Paying Attention To The Sky

 

 

ONE OF THE GREAT SECULAR POEMS about the death of everyman is by Conrad Aiken and it takes its name from the Greek translation of Jesus’ last word on the Cross, “Tetélestai” [John 19:30]. I say that it is a secular poem because there is little in the way of Christian comfort or consolation here. Nor should there be, I guess. Aiken was a tortured soul:  As a child he returned home one day to discover his physician father, a brilliant but erratic man, had shot his mother and then turned the gun on himself. This particular poem was appended by a line “For those of you who understand this, I am sorry.” It reads in some ways like a suicide note.

(Reading One)

Tetélestai
by Conrad Aiken

I.
How shall we praise the magnificence of the dead,
The great man humbled, the haughty brought to dust?
Is there a horn we should not blow as proudly
For the meanest of us all, who creeps his days,
Guarding his heart from blows, to die obscurely?
I am no king, have laid no kingdoms waste,
Taken no princes captive, led no triumphs
Of weeping women through long walls of trumpets;
Say rather, I am no one, or an atom;
Say rather, two great gods, in a vault of starlight,
Play ponderingly at chess, and at the game’s end
One of the pieces, shaken, falls to the floor
And runs to the darkest corner; and that piece
Forgotten there, left motionless, is I…
Say that I have no name, no gifts, no power,
Am only one of millions, mostly silent;
One who came with eyes and hands and a heart,
Looked on beauty, and loved it, and then left it.
Say that the fates of time and space obscured me,
Led me a thousand ways to pain, bemused me,
Wrapped me in ugliness; and like great spiders
Dispatched me at their leisure… Well, what then?
Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,
The horns of glory blowing above my burial?

II.
Morning and evening opened and closed above me:
Houses were built above me; trees let fall
Yellowing leaves upon me, hands of ghosts;
Rain has showered its arrows of silver upon me
Seeking my heart; winds have roared and tossed me;
Music in long blue waves of sound has borne me
A helpless weed to shores of unthought silence;
Time, above me, within me, crashed its gongs
Of terrible warning, sifting the dust of death;
And here I lie. Blow now your horns of glory
Harshly over my flesh, you trees, you waters!
You stars and suns, Canopus, Deneb, Rigel,
Let me, as I lie down, here in this dust,
Hear, far off, your whispered salutation!
Roar now above my decaying flesh, you winds,
Whirl out your earth-scents over this body, tell me
Of ferns and stagnant pools, wild roses, hillsides!
Anoint me, rain, let crash your silver arrows
On this hard flesh! I am the one who named you,
I lived in you, and now I die in you.
I your son, your daughter, treader of music,
Lie broken, conquered… Let me not fall in silence.

III.
I, the restless one; the circler of circles;
Herdsman and roper of stars, who could not capture
The secret of self; I who was tyrant to weaklings,
Striker of children; destroyer of women; corrupter
Of innocent dreamers, and laugher at beauty; I,
Too easily brought to tears and weakness by music,
Baffled and broken by love, the helpless beholder
Of the war in my heart of desire with desire, the struggle
Of hatred with love, terror with hunger; I
Who laughed without knowing the cause of my laughter, who grew
Without wishing to grow, a servant to my own body;
Loved without reason the laughter and flesh of a woman,
Enduring such torments to find her! I who at last
Grow weaker, struggle more feebly, relent in my purpose,
Choose for my triumph an easier end, look backward
At earlier conquests; or, caught in the web, cry out
In a sudden and empty despair, ‘Tetélestai!’
Pity me, now! I, who was arrogant, beg you!
Tell me, as I lie down, that I was courageous.
Blow horns of victory now, as I reel and am vanquished.
Shatter the sky with trumpets above my grave.

IV.
…Look! this flesh how it crumbles to dust and is blown!
These bones, how they grind in the granite of frost and are nothing!
This skull, how it yawns for a flicker of time in the darkness,
Yet laughs not and sees not! It is crushed by a hammer of sunlight,
And the hands are destroyed… Press down through the leaves of the jasmine,
Dig through the interlaced roots — nevermore will you find me;
I was no better than dust, yet you cannot replace me…
Take the soft dust in your hand — does it stir: does it sing?
Has it lips and a heart? Does it open its eyes to the sun?
Does it run, does it dream, does it burn with a secret, or tremble
In terror of death? Or ache with tremendous decisions?…
Listen! …It says: ‘I lean by the river. The willows
Are yellowed with bud. White clouds roar up from the south
And darken the ripples; but they cannot darken my heart,
Nor the face like a star in my heart! …Rain falls on the water
And pelts it, and rings it with silver. The willow trees glisten,
The sparrows chirp under the eaves; but the face in my heart
Is a secret of music… I wait in the rain and am silent.’
Listen again! …It says: ‘I have worked, I am tired,
The pencil dulls in my hand: I see through the window
Walls upon walls of windows with faces behind them,
Smoke floating up to the sky, an ascension of sea-gulls.
I am tired. I have struggled in vain, my decision was fruitless,
Why then do I wait? with darkness, so easy, at hand?
But tomorrow, perhaps… I will wait and endure till tomorrow!’…
Or again: ‘It is dark. The decision is made. I am vanquished
By terror of life. The walls mount slowly about me
In coldness. I had not the courage. I was forsaken.
I cried out, was answered by silence… Tetélestai!…’

V.
Hear how it babbles! — Blow the dust out of your hand,
With its voices and visions, tread on it, forget it, turn homeward
With dreams in your brain… This, then, is the humble, the nameless, –
The lover, the husband and father, the struggler with shadows,
The one who went down under shoutings of chaos, the weakling
Who cried his ‘forsaken!’ like Christ on the darkening hilltop!…
This, then, is the one who implores, as he dwindles to silence,
A fanfare of glory… And which of us dares to deny him?

FOR THE LONGEST TIME, this poem served as sort of an anthem to my life and depression. I still like it in a perverse way because it shows that even in the depths of my estrangement I was animated and touched by a deep hunger for the divine. To be sure, one can live under the illusion that ultimate happiness is something other than God, but the desire for happiness itself is proof that God is subtly at work in the soul of even the most hardened sinner.

In the Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton describes the various paths he took that led him, it seemed, away from God. But from the vantage point of his later years, Merton saw that for each of the “errant” journeys he took that God was mysteriously at work even at what he thought at the time was the least “God-filled” moments of his life. I’ve recognized this also to be true.

I’m not going to tire you with the rest of my story, unless I can get one of those  made-for-tv film offers. Suffice to say that at some point in my life, I came to the foot of the cross and a choice was made. I have recognized that place where I was in this story that Thomas Merton tells of his life when his father died and later when he came to understand what suffering did to the non-believer:

(Reading Two)
“We went into the ward. Father was in his bed, to the left, just as you went in the door.

And when I saw him, I knew at once there was no hope of him living much longer. His face was swollen. His eyes were not clear but, above all, the tumor had raised a tremendous swelling on his forehead.

I said: “How are you, Father?”

He looked at me and put forth his hand, in a confused and unhappy way, and I realized that he could no longer even speak. But at the same time, you could see that he knew us, and knew what was going on, and that his mind was clear, and that he understood everything.

But the sorrow of his great helplessness suddenly fell upon me like a mountain. I was crushed by it. The tears sprang to my eyes., Nobody said anything more.

I hid my face in the blanket and cried. And poor father wept, too. The others stood by. It was excruciatingly sad. We were completely helpless. There was nothing anyone could do…

What could I make of so much suffering? There was no way for me, or for anyone in the family, to get anything out of it. It was a raw wound for which there was no adequate relief. You had to take it, like an animal. We were in the condition of most of the world, the condition of men without faith in the presence of war, disease, pain, starvation, suffering, plague, bombardment, death. You just had to take it, like a dumb animal. Try to avoid it if you could. But you must eventually reach the point where you can’t avoid it any more. Take it. Try to stupefy yourself, if you like, so that it won’t hurt so much. But you will always have to take some of it. And it will all devour you in the end.

Indeed the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt., The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being that is at once the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.”
from The Seven Storey Mountain

MY NEW POEM/ANTHEM, written by a poet/priest who wrestled with depression also but who never gave in to it, whose last words on his death bed, dying of typhoid fever, given over to the darkest despondency and feelings of abandonment, were “I am happy, so happy.” He (Gerard Manley Hopkins) wrote some marvelous poems of faith, none more illuminating of that faith than this one that celebrates Mary, called The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe. I never understood Mary until I learned how to read this poem.

It took me a few months to recite it from memory, but each time I recited it, I learned I had to be true to its rhythms. It was a difficult poem to learn. Now I always recite a portion of it after I finish Eucharistic Adoration. St Clements in Boston has a beautiful statue of the virgin mother and child and in the darkness of the chapel there I’ve found a little spot of happiness when I recall some of these verses. This poem needs to be spoken from time to time and if I can encourage some of you to remember it and to give it life by sharing it with others, well then, I’m doing the Lord’s work.

Oh, and it always needs to be spoken aloud. Unlike the Aikens’ piece, Hopkins makes no sense until you hear it.

(Reading Three)

The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe
                Gerard Manley Hopkins

                Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

                 I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name. 
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air. 

                Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

One of the neatest things I know about Hopkins is that none of his poems were published during his life time but were kept by his good friend Robert Bridges — he later a British poet laureate who recognized their value from the very beginning. After submitting a few to poetry journals, they were first published in one volume in 1918, some 29 years after Fr. Hopkins death.

T.S. Eliot and others lauded them as the roots of modern poetry and Hopkins’ reputation grew slowly but surely. I think now most will agree that his poetry will always be among the greatest poems of faith and doubt in the English language. Some of them, like Pied Beauty, are more like prayers than poems and when I step outside on a morning when creation is stirring all around me, they are the first words of praise I offer to the Blessed Trinity:

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.

Anthony Esolen’s interpretation of the above is here.