Posts Tagged religious poetry

The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here each Sunday. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

Hugh’s notebooks have a number of poems in them… both good and bad. You will find pages with Byron and Keats, MacLeish and Eliot. But you will also find pages and pages of the kind of poetry that is much too often published in churchy publications: sincere and urgent rhymes written by sincere and urgent rhymers.

I like to think that Hugh knew the difference between the two kinds of poems he collected: the truly great and merely sincere. He must have because it is obvious in every other way that he was he was a careful and thoughtful reader.

Hugh was first and foremost a pastor. The poems he collected were not the poems a poet would collect, or an English professor, or even a simple language-lover. They were poems collected for specific purposes… a sermon, a home-bound visitation, study and meditation. That, of course, is true of all of the quotes that he collected: bible texts he took the time to type, prayers, book and article excerpts, and all the poems good and bad.

Today’s page from Hugh’s Notebook shows this literary tension quite well. On a single page we have lines excerpted from one of the most famous poems in the English language typed directly below a poem by an unknown poet with one of the worst extended metaphors one could imagine. What could these two poems – one great… one un-great… possibly have in common?

Both are, of course, lyrical nature-poems. “Tintern Abbey” (or more properly, “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798″) is famous precisely because it makes the case so eloquently for there being a place in poetry for the lyrical nature-poems. Indeed, Ms. Chaffee’s poem is the poor poetical kin of what Wordsworth… and the Romantics… worked so hard to bring into poetry and art. Only because Wordsworth had written “Tintern Abbey” could Ms. Chaffee years down the road write her poem about October.

From a poetical point of view, there are no other similarities between the two poems. Ms. Chaffee’s poem uses a loose rhyme scheme, Wordsworth’s is simple blank verse. Wordsworth is subtle where Ms. Chaffee is heavy handed, clumsy, obvious to a fault. Wordsworth requires thought and concentration… while Ms. Chaffee’s requires nothing at all.

But theologically, and that after all is the ultimate point of Hugh’s notebooks, the two poems are quite similar. Both point to the fact that we can see and experience and know something about God through nature. From this point of view, it is clear why the two two poems are put together on a single page.

According to Hugh’s notation system, the Chaffee poem with the bad pirate metaphor was used twice in a sermon… exactly 5 years apart. It is difficult to tell from the notation system whether he also included the lines from Wordsworth as well.

Read from a pulpit Wordsworth can be hard to digest. Not so much the Chaffee lines. They are simple and straightforward, extremely accessible. And for a preacher… that would have been the most important thing of all. The pastor thinks about poetry in a much different way than the poet.  And that is how it should be.

Enjoy!

____

Yesterday in a conversation with a co-worker about the great, open spaces (former prairie) of Southwestern Minnesota, the name of poet Bill Holm came up. It got me thinking about the fact that I have never reviewed a Holm poem here.

I think of Holm and fellow Minnesota-poet Robert Bly as representing two extremes of the poetic… not so much in literary style as in personal style. Bly has always seemed to me to be the consummate self-promoter : dudish vests, longish-hair, extravagant words and gestures sure to catch the ladies’ eyes and make sure no one forgets that he is an artiste. While Holm always seemed to be self-conciously earthy and rural, humbly reminding all who would listen… whenever he got a chance… of his simple farm roots and older viking roots. I always preferred the Holmian personality  pastiche.

It has been said of W.B. Yeats that his greatest creation was not a poem or a play but ultimately the creation of his mythic self. For Yeats the creation of art and artist were synonymous, inextricably mixed, ”how can we know the dancer from the dance.”

In the case of Yeats, the creation of artist-self only made the art greater. But that is not always the case. In fact, it is usually counter-productive. Artistic posing takes energy and direction away from what is most important… while only temporarily keeping us from noticing what will inevitably be clear over time: artistic substance.

This is one of my favorite Holm poems. And with Lent beginning it seems a seasonable fit.

Enjoy!

New Religion
This morning no sound but the loud
breathing of the sea. Suppose that under
all that salt water lived the god
that humans have spent ten thousand years
trawling the heavens for.
We caught the wrong metaphor.
Real space is wet and underneath,
the church of shark and whale and cod.
The noise of those vast lungs
exhaling: the plain chanting of monkfish choirs.
Heaven’s not up but down, and hell
is to evaporate in air. Salvation,
to drown and breathe
forever with the sea.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Heaven’s not up but down, and hell
is to evaporate in air. Salvation,
to drown and breathe
forever with the sea.

The final lines of a short poem are like the punchline of a joke. Holm lived much of his life close to nature and to the elements. That, combined with the natural tendency of all poets to be pantheists, allows Holm in these lines to touch near to the heart of divine mystery and God-ness. I love these lines.

____

Stone Wall in Iowa (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Robinson Jeffers is famous for building by-hand his own stone home, “Tor House and Hawk Tower,” in Carmel, California. Because of that, it is natural for readers to approach a Jeffers’ poem as if it were also built stone-by-stone.

The image of poet as stone-builder is a good one: the perfect combination of the primitive and the craftsman and the anachronistic. Poetry is, after all, all of that.

Poetry is the oldest art. Even those who painted on cave walls were moved to try and shape their own world ultimately by the magic and religious words that gave their world and their lives meaning.

Words like stones have weight. We may treat words sometimes like they are merely the movements of breath, and play with  them that way… like stones we skip across the water to kill a few moments of the day. But words have a weight unto themselves. A weight we can hold in our hands and feel and measure. Words like God, beauty, desire, secret.

Jeffers, maybe more than any poet, understood the true weight of words, a primitive and anachronistic weight. A weight we cannot always articulate but which is always able to articulate us.

On a cool December morning, a Jeffers’ poem seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

The Excesses of God
Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

                                   to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells

 

There are so many lines in this poem I love. But these are the lines that I have found myself repeating most often over the years.

There is a sub-genre of poetry called Christian Poetry just as in music there is a large amount of so-called Christian Music, Christian Rock, etc…. Just like with Christian Music, Christian Poetry merely has the outside trappings of poetry. It has none of the heart or soul or edge of real poetry. It has none of the weight that this poem by Jeffers does.

____

There are many excellent sources for finding new poems and poets on the web. One of my favorite sites, and a frequent stop for me, is the Poetry magazine website. That is where I found this poem by Spenser Reese.

Googling Reese,  I was un-surprised to discover that he had studied theology. From this poem I would have guessed as much… indeed, I would have been surprised to find that he had not. It is, after all, a religious poem written by one with enough sense and background to take the themes raised seriously.

It is a fine poem with the exception of one line, one metaphor that I do not particularly like:”little milky crosses grow like teeth”. I think if he could rework this one line, it would would be a much better poem… at least to me.

Metaphors and similes are one of the basic “tools of the trade” to poets. They can be familiar, novel, complicated, simple, extended, direct, or some combination of all of those things. But in end they need to convey, as exactly as possible, what it is the poet is trying to convey… NOT detract from it.

While I do not wholly subscribe to Eliot’s notion of the objective correlative, I believe that there does exist for words, symbols, metaphors, and phrases a duplexity of meanings that really do need to be respected. That is to say, some words and metaphors should never, ever be placed together because the weight and freight of their many meanings can not co-exist by definition. I would respectfully submit that the three words “milk, crosses, and teeth” are three such words. Putting them together in a clumsy, unworkable metaphor disfigures an otherwise fine poem. But, to quote Dennis Miller, “Then again… I could be wrong.”

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

As a poet, Denise Levertov’s work consistently reflects her interests in politics and religion. Her style shows her willingness to push boundaries, to demand space in literature for things of “ultimate concern.” It is this that I have always most admired about her…  and would most like to emulate.

In her early career, she was very influenced by William Carlos Williams. I fancy at times that I can see that influence… not so much in theme and style as in a certain core sensibility, a way of seeing things.

Most of all what shines through in her poetry is her essential “Catholicness” (she converted to Roman Catholicism late in her life). By that I mean, her way of seeing the world is above all sacramental.

I did not begin reading Levertov seriously until I was in my late thirties, probably around the time of her death. It was a Donald Hall essay, I think, that led me to look again at her poetry. I wish I would have been reading her more seriously earlier.

“Aware” is not my favorite Levertov poem… but probably since I have been thinking of mindfulness of late, it was the first one that came to my mind this morning flipping through a volume of her poems. It shows well, I think, the “sacramentalness” of her work and her wonderful command of language.

Enjoy!

Aware
When I found the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I’ll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.

_____

Hopkins is, of course, Roman Catholic… the most Roman Catholic of all English poets. His art and vision is rooted in his theology, his language in the singularity of his position as outsider. Like American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, being the ultimate “outsider” leads Hopkins to heights of artistic and intellectual uniqueness.

In the English speaking world (with the obvious exception of “mad Ireland”) there is, of course, no greater outsideness than being a practicing Roman Catholic. Foibles and intellectual inconsistencies of a thousand kinds can be easily forgiven and overlooked for the most part in the ivory towers and coffee shops of American and English intellectualism, with the exception of this one. Roman Catholicism remains anathema… the unpardonable intellectual and cultural sin.

Even if Hopkins were not such a unique and wonderful poet, I would love him for his status as ultimate outsider, just as I love O’Connor.

I have not posted a poetry review for awhile. A Hopkins poem seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

____

I have always thought of Denise Levertov as intimidating. Looking back at a volume of her poetry I am not completely sure why that is. At first glance, she does not seem anymore or less accessible than a dozen other poets I can think of… and yet she does intimidate.

Theology and philosophy are constant themes in her poetry. Levertov brings an intelligence and breadth to her poetry that demands intelligent readers. You cannot read her lightly or with only your ear… you need to use both sides of your brain.

“Seeing for a Moment” is to my mind a “typical” Levertov poem… not so much in style as in direction or theme. It is a theological poem in the best sense of that term. It asks the reader to think deeper and more theologically about an ordinary moment: seeing one’s reflection, and more than merely a reflection, in a mirror.

Stylistically the poem is deceptively simple: short lines and stanzas. The complexity of the poem, like most of Levertov’s poems, is in the ideas not the form. It is this in the end that makes her an interesting and demanding poet.

Outside my Minnesota home the weather is warming.  The sun stays longer each day in the sky, brightening my mood and making me feel strong enough to tackle even Denise Levertov. Enjoy!

Seeing for a Moment

I thought I was growing wings—
it was a cocoon.

I thought, now is the time to step
into the fire—
it was deep water.

Eschatology is a word I learned
as a child: the study of Last Things;

facing my mirror—no longer young,
the news—always of death,
the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring
and howling, howling,

nevertheless
I see for a moment
that’s not it: it is
the First Things.

Word after word
floats through the glass.
Towards me.

____

Mark Van Doren

When I think of Mark Van Doren, I always think of Thomas Merton. That is because it was Merton that first led me to read Van Doren, or rather, reading Merton’s Seven Story Moutain that led me to want to find and read Van Doren’s poetry.

Once Van Doren was widely acclaimed as a poet. His Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. As time has passed though, his stature has diminished. His books are difficult to find. Looking on Amazon.com, I find used copies of his poetry available… but little currently in print.

It is difficult to say why Van Doren has fallen so far out of fashion. It is not his poetry or his poetic ability. It may simply be that at this point in time predominant tastes do not lean in his direction. Some day they will again. They must because his poetry is too good to be lost.

The first volume of Van Doren’s poetry I ever purchased was one I found at a used bookstore in Birmingham, Alabama. I was killing time waiting for a Greyhound bus headed for Florida and Key West. I stepped into a small used bookstore on my way back to the bus station from a barbecue place that someone had recommended to me.

The store was cramped and filled with Harlequin romances and old best sellers. On a table in the back, I found a paperback copy of Van Doren’s Collected Poems. It may have been the only volume of poetry in the whole store. It was beat up but unmarked and only  .75 cents. I bought it.

I read the book on the bus through Florida and in Key West. When I read one of his poems now, I quite often think of Key West… of Red Stripe beer and boats… of  long, lazy mornings and lazier afternoons… of music and girls and sun… of my youth.

What better way to start the weekend than reading a poem that reminds you of all of that….

Enjoy!

Morning Worship

I wake and hearing it raining.
Were I dead, what would I give
Lazily to lie here,
Like this, and live?

Or better yet: birdsong,
Brightening and spreading –
How far would I come then
To be at the world’s wedding?

Now that I lie, though,
Listening, living,
(Oh, but not forever,
Oh, end arriving)

How shall I praise them:
All the sweet beings
Eternally that outlive
Me and my dying?

Mountains, I mean; wind, water, air;
Grass, and huge trees; clouds, flowers,
And thunder, and night.

Turtles, I mean, and toads; hawks, herons, owls;
Graveyards, and towns, and trout; roads, gardens,
Red berries, and deer.

Lightning, I mean, and eagles; fences; snow;
Sunrise, and ferns; waterfalls, serpents,
Green islands, and sleep.

Horses, I mean; butterflies, whales;
Mosses, and stars and gravelly
Rivers, and fruit.

Oceans, I mean; black valleys; corn;
Brambles, and cliffs; rock, dirt, dust, ice;
And warnings of flood.

How shall I name them?
And in what order?
Each would be first.
Omission is murder.

Maidens, I mean, and apples; needles; leaves;
Worms, and planers, and clover; whirlwinds; dew;
Bulls; geese –

Stop. Lie still.
You will never be done.
Leave them all there.
Old lover. Live on.

____

St. Thomas Aquinas

The “poems” that make up the book of psalms were written long before the first century. Yet in the nature of great literature they hold truths that are as important and relevant today and they were when they were first heard.

In the time that Psalm 14 was first composed and sung, monotheism was a minority religion. Most  peoples of the world believed: in a set of gods particular to their culture/family; a democratic kind of holiness that said that you believe in your gods and I will believe in my gods and we will leave each other alone; or in no gods at all. While people claiming to adhere to monotheism in the 21st Century has increased “radically,” in point of fact, not much has changed.

The result of thinking that gods and religion really don’t matter are quite clear to the psalmist. For the psalmist, being rightly rooted in faith in the one true God leads naturally to peace, better life, and a better world. Just as obviously, being rooted into the wrong faith, or believing that faith does not matter, leads inevitably into violence, ignorance, and chaos.

St. Thomas Aquinas believed that if you had a thousand years, you could through reason convince any person of the existence of God and the truth of Christ. He believed, like the psalmist, that wisdom led back to the Creator because all reason and wisdom began there. Intellect and reason were inextricably mixed with the author of both.

Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and the rest of the reformers held no such confidence in the power of reason. The Protestant battle cries of “faith alone”… “scripture alone”… express the duality of reason and faith that the Reformation ushered into the Western world. Reason is used to talk about faith in the Protestant world, it cannot by definition lead you there. Mohammad created the same dualism for Islam by making God so transcendent that ultimately you can only hint at aspects of God. Reason in that religion has a lesser place apparently than even the most radical Protestantism.

The faith vs. reason battle of the Reformation has become the religion vs. science battle of our time. Like the psalmist, we live in a time when most people believe in whatever god (small g) they are born into “worshiping” or they believe in none at all. For the psalmist it is all the same. It involves ultimately, fools missing the truth of the one, true God.

Religion matters profoundly. Thinking it does not is foolishness. But it also matters whether the chosen religion is “true” or not. The wrong religion is also dangerous, more dangerous even than no religion at all, perhaps. That was true thousands of years ago. How much more true is it in our own nuclear-loaded, inter-connected, small world?

Psalm 14

The fool says in his heart,
“There is no God.”
They are corrupt, they do
abominable deeds,
there is none that does good.

2 The LORD looks down from heaven
upon the children of men,
to see if there are any that act
wisely,
that seek after God.

3 They have all gone astray, they are
all alike corrupt;
there is none that does good,
no, not one.

4 Have they no knowledge, all
the evildoers
who eat up my people
as they eat bread,
and do not call upon the LORD?

5 There they shall be in great terror,
for God is with the generation
of the righteous.
6 You would confound the plans
of the poor,
but the LORD is his refuge.

7 O that deliverance for Israel
would come out of Zion!
When the LORD restores
the fortunes of his people,
Jacob shall rejoice, Israel shall be glad.

____

Just one "small" part of the universe

On the first Sunday of the new year, I am thinking of some of the oldest poems that we have, the Book of Psalms. These “songs” were originally created to be used in worship, at the Temple in Jerusalem. They are now part of the Christian Old Testament and are either chanted at mass or simply read responsively.

Tradition attributes this psalm and many of the others to King David. Biblical scholarship suggests that that attribution is meant to be taken loosely not literally… but than again, fundamentalism aside, most biblical scholarship suggests that the Bible, Old and New Testaments, is not meant to be taken “literally.”

For the faithful of Judaism and Christianity, the Book of Psalms is seldom thought of as a book a poetry… but it is. And like any poetry translated from one language into another, much that runs beneath the words (forms, musicality, nuances, and word plays in the original language) is lost to us.

For the psalms, I still prefer the Revised Standard Version (RSV) translation. The archaic “thou” and “thy” maintains the musicality and stature of the King James while making use of modern biblical scholarship. The version of Psalm 8 that is here is RSV.

This psalm needs no explanation. The psalmist wonders at the beauty of the earth and the universe and marvels that mere human beings have come under the special attention of the Creator of such a vast and awe-inspiring creation.

Contemplating a universe created billions of years ago with “billions and billions” of galaxies where there would presumably be countless other inhabited worlds let alone possibly countless other dimensions, we have two options: to succumb to our apparent smallness within such limitless vastness and forgo our humanity or to acknowledge with humility the great status we have been given by the one great enough to be Creator of all. The psalmist points us to the answer to this essentially existential either/or question.

Psalm 8

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!
Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted
2 by the mouth of babes and infants,
thou hast founded a bulwark because of thy foes,
to still the enemy and the avenger.
3 When I look at thy heavens,
the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars which thou hast established;
4 what is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?
5 Yet thou hast made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with glory and honor.
6 Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet,
7 all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,
8 the birds of the air,
and the fish of the sea,
whatever passes along the paths of the sea.
9 O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!

____