Getting to the Point: poetry

Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The Leaves That Are Green Turn to Gold

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

Reflection – It’s been awhile since we had any poetry on the blog (the Monday psalms aside). This time of year always puts me in mind of this fine Hopkins poem. The leaves in Combermere have been spectacular this week, at their finest peak of reds, golds, orange, and yellow. We have had bright sun the past few days, which has given the overall effect of the world being on fire, the fall leaves glowing incandescent in the light.

I have always believed there to be a profound sacramental meaning in the beauty of fall. Because, of course what we are watching as we watch the “leaves that are green turn to gold” is a large scale manifestation of death and dying, the living tissue of tree-leaf turning to ‘wanwood leafmeal’ lying on the earth, to decay and become part of the earth.

And it is a spectacularly beautiful sight, breath-taking in its brilliance. Hopkins of course is writing in this poem about the next sequence in the fall, the great denuding of the trees of their leaves, the fading of the red, gold, and orange into various hues of brown and grey, the starkness of the branches stripped of their foliage. I personally find that has its own beauty, but I am well known to have weird taste in these matters and to find beauty in the strangest things.

But we are all caught up in this season, at least in the northern hemisphere, in a grand contemplation of death and dying—the blight that man was born for, the springs of sorrow, that for which we ‘weep and know why’ as life draws on.

The blaze of glory that accompanies the ‘dying’ of the trees has, I maintain, a sacramental significance. That is, I believe it communicates to us that death is not merely a blight, not merely a sorrow, that there is something in the passing away of a life, and particularly a human life, that manifests glory, that reveals the beauty and majesty of a person.

We always joke in Madonna House that we don’t really appreciate anyone in the community until they die, and then we see them plain, perhaps a little bit as God sees them. In their passing away they shine forth like autumn leaves of red and gold before they vanish into the earth, disappear into the mysterious heart of God.

There is grief then, of course, in the death of the dying, in the inevitable presence of death in all our lives and our own deaths, whenever they may come. But it is a grief tightly bound up with the precious beauty, the blazing fire of color and depth and life that shines forth in this world, so often most brilliantly in the very moment of its passing away.

It is this beauty and this shining forth that, I believe, bears witness to the hope of the resurrection, to their being something next, something beyond, some continuance of the person, of life, that the grave is not the goal, the end, the finis of the world. We live, we die, we shine forth like a bonfire shooting up into the sky, and then vanish… but we do not cease. The song is taken up in a new key, in a new mode, the fire burns even more brightly in a different world, with a light and flame that is not extinguished.

Margaret grieves, but Margaret will rejoice. Fall comes, and then winter, but spring comes after, and it is the assurance of our faith that spring and the glory of summer is the last word of God to man, the last movement of the world into eternity, and that the glory and beauty of the person will shine forever in the resurrection of the dead.

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Being Good and Making Good Are Not the Same Thing

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend

With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.

Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must

Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,

How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost

Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust

Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes

Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again

With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,

Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.

Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Thou art indeed just”

Reflection – Yesterday’s blog about Psalm 1 put me in mind of this Hopkins sonnet. All the references to trees planted by water, to the just flourishing and the wicked perishing—all of this can easily be misconstrued as a sort of prosperity Gospel, an essentially self-centred affair of ‘be good, and you’ll make good’. Virtue not being its own reward, but a sort of shrewd investment strategy, and the ROI is out of this world.

So Hopkins’ poem is a good corrective to this. We really don’t see the obvious flourishing of the good and the righteous and the obvious perishing of the wicked—it is not so simple in this world. Indeed he complains here of the seeming fruitlessness and waste of his life spent ‘Sir… upon thy cause’. It is a particular element of the celibate vocation in the Church to confront this mystery of fruitlessness and seeming sterility in a direct immediate way, and this poem is very much about that in particular.

And this is a reality, a very definite and painful reality of life in this world, and not just for celibates. Any one of us can rightly ask just what the good of our life is, just what we are really accomplishing. Anyone, even someone with twenty children, can feel a bit sterile and pointless at times.

And it is a permanent temptation to slide into a sort of cynicism or jaundiced attitude—God says He is going to reward the just and that wickedness perishes under its own weight. Humph—don’t see any signs of that happening, yet. Tell me another one.

Instead we are meant, I think, to go deep in the face of the mystery. And in this going deeper, I find myself contemplating the Blessed Virgin, who I think holds the key to the matter. It is this last line of the poem – ‘Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.’ It is the Lord who makes our life fruitful.

This is the deep truth of Mary’s virginity, which is not simply a mystery pertaining to herself but is a theological sign to all humanity of the very nature of things, the very deepest and most essential nature of life in this world.

It is God who makes our lives fruitful. ‘If the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labor.’ That God chose to be incarnate of a virgin is no accident; it signifies that no matter what a person’s vocation is, what their state of life is, it is God and God alone who will bring their life to its proper fruition.

This is also the meaning of celibacy in the Church and why those called to celibacy are so essential to the life of the Church. It is witness to the provident will of God to create life as a direct action of grace and not merely or even primarily through the natural means of life-creating.

And so we are called in our efforts to live by God’s law to trust that we are these trees planted by the water, but the water is not natural water, not natural prosperity and wealth and health. We do not strive to be good so that our lives are filled with strictly natural goods.

The water is the Holy Spirit coursing mysterious and free through the life of the world. And this Spirit is the one who gives life to our being and nourishes us in hidden ways, even as we seem to fail and falter outwardly. And this is the deepest meaning of Psalm 1, which G.M. Hopkins ably captures in his sonnet here.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Break and Make Me New

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,

Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

John Donne, Holy Sonnet

Reflection – One more day of poetry, then on to other stuff! I’m not a huge Donne fan, to be honest, but have always found this one to be rather moving. It captures so very well the reality of our resistance to God, the desire we carry within us that God should overcome that resistance and that we be His entirely at last, and the fact that we of ourselves do not have to power to overcome that resistance.

The images used—a city under siege, a woman betrothed to a loathed enemy—are telling. The violent imagery of the first stanza suggests Jacob’s wrestling with the angel; the last couplet is downright disturbing in its violent wording, yet there it is.

This poem raises questions about the nature of freedom and grace and discusses them in a way that some would consider Calvinist—the soul of the pre-destined one being overpowered by the action of God, freedom essentially becoming an illusion in this presentation.

Well, you could read the poem that way, and if you wish push it to the extremes of Calvinist theology—absolute corruption of human nature into sin, absolute necessity of God to act, therefore the action of God is only given to his favored pre-destined souls, and so forth.

I read the poem as a Catholic, and so see in it strong echoes of John of the Cross, the mystical tradition of the Carmelites, and that strong Augustinian stress on the utter necessity of God’s grace to save and restore the human person. In that, there is much to be meditated upon regarding the nature of human freedom and the intersection of God’s action and our response.

‘Except you enthrall me, never shall be free’ is a most profound statement. We do tend to think that freedom means unencumbrance, means that nothing and no one has any absolute claim on us. This is a profound spiritual mistake, one which in fact delivers us over to the most base slavery, which is slavery to the winds and whims of desire, fancy, and fashion. We are not strong enough, in an essential metaphysical way, to stand in the kind of freedom we imagine to be the human ideal. When we cast off the yoke of God in the name of human freedom, we end up the worst and most degraded of thralls, trafficked to the highest bidder for our passions without any capacity to resist or any means of escape.

It is the great paradox, only learned by experience, that the servitude of God is the doorway into absolute and utter human liberty, the surrender of one’s own self-will the road into freedom and full joyous human life. The slave traders of the human person are the passions, the unfettered desires; it is only in their fettering and harnessing that the person is emancipated and walks free.

Donne’s poem reflects on all this, with great poetic beauty. I must say, too, without lapsing into inappropriately public self-revelation, that this sonnet captures my own spiritual experience and journey pretty accurately. And this is one of the great gifts of poetry, why I am a proud poetry geek and will occasionally lapse into a sonnet on this blog. Poetry gives words to the deepest level of human experience and apprehension of reality, that which cannot be expressed in simple prose but has to be voiced in meter and rhyme, image and allusion. That is the function of poetry, that its abiding value for us.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Out of the Fire and Into the Light

CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature’s bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest ' to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, ' his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time ' beats level.

Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; ' world’s wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

GM Hopkins, That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

Reflection – Another great poem from another great poet. If, as I said yesterday, I am a poetry geek, I am a Gerard Manley Hopkins uber-geek. Love the man.

He can be a difficult read, mind you, and this is a good example of that. This particular poem is in particular an Easter poem, as the title suggests. One can get a bit hung up in the verbiage, mind you, and lose the plot of it. Something about clouds, something about dough and crust (is he writing about pie? Now I’m all hungry…), then a residuary worm (whatever that is), and then Christ shows up and there’s something something something immortal diamond. Ummm… OK? I want some pie.

Well, let Fr. Denis explain it all for you. (Not really – ‘explaining’ a poem is one of the mortal sins of literature). What is this ‘heraclitean fire’ of the title? Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, who held that all of being was in a state of constant flux. Nothing stays the same; nothing abides through all the changes of nature. ‘You cannot cross the same river twice’ is the Heraclitean maxim, since the water of the river is different each time.

Hopkins first rejoices in the splendor of this Heraclitean fire, this pageant of unending change in nature, the roystering of the clouds, the endless variation of rain and sun, the glittering and gushing and run of water, the constant saturation of the earth and its drying up, the shaping and reshaping of all the natural order all around us—nature’s bonfire burns on.

But we do not rejoice quite so much when we see this Heraclitean fire burning up that one part of nature most dear to us—the human person, the mind and heart and soul of man himself caught up in transience and brought to an ‘enormous dark drowned.’ We rejoice in the pageant of nature and its seasons and moods, but ‘o pity and indignation’ when those seasons drag us down, when ‘time beats level’ the human person.

This bugs us, which is an interesting argument against atheistic materialism. Since it is the plain nature of everything to come in and go out of existence, to be born, to live, and to die… why does the prospect of human death bother us so much? How on earth did we randomly evolve in such a way that we rebel against the plain natural heraclitean order of things? Why do we say ‘Enough!’ to death which rules all material being, if we are not something besides a material being? How would we even think of such a thing?

At any rate, the poem takes this great muscular leap towards faith in Christ, in the resurrection, to there being something that happens after death and the residuary worm has its go at us. There is a flash, a crash, a trumpet and something shines forth, something not subject to the heraclitean tyranny of fire and destruction. Death presses us down, pushes us deeper and deeper into the earth, into the very pit of natural oblivion… and up rises the immortal diamond from the bowels of the earth—Christ, acting in us, making us what we are not since He became what He was not, the great hope and joy of humanity, the answer to the ‘Enough!’ of our objection to death.

The great thing is that God shares that objection with us, and has acted to carry us out of the fire and into the light, and that is the hope of Easter and its promise. (But I do still want some pie...)