rhythms: `that's a good line; it can survive me.' This conclusion also suggests that the poet's ego sometimes obstructs or even destroys the wellsprings of successful poetry, at the same time as the poetry could not be written were it not for the ego's driving force, which must set forth and get out of its own way at the same time. The overall rhythmic pattern of The Orchards of Syon creates an extended dialogue between iambic pentameter, common meter and free verse, with some hints of Anglo-Saxon caesurae thrown in for good measure. The typical line has five strong syllables, accompanied by a highly irregular number of weak or weaker syllables. Occasional four- or three-stress lines offer variety, a feeling of lightness, perplexity, inconclusiveness, or even of momentary exaltation. Often two, three or sometimes even four stressed syllables appear right next to each other. The effects Hill achieves with this range of rhythms, particularly the compacted stresses, include emphasis, density, a strong, adamantine yet selfchallenging tone, and abruptness.14 The `divine genius' of an `abrupt self', which Hopkins commends in his sonnet for Henry Purcell, is a value (and a characteristic) that he and Hill share.15 The concept of `abrupt self' parallels the `counterpointing' that Hill values in linguistic rhythms: the capability of and ethical necessity for language to break off from its own flow and to enact internal resistance to its patterns of argument. Christopher Ricks has identified the importance of Hopkins and abruptness for Hill. It `points towards one of Hill's convictions. For him, Hopkins is preeminently the poet of ± in Hopkins's phrase [from his sonnet on Henry Purcell] ± ``abrupt self'', where abrupt is

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used ``both for a very technical thing and for a very spiritual or psychological thing'' '.16 Abruptness also becomes a theological thing. Using distinctly Hopkinsian terminology at the beginning and end of a phrase, Hill identifies `one of a number of possible points of departure' for exploring a `theology of language': `the abrupt, unlooked-for semantic recognition understood as corresponding to an act of mercy or grace'.17 For Hill a vital component of poetry, often accompanied by such abruptness, is self-criticism. Hopkins, while less overtly self-mocking or excoriating, also presents the reality of human beings' `sweating selves', and of his own sweating self, terrifyingly aware of damnation's proximity.18 Hill learns from Hopkins not only about the rhythms of self and society, and about abrupt grace, but also about how words can be used to find and identify reality. If rhythms are about recovery, then words are about discovery. In `Common Weal, Common Woe', Hill uses examples from Hopkins, among others, to identify weaknesses in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the immense and immensely valuable philological project whose lengthily produced first edition overlaps with Hopkins's life and first posthumous publication.19 One facet of Hill's criticism is that although the Second Edition (1989) remedies the 1933 Supplement's omission of `disremembering' from Hopkins's `Spelt from Sibyl's Leaves' (`quÂite / Disremembering, dõÂ smeÂmbering aÂll now') in its entry for that word, `it patently fails to register the metamorphic power of Hopkins's context', in which the word signifies not `forgetting' but what Hill calls `dismembering the memory'.20 The idea of the dismemberment of memory, both individual and cultural, recalls a familiar and abiding concern of Hill's. The phrase suggests a violent element in the destruction of one's consciousness of the past, a rending of the structure of internal relations. In Hopkins's sonnet, it is again the energies of the self-involved self that lead to this loss: `self õÂ n self steepeÁd and paÂshed', and yet there are consequences not just for the individual but for the whole of nature. Hill's focus is more overtly political; he condemns the lack of British attention paid to the history of war in particular. He writes, for example of Britain's `many memorials and no memory',21 and admits that he asks over again even in the same volume, The Triumph of Love (1998): `what is to become of memory?'22 Hill's phrase `metamorphic power' to describe what Hopkins does with the word `disremembering' evokes his own interest in how interactions between words can highlight particular significations or even create new ones. Despite the OED's power to demonstrate, to Hill at least, that

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`sematology is a theological dimension', it is its own inevitable failure to recognize all such instances of new significations or neologisms that Hill contemplates in `Common Weal, Common Woe'.23 `Metamorphic' itself, in a poetic context, suggests a sound-shifted `metaphoric'; Hopkins's line, his work with `disremembering', is both figurative and transformative. It is through these kinds of linguistic transformations, instances of poetic `grace' or `coups de graÃce', that the poem may turn the reader, if the reader is willing, toward what the poet considers essential.24 Hill writes in Style and Faith about Hopkins, `The main burden of his poetic argument, both in theory and in practice, was to guard the essential against the inessential, the redundant, the merely decorative.'25 Even in his early diaries, Hopkins distinguishes between what he calls the `Parnassian', which demonstrates true technical skill, and `poetry proper', written in the `language of inspiration'.26 It is only by reading a poet more extensively, according to Hopkins, that it becomes possible to hear the difference. Hill, too, deplores the inessential, redundant and `merely' decorative, although decoration may serve a necessary purpose ± to honour and praise, for example. Hopkins's own poetry is often richly ornamented, the English language gilded and twirling around itself like an initial letter in a medieval Bible. But what is `essential'? For Christians, what is essential is God and Christ and how the believer relates to Him. Hopkins's poems seek to look towards the God of Roman Catholicism, and not to remain gazing even in adoration on the beauty of the phenomenal realm, which is only the tangible evidence of His divine creative power. The earthly realm is not eternal, and so Hopkins exhorts his reader to `Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty's self and beauty's giver'.27 It is not the glory of creation, the `features of men's faces' that ultimately are to be loved, but God the Father.28 Hopkins and Hill were both brought up as members of the Church of England. As a young adult Hopkins converted to Roman Catholicism and joined the Society of Jesus. Hill, described by Christopher Ricks as a `profoundly honest doubter',29 sometimes attends services in the Church of England in his later adulthood and has said in print that he is a Christian, specifically `an Anglo-Catholic conservative'.30 While the two poets may broadly share the central doctrines of Christianity, they belong to different denominations as well as to different centuries. (Nineteenth-century Roman Catholic teachings about Hell, for example, are different from, and less various than, those of twentieth-century Anglicanism.) Hill, as a twentieth-century poet, has been exposed to more forms of agnosticism and atheism, and to more religious pluralism. Although he has been at times an

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Anglican practitioner, Hill works and struggles with religious traditions, ideas and symbols, rather than whole-heartedly surrendering to the teachings of ecclesiastical authority. Even if the later poet remains attached to the traditions of his childhood denomination, historical circumstances, and perhaps individual character, have made Hill's understanding of religion on earth more expansive than Hopkins's. For example, at the end of section six of `An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England', Hill puts in quotation marks what sounds like an English traveller's description of items for sale, including `heavenly Buddhas smiling in their sleep'. This line comments ironically on Western misperceptions, for `Buddha', a Sanskrit past participle, means `Awakened One'. The Buddha himself is of course not for sale, only representations of him (would one speak as freely of selling Christs?), and the adjective `heavenly' is quite inappropriate, as the statues of the Buddha lying on his side are in fact representations of his parinirvana ± his death and consequent final freedom from the cycles of death and rebirth, even rebirth into the kingdoms of heaven.31 Hill's more modern and multidimensional relationship to religion does not mean, however, that his poetry demands any less attention to its religious nature than Hopkins's does. Reading Hill requires an understanding of how he is using the medium of poetic language to illustrate, to embody, or even to enact his own theological struggles, convictions and self-criticisms. The title of his book of criticism from 2003, Style and Faith, indicates his opinion of the potential mutuality of theological and artistic concerns. The foreword to the book clarifies that the relationship between faith and style is, ideally, one of `equation'.32 However, he does not list Hopkins among those who have achieved this union (a heady triumvirate of Donne, Herbert and Milton). None the less, it is to Hopkins that Hill turns in 1999 to explain his foundational suppositions for a proposed `theology of language' that would acknowledge art to be inadequate as a response to poverty, oppression and suffering. Mere `expressions' of solidarity will not do when an act of selfsacrifical generosity is required, even if that involves (no more than) temporarily giving up one's book allowance, as Hopkins suggests in a letter to Bridges.33 Hill points out that Hopkins himself believed that he was `barely entitled, if entitled at all, to withdraw his attention from his duty to the work of Christ in the world in order that it might be bestowed on the lesser practice of literary composition'. For this reason, Hill worries over how to describe Hopkins's vocations, and ends up with what he acknowledges to be an `awkward periphrasis ``Catholic priest who was

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also a poet'' ', rather than the briefer `priest and poet', or `priest-poet'. (By contrast, I lapse into such inaccurate brevity at the beginning of this chapter, where I even reverse the terms on the shifty grounds that Hopkins the poet is more important to my subject matter than Hopkins the priest.)34 Given that Hill is so concerned here with what he calls the `minutiae of one's own critical and descriptive vocabulary', it is worth attending closely to his explanation of Hopkins's suggestion for how Bridges might `give alms': `One sees how Hopkins brings the point home to the place where this particular recipient, a book-lover, will be galled: give till it hurts, and in your special case this may involve the sacrifice of your treasured monthly book-allowance.' Christian charity asks the individual ± `particular', `special' ± self for nothing less than the sacrifice of what one treasures. Hill's use of the past participle `galled' recalls the last lines of `The Windhover', in which embers `Fall, gall themselves, and gash goldvermilion'.35 Through its symbolic `blue-bleak embers', Hopkins's sonnet illustrates how self-sacrifice enables people to give up what is of ultimately greater value than the intact but dull self, and even to discover the real treasure, which is not personal inviolability but the fire of Christ within. Hopkins's use of `gall' here seems closest to a signification that the OED deems questionable and obsolete: `to crack' (7b). Hill's use of `galled' is close to the OED's definition of the participle as a figurative adjective: `Irritated, vexed, unquiet, distressed', and yet the `metamorphic power' of its Hopkinsian context (which includes also the bitter desolation of `I am gall' in `I wake and feel')36 suggests that the spiritual consequences of an act of self-sacrificial solidarity are both more painful and more profound than irritation or vexation, or even distress. The conclusion of Hill's essay `Language, Suffering, and Silence' returns to his early interest in Hopkins's handling of stresses, but not the stresses of the art of poetry. He says that Hopkins `leans away from the aesthetic equation, takes the weight of the more awkward stresses of the world which, in justice, contains aesthetics as a good, but is not to be either ruled or saved by them'.37 By ending on this note, Hill appears to incline toward similar views of the relative values of aesthetics, religion and ethics, and of the insufficiency of art as a means of redemption. The Orchards of Syon is the most Hopkinsian of Hill's volumes of verse. The book is an extended sequence of sections, structured similarly and tied together by repeated themes. It refers directly to Hopkins on three occasions and alludes to him over a dozen times, most noticeably in Hill's use of the

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word `Goldengrove', taken from Hopkins's short poem `Spring and Fall', with its vision of humanity's grief for its fallen mortality, reflected in a child's tears for the fallen leaves. Throughout The Orchards of Syon, `Goldengrove' resonates as a complex chord, incorporating dissonance, already weighted by Hopkins with interlocking seasonal and theological associations. Hill uses `Goldengrove' in dialogue with two other imagined landscapes, the eponymous `Orchards of Syon' and the Augustinian reference, `City of God'. These three places together and separately evoke a prelapsarian realm and a potential ± never certain for Hill but never to be given up on ± postlapsarian realm of redemption and resurrection. There are other allusions. For example, there is a reference in section XX to Stonyhurst in Lancashire where Hopkins taught. Several key words, including `ransom', `diamond' and `patch', can be fruitfully considered in the light of their use in Hopkins.38 The three direct references to Hopkins occur about two-thirds of the way through the book, evenly spaced across fourteen sections in which Goldengrove is not mentioned. The first and last of these references capitalize `HOPKINS', a punctuation technique the book uses frequently, in commemoration of individuals who are often being quoted directly.39 These two references do quote Hopkins, first his metaphor for patience from a sonnet `natural heart's ivy' (`Patience, hard thing'), and second his prose comment `Scotus shows / necessity reconciled with free will'.40 In the middle reference Hill writes extensively of Hopkins's response to the sometimes afflicting power of the action of divine grace on him: . . . The sun, the sudden prism, rediscover their own time, whenever that is; bending to our level they lift us up. Hopkins, who was selfbelaboured, crushed, cried out being uplifted, and he was stronger than most. He said that creatures praise the Creator, but are ignorant of what they do. Imagine your own way out of necessity; imagine no need to do this. Good story, bad ending, if narrative is the element that so overreaches. Providence used to be worked-in, somewhere. I, at best, conjecture divination. The rainbow's appearance covenants with reality. (XLIX)

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Ninian Smart has noted that the religious metaphor of being `lifted up' has a quasi-universal presence across the world's cultures. Something in the way human beings orient themselves in the physical world translates into a spiritual orientation that sees up ± the direction of sacrificial smoke ± as towards God or the gods.41 Being lifted up and crying out also suggest the crucifixion and the words ascribed to Jesus in Matthew 27.46, quoting Psalm 22.1: `My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' `[C]rushed' and `cried' alliterate with the unspoken `crucifixion' and also with `creatures' and `Creator'. The sequence `self- / belaboured, crushed, cried . . . uplifted' describes spiritual rebirth, being created anew, in the verbs of human physical birth: the mother's labour, the child's passage through the birth canal, the first sound, and the first picking up of the newborn infant. For Hopkins, the God of Catholic doctrine can shift the created humanself to a higher pitch. For Hill this is a central point in Hopkins's devotional writings. He draws his students' attention to Hopkins's writing: `God then can shift the self that lies in one to a higher, that is / better, pitch of itself; that is / to a pitch or determination of itself on the side of good', and one page later: `This shift is grace.'42 Hill draws on this idea throughout The Orchards of Syon, in which he investigates and dramatizes these same ideas. The energies of the self are incarnated in the poetic language that explores yet resists the downward pull of self-celebration and its partner self-despair. Hill's verse seeks to fashion an opening to the metamorphosis of being at least momentarily lifted up. The following lines of this section continue to lean on and work with Hopkins's language and theology. `Crushed' recalls `God's Grandeur', in which `The world is charged with the grandeur of God.'43 God's working may be sudden like a flame, or gradual, like the crushing of olives. In his verse and prose theology, Hopkins dwelt on the phenomenon of creaturely praise of the Creator, and how necessity can be reconciled with free will, as Hill's lines briefly suggest. Hill also introduces the term `imagination' (likely with Coleridge, another of the men praised in The Orchards of Syon, in mind), and the literary term `plot'. The end of Hopkins's own life is a sad story ± lonely, relatively young, sick in Ireland, away from the country he called home. In the face of such misery, traditional Christian theology turns to the `mystery' of God's ways, and to acceptance of them. Now, in Western postmodernity, there is little space for what is often, if mistakenly, perceived to be such passivity. The awkward, if conversational, rhythms of this poem's antepenultimate line embody that difficulty: `Providence / used to be worked-in, somewhere', in which there are three stressed

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syllables right next to each other: `woÂrked-õÂ n soÂmewhere.' As Hill is well aware, Hopkins had trouble working the word ± if not the idea of ± Providence, into `The Wreck of the Deutschland'. Rhyming `Providence' with `-g oÂf it and / S-' was one instance in which the nineteenth-century poet stretched the decorative essentials of versifying experimentation very far.44 Perhaps the twentieth-century poet is thinking of this line as he wrestles with the whole concept of Providence, which does not easily rhyme with contemporary perceptions of the world. Hill refuses to contrive such a rhyme. Rather he struggles to unearth both the evidence and the consequences of this historical shift from the idea of a providential universe to one that is governed by chance. In prose he similarly sees the challenge to Christianity posed by modern historical understandings: `If the historical contextures are attended to, our search for an absolute standard of value takes on a complexion of relativity.'45 Because of the absorbing (or repellent) power of Hill's language and the compelling (or repelling) force of his convictions, it is a challenge to discuss him from a position that finds the middle ground between adulatory and adversarial. In debates about Hill's work ± which can become heated, both on paper and in conversation ± critical understandings of Hill's artistic and theological values (vexed as they may be) can contribute to greater clarity of argument. Critics may object to his values, or to his apparent failure to write poetry that embodies those values, or to both ± but at least we will know what we are talking about. Understanding Hill's relationship to Hopkins is vital to understanding his poetry, especially his later poetry. There is likely to be a strong transferential element in any poet-critic's consideration of another poet or critic. Hill argues that Hopkins's letters to Bridges contain `some of the toughest yet most tactful literary criticism of the nineteenth century'.46 Hill's assessments of Hopkins's achievements as a critic, a poet and priest often indicate what he himself seeks to accomplish in poetry, criticism and even in ethics. A summary list of these virtues and values is intimidating: toughness, tact, earnestness, faithfulness, abruptness, redemption, recovery and self-sacrifice. The `burden' of Hill's own `poetic argument' is to recognize moments in great poems (by others and by himself) when language abruptly shifts into an unexpected dimension ± when the poet uncovers the astonishingly right word, or the poetic rhythm suddenly recalls older rhythms of human communal life rooted in a particular time and place, or when a new word or rhythm transforms a line and creates new possibilities by changing its centre of gravity. For Hill, such shifts of pitch, as painful as Hopkins teaches his readers they may be, are what can make life (and poetry) worthwhile.

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Notes 1 2

3

4

5

6 7 8 9 10

11

12 13

14

15

In spring 2003 I attended Hill's Boston University seminar on Hopkins. Gallet's translation of `The Wreck of the Deutschland' and other Hopkins poems is preceded by a translation of Hill's essay on Hopkins, `Redeeming the Time' (`Racheter les Temps'). Hill's essay title is borrowed from Paul's letter to the Ephesians 5.15± 16: `See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, [r]edeeming the time, because the days are evil'; and from that to the Colossians 4.5: `Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time.' See Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). The publication includes The Enemy's Country, The Lords of Limit and Style and Faith, plus the additional collections Inventions of Value (printed but previously uncollected essays) and Alienated Majesty (unpublished lectures, including considerations of Hopkins). Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 97±8. Ibid., 87. Geoffrey Hill, Style and Faith (New York: Counterpoint, 2003), 3±5. Hill (1984), 103. Ibid., 103. Cf. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. C. C. Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1955, second, revised impression), 145: `I do not claim to have invented sprung rhythms but only sprung rhythm.' Walt Whitman, `A noiseless, patient spider', from Leaves of Grass (1891±2), in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America), 564±5. Hill (1984), 16. Christopher Ricks has previously observed Hill's `distending' of the word `fable' into `fatted marble' in The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 289. For a more extensive discussion of Hill and rhythm, see the chapter `Beaten into surrender: Rhythm in Geoffrey Hill's The Triumph of Love' in Merriman, ` ``Whatever'': God as Absent Presence in the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, and Charles Wright' (unpublished PhD thesis, Boston University, 2007), 144±89. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 143.

Geoffrey Hill and Gerard Manley Hopkins 16

17

18 19

20 21

22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30

31

32 33

157

Ricks, op. cit., 310, quoting `Hill, interviewed by Hallam Tennyson (1977), for a BBC programme on Hopkins'. Geoffrey Hill, `Language, suffering, and silence', in Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 1.2 (1999), 253. `I wake and feel', Hopkins, Major Works, 166. Hill says (Style and Faith, 12): `while the making of the Dictionary disclosed a vast semantic field in which the brute actuality of English misapprehension could be charted as never before, some of the most telling evidence failed to lodge itself in these pages'. Ibid., 3. Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love, LXXVI (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 40. Ibid., CXXXVIII, 75. Hill (1984), 20. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) argues that `grace' is a paradigmatic instance of an originally secular (Latin) word that was borrowed to describe religious concepts. As a consequence, `the etymological conditions were set for a reverse process whereby the theological term could in effect be aestheticized' (7±8). Even if it is no more than the result of etymological confusion, the relationship between theology and aesthetics as enacted in the word `grace' is important to Hopkins's thinking about poetry. See Emily Taylor Merriman, `Corresponding grace: Hopkins's theory and use of rhyme' in Hopkins Quarterly 32.3±4 (2005). Hill (1984), 11. Hopkins's `Early Diaries' August±September 1864. Major Works, 185± 8. `The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo', Major Works, 156. `As kingfishers catch fire', Major Works, 129. Ricks, op. cit., 317. Geoffrey Hill, `Between politics and eternity' in The Poets' Dante, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001), 331. See, for example, `Language, suffering, and silence', 249. Geoffrey Hill, New and Collected Poems, 1952±1992 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 145. Style and Faith, xiv. `Language, suffering, and silence', 255. Hopkins, Letters, 63.

158 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41

42 43 44 45 46

Ecstasy and Understanding `Language, suffering, and silence', 255. Major Works, 132. Ibid., 166. `Language, suffering, and silence', 255. As discussed in Merriman, `Treasure in temples and labyrinths: Language in Geoffrey Hill's The Orchards of Syon', Graduate Student Symposium (unpublished), Boston University, 19 October 2004. Hill (2002), XLIII and LVI. Cf. 1883 Letter to Bridges, `Duns Scotus, who shews that freedom is compatible with necessity' (Letters, 169). Ninian Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred, An Anatomy of the World's Beliefs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 51, 140, 153±4. `Notes on Suarez, De Mysteriis Vitae Christi': Major Works, 283±4. Major Works, 128. Ibid., 117 (`Wreck of the Deutschland', Stanza 31). `Language, suffering, and silence', 249. Style and Faith, 10.

Works Cited Burke, K. (1970), The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Berkeley: University of California Press. CalderoÂn de la Barca, P. (1970), Life is a Dream, trans. Edwin Honig. New York: Hill & Wang. Hill, Geoffrey (1984), The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas. New York: Oxford University Press. Hill, Geoffrey (1994), New and Collected Poems, 1952±1992. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hill, Geoffrey (1998), The Triumph of Love. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hill, Geoffrey (1999), `Language, suffering, and silence', in Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 1.2, 240±55. Hill, Geoffrey (2000), Speech! Speech! Washington DC: Counterpoint. Hill, Geoffrey (2001), `Between politics and eternity' in The Poets' Dante, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 319±32. Hill, Geoffrey (2002), The Orchards of Syon. Washington DC: Counterpoint. Hill, Geoffrey (2003), `Common Weal, Common Woe' in Style and Faith.

Geoffrey Hill and Gerard Manley Hopkins

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New York: Counterpoint, 1±20. [reprinted from (1989) `Common Weal, Common Woe'. Times Literary Supplement 4490, 411±12]. Hill, Geoffrey (2003), Style and Faith. New York: Counterpoint. Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1955, second, revised impression), The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. C. C. Abbott. London: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1986), Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Major Works, ed. Catherine Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, G. M. (1991), Le Naufrage du Deutschland suivi de PoeÁmes gallois, Sonnets terribles, trans. Rene Gallet. Paris: La DiffeÂrence. Merriman, Emily Taylor (2005), `Corresponding grace: Hopkins's theory and use of rhyme', in Hopkins Quarterly 32.3±4: 85±111. Merriman, Emily Taylor (2004), `Treasure in temples and labyrinths: Language in Geoffrey Hill's The Orchards of Syon', Graduate Student Symposium (unpublished), Boston University. Merriman, Emily Taylor (2007), ` ``Whatever'': God as absent presence in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Derek Walcott, and Charles Wright', unpublished PhD thesis, Boston University. Ricks, Christopher (1984), The Force of Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smart, Ninian (1996), Dimensions of the Sacred, An Anatomy of the World's Beliefs. Berkeley: University of California Press. Whitman, Walt (1982), Complete Poetry and Collected Prose. New York: Library of America.

Further Reading Brown, M. (1980), Double Lyric: Divisiveness and Communal Creativity in Recent English Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. Hart, Henry (1986), The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Hill, Geoffrey (2006), Le Triomphe de l'amour, trans. Rene Gallet. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon: Cheyne. Knottenbelt, E. M. (1990), Passionate Intelligence: The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Costerus, New Ser. 77. Amsterdam: Rodopi. McNees, E. J. (1992), Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geoffrey Hill. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Robinson, Peter, ed. (1985), Geoffrey Hill: Essays on His Work. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

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Robinson, Peter (1992), `Geoffrey Hill's Position', in In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 105±41. Sherry, V. (1987), The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

13

Simone Weil among the poets Adrian Grafe

`The greatest mind of our time', Camus called her, while, according to the poet and anthologist Sean Dunne, Simone Weil (1909±43) was `the greatest religious writer of the twentieth century'.1 Reflected in her restless travelling to different parts of France, Spain, America, and finally England, Simone Weil's life was a difficult, exploratory, intellectual journey. This in itself makes her attractive to a certain kind of poetic mind or temperament. It may help to explain what attracted Weil herself to the Metaphysical poets ± the speculative nature of their poetics. Weil valued the individual intellect more highly than any other human faculty, yet in her philosophical method she proceeds by intuition and intimation as much as by reasoning. A fine poet herself, even if only for a brief spell of her short life, this most intellectually rigorous of writers was also hugely receptive to people, ideas and great literature, especially poetry, even more so English poetry: `nothing in modern European languages compares to the delights contained in English poetry'.2 Simone Weil was devoted to Shakespearean tragedy and especially the Metaphysical poets, and Herbert in particular; it seems somehow logical that she should end up living and dying in England. She spent the last months of her life in London, working for the Free French Forces, and died in August 1943 at Ashford, Kent. Elizabeth Jennings wrote: `The restless demands of the intellect, the search for suitable imagery ± these are the things which place Simone Weil among the poets.'3 And there are many poets who have responded powerfully and above all creatively to Simone Weil in writing, including, along with Jennings, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Rowan Williams and Michael Symmons Roberts (there may, of course, be others). Hill, Williams and Symmons Roberts all involve Weil directly in the texts of their poems. Why do all these poets ± for they are all poets ± gravitate towards

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Simone Weil? For the figure of Simone Weil brings these poets together and creates a commonality. This poetic commonality centred on Weil springs from a kind or kinds of religious awareness and the search for poetic expression of the latter. It may, in this respect, be possible to turn these terms on their head, and discuss the interplay between poetic awareness and religious expression as far as Weil and these poets are concerned, especially with regard to a text vital to my analysis: St Paul's kenotic hymn in Philippians 2.5±11. English poetry, especially since the fifties, has sometimes been criticized for being insular, inward-looking, provincial, parochial, domestic even, afraid of tackling broader or deeper issues, metaphysical ones. These poets' response to Simone Weil proves the ability of English poetry to engage with foreignness at a high ethical and spiritual level, and the catholicity of their approach to poetry, thought and language. These poets see Weil ± the woman and the writer ± almost as a symbol of something beyond herself, a courageous symbol of the distress and anxiety of the age, though not only a symbol but also a woman of individual thought and action holding within herself many basic human contradictions. Excess of character, or will, or estrangement from earthly realities, or extreme proximity to such realities, make her an attractive subject to write about. The feverish level of intensity at which Simone Weil lived and wrote partly accounts for her early death as well as for the attraction to her of lyric poets. Moreover, one finds in her writings a religious metaphysics and a social philosophy centring on an option for the poor and disinherited, which form a body of thought which continues to resonate throughout European culture and beyond. Her searing intuitions, often expressed in a jagged, aphoristic style, her use of symbolic language often bordering on the mythical, and her haunting sensitivity to dereliction and affliction, make her peculiarly attractive to the poets of the present age. Michael Symmons Roberts has responded to Weil in poetry, Hill and Williams in both poetry and prose, and Eliot, Jennings and Heaney in prose. Nevertheless, a poet remains a poet even when writing prose, especially prose about literature and belief, and his poetic identity will distinguish his every word. Jennings and Heaney write about Weil in relation to language and poetry.4 Hill quoted from Weil in an epigraph to `The Pentecost Castle', and in one of the `Lachrimae' sonnets used the word `decreation', which modern theological metaphysics associates with Simone Weil, who invented or re-invented it for herself.5 He also quoted her approvingly in his first essay-collection The Lords of Limit.6 He mentions her by name, albeit enigmatically, in Speech! Speech!7 Hence she

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has become one of many threads, and not the least, running through Hill's work. Rowan Williams has referred to Weil in various writings and speeches, and written the powerful poem `Simone Weil at Ashford'.8 Finally, another contemporary poet, Michael Symmons Roberts, has devoted a sequence of poems to her: `Simone and the Unknown Friend' (the `Unknown Friend' I take to be Symmons Roberts himself).9 What is it about Simone Weil that has caused these poets to write poems about or involving her? What poetic insight led them to write these poems, and what poetic insight is to be gained from reading them? For, as Eliot said in his introduction to the English translation of Simone Weil's L'Enracinement (The Need for Roots), `Simone Weil begins with an insight' (my italics).10 These English poets respond to that insight in exciting and powerful ways. Eliot found in Weil what Hopkins before him applauded in Wordsworth's Immortality ode: `his insight was at its very deepest'.11 Insight is arguably what enables us to enter into a reciprocal relationship with a poem: beyond the poet's own insight, beyond the poetics of vision, the poem sees into us as we see into it. On the rare occasions he uses the term `insight', Hopkins never, to my knowledge, uses it in a non-poetical context. He puts insight at the heart of his poetics in one of his most moving metatexts (with `Henry Purcell'), `To R.B.': in the poem, he writes of the poet's mind: `The widow of an insight lost she lives.' The insight is thus the mind's husband, the `fine delight', the fecundating pleasure that, in the shape of `thought', sires the `immortal song'. A poem begins with an insight, then, as Simone Weil begins with an insight. Hopkins identifies insight in one more place ± and not the least, either ± in a letter to Bridges of February 1883. I say `not the least' because the lines in question are the only ones in Hopkins's correspondence in which he explicates a passage from the Scriptures. Hopkins is attempting to identify what he calls `true virtue' and says of it, incidentally using the `parenting' image which he was to develop to a higher pitch in `To R.B.': `This is that chastity of mind which seems to lie at the heart and be the parent of all other good, the seeing at once what is best, the holding to that, and the not allowing anything else whatever to be even heard pleading to the contrary.'12 It is worth stressing both Hopkins's use of the word `insight', which he associates so with poetry, and the fact that the particular passage in question ± the kenotic hymn in Philippians 2.5±11 ± is itself poetry: `Christ's life and character are such as appeal to all the world's admiration,' Hopkins continues, `but there is one insight St Paul gives us of it which is the very secret and seems to me more touching and constraining than everything else is: This mind he says, was in Christ

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Jesus.' Hopkins goes on to quote and explicate clause by clause the kenotic poem. Hopkins's appreciation of the passage is not aesthetic. Nevertheless, St Paul's insight is `touching and constraining', and it was precisely such qualities, lying far beyond the realms of theology and metaphysics, that led Simone Weil to adhere to her faith. Simone Weil was a witness to the absolute, a religious absolute which was that of the kenosis, that self-emptying act of God's underpinning the whole of Weil's religious metaphysics and informing everything she wrote once she had discovered the passage in the Philippians. Her witness derived from her sensitivity to poetic beauty. Time and again in her writings on totally disparate topics Simone Weil reverts to the kenotic hymn in Paul's letter to the Philippians, as here: For me, the proof, the really miraculous thing is the perfect beauty of the accounts of the Passion together with several searing phrases from Isaiah and St Paul: `He thought it not robbery to be equall with god . . . He made hym silfe of no reputacion . . . He becam obedient vnto the deeth/even the deeth of the crosse . . .' That is what forces me to believe.13 Such passages ± and there are many in her writings ± show how Weil rests her religious belief neither on reason nor on any pre-established disposition or passion to believe, but rather on aesthetic grounds ± grounds which bear within them the meaning of `aesthetic' as wakefulness, the being aware, attentiveness, in the same way as the word `anaesthetic' connotes unawareness and sleepiness. The theology of the kenosis is complex, especially when poets and original thinkers of the order of Weil, Hopkins and, in our time, Hill are interpreting and working through it. Two aspects of it are particularly worth bearing in mind. First, it is a poem, and this is what both Hopkins and Simone Weil were, I think, tuning into, for it is the beauty of the text that attracts them above all. Its poetic form and resonance have been explored in a work by a Boston University theologian, Lucien Richard (Christ: The Self-Emptying of God, 1997), which contains an appendix by Geoffrey Hill in which he adverts to the status of St Paul's text as a poem. Hill also explicitly works both some of St Paul's lines and the word `kenosis' into The Triumph of Love (1998): `Paul's reinscription of the Kenotic Hymn ± / God . . . made himself of no reputation . . . took / the shape of a servant ± is our manumission' (from section CXLVI).14 The date of publication of The Triumph of Love, taken in conjunction with his appendix for Richard's book, confirms the notion that Hill was mulling

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over the kenosis in its poetic and theological implications in the years spent composing The Triumph. Within the dynamic of this poem, Hill presents the kenosis as a metaphysical and religious choice on the part of his poetic persona. To return to Simone Weil: during Passiontide 1938, while staying with her mother at the Abbey of Solesme in order to listen to the Gregorian chants of that season, she met two young Englishmen. One, Charles B., whom she nicknamed, in English, the devil boy, introduced her to his own poetry, which she enjoyed; the other, John Vernon, whom she nicknamed in English the angel boy, introduced her to the art of `Love': `Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back . . .'15 Her encounter with Herbert's `Love' led to the decisive encounter of her life: that with Christ who, she claimed, came down and took possession of her as she inwardly recited `Love'. In the history of English poetry, Herbert is perhaps the poet who most lived out the spirituality of the kenosis and integrated it into his poetry, above all in `Love': the speaker wishes to serve his divine host: ` ``My deare, then I will serve.'' ' But it is Love who so delicately places Himself at the service of the guest who feels so unworthy: ` ``You must sit down,'' sayes Love, ``and taste my meat.'' ' The attraction which drew Simone Weil to the Metaphysical poets also drew Eliot to rediscover them for the twentieth century. His essay on Herbert, not among his best-known, is one of his finest and most enthusiastic pieces of criticism. One aspect of Eliot's project in his essay is to remind readers of Herbert's present-day relevance. He quotes some lines from the introduction to a 1907 edition of Herbert: Here, as the cattle wind homeward in the evening light, the benign, white-haired parson stands at his gate to greet the cowherd, and the village chimes call the labourers to evensong. For these contented spirits, happily removed from the stress and din of contending creeds and clashing dogmas, the message of the gospel tells of divine approval for work well done . . . And among these typical spirits, beacons of a quiet hope, no figure stands out more brightly or more memorably than George Herbert.16 Eliot passionately refutes these lines ± the passage, Eliot says, `is worth quoting in order to point out how false a picture this is' ± because, as he says, they give a false picture of both the poet and his age and, worse, they ghettoize him in a position from where, if the logic of the writer's argument were followed through, Herbert would have nothing worthwhile to say to

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the modern world.17 Eliot was consciously creating a Herbert for 1962, a Herbert capable of speaking to a post-war world, just as, before him, the 28-year-old Simone Weil had responded to a Herbert capable of speaking to a world on the brink of war. For the Anschluss had taken place on 13 March 1938, almost exactly a month before Simone Weil and her mother set out to attend the Holy Week services at Solesme, Easter falling that year on 17 April. Evidently, Simone Weil, like Eliot, found something or Someone in Herbert that would serve her, which or Whom she in turn could serve, taking her beyond the contingencies of the historical moment while leaving her free to act within it. Geoffrey Hill, writing on Herbert in the appendix to Richard's Christ: The Self-Emptying of God, says: `Other than William Tyndale's Englishing of Philippians 2:5±11, in 1526, the purest kenotic poetry in English is that of George Herbert.'18 Whether or not `kenotic poetry' is a term of critical evaluation or indeed approval for Hill is debatable, though it may well be, given the high regard in which his writings show he holds Herbert. But he does go on to say that Herbert's poetry is `simultaneously characterized by power and powerlessness, magisterial in its rhetorical command (Herbert had been Public Orator to the University of Cambridge), and yet recurrently and finally self-humbling'.19 It is partly, at least, this combination of poetic power and kenotic powerlessness that, I believe, appealed to Simone Weil. But Simone Weil was not merely inspired by English poetry. Nor is she only someone who partakes of the kenotic spirituality evident in a certain number of English poets. She is more particularly someone who has herself inspired English poems. Rowan Williams's `Simone Weil at Ashford' is part of a sequence of poems called `Graves and Gates'. From what insight does the poem derive, what insight does it leave us with? Upstairs into the air: a young god, pupils dilated, blows into his little flute. At each stair's end, he breaks it, reaches for a new one, climbs again. Below the crowd blurs, hums, ahead the sky is even, dark from the bare sun. Breaking the last instrument, he waits, and in a while they will tear out his heart, now it is still and simple as the rise and fall of tides. The crowd and the sun breathe him in. No, we don't walk like him. We stagger up

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the steps in padded jackets, moonboots, crash-helmets, filters and shades. In gravity. Some of us try to strip; but what's beneath is very cold, even under the dark bare sun: a stiff, gaunt crying, I must not be loved, and I must not be seen, and if I cannot walk like god, at least I can be light and hungry, hollowing my guts till I'm a bone the sentenced god can whistle through. The title refers to the place where Simone Weil was taken from central London on doctors' advice when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The sequence is prefaced by a quotation from the Book of Common Prayer from which the sequence takes its title: `. . . that through the grave and gate of death we may pass to our joyful resurrection.' This places the poems, then, within the context of institutional prayer of the ecclesial community. Of the ten poems that make up the sequence, this is one of only two to mention God, or `god', directly. The nature of the religious awareness at work in the poem on Weil seems to me to be nevertheless problematic, and it is to Williams's credit, I think, that in the poem his poetic radar picks up on liminal phenomena floating as it were on the margins of consciousness: this is the blurring, humming, waiting, staggering dimension of the poem. He shows a sensitivity to Weil not as she is sometimes seen ± as a secular saint ± but rather as she was, locked in a struggle with, and seemingly succumbing to, darkness. The poem is not about religious awareness, nor does it turn out to be precisely a report on Simone Weil at Ashford: rather, it is itself an experience of the religious awareness that was Simone Weil's, or at least that awareness as interpreted, with great skill, by the poet. The intersection of religious awareness and poetic expression begins in the first line with the `young god' seemingly anticipating `god' and finally `the sentenced god' of the second stanza, for the poem hovers between the presence and absence of the definite article. This is possibly a crux of the poem because it is a point at which Weil's religious faith is at stake: if a mythical Greek god is in some sense an avatar of Christ, Christ himself risks taking on a kind of syncretistic quality at odds with orthodox Christian theology. It may be a cipher for the deeply personal nature of Weil's Christian faith. The absence of initial capital letters for `the god' and then, more interestingly, `god', shows that the religious space in the poem falls beyond or outside the Christian tradition as it is conventionally referred to today, which rarely writes `God' without a capital letter, although the lower-case g seems to have been accepted until the nineteenth century and was used in Tyndale's

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translation of the Bible. With the definite article, at the beginning of the poem at least, the god with his flute is a figure of Pan, the satyr and god of music in Greek mythology. Pan is said to be the only one of the Greek gods to have died, or at least whose death was announced, and some scholars consider him as a precursor of Christ. The poem pays tribute to the intimations of Christianity that Simone Weil found within Greek civilization. In the Greek myth of Pan, the god pursues the nymph Syrinx who, refusing his advances, is transformed into a reed. The god forges his flute from the reed. The first two lines and the last two lines of the poem seem to be a blurred allusion to this. The poem is composed of two nine-line stanzas, possibly reflecting a certain duality in Weil's thinking about faith. It is perhaps hard to see how the first stanza is related to the title. It is marked by an excess of absence, building up to its perfect obverse, the excess of presence within the fine single sentence, with its `sentenced god', taking up the whole of the last third of the poem. The whole poem is shot through with bleakness and breakage, darkness, bareness and death. The first stanza is an objective but deeply elliptical description of a dramatic situation. The tone of the second differs due to the appearance of a first-person speaker, first within a multiple `we', and then the `we' is `stripped' of its multiplicity and of its community dimension as found in the epigraph to the sequence, to become the `I' invading the poem five times in the last four lines. Is this `I' that of each of the individuals who make up the enigmatic `we' in the first line of the stanza? Or is it, more likely, the voice of Simone Weil, whose status as a Christian was vexed because of her conscious refusal to be baptized? In terms of this interpretation, the `I' here highlights Simone Weil's to some extent self-chosen identity as a solitary outsider. This `I' reduces itself to nothing so that it can become ± but does it? ± god's poor vessel. The poem suggests that Weil over-extended herself and attempted the superhuman, so that she's finally something subhuman, a mere `bone': almost, but not quite, a relic perhaps: I must not be loved, and I must not be seen, and if I cannot walk like god, at least I can be light and hungry, hollowing my guts till I'm a bone the sentenced god can whistle through. Certain details suggest that the Passion discreetly underlies the poem: the youth of the god, the repeated breaking, the crowd's murderous intentions towards him, the sentence. The first stanza is timeless in content and

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therefore, perhaps, ethereal, airy, gaseous. It is in fact an image of elevation, more particularly of ascension, with the word `ahead' suggesting the god is level, or almost, with the sky. He walks free from gravity, which is why the second stanza insists on this aspect of the others' ± mere mortals' ± staggering. But Weil would like to `walk like god' `Upstairs into the air'. The poem returns to this idea with the word `light': this is Weil's attempt to break free of the bonds of gravity: sin, in other words. The second stanza fixes the poem in the modern period with the description of bikers. At the end of the first stanza the god is, like Hopkins's Virgin Mary, `compared to the air we breathe'; though while the `crowd and the sun breathe him in', there is no suggestion of the `rise and fall' of the first stanza, for they breathe him in but do not breathe him out. The flute in the first stanza is the human instrument in the second: or perhaps one should say inhuman instrument, such are the lengths to which Weil goes to hollow herself out. Williams reads this gesture of Simone Weil's ± she refused food in solidarity with her compatriots in the occupied zone of France ± as kenotic: or does he? The bareness, the darkness, and the breakage, the stripping down and hollowing out at the heart of the poem make the poem itself the `gaunt cry' that so haunts it, while the stiffness of the cry catches a certain inflexibility in the intensity at the heart of Weil's spirituality, especially of her will to selfimmolation, some would say self-destruction, the which is contrary to the spirit of the kenosis. `I must not be loved': `Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back / Guiltie of dust and sinne'. It might appear that Simone Weil neglected the rest of Herbert's poem. Yet Rowan Williams's poem can also be taken as a tribute to Simone Weil's courage in standing alone and, more than that, to the huge daring of her moral and spiritual enterprise. Williams himself demonstrates here the ability to identify as fully as possible with the other and to figure forth this identity in poetry that is one mark of a truly kenotic poetic sensibility. His insight into the darkness and despair that Simone Weil went through at Ashford in the last days of her life has brought forth a thing not only of gravity ± in every sense of the word ± but of grace: this blend of gravity and grace is the poem's, and the reader's, manumission.

Notes 1

2

For the Camus quotation, see Jean Mambrino, La Patrie de l'aÃme (Paris: Phebus, 2004), 324; for that from Sean Dunne, see Something Understood: A Spiritual Anthology (Cork: Marino, 1995), 190. See Mambrino, op. cit., 328.

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Ecstasy and Understanding Elizabeth Jennings, Every Changing Shape: Mystical Experience and the Making of Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996; first edition, 1961), 134. See Jennings, op. cit., 131±9; Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (Oxford Lectures) (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 3. See Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (London: Penguin, 1985), 137, for the epigraph; the `Lachrimae' sonnet entitled `Pavana dolorosa': music creates the `moveless dance', `the decreation to which all must move', 149. Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984), 8. Geoffrey Hill, Speech! Speech! (London: Penguin, 2000), 16, where he asks the philosopher to take `TIME OUT, SIMONE WEIL.' The Poems of Rowan Williams (Oxford: Perpetua, 2002), 65. Among the writings, see Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2004 ; first edition, 2003), 73. Among the speeches, see `Analysing Atheism; Unbelief and the world of Faiths' at www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/ 2004/040329.html#top. Michael Symmons Roberts, Soft Keys (London: Secker and Warburg, 1993), 31±5. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to the Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, with a preface by T. S. Eliot (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), X. The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. C. C. Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, second, revised impression, 1955), 148. The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. C. C. Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, second, revised impression, 1955), 174±5 for this quotation and the next. Simone Weil, Lettre aÁ un religieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 62. Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 80. George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, ed. Louis L. Martz, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 171. T. S. Eliot, George Herbert, Writers and their Work No. 52 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1952), 14. Ibid., 15. Lucien Richard, OMI, Christ: The Self-Emptying of God, (New York/ Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1997), 197. Ibid.

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Works Cited Dunne, Sean, ed. (1995), Something Understood: A Spiritual Anthology. Cork: Marino. Eliot, T. S. (1952), George Herbert, Writers and their Work No. 52. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Heaney, Seamus (1995), The Redress of Poetry. London: Faber and Faber. Hill, Geoffrey (1984), The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas. London: Andre Deutsch. Hill, Geoffrey (1985), Collected Poems. London: Penguin. Hill, Geoffrey (1998), The Triumph of Love. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Hill, Geoffrey (2000), Speech! Speech! London: Penguin. Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1955, second, revised impression), The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. C. C. Abbott. London: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1955, second, revised impression), The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. C. C. Abbott. London: Oxford University Press. Jennings, Elizabeth (1996; first edition, 1961), Every Changing Shape: Mystical Experience and the Making of Poems. Manchester: Carcanet. Mambrino, Jean (2004), La Patrie de l'aÃme. Paris: Phebus. Martz, Louis L., ed. (1986), George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, The Oxford Authors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richard, Lucien, OMI (1997), Christ: The Self-Emptying of God. New York/ Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press. Symmons Roberts, Michael (1993), Soft Keys. London: Secker and Warburg. Weil, Simone (1951), Lettre aÁ un religieux. Paris: Gallimard. Weil, Simone (1952), The Need for Roots: Prelude to the Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, with a preface by T. S. Eliot. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Williams, Rowan (2002), The Poems of Rowan Williams. Oxford: Perpetua. Williams, Rowan (2004; first edition, 2003), Silence and Honey Cakes: The Wisdom of the Desert. Oxford: Lion Hudson. Williams, Rowan (2004), `Analysing Atheism; Unbelief and the world of Faiths', www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/2004/ 040329.html#top.

14

Unpropitious: Christian poetry and `now' Michael Edwards

As someone involved in the poetic expression in English of religious awareness, I intend to reflect, in a preliminary way, on both the awareness and the expression in terms of the present. One's situation in 2008 is, in certain essentials, the same as that of Hopkins in 1875, but also quite different, notably as concerns the English language. It happens that, as soon as I turned to the subject, a passage in Eliot's `East Coker' came to mind, as already engaging with religious awareness, poetic expression and Eliot's own present, and I shall proceed to general considerations from that particular example. The passage concludes the first part of section V: There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.1 One's first response may well be that Eliot is wrong, and that his writing is slack. The conditions that seem unpropitious presumably include the widespread lack of interest in poetry and the fact of the War (`East Coker' dates from 1940), but no period is less propitious than any other for the making of poetry (though certain kinds of poetry may not be achievable), and nostalgia, here as elsewhere, is a temptation, an agreeable excuse. In so far as Eliot is thinking of Christian poetry, the easy feeling that, say, the fourteenth or seventeenth centuries offered the poet the necessary rich Christian culture which the religious indifference or hostility of the twentieth failed to do, ignores the fact that Christianity, as opposed to Christendom, is always a minority concern, and that being forced to recognize this by the pressure of the times may be greatly to one's advantage. The Christian poet sees, in such conditions, how far

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Christianity is from triumphing, and he becomes more ready to understand, though not more ready to attain, the beautifully quiet virtues of the Beatitudes, such as are lived, without their realizing it, by the anti-saints of Graham Greene. All conditions are both propitious and unpropitious; they are above all unique. The poet can count on the resources of the everchanging present, and the newness of his work will derive in part from the original personal and social experience which each now makes available. To hear the (apparent) looseness of the writing, one only needs to take note of certain words: what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps . . . The passage reads ± when read in that way ± like a parody of Eliot, or like the self-parody for which he had a peculiar talent, as in the fifth of the `Five-Finger Exercises'. One's judgement of the passage is transformed, however, if, after wondering why Eliot chose unpropitious rather than, for example, unfavourable or unpromising, one hears the theology. Propitiation, or reconciliation through sacrifice, is a word fraught with history and controversy and stressed with the whole range of Christian thought. The forms hilasmos, hilaskomai, hilasteÃrion, when used in the New Testament of the death of Christ, are always accompanied by references to sin or to blood. (They remind one that the most unpropitious state of affairs prevailed when the propitiation was actually being made.) If Eliot has the Christian propitiation in mind, which I find difficult to doubt, he can hardly commit himself to the thought that, in this deep-set meaning of the word, his own time is less propitious than others ± that propitiation is less available, to the Christian poet in the act of writing as to anyone else. The word `seems' also changes. Eliot is not using it weakly (as if to say that the conditions do rather seem unfavourable, when you think about it), but strongly, to mean what it says: the conditions seem unpropitious, but may not be. One then discovers that the next word is, indeed, `But'. Eliot is admonishing himself, as he drops from the everyday meaning of unpropitious into the bottomless depth of propitiation, and as he adjusts, or makes just, the small word `seems'. One then realizes that it is not Eliot who is slacking in putting his words together, but oneself as reader. If one is disappointed to find four instances of and in a single line, one can be even more surprised in glancing at the previous lines. The section begins: `So

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here I am, in the middle way . . .', the second sentence begins: `And so each venture / Is a new beginning' (where the repetition of `so' can also appear lame), while the third sentence begins: `And what there is to conquer . . .' These initial Ands are not, I think, Hebraic: they convey the tension of the thought. The extraordinary sequence of occurrences of the word `and' articulates an essential part of the poem's meaning. One and after another is a further turn of the screw, as the poet acknowledges, in distress, that his predicament is traversed by one thing after another, that nothing is finally achieved: `and every attempt / Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure', and that all one's cogitation brings one back to where one is. The reader should, in fact, accentuate the four ands, so as to register the emotion in Eliot's thinking: `And found and lost again and again: and now . . .' Even the colon bears the strain of the poet's thought. After so many ands, the `But' that begins the next sentence is thoroughly charged, with the hope that emerges from beneath the word `unpropitious', while `perhaps', rather than being tired and `per'apsey', is the awakening to another possibility: one may not be required either to win, or to lose. Only if we read at concert pitch can we catch the articulation by syntax of a strong, continually toiling, rhythmic thought, and the poet's shock of recognition as he hears into the word `unpropitious' and thinks again and anew in the expectant hesitation of `But perhaps . . .' Only if our ears are tuned can we hear the last sentence of the section, not as the expression of a resigned thought already arrived at (`The rest is not our business'), but as a new and happy thought taking shape in the poet's mind: `The rest is not our business.' Four Quartets is far from being, as many have supposed, an Anglican drone; the Alec Guinness voice, for all one admires him as an actor, is not right for it. Eliot is continually exerting himself and working his material. The second section of `East Coker' has spoken of the `wrestle' with words and meanings; the passage I am trying to have an ear for acknowledges the `fight' to recover what has been lost. The wrestle was moreover `intolerable' and I see no reason to assume that, when Eliot uses the word, he does not mean it. He also retunes the word when he has recourse to it a second time, in the penultimate section of the last quartet, for the `intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove'. By writing the line as he does: `The intolerable shirt of flame', he forces one to stress, in keeping only with emphatic speech, the first two syllables of `intolerable', and no doubt wishes one to recall the earlier use and to compare the two contexts. By introducing the unbearable flame of the consciousness of guilt, of self-accusation, and maybe of Purgatory, he places the mere hardships of the poet in a zone of less importance ± he

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(almost) mocks his local worries when seen in the light of what really matters. He presumably lifted the word `intolerable' from the Confession at Communion in the Book of Common Prayer (he originally wrote `insupportable'), where he may have observed that Cranmer (if it was he) also tunes his words, to a different end but with the same care. Having got the congregation to acknowledge the sins that they have committed `most grievously', that is, exceedingly and in a way hurtful to God, he has them repent of their sins by saying: `The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable.' The hurt returns against the sinner, as he learns, within the limits of his capacity, something of the grief of God. In a Christian perspective, and in a fallen world, it is right, while resting in God, to be restless, but those who object to Four Quartets as relaxing into placidity have not taken the measure, or so it seems to me, of Eliot's verse and his vocabulary and have not sensed the unceasing activity of his mind and engagement of his feelings. In the passage under consideration, he is continually refining, redefining, the ethical and spiritual understanding of his problem. He needs to conquer by strength `and submission'. The idea of not being able to `emulate' is immediately qualified: `± but there is no competition ±', and then qualified again: `There is only the fight'. The running metaphor from soldiering (`raid', `shabby equipment', and so on), while linking the struggle of the poet to the struggle of the nation in the War, serves also to humble the poet in such a context, a dry self-raillery being audible in such phrases as `Undisciplined squads of emotion'. One then returns to the opening words of the section: `So here I am', to realize that the whole passage is a concentrated sounding of here and now, and especially of the `I am'. The year 2008, in a postmodern world which proclaims, peculiarly often, the death of God and which waits, unexpectantly, not for the Second Coming but for the post-post-modern, is no more unpropitious than 1940 or 1640 for the poetry one might wish to write after Eliot. The same wakefulness is required in matters of language and prosody, but the situation of English has changed so radically that I shall need to return to the question of language. For there is another, equally relevant, way of interpreting phrasing such as `seems . . . But perhaps neither . . . nor': as an example of what I call, with a rather special meaning of the adjective, a prosaic act, distinct from, yet participating in, the poetic act. The prosaic act is an important move, and one especially noticeable in English poetry, for writing which aims high, since it relates, to the prose of the everyday where much of our life is spent, the poetry of the prodigious, of quest and vision. At the moment of entering on the sustained and searching

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meditation of `Tintern Abbey', for instance, Wordsworth pauses to correct a seemingly inconsiderable observation: `I see / These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild', and to write a note, literally in prose, to explain why the waters he hears flow with `a soft inland murmur'.2 Eliot's `prose', used extensively in Four Quartets, his poem which reaches most ambitiously for the overall design of experience, serves to undermine the poetic attempts to speak large truth, or to descend from the timelessness of meditation into the time-bound reality of the man inside the poet. The tetrameters resounding with rhyme, myth and metaphor in section II of `East Coker' are famously met by: `That was a way of putting it ± not very satisfactory'. The sestina in section II of `The Dry Salvages' manoeuvres its repeating rhyme pattern so as to climax in the pivotal Christian event: `Only the hardly, barely prayable / Prayer of the one Annunciation', only to be followed by: `It seems, as one becomes older . . .', where `seems', rather than being tense with possibility, is deliberately lowkeyed. At the end of `Little Gidding', if a suggestion I made thirty years ago is acceptable, the whole poem, which appears to settle into an achieved unity of history and of vision: `And the fire and the rose are one', allows itself to be queried as the reader recalls the earlier comment: `That was a way of putting it'. These questionings of one's vision of the real and these returns to the ordinary are of such importance only because of the high aspiration of the poem. The aspiration, the questioning and the return are all crucial for now, as is one aspect in particular of Eliot's ambitious poetic act, his relating of his `hints and guesses' to the visionary poetry of Blake. At the end of a very unBlakean passage in section III of `East Coker', about waiting, without hope, love or thought, Eliot includes, among a series of impingements on the senses of a possible, supernatural communication, `The wild thyme unseen'. In the second book of Blake's Milton, Ololon descends into the garden of Blake's cottage in Felpham when `the lark mounts' and `Just in this moment when the morning odours rise abroad / And first from the wild thyme'.3 Blake seems to be caught up in a kind of ecstasy, from which he awakes in the final lines of the poem, to find his wife bending over him, to the accompaniment of the same mounting lark and of the same `wild thyme'. As if to recall the recurrence of the wild thyme in that single yet infinitely protracted moment, Eliot too repeats himself, when he meditates again, at the end of `The Dry Salvages', on the `distraction fit' in which one is in touch with otherness through the well-disposed presences of nature (which create an increased sensitivity in the mind to the increased sensitivity of the senses), and again refers to the `wild thyme unseen'.

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I suspect that one would need to reflect further on Eliot's negotiating with Blake before understanding all that he wishes to accomplish. It seems, firstly, that he is distinguishing his `moment' from Blake's. While Blake too is concerned, in his own way, with `The point of intersection of the timeless / With time' (from the same section V of `The Dry Salvages'), the timeless is what really matters to him, the more than 300 lines of poetry which separate the first scenting of wild thyme from the second being composed in a kind of epic instant. In mistrusting the `intense moment . . . with no before and after' (`East Coker' V), a pleasurable epiphany which fails to `urge the mind to aftersight and foresight' (`Little Gidding' II), Eliot both echoes Kierkegaard on the necessity of advancing from the aesthetic to the ethical and the spiritual (not that Blake had any need of such a lesson), and situates vision thoroughly in passing time and in the individual experience of the continuum of memory. By remembering the wild thyme at another moment of the poem, Eliot mimes the way in which memories recur and change and deepen, in line with that particular development of creative memory in modern writing in Wordsworth and Proust. (The company might have surprised him.) I believe that this way of conjoining the timeless and time, this realizing of transcendence in a person's developing consciousness of an unceasingly changing milieu, is the proper response to the Christian as opposed to the Platonic notion of the meshing of the two worlds (which are one), as valid now as it was for Eliot. Eliot also modifies Blake, from the same perspective, by emphasizing what in Blake is left unsaid: the fact that the wild thyme is `unseen'. The unseen is a path, in the here and now, to the invisible, for although thyme is not a flower of paradise but a common herb, its presence can become numinous by reason of its absence from sight. Eliot abstains from describing the invisible of which he has had no view, preferring what I again take to be the way appropriate to a fallen world, of suggesting another world through the reaching of this world towards its own possibility and otherness. At the end of Four Quartets, he looks to the entering of Eden and to being ushered there, in a similar fashion, by the `voice of the hidden waterfall'. The `moment in and out of time' (`The Dry Salvages' V) is elicited by an object in and out of place. I note also how friendly, in principle, is this search for the unknown in the known to anyone who does not share the poet's Christianity, and that the `unseen' has a similarly more-than-natural quality in Charles Tomlinson, a nonChristian poet who nevertheless discerns in the artistic ethic of CeÂzanne `a sort of religion' (`The Poet as Painter') and who described his own work, in a London Magazine interview of January 1981, as `a kind of religious

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poetry'.4 Eliot would surely have appreciated the reticence and the underplayed language in `a sort of', `a kind of'. Christian poetry, now and at any time, is likely to rework the real in search of whatever is beyond what meets the eye, and always does well to return to the unamended real in acknowledgement of the creatureliness of even the most clairvoyant visionary. The need to re-view and to re-word the real derives from the Fall, from the perception that the self and the whole of its world have suffered a catastrophe. The ability to do so comes from the other end of history, from the new Creation, from the promise that the world is not to be laid aside in the name of an Elsewhere, but is to become `new heavens and a new earth'. I would argue of Re-creation that it justifies, and gives point to, all theories, whether Christian or not, which see poetry as, in one way or another, changing and improving the world, and I would suggest that anaktisis rather than mimesis is the centre of a specifically Christian poetics. I also feel that such a poetics is particularly joyful, assuming as it does that it is our world that will survive and become incommensurably more glorious, and that the imagination is not destined to project alluring mirages of what cannot be, but is given us so as to renew a world, in our perception of it, that will one day be renewed in itself. And yet, since Hopkins and despite his example, there has not exactly been an abundance of joy; much Christian poetry seems to have been born under what Baudelaire called the ciel meÂlancolique de la poeÂsie moderne, and one could almost believe, with Pater or Swinburne, that what Christianity introduced was, indeed, melancholy, rather than a new quality of joy and a new reason for being joyful. It also introduced a new idea of language, but so exalted that one can hardly see how to consider it in practical terms. One can understand, however, that human language has fallen along with everything else that constitutes human being, and that language too is subject to change and decay, and open to continually varying opportunity. Sensing trouble for English, Hopkins went down into the language as far as one can go, and reached the living rhythm of English in the stress and pitch of Anglo-Saxon accentuation, the equally Germanic gusto in snapping words together, and something of the ability of that early language of ours to persuade the ear that the thing itself is alive in the sounds that say it. In calling a falcon a windhover, Hopkins names it as a child might name it, or Adam. If Hopkins reached for an Edenic language, which shows the intervention of the Fall by its extreme though exhilarating outlandishness, Eliot exhibits Babel, most emphatically in The Waste Land, though Four Quartets has its sprinkling of foreign words and French idioms (`Dawn points', `the

Unpropitious: Christian poetry and `now'

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unattended / Moment'). The fact that Eliot, along with the even more Babelic Pound, was an American at a time when America was realizing its importance in the world, may account for his finding that particular opportunity of wrestling with a fallen language, and prevailing. Although he read a number of foreign languages, however, he does not seem to have been profoundly interested in how they work, whereas the enlightening difference of the foreign may be the distinctive opportunity that presents itself to us. It is always tempting to think that one's own period is unique, yet ours are the generations in which English has become the world language and a language under threat, through being spoken by so many for whom it is convenient but not vital. Our situation is the reverse of that facing Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, whose national language was relatively unimportant ± like their nation, which was only beginning to find a role outside its own territory ± and who seized the occasion exuberantly to enrich the language by borrowings from more than fifty others. As the United Kingdom loses its influence, a fact which, in the realm of intellect and spirit, is, I take it, neither here nor there, English, on the contrary, is progressively invading the world and its languages. We are emerging from a centuries-long phase of the history of English, and the Christian poet and reader, as well as the non-Christian, ought surely to be aware of this. How we face the situation, no one can decide, except for himself. It would seem a good thing, as against the unrooted homelessness of the worldwide lingua anglica, to give voice to all the varieties of British English and to the different kinds of English, as of relations to the real, promoted by the complex of linguistic origins in our strangely hybrid tongue, especially the Germanic and the Franco-Latin; this is already happening, in Hughes's Viking, for example, or Heaney's Ulster, as if British poets were already alive to the danger. One might also expect a concentration on highly idiomatic ± as opposed to merely popular ± English, and Geoffrey Hill is attuning his poems more and more to this inimitable and untranslatable dimension of the language. I also believe, however, that the time invites us to consider other languages, and to do so in a new way, in the light not of Babel but of Pentecost. The foreign, deeply entered into, is an initiation into otherness, into a quite alien practice of perceiving, of naming and of living, the real. To find one's way into the foreign is to meet the strange, or, as French puts it more deftly, one crosses the threshold at one and the same time of l'eÂtranger and l'eÂtrange. In terms of mental and of spiritual hygiene, there are few things more salutary, since one sees the narrowness ± though not the wrongness ± of one's own perspective, and one learns the potential of

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the strange, in a world where, a Christian would say, so much of what is really happening is unknown to us, let alone familiar. The value to the poet in particular is the gradual revelation of a different rhythm and syntax, with not simply a different vocabulary but a different kind of vocabulary, and the slow appearing of the same world as another world. All those precise dissimilarities also throw a sharp light on English. They reveal, with an exactness that one may not attain otherwise, the specificities of the English language, of English poetry, and of English poetics: the genius of the language, which makes it worthwhile to undertake its `defence and illustration'.

Notes 1

2

3

4

T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909±1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 203; for all further references to Four Quartets here, see this edition, 187±224. See William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and other Poems, 1797±1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 116. William Blake, ed. Michael Mason, The Oxford Authors (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 371. Charles Tomlinson, `The poet as painter', in Essays by Various Hands, ed. V. Cronin (Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1979), 154; Interview in The London Magazine, January 1981, 71.

Works Cited Baudelaire, Charles (1976), `Lettre aÁ Jules Janin', in Oeuvres compleÁtes II, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: nrf/Gallimard, BibliotheÁque de la PleÂiade, 231±40. Eliot, T. S. (1963), Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber. Mason, Michael, ed. (1988), William Blake, The Oxford Authors. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Tomlinson, Charles (1979), `The poet as painter', in Essays by Various Hands, ed. V. Cronin. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Tomlinson, Charles (1981), Interview in The London Magazine, January 1981. Wordsworth, William (1992), Lyrical Ballads, and other Poems, 1797±1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Index

Auden, W. H. 3, 84±102 passim Anglicanism, Anglican Church 28, 29, 47, 84, 88, 124, 150±1, 174 Arendt, Hannah 3, 93f Baudelaire, Charles 136, 178 Beardsley, Aubrey 16 Belloc, Hilaire 17 Bible 3, 7, 48f, 116, 120±1, 129±30, 178 Colossians 156 n3 Ephesians 156 n3 Isaiah 118, 164 Jeremiah 125 Matthew 154 Philippians 162±4, 166 Psalm 22 154 Revelation 50f, 121 Song of Songs 121 Blake, William 3, 105±8 Milton 176±7 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 93 Book of Common Prayer 7, 128, 167, 175 Botticelli 9 Brooke, Rupert 115 Brown, George Mackay 2, 9, 12 `The Storm' 12f Cather, Willa 59 Catholicism, Catholic Church 2, chapters 2 & 3 passim, 96, 105±7, 119, 145, 150±1

Dickens's attitude to 31 CeÂzanne 177 Chateaubriand 17 Chesterton, G. K. 17 Coleridge, S. T. 107 Corbin, Henry 107 Dante 72±4, 78, 80±2, 88 Davie, Donald 7 Douglas, Lord Alfred 16 Dowson, Ernest 16, 18 `Benedictio Domini' 18±20, 23 Dunne, Sean 161 Eliot, T. S. 2, 4, 10, 14, 161±3, 165±7 `Ash Wednesday' 130 `Hollow Men' 3 `Four Quartets' 3, 5±7, 71±82 passim, 128, 161±3, 165±6, 172±9 `The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' 73 `Murder in the Cathedral' 78 `Notes Towards the Definition of Culture' 6 `The Waste Land' 73, 178 objective correlative 116 St Francis of Assissi 12 Feuerbach 137, 141 Freud 86, 140, 147 Gallet, Rene 145, 156n 2

182

Index

Gray, John 16 `A Crucifix' 23 Greene, Graham 105, 173 Herbert, George 128, 161, 165±6 Hill, Geoffrey 2, 4, 5, 12, 145±60 passim, 161±2, 179 For the Unfallen 9 `Lachrimae' 162 `Metamorphosis' 9f The Lords of Limit 145, 162 The Orchards of Syon 146, 152f `The Pentecost Castle' 162 Speech! Speech! 148, 162 Style and Faith 145, 150±1 The Triumph of Love 149, 164 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 2, 4, 5, 6±15, 28, 32, 38, 41, 142, 145±60 passim, 163, 169, 172, 178 `God's Grandeur' 154 `Henry Purcell' 148, 163 `To R. B.' 163 `true virtue' in 163 `The Wreck of the Deutschland' 9f, 147, 155 `The Loss of the Eurydice' 12 `The Caged Skylark' 13 `Henry Purcell' 13 `The Windhover' 13, 152 `The Bugler's First Communion' 33±5 Hughes, Ted 179 Incarnation 33, 36, 75, 80, 88, 92 Irenaeus 92 Jennings, Elizabeth 2, 28, 40±1, 161±2 `Harvest and Consecration' 40 `A Requiem' 40 `A Serious Game' 41 `Towards a Religious Poem' 40±1

Johnson, Lionel 24 `Walter Pater' 24 Jones, David 2±5, 28, 38, 115±23 passim The Anathemata 39 In Parenthesis 3, 38±9 Julian of Norwich 78, 88 Jung, C. G. 107, 111 Kierkegaard 125, 130, 177 Kermode, Frank 58±60 Larkin, Philip 1, 4, 135±44 passim Lawrence, D. H. 3, 46±57, 59 `Weeknight Service' 52±3 `Piano' 53±4 Luther, Martin 90 MallarmeÂ, SteÂphane 136 Mann, Thomas 59 Marion, Jean-Luc 3, 71±82 passim Maxwell, Gavin 110 Methodism 47 Milton, John 81±2, 89 Modernism 5, 8, 58±70 Muir, Edwin 2 `The Bird' 13f `New Catholic Baroque' (Moran) 28, 32, 38 Newbolt, Henry 9 Newman, John Henry 16, 26 n10, 28±9 Nietszche 64, 141±2 Ovid 9 Pater, Walter 5, 17, 18, 24, 29, 30, 178 Plato 86 Plotinus 86 Pound, Ezra 11, 60, 64, 116, 179 Proust, Marcel 177

Index Raine, Kathleen 3, 105±114 passim Rhymers' Club 16 Richard, Lucien 164, 166 Ricoeur, Paul 72, 74 Rielo, Fernando 108 Rimbaud, Arthur 25 Roberts, Michael Symmons 161±3 Rolfe, Frederick (Baron Corvo) 16 Scotus, John Duns 153, 158 n40 Socialism 49 Spender, Stephen 6±7 Swinburne, 178 Symons, Arthur 16, 24±5 Thomas, R. S. 4, 124±134 passim Thompson, Francis 2, 27f `The Hound of Heaven' 37 `Orient Ode' 35±6, 39 Tomlinson, Charles 177 Tractarian Movement 16±17 Transubstantiation, doctrine of 31

183

Verlaine, Paul 23 Voznesenski 8 `Waiting for Godot' (Beckett) 66 Weil, Simone 4, 161±71 passim Whitman, Walt 147 Wilde, Oscar 16, 21 `Rome unvisited' 22 Williams, Charles 91f Williams, Rowan 2, 4, 161±3 `Simone Weil at Ashford' 166f Wordsworth, William 163, 177 `Tintern Abbey' 176 Wratislaw, Theodore 16 `Palm Sunday' 19±20 Wyndham Lewis 60, 64 Yeats, W. B. 58±70, 107 `The Second Coming' 3