Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

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Four by Wallace Stevens

August 11, 2010

Wallace Stevens House in Hartford CT

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm by Wallace Stevens

The long rhythmic lines arranged in couplets and the frequent repetition create songlike quality that draws us into the poem. We settle into a moment of tranquility, a sense of perfect fulfillment. The work of a master.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be 
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom 

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page. 

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself 

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.  

The Emperor Of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens

The two stanzas represent two rooms, one with pleasurable activity the other with death. In the kitchen a strong man is asked to make ice cream by hand, the old fashioned way. In the bedroom lies a woman who has died. All those k sounds in “kitchen cups concupiscent curds” seemingly whip words into ice-cream This was a Steven’s personal favorite; it was “an instance of letting myself go,” written during a time of his “pure poetry” period.


The idea behind “pure poetry” is a poetry which should depend for its effectiveness on its rhythms and the tonal values of the words employed with as complete a dissociation from ideational content as may be humanly possible. Those who have argued for such “pure poetry” have frequently, if not always, been obsessed with some hazy notion of an analogy between music and poetry. His book of poems, Harmonium, was criticized as a tour de force, a “stunt” in the fantastic and the bizarre. The NY Times critic wrote:  “From one end of the book to the other there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not a word that can arouse emotion. The volume is a glittering edifice of icicles. Brilliant as the moon, the book is equally dead.”  

The Emperor of Ice Cream remains a favorite of mine, however. Despite the restrictions placed on the poet, an inventiveness dominates that stretches the mind of the reader and affirms Stevens’ greatness. 

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. 

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

From Harmonium | Written c. 1923

Tea At The Palaz Of Hoon by Wallace Stevens

Stevens once admitted that “Poets are never lonely even when they pretend to be. Watching a sunset the speaker felt as large and magnificent as the sun itself. But he knew that the beauty and wonder he experienced really came from within his own imagination. That made him less lonely, more truly himself and more mysterious.

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

From Harmonium | 1923

Anecdote Of The Jar by Wallace Stevens

A curious contest between a jar and a hill; an object made by people, the other by nature. At first the jar seems to tame the wilderness, but then it seems lifeless. The jar makes and takes; the hill gives. 

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

From Harmonium | 1923

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Poem: Hurrahing in Harvest by Gerard Manley Hopkins

July 30, 2010

Gerard Manley Hopkins asserted with great ardor that man could approach his Lord by the inconsiderable trifles of the world, a love for irises and moths and falcons. His notebooks are crammed with the canniest descriptions, born of love, of what he called the “inscapes” of the things he saw, the peculiar inner fingerprint of a thing that made it itself and no other:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells;
Crying What I do is me: for that I came
(“As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” 5-8)

His term inscape is well chosen. It suggests a creation that delves deep within a thing, to its essence. The term is derived from the German schoepfen (to create) and -schaft (knowledge, as of a craft), and from the Anglo-Saxon scieppan (to shape or fashion) and scop (a shaper of verses, that is, poet) Hopkins says the finding of inscapes is precisely what the world is for, all things are for man’s beholding, that he may learn of his Maker and sing his praises.

Hence the typical irony of Hopkins’s poetry. Knowledge is everywhere to be gleaned, but only by those who love. The fault line severs those who can read the signs, often in the most unexpected places, from those who cannot, because their love does not beat warmly enough. The double identity of the world — as heaven penetrates this smallish portion of the world that we misconstrue as the whole — comes across quite nicely in the following notebook entry, describing the first time Hopkins saw the northern lights:

Mv eye was caught by beams of light and dark very like the crown of horny rays the sun makes behind a cloud. At first I thought of silvery cloud until I s aw that these were more luminous and did not dim the clearness of the stars in the Bear. They rose slightly radiating thrown out from the earthline.

Then I saw soft pulses of light one after another rise and pass upwards arched in shape but waveringly and with the arch broken They seemed to float, not following the warp of the sphere as falling stars look to do but free though concentrical with it.

This busy working of nature wholly independent of the earth and seeming to go on in a strain of time not reckoned by our reckoning of days and years but simpler and as if correcting the preoccupation of the world by being preoccupied with and appealing to and dated to the day of judgment was like a new witness to Cod and filled me with delightful fear.
(Sept. 24, 1870)

Note that Hopkins senses a time-within-time, independent of the clicking minutes whereby we calculate our days in the countinghouse. But it is also a time above that time, steering it, leading it from the nothingness whence it came to the eternity whither it is going. He experiences the fearful sense of the provisionality of time, of its being embedded in God’s time — against which our minutes seem to clash.

BUT IF OUR HEARTS are open, we will see. Then it will be as if the veil of creation had been torn in two. We will not see beyond creation, leaving it behind in disdain, but into creation… We will see even unto the dangerous and loving Creator who awaits within and beside and beyond. God is no mere object of love, but the Lover who will tear through cloud and sky to grip the heart of man That explains the ironic reversals in one of Hopkins’s loveliest hymns to natural beauty:

Hurrahing in Harvest
Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, willful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world wielding shoulder
Majestic as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet

The first line of the poem leads, or misleads, the reader to believe that he is about to hear of the “barbarous” beauty of late summer. Hopkins echoes Shakespeare’s famous line describing the sheaves brought in for the harvest, “Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard” (Sonnets 12 8 ) The “stooks” or ricks of baled corn are bearded and bristly — in that sense barbarous, punning on the Latin barbatus (bearded) — and of a rough and rustic thrusting into the sky

But that is the last sight of an autumn harvest we have in the poem. For Hopkins casts his eye upward. Dante had called the world “this little winnowing floor” (Paradise, 22 151), alluding to Jesus’ warning that it the Last Judgment the wheat would be winnowed from the chaff. Hopkins instead looks to the physical heavens — there is the harvesting, unbeknownst to the men who shock the grain on earth. The skies are “wind-walks” where the horses of the air march round (and there, not simply round and round but in the wildest streams) to power the fan to blow the straw free; the clouds are silky sacks grain a-bursting; they spill the meal, flowing away in sudden runnels and siftings and scatterings.

It is no mere physical description. A real gleaning is going on, with the poet as gleaner, walking through the rows of grain: and his instruments are his heart and eyes. He is gleaning the Savior. That image is meant to evoke a theology of love. In most of the New Testament passages that refer to the harvest; Jesus is comparing the grain to the souls of the blessed (e.g., Luke 8:4-15). In at least one place the souls’ enjoyment of the kingdom of God is compared to a bumper crop at the harvest, “good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over” (Luke 6:38). And why not? Since the life of Christ is the feast: he is the manna from heaven, the food that brings eternal life.

This is the paradox of Hopkins’ poetics of love. God loves a world whose beauty should stir man to fall in love with it and with Him. The more truly I love the meal-drifting clouds, the more truly I love God, because unless I see God in them, I do not fully see what they are. In the same way, Christ gives himself the Eucharist that we may be gleaned by our gleaning our taking Him in is His own taking us up to Himself, so that Aquinas properly says of the sacrament that it is not heaven that descends to us, but we who are raised to heaven.

No earthly love can match the fullness, even the violence, of God’s love for man, when man lifts up his heart to God. Christ’s is a “real” and a “round” reply, a halloo more reverberating than any man’s shout of joy, a kiss more real and warm than the most passionate lover’s embrace. Worship is not for the faint of heart. The hills above are the world-wielding shoulder of this hero — this God and man who is as “stalwart” (and as self-willed!) as a “stallion,” yet mysteriously as sweet as “very-violet.” Very God and very man, says The Book of Common Prayer; but Hopkins combines both natures in those superb images of royalty and approachable beauty.

Just as the northern lights seem to keep a time fixed upon eternity — a real time, a rounder time than what we know — so too the beauty of the harvest is and has always been ready for our seeing. Not the harvest of an Irish countryside, but in that harvest the harvest of oneself, in harvesting Christ. What is wanting? Only our attention: “the beholder.” But we are here to behold it. Then it is our love that is wanting. But if that heart should once move in love, it will find ravishment, swept away by and from the beauty of the earth to the beauty of Christ. For ‘they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Isaiah 40:31).

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The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

July 16, 2010

One must have a mind of winter...

The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Stevens utilizes several shifts in point of view. Stanza one is “One must have a mind of winter,” referring to the snowman or the speaker regarding himself as a mind in/of nature. The line, “And have been cold a long time” (line 4), mirrors that first line in that both are suggesting that one must become numb to grasp the mind of nature in order to see the landscape as it is from nature’s point of view. 

“Everything in nature has its life and history determined by its timeless pattern, plan or essence; with the human it is the reverse.  Roses can no more be un-rosy than a triangle scan be non-triangular; but humans [God bless us] can be inhuman. Man’s essence does not determine his existence but his existence determines his essence. We determine our nature, our character, our personality, by the free choices in our existence, our life, our career in time, our history.”
Peter Kreeft

So for the human thinker who is introduced in the third stanza needs “not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind, / In the sound of a few leaves.” Stevens says that the sound of wind that humans find so miserable, is the same wind “that is blowing in the same bare place” (line 12). In this line, and the line that follows, Stevens draws a direct connection between humans and nature in that they exist on the same Earth, in the same conditions, however these conditions differ greatly due to human condition and imagination.

The last stanza introduces a marvelous scramble: Regarding himself as nothing, the mind of nature, the snowman mind of the perfect perceptual eye, the human (now identified as the listener in the snow) beholds the “nothing that is not there” and the “nothing that is.” It takes the human mind stripped all imagination and human feeling to conceive of that pregnant nothing that the holy spirit fills, to see the something that lies beyond the heart of nothing.

The poem suggests to me that nature is what it is because of human imagination: We are of this world and yet are never at home in it. The numerous shifts the point of view that mark the poem create a series of  unbreakable links between the human and the mind of nature. Perhaps one cannot exist without the other or needs to let the other exist.

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Poem: The Lantern Out of Doors by Gerard Manley Hopkins

July 8, 2010
 
 
 

G. M. Hopkins

A poem I hadn’t noticed until Anthony Esolen introduced it in his chapter on Hopkins from Ironies of Faith. The interpretation that follows is so true and rather sad in some ways but in the end deeply affirming of our Catholic faith.

Before the poem, a short bio on the poet written by Fr. Joseph J. Feeney, S.J.

Hopkins the Poet, Hopkins the Jesuit
The major, the finest, poets of Victorian England were Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yet Hopkins was almost unknown until 1918 when his book Poems was first published, as edited by his friend Robert Bridges, then Poet Laureate.

Born on 28 July 1844 in London suburb of Stratford, Essex, Gerard Hopkins grew up in the London’s Hampstead, among a comfortable family talented in word, art, and music. In 1863 he went up to Oxford where he did brilliantly and anguished over religion. With the counsel of John Henry Newman, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 21 October 1866, and after finishing Oxford in 1867 he taught for some months at Newman’s Oratory School near Birmingham.

Hopkins entered the Society of Jesus on 7 September 1868, and did his novitiate in London and his philosophy in Lancashire. After a year of teaching in the Jesuit Juniorate, he began theology at St. Beuno’s College in beautiful North Wales where, in the winter 1875-76, he flashed into poetic splendor with the long, great ode “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” His annus mirabilis as a poet was 1877, the year of his ordination, when he wrote eleven sonnets including “God’s Grandeur,” “The Starlight Night,” “As Kingfishers catch fire,” “Spring,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” and “Hurrahing in Harvest.”

In October Hopkins left Wales, his “Mother of Muses,” to teach and minister variously in Derbyshire, London, Oxford, Bedford Leigh, Liverpool, Glasgow, and (after tertainship) Stonyhurst College. In these middle years Hopkins wrote fine prose sermons and such excellent poems as “Duns Scotus’s Oxford,” “Henry Purcell,” “Felix Randal,” and the poignant, wonderful “Spring and Fall.”

In 1884 Hopkins went to Dublin as Professor of Greek at University College and examiner in the Royal Univeristy. But on Stephen’s Green his chronic depression was magnified by bad eyesight, political irritation, spiritual desolation, and exhaustion from grading hundreds of examination papers.

In 1885-86 he wrote seven sonnets, the “Terrible Sonnets” or “Dark Sonnets,” which scream with pain amid technical perfection. But other poems express patience, even jubiliant hope in Christ, though his final poem describes a “winter world ” in which his “sweet fire” of poetic inspiration has waned. A few weeks later, on 8 June 1889, he died, a victim of typhoid fever.

Hopkins’ poems, first published in 1918, grew into fame after the second edition of 1930. Hailed as experimental and strikingly modern, they display rich music, novel rhythms, clustered words, craggy strength, and poetic power. Later, Hopkins had distinguished followers: notably such important modern poets W.H.Auden, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, David Jones, and Dylan Thomas.

The Lantern Out of Doors
Sometimes a lantern moves along the night
That interests our eyes And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.
Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
there, eyes them, heart wants, care haunts, foot follows kind,
Their ransom, their rescue, and first, fast, last friend.

We think we love, but how slow and lukewarm our hearts are! How fortunate that salvation depends not on our love, but on God’s. Hopkins seems to have been as naturally curious about other people as anyone alive, but he is honest about how far this love of neighbor takes him:  not far.

Many a man would not travel with the lantern carrier to the end of the first stanza. But we are each of us that lantern carrier, traveling the darkness alone. And more: we are that darkness, too. For the physical or intellectual beauty of a man has to fight its way to us: it has to “rain” “rich beams” “against our much-thick and marsh air.” Then we notice him, we of the dismal marsh: a beautiful man with a lantern, going somewhere.

Where does he go? The way of all flesh. He fades into death or, what serves as well for the speaker, into distance. With that, the speaker loses all interest. The metaphor is financial as well as psychological. Death or distance buys up everything we have invested, and then “out of sight is out of mind.” Thus Hopkins says, with sadness, that even friendship is little more than the flickering interest kindled in us by a lantern swinging in the hand of a night traveler.

No, we do not know love from ourselves. That is the affront Christianity delivers to the sentimentalists who divorce the dignity of man from God. The sentimentalist will make a god out of love; Christianity asserts that you do not even know what love is unless in some fashion you know God, for it is God who is love, the Creator and no other. He chose us that we might choose him. We do not say he is our friend, deriving the image by analogy from human friendship. Rather we say that all human friendship is the far and shadowy reflection of God’s true love for us.

For here in a world of night foundered wayfarers, there is yet one who seeks us out. We may “wind our eye after” someone in whom we are interested, but we do not follow. Christ follows. Moving among us mind-misted people of the marsh, who half forget even as we begin to love, is one who not only remembers, but who loves and amends what he sees.

We think we enjoy fellowship, says Hopkins, but that is but an interruption of our solitude. Yet in the same solitude, unseen by us and unsuspected, walks Christ. His interest does not flag, because His is the creature, as His are the winnings. He buys us back from death and distance; He loses, so to speak, that He may win. He alone is our “ransom” and “rescue.” In the beginning, now, and evermore, Christ is ours before we know we are His, closer to us than we are to ourselves, our “first, fast, last friend.”

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Robert Browning and the Irony of Humility

July 6, 2010
 

Robert Browning

Anthony Esolen uses Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book here to demonstrate how the richest irony presupposes truth and order. In his book Ironies of Faith he also shows how irony is used by Shakespeare, Herbert, Dickens and Gerard Manley Hopkins to reveal the mysteries of Christian faith.

Before I define what irony is, let us examine what habits of mind are necessary for understanding so subtle a feature of language. Those habits are all the more necessary as the language of Christendom grows more distant and the culture more foreign.

Cleverness is not the answer. I would like to illustrate why by turning to a masterpiece of Christian poetry. Robert Browning wrote his longest and most difficult work, The Ring and the Book, precisely to show human beings failing to interpret correctly the actions and motives of one another. They fail not because they are dim-witted, but because their moral compromises limit their vision. Pride — and its concomitant assumption that everyone must be just like oneself, only not quite so intelligent or strong-willed — is the problem.

Browning derives his plot from the account of a notorious series of trials in late-seventeenth-century Rome. Violante, a childless wife, finds a woman of the streets who has recently given birth to a girl. She pays her for the baby and passes it off to her husband Pietro as their own. They christen her Pompilia , and together they live well enough for people with no hereditary title. ‘Worried that the secret of the birth will come out, Violante seeks to marry Pompilia away as soon as she can to someone with the title they lack. She finds one Guido, an Aretine and hanger-on at the cardinal’s court, no priest but enough of a cleric to claim ecclesiastical privilege. He is a short, middle-aged, cowardly, ugly, embittered, and poverty-stricken aristocrat. The marriage is a hugger-mugger affair, Pietro not even present. Guido expects a large dowry; Pietro imagines the wealth of Guido’s ancestral home. When that castle in Arezzo proves dilapidated and cold, and when Guido treats the parents with brute tyranny, they flee to their old home in Rome, leaving Pompilia behind.

There she bides, patient and unhappy, subjected to Guido’s tyrannical whims and to the obscenity of his brother, a canon of the church. When the parents suddenly turn about and attack their attacker, testifying that Pompilia was not their daughter (and that therefore Guido was not entitled to her dowry), Guido counters by attempting to tar her as an adulteress. Fic uses maids and “friends” to try to press Pompilia into compromising herself with a local priest, the dashing Giuseppe Caponsacchi. He goes so far as to compel her to “write” letters at his instruction: he holds her hand and forces the pen along, as she can neither read nor write, nor does she know the content of what he has her compose. Caponsacchi, however, who has never spoken with or met Pompilia but only looked upon her sad, strange beauty once and from afar, sees through the ruse and resists.

Pompilia entreats first the governor of Arezzo, then the archbishop, while weeping like a child, pleading to he rescued from the evil that threatens her, body and soul. But they are worldly men and cronies of her husband. They know better. They wink at the wickedness and tell her to go home. They have no ears to hear.

At that, Pompilia turns to her last hope. She has never spoken to Caponsacchi. By all rights she should know nothing about him. But she does know. She has looked into his eyes once and seen — her knight.

Browning dares the reader to play the archbishop or the governor, to smile and shake his head and say that such “knowledge” is for fairy tales and not for real life (whatever that is). But a true man is what Pompilia sees. She manages to send him a plea to come take her away. After some days of hesitation, for he knows that no one will understand, and that he is about to destroy the churchly career his superiors have chiseled out for him, Caponsacchi submits to the promptings of a holy love. He sweeps her away to Rome. Just before they arrive, they are overtaken by Guido and his henchmen — Pompilia sleeping in a bedroom in a wayside inn, the priest watching over her.

 So incriminating are the appearances that Guido might have slain her on the spot and been pardoned. But he is a coward; the priest raises a sword to defend Pompilia, and when the henchmen pinion his arms, the girl herself seizes a sword and raises it against Guido. At this point he retreats and decides to take legal action. The trial of charge and countercharge ends in stalemate: Guido is allowed to keep the dowry, Caponsacchi is removed to a retreat house, and Pompilia is committed to a convent outside Rome. When, a few weeks later, she is found pregnant, the court mercifully remands her to the home of her mother and father, under provision that she not leave. There she gives birth to a son, whom she names Cactano, after a recently canonized saint, for as she sees it, Guido has no part in this son — only heaven.

Infuriated by the perceived insult to his honor, Guido steals to Rome during Christmastide and knocks at the door where the family dwells. When they ask who is there, he utters the magic word, “Caponsacchi.” When Violante opens, he slashes her in the face. He and his fellows cut her mother and father to pieces, and give Pompilia what should have been a dozen death-stabs. But Pompilia does not die, not yet. Guido is discovered fleeing back to Arezzo and is brought to Rome to stand trial. Pompilia gives her full testimony from the bed where she will soon die — the testimony of a young woman in love, chaste love, with her champion, the gallant Caponsacchi The priest and Guido testify and Browning provides us with the “opinions” of the half of Rome that is for Guido, and of the half of Rome that is for Pompilia, and also of what he calls “Tertium Quid,” the sophisticates who see more keenly, so they think, than does either side of the rabble. We are likewise presented with the trial preparations of the prosecutor (the grandly titled Fisc) and the defense attorney — worldly men, not exactly had and not exactly good, full of themselves, and cutting a partly comic figure in their pretending to know everything.

When Guido is convicted and sentenced to death, he appeals to the pope, Innocent XII, himself old and dying. The pope responds that while, everyone might have expected Guido to long outlive him, as it is, in all his weakness the pope will live another day, while Guido shall not see the sun set again.

What Browning shows us in this tangle of purity and wickedness, and half-virtue and shadowy half-vice, is not only how difficult it is for us to “read.” That is what critics of Browning put forth: he is the poet, they say, of multiple points of view, himself coolly distant from judgment. We are granted the irony of seeing that the same events might he viewed in a variety of ways, with all kinds of arguments to justify them.

But the irony Browning relishes is deeper than that. The spokesman for “Tertium Quid,” a cool aristocratic skeptic, dismisses Pompilia’s claim of innocence as incredible and dismisses Guido as a coward who in part got what he deserved. And he expects the pope to do the “reasonable” thing, to commute the sentence. Tertium might well be a modern trader in literary criticism. He is well-heeled, smiling at outrageous claims either to surpassing virtue or to surpassing wickedness. He pretends to a careful examination of evidence, hut actually he works for self-advancement, whispering into the ear of his lordly master just what his lordly master is to believe of all the brouhaha. Yet the irony cuts against him and against all skeptics: for Browning reveals that Pompilia was not only innocent but miraculously pure. We who cannot believe are the ultimate objects of his admonition.

Pompilia is also the most acute “critic” in the poem — she, barely seventeen, who can neither read nor write, and who was married, as she says, “hardly knowing what a husband meant” (7.410). What makes her wise? Browning identifies it unhesitatingly. Pompilia’s humility enables her to move outside herself, to imagine what it might be like to be someone else. So she is the only one in the poem, aside from the similarly humble pope, to excuse the whore who sold her away:

Well, since she had to hear this brand  — let me!
The rather do I understand her now, —  
From my experience of what hate calls love, –
Much love might be in what their love called hate. (874-77)

So too she reads the virtue in Caponsacchi, though he — trained for worldly expectations, and having priested it so far among the gentry — struggles honestly and abashedly to find the same. And, ironically, she knows that others will “know” better:

So we are made, such difference in minds,
Such difference too in eyes that see the minds!
That man, yon misinterpret and misprise –
The glory of his nature, I had thought,
Shot itself out in white light, blazed the truth
Through every atom of his act with me:
Yet where I point you, through the crystal shine,
Purity in quintessence, one clew-drop,
You all descry a spider in the midst.

One says, “The head of it is plain to see,”
And one, “They are the Feet by which I judge,”
All say, those Films were spun by nothing else.” (7.918-29)

We judge by what we see, and unless we love deeply, we see ourselves. So will a cheat watch the fingers of everyone else at the card table.

What do the Romans make of the evidence? Most often, Browning shows, evidence is a motley’ thing, patched up with fads, haff—heard news, clichés, smug assumptions about how all people must be, self—satisfaction, and, in the case of the, professional Fisc and his hilariously slick—talking opponent Lord Hyacinth of the Archangels, the false alleys provided by a little learning and a heap of rhetorical trash. Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and the pope also have to weigh evidence; but humility opens their hearts to insight. Here is Pompilia, trying to express a joy in bearing a child who xviii never know his mother, but who will probably hear the lies:

Who is it makes the soft gold hair turn black,
And sets the tongue, might lie so long at rest,
Trying to talk? Let us leave God alone!
Why should I doubt tie will explain in time
What I feel non’, but fail to find the words? (7.1756—61)

Her words profess incapacity — and speak to the heart. God, who unties the tongue of the infant, will reveal to Gaetano the truth. An innocent child will hear when all the world is deaf.

The pope hears and understands. We meet him in his chambers, pondering the mystery of evil, knowing he is not long for this world, and wondering what fruit of all his shepherding he will have to show in the end. The world regards him as powerful, but the world is wrong. Consider with what humility and love he regards Pompilia:

Everywhere
I see in the world the intellect of man,
That sword, the energy his subtle spear,
The knowledge which defends him like a shield— Everywhere; hut they make not up, I think,
‘the marvel of a soul like thine, earth’s flower
She holds up to the softened gaze of God!
It was not given Pompilia to know much,
Speak much, to write a book, to move mankind,
Be memorized by who records my time.
Yet if in purity and patience, if
In faith held fast despite the plucking fiend,
Safe like the signet-stone with the new name
‘That saints are known by, — if in right returned
For wrong, most pardon for worst injury,
If there be any virtue, any praise,–
Then will this woman—child have proved — who knows? –
Just the one prize vouchsafed unworthy me. (10.1019-29)

No one sees what is really going on, says the pope; no one can read the narrative of the world from God’s point of view. Yet he sees, humbly enough, that the finest harvest from his priesthood may be just this one poor soul, the illiterate Pompilia, a “woman-child,” of whose virtue and sanctity Innocent considers himself unworthy. She never wrote a book, or even her own name. The papal historian will not remember her. But the Recording Angel will. Does that assertion strike the reader as credulous sentiment? Beware. The problem with skeptics and cynics is not only the faith they lose, but the faith they gain. It is what the pope identifies as Guido’s telltale mark, “That he believes in just the vile of life” (10511). On the night before his execution Guido can “see through,” with what he thinks is ironical acuity, the façade of the pope’s goodness:

The Pope moreover, this old Innocent,
Being so meek and mild and merciful,
So fond o’ the poor and so fatigued of earth,
So . . . fifty thousand plagues in deepest hell (11.55-58)

So the spokesman for “Half-Rome” can also “know” what a curly-haired young priest is all about, “Apollos turned Apollo” (2.794)1 He’ll not “prejudge the case” (68o), he insists, yet so far does prejudge it that he pieces events out with his own sly imagination, picturing the contretemps between Pompilia and Caponsacchi, things that never happened at all: “Now he pressed close till his foot touched her gown; / His hand touched hers” (803-4).

If we must he blind, would it not he better to be dazzled by a piercing light? In this way Pompilia is blind, and therefore she sees — and it is actually there — the virtue of a man, Caponsacchi, who is yet to become the man she imagines. If she is blind to the faults of a less-than-chastely spent youth, it is because she is dazzled by the greater light. These are her dying words, spoken as if even now Caponsacchi were her saving knight, and not she his saving damsel.:

So, let him wait Gods instant men call years
Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,
Do out the duty! Through such souls alone
God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i’ the dark to rise by. And I rise (7.1841-45)

Criticism and Gossip
THE RING AND THE BOOK is a storm of irony, currents and crosscurrents of knowledge and ignorance surefire plans foiled, certitudes that wither awry, and un-possibilities come to pass. To understand the irony we must adopt the stance of Socrates, who in humility, perhaps in mock humility, insisted that he was the only man in Athens who did not know anything. For irony, as we shall see, has to do with what people think they know, or what they think they can expect. All criticism that does not begin in the humility of wonder must end up as the one or the other half of Rome: when correct, correct by happenstance; pretending to analyze, yet studying nothing with that patience that invites us to learn from what is beyond us; mired in gossip, and often gossip with a clear incentive in money or prestige.

From gossip we learn nothing new. If Mrs. Jones flirts with the delivery man, we may find it shameless; but we know nothing more from our self-pleasing gossip than that she has done what we would not (usually, let it be noted, because we happen not to be tempted that way). But of what it might he like to be Mrs. Jones, or the poor workman, nothing. Gossip preempts, then deadens, our half-hearted attempts to enter imaginatively into the life of another. If we could glimpse the world for a moment through something distantly like Mrs. Jones’s eyes, our understanding of her action might be very different. We might then be ready to invite her to tea, or to lock her up. There is no logical reason to suppose that our imaginative entry into her world must make us think the better of her; the pope saw into Guido, and found the lizards of our lower nature. Consider how uncomfortable you would feel if your admirers could enter your thoughts for the twinkling of an eye.

But perhaps I have miscast the action. Most of us are not endowed with what Keats called “negative capability,” the imaginative power whereby we empty ourselves and assume the minds and souls of others. If we are to work our imaginations, we must love or hate. If we hate, we will, from our position of moral superiority, see our own vices smiling back at us, as Browning’s Romans do, the vices we would possess if we were like the people we judge; but, thanks he to almighty God or to a sound education, we are not like them. He whom I imagine is no better than I am. So the Fisc, to win his case for Pompilia, will not concede that she had any love affair with the priest, nor that she committed adultery (unless the priest took his importunate way with her while she slept). Fine; but see how his “defense” patronizes her supposed weakness of character and turns her into a common flirt:

And what is beauty’s sore concomitant,
Nay intimate essential character,
But melting wiles, deliciousest deceits,
The whole redoubted armoury of love? (9.229-32)

No beauty that reflects the grandeur of God, this. The Fisc’s vision is imaginative indeed, drearily so, and many “truths” of the petty and misleading variety can be derived from such a thing. We can happily note the small wickedness of others, and miss the darkness that is our own.

The truly educative act of imagination is spurred by love: that turn of the mind towards the fellow sufferer on his way to the grave. It may he tinged with pity; it need not be, and may be better if not. I turn towards him because he means something to me — he is as I am. Such an act of imagination begins in humility. I am no better than is he whom I imagine. I may be worse. In any case, I will be more apt to aspire to assume his virtues than to assign to him my vices. My understanding of him will thus be far subtler and far richer, far more fulfilling than if were moved by hate. For virtue is to vice as manliness is to machismo, as womanliness is to effeminacy, as any full-blooded reality is to its caricature. In this vision, by an act of humble imagination, I recast my inner world in the image of someone else.

Unfortunately, much of what passes for criticism is little better than idle gossip. Its initial spur is often not honor for the work of genius at hand, but the desire to say something clever. That is not fertile ground for love; thus, neither for the imagination. Yet the result can be impressive in a perverse way. Milton’s Satan, hating Eve, saw his own vices potentially in her, and thus could squat like a toad at her ear, imaginatively entering her and attempting to pollute her. Nor could Nietzsche have misunderstood the Bible so well had he not hated it so thoroughly.

With far less of fallen glory the same can be said of many a critic of Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton. Their words all but confess that they dislike the deepest beliefs these men either possessed or struggled vainly not to possess. Having delivered beauty, sex, love, sport, religion, education, youth, age family life, and even the care of newborns to an obsession with politics, the modem critic sees his own political face everywhere. Lorenzo and Jessica in the Merchant of Venice sing their rallying love-hymn to the night; the critic sees tiresome struggle for power. The traitor Macbeth is beheaded; the critic snickers and says that Malcolm will probably prove worse.

Emptying Ourselves of What We Think We Know
Is it possible to come to wrong conclusions on every important point? If our criticism were subject to random chance, we would be bound to get many things right. But the more intelligent we are, the more consistent our conclusions will be, and if we start from false principles, the more consistently wrong they will be. Take for example a young critic of medieval and Renaissance English poetry. Suppose that he is thoroughly conversant with the language of those old texts. Suppose also that he knows the history of England — and not just the wool trade or the tin mines or other now fashionable niches of economic history. Grant that he knows it well enough to place the poetry in its historic context, the better to understand what the words on the page mean. Grant him the rare knack for catching the well-turned phrase or the well-hewn line. Such a critic must still fail if he does not also understand what it might he like to believe in the Christianity which was the shared faith of Chaucer, Spenser. Donne, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, and Milton.

Can such an understanding he attained? If not, why read books? I am a great lover of the poet Lucretius, though he is a materialist and, for all practical purposes, an atheist, while I am not. When I read Lucretius, the skeptic, the satirist, and the scientist in me can relish his attack upon superstition. So could the ancient Christian polemicist Lactantius, who enjoyed the poetry and then used it as a sabre against paganism. But Lactantius could hardly have done so had he not entered into the spirit of Lucretius.

For the sake of understanding materialist poetry, then, I become provisionally and temporarily a materialist. As C. S. Lewis says, what the critic requires is not so often a suspension of disbelief as a suspension of belief. It is too easy to respond that such self-transformation is an illusion. Of course we cannot leave our minds behind. The point is that our minds possess myriads of possibilities, usually dormant, inactive, unrealized. Good reading sets them in motion. For the sake of Lucretius’ great poetry I allow the materialist in me to take the stage and declaim. That Lucretius’ voice is still bound up with my own does not matter. It could not he otherwise; nor do I require it. All I require is that humbling release of what I am and what I believe now, surrendering to what I might have been or to what I might have believed had I been more like Lucretius. I say with Alyosha Karamazov, who tries to understand his brother Ivan, “I want to suffer too” (The Brothers Karamazov, 287). I surrender in imaginative love.

Now there is a catch to this surrender. The farther you are from the faith of the author you are reading, the more readily you will acknowledge the need to surrender yourself, but the more difficult it will be. The closer you are to the author’s faith, the easier the surrender would be, could you ever he prevailed upon to see the need. In the case of Christianity, it is as Chestcrton puts it. You had better be in the faith completely or out of it completely. The worst position, if you want to understand it, is to be partly in and partly out, or to have a passing, culturally based familiarity with its surface. You are neither so familiar with it as to probe its depths, nor is it so strange that you are moved to approach it with care. You take the attitude of Petronius, or of “Tertium Quid,” You’ve seen it all before.

Apply a two-dimensional Christianity to the mature allegories of Spenser and Milton, and at once you will discover discrepancies and incoherence. Why don’t Spenser’s Guyon and the Palmer kill the witch Acrasia? Are they still tempted by her Bower of Bliss? Why do the devils in hell discourse on philosophy? Has Milton rejected his classical education? Are faith and reason to part forever? Many such false dilemmas arise because the critic has failed to understand the subtleties of the Christian faith.

And Christianity is the subtlest of faiths, yet of a wondrous simplicity “I thank thee,” Jesus observes with biting irony, “O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes” (Matthew 1:25) The kernel of the faith can he grasped by a child. We are sinners. The Lord who created us not to sin sent his obedient Son to die for us. That Son rose from the dead to sit at the right hand of the Father. We may join him in heaven if we have faith.

Christianity is the opposite of a mystery religion: the creed is short and openly professed. Yet its simple tenets belie unfathomable depth. “Matter is a form of energy.” We all know this Einsteinian truth — a child could be taught it, and, to the limits of his capacity, really believe it. But what does it imply? What does it mean? “There are three persons in one God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Again, a child could learn the formula, but what does the Trinity imply? The wise and prudent are struck dumb. A religious anthropologist may chatter about the symbolism of three, and how all cultures attach a mystical importance to it, and on and learnedly on. But to the clean of heart it may reveal the mystery of existence itself. So Dante implies in his invocation to God:

O Light that dwell within thyself alone,
who alone know thyself, are known, and smile
with Love upon the Knowing and the Known.
(Paradise, 33.124-26)

Merely to exist, to be a knowable object, is to have been made by the God of knowledge who knows and is known, whose being is love, and who has loved into being all things that have been, are, and are to come.

Pride is blinding; the moral problem becomes epistemological.  Suppose we assume that the lanky fellow across the table is a dullard. When he remarks of someone else’s immorality, “For them as likes that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they likes,” we will find our prejudice confirmed. The statement is tautological arid evasive. But if we knew that the man was Lincoln, we might see the wry condemnation hiding beneath the hayseed humor. We will know, when he assumes the self-deprecatory air, not to take him at his word. When we later discover the same man condemning that behavior, we will know that it is not he who is inconsistent, but we who underestimated him.

Irony and Knowledge
WHAT DOES THIS HAVE to do with irony and faith? Much, if we consider what irony is. Until fairly recently, most writers on irony have defined it as speech that means something other than (or opposite to) what is literally said. The problem with this definition is that it is at once too narrow, too broad, and beside the point. Liars mean other than what they say, but the lie is not in itself ironic; and you may, with irony, mean exactly what you say, but in a way that your audience (or perhaps a putative audience, more foolish than those who are actually listening to you) will not understand. The definition is beside the point, since moments of dramatic irony, or what some have called “irony of event,” may not involve speech at all, but only strange turns of fate.

Contemporary literary theorists have attempted to distill the essence of irony, that which underlies both the winking assertions of ignorance made by Socrates, and concatenations of events that seem (but only seem) to suggest design, or that demolish any sense of design. Irony, they assert, is a universal solvent: no theology or epistemology can contain it. It dissolves— — “deconstructs” every assertion of absolute truth

The trouble with this view of irony now prevalent in the academy is that it enshrines one sort of ironic statement or event and ignores the rest. Worse, the kind of irony it enshrines is destructive, and the first thing it destroys is irony. If there is no objective truth — if irony must undermine and destabilize — then, once we have noticed the fact, there is no more point for irony, just as it makes no sense for the skeptic to embark on a quest for knowledge, when there is no knowledge to be had. How, after all, does one then proceed. by irony, to undermine the “truth” that every truth can be undermined? If all speech is inherently slippery, why trouble oneself with the subtleties of irony? Why pour oil on a sheet of ice?

But in fact, irony commonly is used to exalt rather than undermine. It can stun us with wonder and raise our eyes to behold a truth we had missed. All kinds of unsuspected truths, particularly those combined in paradoxes await our attention, but we are too dulled by habit to notice. Then irony — verbal or dramatic — awakes us. Consider:

1. A bystander watches as a professor, holding forth to his suffering companion on the epistemological subtleties of irony, steps dangerously near a banana peel.

2. In King Lear, Gloucester tries to refuse the help of his son Edgar, whom he cannot see and does not know: “I have no way and therefore want no eyes; / I stumbled When I saw,” (4.1. 18-19)

3. In II Henry IV (and apparently in real life, too) the usurper King Henry, who had wanted to atone for his sin by fighting in the Crusades, removes to die in a room called “Jerusalem,” noting that it had been foretold to him that he would die in Jerusalem. (4.5 236-40)

4. St. Paul sings a hymn of Christ’s Atonement:

Let this mind be in you, which Was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that even tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father
(Philemon 2:5-11)

5. In Moliere’s comedy Tartuffe, the jealous husband Orgon squirms under the table where his wife Elmire has put him, listening as his protégé Tartuffe, the one man he is amazingly not suspicious of attempts to seduce her. (4.5)

What do the cases have in common? The first verges upon slapstick; the second involves a lesson learned in an unusual way; the third hinges upon a play on words; the fourth is a theological reversal of expectations; the fifth is a piece of staged ignorance. Each involves a problem of knowing. The irony lies in a stark clash between what a character thinks he knows and what he really knows. This clash is staged to let the reader or the audience in on the secret. We are, then, not merely watching ignorance, but ignorance unaware of itself and about to learn better, or at least about to teach by way of its own incorrigibility. The irony reveals, with a kind of electric shock, order where randomness was expected, or complexity and subtlety where simplicity was expected.

Each case involves a staged clash of incompatible levels of knowledge:

1.  The professor thinks he knows a lot about the subtlest things, but misses the humble and material banana at his feet. The bystander probably knows a great deal less about irony, but he does see the hazard and, if he possesses either a profound moral sensibility or none at all, will stand back to enjoy the tumble. The apparent intellectual hierarchy belies a richer order: the great intellect is not so wise. He “deserves” to slip, falling victim to the very thing, irony, about which he declaims so proudly. Had he known less about it, he might have looked to the sidewalk in time.

2.  Only after Gloucester loses his eyes does he ‘see” how rashly and unjustly lie has treated his son Edgar. The irony, a reversal of expectations accompanied by a deepening knowledge, is richly theological as well. For there is an order at work, bringing about Gloucester’s sight through blindness, and his reconciliation with his son through suffering. The man before him is that wronged son, whom he has seen in disguise and taken for one Tom-a-Bedlam, the “poor, bare, forked animal” that “un-accommodated man” is (King Lear, 3.4. 105-106). Now it is the wronged Gloucester reduced to misery who requires assistance from Mad Tom. Gloucester does not yet understand what his “way” is, why he has been blinded and what he must suffer still. He says he has no way, yet his meeting with Edgar shows that a way has been designed for him nonetheless. He will walk towards a final, terrible resignation to his punishment and reconciliation with his son. And Edgar wii1 he his eyes — his spiritual guide — along this way.

3.  We “know” that Henry might have died in any room or might have died falling from a horse on a holiday hunt. He had hoped to die in the Holy Land, and when he learns the name of the room, he finally sees the design and resigns himself to its justice. For us, that death feels right–better than if he had died a-crusading, better than if he had been hanged at the Tower of London. The usurper should not be granted a matyr’s death; better that he should he disappointed by his hope to expiate the crime. The place of his death reveals a more subtle order than either he or we had expected.

4.  The chasm between human expectations and divine will has never been sung more powerfully. The prophet cries, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord” (Isaiah: 55:8), but here Saint Paul fleshes out that cry with specifics that seem impossible to hold simultaneously. If Christ is equal with God, why should He, or how can He, empty himself, making himself of no reputation?  How can God become obedient to God, obedient unto the shameful death on a cross? How can submission exalt? For Christ is not exalted despite his humility but in it and through it. For the believer, then, Paul’s hymn reveals complexities in the notions of equality and hierarchy: because Christ was the Son of God, He set aside that equality, and in his obedience He is set above all things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth. He is equal to the Father because he obeys.

5. This brilliant stage business shows dramatic irony at its purest. Of this double-plot no one, not even the audience, can see everything. Elmire knows she is chaste, but as she leads ‘Tartuffe on, to prove to her husband under the table what a fool he has been to trust the charlatan, she must worry lest her trick backfire and Tartuffe ravish her before Orgon manages to get out from under there. For she cannot see him, and cannot be sure that he will come to his senses even when he hears Tartuffe making love to her. Meanwhile Organ can only fry in imagination: he hears but cannot see the couple, and must restrain his wrath and jealousy long enough to let Tartuffe hang himself for certain. The audience, too, can see Tartuffe and Elmire, and so they know’ what Orgon must learn; but they cannot see Orgon, and must guess, from his awkward and frantic movements under the table, what must be going through his mind. Finally, there is Tartuffe, master trickster, steeped in ignorance, believing himself so clever yet missing so obvious a trick — for I do not think Orgon can remain as still as a chuchmouse!

It is, then, not the unexpectedness of a thing that produces irony—a violin flung at a man’s head is unexpected, but not ironic — nor is it ignorance that produces irony — after all, if he saw the violin he would duck. Irony arises, rather, from the ignorance of unseen or unexpected order (or, as it may happen, disorder), from the failure to note subtleties, or from seeing subtleties that are not there, especially when the ignorance and the failure are highlighted before observers are in a better position to see the truth. That is the sort of thing we feel as ironic. A violin flung at a man’s head is not ironic. A man missing a sharp as he tries to hum the Kreutzer sonata is not ironic. The same man botching Beethoven as the violin sails his way — now that is ironic.

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Drawing Closer To The Heart Of The Lord: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty

July 1, 2010
 
 
 
 
 
 

Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough...

This is not the first time I have introduced this poem on Paying Attention To The Sky, but I shall do it again to showcase Anthony Esolen’s prodigious talents of interpretation. I first studied the poem back in a lit class in college and counted syllables and stress, marveling at the intricacies of structure and form of the sonnet. Elsewhere I have related how this poem can easily become a prayer — a cool summer morning following several days in the nineties — you can memorize this and recite it on the way to bus stop. You’ll be surprised how many more counter, original, spare, strange things you’ll notice on the way to work.

“God is Love”
WE ARE USED TO hearing the biblical verse, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and nodding knowingly to ourselves. “Ah yes,” says the modern agnostic with a taste for religion. “I don’t know whether God exists, but I do know that if he does, then He is love. So I will try to live according to love.”

That’s better than nothing. But we are too familiar with the verse. We no longer hear its thundering challenge to the entire Greek philosophical system.

For if God is love and not necessity (since what is determined or compelled cannot be an act of love), then none of this universe need have been. Nor need it have been the way it is now. The belief that God creates from nothing, freely, is a logical consequence of believing that he creates from love.

But how can God love man? God needs nothing from man, not even man’s love. Christians believe that God already is a communion of three persons bound by love, each distinct, yet each fully God. Man knows a trace of the love that moves God, or that is God’s movement within himself: as he moves not from need, but from superabundance, from generosity one might even say from playfulness.

Man will cherish animals from which he derives nothing of use; he will potter about a flower garden for delight in the flowers; his heart will soar at the strains of music; he cheers at the sight of a big and boisterous; family. Unlike every other creature on earth, man needs what he does not need, and loves where he does not lack — and he feels that he loves more fully from his plenty and strength, from his fascination with life, and from his will-to-beauty, than from his sense of incompleteness and insufficiency. In those high-hearted moments, man is close to God.

In no classical author do we find the great Zeus, father of gods and men stooping to limn a blade of grass or smooth out a dewdrop. Such affairs would be relegated to some deity so low on the scale as to he nameless. But our God, who made even the creeping things that creep upon the earth, who cares for ostrich egg because the hen is too bird-brained to do it herself (Job 39:13), whose kingdom is as a mustard seed, and who decks the lilies of the field in such glory as would put to shame the tailors of Solomon, de1ights in works. He enjoys them, he calls them good, he loves them. And, to paraphrase Jesus, if God so loves the grass, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more does he love us, us of the hard hearts?

We might think such things beneath our notice, but the incomparably great God notices them. Small as they are, they provide for the attentive a powerful way to draw closer to the heart of the Lord (Paying Attention, don’t you see!!!). Such was the insight of the Victorian priest-poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The more unusual creature, the more it is peculiarly itself, the greater the delight. Consider this magnificent miniature sonnet on the beauty of all things great and small:

                           Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-color as 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 all trades, 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.

The bustling corral of things animate and inanimate defies category, exactly as Hopkins intends. No one really looks upon the sky and thinks of the splotches on a calico cow, probably because no one looks appreciatively enough at the sky and its cowishness, or at a cow and its reflection of a weathering sky. That odd second line brings heaven to earth with a delightful bump. The point, after all, is that heaven can be seen where no one sees it, especially upon the peculiarly beautiful things of earth — on the rosy stipples of a freshwater trout, for instance.

Not only there, though; Hopkins would never settle for being a dreamy little nature poet, a devotee of the pretty, and therefore a pretender of love. For how can you love weeds and thrush’s eggs and not love man?

If God delights in the making of chestnuts, the more does he delight in waking beings who can delight also in his making of chestnuts and everything else. Therefore, man, his labor and his ingenuity, must also be praised; for the quirky beauty of man’s own creativity, as evinced in sickles and ice-tongs and flails and adzes, reflects its source, the beauty of God. Fishing lures, wrenches, lathes, ropes and pulleys, pails of tar, seedbags and harrows, all in “trim,” in order, share in Hopkins’s hymn to muscular love.

But in the second stanza the poet leaves these particular things behind and turns his attention to their typical qualities — there is not one specific noun for the rest of the poem. That is because he wants to reverse the kaleidoscope: we shift our sights from the ever-changing and exuberantly various individual things to the never-changing God who made them.

Now the ironic thing about this shift is not just that a never-changing God would create things which, since they are not God, would be subject to change. It is rather that God would delight in having his never-changing beauty pieced out among, refracted through, so many forms and so odd. Yet it is no derogation of his one and eternal beauty that it should be made manifest in the swift and the slow, the dazzling and the dim. For he does not simply make, as an artificer. He “fathers-forth.”

We should meditate upon that phrase. It suggests neither the pantheism latent in earth-mother cults (whose goddess is identified with the mindless fecundity of nature), nor the fatalism latent in rationalistic theologies such as deism. God “fathers-forth”– the begetter and maker of what he did not have to beget or make. He has loved all things into being.

Begetting them, he is to be found by means of them, whether the spiraling galaxy or the conch on the shore. Man’s proper response, then, after he has paid his loving attention to trout and finches and things that show forth that breathless list of adjectives, is a quiet movement of the heart: “Praise him.” Two simple words, for a simple act that does not change: praising the Maker of change, who dwells in eternal light.

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Reasonable Damnation, Unreasonable Love: Herbert’s The Temple

June 29, 2010

George Herbert

Anthony Esolen shares a reading of George Herbert’s poem “Love”, the final poem of Herbert’s volume, the Temple. In both biographies of Simone Weil (here and here) you will see the poem noted as one of her “anthem poems,” by which I mean it was a poem she lived her life by.

One of the problems of poetry is that it requires a certain discipline to read. Unless you spend time with a poem, constantly returning and re-reading, or getting a chance to listen to a poet perform the piece, the meaning may elude you. In this case we have a professional scholar sharing his interpretation of the poem. More than an interpreter, Esolen is a true blessing.

LET US BEGIN WITH the final poem of Herbert’s volume The Temple, as it will show us most clearly the love for which we have been made. In “Love (III) the soul is the “reasonable” party, and Love — Christ — is the gentle but firm ironist. The poem is a dramatic dialogue between the mere man, who is right about everything, and Christ, who makes everything right. Here is the poem in its entirety. (Here and throughout, I have modernized Herbert’s orthography,

Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back,
     Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
     From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
     If I lacked anything.

“A guest,” I answered, “worthy to be here.”
     Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
     I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand, and smiling made reply,
     “Who made the eyes, but I?”

“Truth, lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
     Go where it doth deserve.”
“And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”
     “My dear, then I will serve.”
“You must sit down;’ says Love, “and taste my meat.”
     So I did sit and eat.

“Love bade me welcome,” says the speaker, and we should not be too hasty to personify this love. Christ bids him welcome, but as an act of love because there is no reason why the soul should be welcome. In truth, he is not well come,” and he knows it: “Yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.” That soul may be timid, but its timidity is rational. It fears the center, as a poorly dressed man would fear the spotlight. It is afraid to be loved, and knows it should not be loved. How much more fitting it would be if the soul could slink away to the justice it deserves.

Fitting indeed, for this soul flatly cites Scripture to its own damnation: it is “guilty of dust and sin.” Into this one strange phrase (how is one guilty of “dust”?), Herbert compacts a theology of justice. He alludes to Christ’s parable comparing the kingdom of God to a wedding feast that a king gave for his son. When one of the guests arrived unsuitably dressed for the occasion, the king ordered him bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness, where there was wailing and gnashing of teeth (Matthew 22 11-13).

 To be “guilty of dust” is to be mortal, to suffer death, the wages of sin. The “dust” lies on the clothing of the arriving soul — but it is also what the body is made of, and what the body must return to is a consequence of sin. No sin, no offending dust; but there is sin, and so there is death, and so there is also the dust of a deeper  mortality that soils the garments we bring when we meet our Maker. We cannot fit ourselves for the wedding feast, just as we cannot bring ourselves to life. We are all that poor man in the parable.

The soul in Herbert’s poem would courteously spare the king the trouble. It sees itself in that shameful light, and is eager to fall away from Love and embrace the darkness. The love of God is more terrifying than his justice for in love his essence shines forth more radiantly. That love exalts dust. It raises the tattered mortality we are robed with, and it forgives sin when there is no reason in our natures or in the world why it should do either.

The trans-logic of God’s forgiveness is celebrated by Herbert’s daring reversal of the parable from Scripture. The soul flings Christ’s own words back at him, to prove why he should not show mercy. But, in seeming to violate his own just law, Love fulfills his just mercy, giving us what we cannot have expected, and thus, from Love, what is above all to be hoped.

Love is “quick-eyed” — as a solicitous bridegroom orchestrating the celebration, careful to observe any hesitation or discomfort among his guests. The lord of the universe, who spies the secrets of man’s inmost heart, is here a cheerful, tactful young man, the prime servant for the feast held in his honor. That homely reduction is part of the message of the Incarnation and the Atonement: who would have thought that God could or would become man?

The rational soul resists the invitation. No surprise our rational souls, in action ,are but bundles of pride laced up with a thread or two of logic. We do not deserve the invitation, we say, when secretly we feel that the invitation offends high sense of our tragic insignificance. But if the soul will not move to the center, the center will move to it. So the young groom, the host of the feast, Creator of life and light, asks the stunningly understated question “Do you lack anything?”

How can such a question be answered? Love asks it, as if he were asking the newly arrived guest whether he needed a trifle, like a place to leave his coat, or a drink, or a chair. Yet, as with the phrase “guilty of dust and sin,” the question implies a theology. In the presence of its redeemer the soul lacks everything. Christ’s question is both invitation and gentle accusation. The speaker understands it so. What does he lack? Knowing that he falls infinitely short of the glory of God, and infinitely short of the love he owes to the Lord who has loved him, he fashions a reply which he thinks leaves no room for exception. “A guest… worthy to be here.”

The lack is not in what the speaker has, but in what he is. That lack is total. He himself, what God meant him to be, is lacking, is absent, all that remains is for the sinner he has become to make himself absent too. The speaker knows he lacks the slightest quality to merit the host’s attention.  But this host is called Love, and that literally makes a difference “Love said, ‘You shall be He.”

The sentence is not to be construed rhetorically. The soul will not simply be considered or named a worthy guest, but will actually be one, by the creative fiat of Love. What in an earthly host would be a polite pretense (“You are worthy after all.”) or a jocular exercise of authority (“You are worthy, because it is my day, and I say you are”) is here a command and an act. Love supplies the lack by making the speaker a worthy guest, drawing good not only out of evil but out of nothingness.

Still the soul holds to its view of the fitness of things: “I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, / I cannot look on thee.” Why should it be loved? It is not natural, for the soul has been unkind,” a perversion of its “kind” or “nature,” a frustration of its innate purpose. It is not just, for the soul has scorned or misused the free gifts of God, ungratefully returning evil for good. The last thing ingratitude merits is another free gift, another grace, the last thing kindness can arouse is the warmth of natural affection.

Yet the soul, overcome with shame and love, utters its truest and least calculated phrase: ‘“Ah my dear.” In this phrase the speaker acknowledges the transcendent worth of Christ he is ‘dear’ or “priceless,” the one whose precious blood redeemed or bought us back from the bondage of sin.  He also confesses that he longs for Christ as the only object of his deepest and truest love. Yet he uses the phrase as a way of excusing himself from love!

One endearing irony of Christian love is that it should be at once so modest and so bold, the bride in the Song of Songs who, drunk with love, dares to ask her Creator and Redeemer for a kiss. With the exclamation ah my dear the soul wavers in its small rationality. It moves uncertainly between the shy bravery of true love and  the proud diffidence of rejection. The soul is that of a sinner, caught between desire and disdain; wanting much to be loved, and wanting much not to be loved. On its own it can do nothing. All is up to Love, who takes the speaker’s hand. The gesture is firmly paternal and gently respectful of the poor sinner’s dignity. Then Love fixes the speaker’s gaze with a smile, and, not scorning to use the lowly pun as an instrument of grace, asserts his sovereignty over all things material and spiritual “Who made the eyes but I?”

At this, the speaker’s last hold upon his paltry dignity slips away. A note of desperation enters his abrupt reply “‘Truth, Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame / Go where it doth deserve.” Herbert touches upon a psychological profundity that only the strongest believers or the strongest resisters perceive: most sou1s would find it more comfortable not to be saved. The speaker does not plead justice, though that is the logical content of his plea. He begs for mercy, the mercy of mere justice! He argues for justice as a strange form of compassion. “Look at how filthy I am;” says the embarrassed beloved. “Please, please let me leave this place I deserve no better” But the soul leans upon a straw, in calling the name of justice for mercy’s sake, and instead is reminded that the claims of justice have already been mercifully fulfilled “And know you not,” says Love, “who bore the blame?”

Of course the soul knows, to its anguish. Beaten from his last ward, the speaker capitulates, but upon condition: “My dear, then I will serve.” I will agree to my salvation, so long as I retain the appropriate judgment attendant upon my sin. Since I do not deserve to be here, if I must be here, let me be saved only somewhat. Let me, in a dainty reserve that looks like humility, serve the others, and thus not be so searing a focus of Love. Yet even that will not do. For Love is jealous, and will have all. “You must sit down; says Love, and taste my meat.” You must submit to your exaltation. Emptying yourself of all self-centered judgments of worthiness or unworthiness, you must allow yourself to be the center of Love’s attention. You, Simon Peter, must have your feet washed. You must be served by Love.

It is fitting that Herbert should recall that moment at the Last Supper. In “Love” we have the servant, Christ, present at his wedding feast, at which he himself, the Paschal sacrifice, is served. As Love by his own power supplies the :worthy guest, so Love himself is the feast he serves. Christ’s giving of himself is not figurative. When Love insists that the soul taste “his meat,” he means not the food that belongs to him, but the food he is: “For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (John 6:55).

Love invites the soul to taste of Love, to be nourished by it, to be refreshed and re-created by it. So it is both true and misleading to say that the salvation of an individual soul is the center of Herbert’s Christian universe. The soul attains that honored rank, or rank is granted that honored rank, by emptying itself, rejecting the decisiveness its sin, and accepting Christ, who is center and circumference both. The human is subsumed in Incarnation: in sharing this great communion, it is not the man who assimilates the food to himself, but the food that assimilates the man to itself. Of all the mysteries of Gods love for his people, this is the improbable. There is nothing left to say. The poem and Herbert’s volume end on a note of submission and sublime simplicity “So I did sit and eat.”

Why should God so love the human soul? I do not know. If I thought I knew, I would not be Christian.

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Simone Weil and Wallace Stevens: The Notion of De-creation as Subtext in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” — JAMES R. LINDROTH

June 18, 2010
 
 
 
 

Wallace Stevens

I was amazed to read this essay. For the longest time I had associated Stevens with my new-age past. After my conversion to Catholicism I became drawn to the mystical writings of Simone Weil (several posts here). Until Professor Lindroth made the connection I had never imagined that Stevens had also been drawn to her and that his poem “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” could be seen as a response to many of the writings in Gravity and Grace which he had been influenced by. This is a complex essay and a difficult read. Probably only of interest to those of you who share my fascination with Weil and Stevens. Stevens’ “strong religious concern[s]” are still batted about in the secular university. Needless to say while I was growing up, this was never considered. I had always considered him a factor in my conversion and have been cheered by others seeing the religious significance of his poetry.

Wallace Stevens’ deathbed conversion to an orthodox Christian faith, reported by Peter Brazeau in Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered: An Oral Biography (1983), has been met with cynicism by James K. Guimond, among others, who speaks of it as a “final insurance policy” and with outright denial by his daughter Holly. Yet Stevens’ correspondence with Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, (See particularly the letters dated 7 April 1948 and 21 Dec. 1951; in the first, Stevens remarks on the striking similarity of their minds, after which he asserts that he does “seek a center” and expects “to go on seeking it”; in the second, he expressly states his belief in God, although not “the same God in whom” he believed as “a boy.” Wallace Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens (NY: Knopf, 1977) 584, 735.)

His reading of Simone Weil toward the end of his life, (Stevens, who died in 1955, was 68 when Weil’s La Pesanteur et La Grace was published; he draws upon this 1947 edition for his essay “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” originally read at the Museum of Modem Art in 1951 and subsequently published in his The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (NY:Knopf, 1951) 159-76) and the corpus of Stevens’ poetry, particularly the late poems, bears witness to a strong religious concern often commented upon by his critics.

Although most, like Milton J. Bates in his authoritative new biography, find it subordinate to and ultimately subsumed by his poetic theory. In Bates’ final judgment that “Stevens effaced himself before the Supreme Imagination” in the way that “Eliot effaced himself before the Supreme Being,” Bates is representative of those critics who reject the notion that what ultimately became most important for Stevens was the quest for Weil’s uncreated reality, although the emphasis on the effacement of self is very close to Weil’s notion of de-creation. However, unlike “The Man with the Blue Guitar” and “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” earlier poems to which it is frequently compared, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” composed in 1949 just prior to Stevens’ seventieth birthday, contains a subtext echoing Simone Weil’s religious meditations and displaying a spiritual ascesis in accord with the poet’s final religious act.

It is not only fitting that Wallace Stevens should be drawn to Simone Weil, a figure whose belief presents a religious paradox as problematic as his own, but that Weil’s mystical notion of de-creation should provide a key to the understanding of one of Stevens’ most difficult and, at the same time, most religious poems. Weil’s meditations on de-creation appear in her notebooks and were included in Gustave Thibon’s selections from these notebooks, published under the title La Pesanteur et La Grace (Gravity and Grace) 1947, two years before the composition of the Stevens poem. It is to the selection that Stevens refers in The Necessary Angel, and it is from this selection that he draws the notion of de-creation to emphasize the absolute value of artistic effort in his consideration of poetry’s relationship with painting.

“Simone Weil in La Pesanteur et La Grace,” says Stevens, citing the edition by its complete French title, “has a chapter on what she calls de-creation. She says that de-creation is making pass from the created to the uncreated, but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness. In this essay, “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” Stevens only appropriates Weil’s notion of de-creation for the purposes of his familiar aesthetic argument that in the modern world the poet functions as a substitute for God. Still, from the standpoint of his late poetry in general and more particularly as it applies to “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Stevens’ acknowledgment of a full familiarity with the Weil text becomes critically significant, as does the undeniable sympathy between the two as religious thinkers. If Weil’s mystical notion of the de-creation of self is a pertinent idea for Stevens in his later years, so are the correlative notions of spiritual gravity, a hidden God, affliction, and the renunciation of time.

De-creation, as postulated by Weil in Gravity and Grace, is making “something created pass into the uncreated,” and to this she opposes the notion of destruction, making “something created pass into nothingness,” which she calls a “blameworthy substitute for de-creation” (Gravity and Grace 28). For Weil, the uncreated, another term for reality, is identified with God, and the passage from the created to the uncreated is not a fall into nothingness but the attainment of God. Yet this attainment of God, through de-creation, depends on the individual’s willingness to become nothing, to detach himself from sense life, and ultimately even from a “belief in the prolongation of life,” robbing “death of its purpose” of allowing the individual to attain divine being (Gravity and Grace 33).

Within this mystical formulation, one’s greatest enemy is the world of appearances to which one clings in a desperate effort to prolong life. “Appearance clings to being,” asserts Weil, “and pain alone can tear them from each other. For whoever is in possession of being there can be no appearance. Appearance chains being down” (Gravity and Grace, 34). Here, Weil’s chain metaphor emphatically evokes her notion of spiritual gravity, the force that binds one to the created world of appearance and time. Creation says Weil is composed of the descending movement of gravity to escape gravity’s pull the individual ‘must necessarily turn to something other than himself, since it is a question of being delivered from self’ (Gravity and Grace, 3) Paradoxically, and it is a paradox fully explored by Stevens in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”; time, our enemy in the conventional sense, becomes our salvation, since time “in its course tears appearance from being and being from appearance, by violence. Time makes it manifest that it is not eternity” (Gravity and Grace 34).

Weil’s notions of de-creation and spiritual gravity manifest themselves in the Stevens poem through two informing impulses. The first of these is the poet’s stated intention the need to strip created reality of all illusion ‘Here,” declares Stevens of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven:

“My interest is to try to get as close to the ordinary, the commonplace and the ugly as it is possible for a poet to get. It is not a question of grim reality but plain reality.” The poem’s second informing impulse is the desire to embrace uncreated reality. This double movement produces a subtle text continually questioning the poet’s relationship to the phenomenal world of appearances, and an even subtler subtext presenting our relationship to the noumenal (vocab: In the philosophy of Kant, an object as it is in itself independent of the mind, as opposed to a phenomenon), to uncreated spiritual reality — to God.

Attending to the first movement alone has invariably led critics to reductive interpretations some dismissing the poem as an aging poet’s cry of despair over the loss of imagination; others finding a saving ballast in what they mistakenly judge to be the old Stevens’ renewed affirmation of the sense world Helen Vendler, for instance, invoking “Dejection An Ode,” sees the Stevens poem as a “long expansion of Coleridge’s disjunction before the moon and the stars,” the depression of the poet experiencing the “metabolic depletion” of age.  In a similar fashion, Harold Bloom, although rejecting Vendler’s interpretation of the poem as a “portrayal of dessication,” is equally reductive in his insistence that the poem is a Whitmanian celebration of sense life and that the final canto presents reality as “the solipsistic recognition of privileged moments, sudden perfections of sense, flakes of fire, fluttering things having distinct shapes.”[Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976) 336]

At the heart of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” is neither “metabolic depletion” nor celebratory “solipsism” but, as is the case with Weil’s meditations, the notion of ascetic denial leading to spiritual life, to being, to God. Like Weil, Stevens raises the ordinary to a mystical level where the drama of de-creation is presented in terms of the shedding of appearances, the renunciation of the created in time, the acceptance of nothingness: “The dilapidation of dilapidations” (16.3), “total leafless-ness” (16.18), “The dominant blank” (17.7).

As a major obstacle to de-creation, Weil postulates spiritual gravity, the pull exerted by the world of appearances (Gravity and Grace 45-48). “Weil,” says Eric O. Springsted, commenting on this aspect of de-creation, “contended that our natural attachment to our terrestrial existence is weighty and constitutes a sort of spiritual gravity to which we are constantly subject. Consequently, she argued that as long as we remain subject to this gravity there is no way from man to God” (Springsted, Christus Mediator, 117).and it is in the exact middle of the poem, Cantos XV, XVI, and XVII, that Stevens gives his most compelling evidence of this spiritual gravity at work.

Canto XV, for example, places the drama of de-creation against a rain-drenched landscape where the rain heightens man’s awareness of the sense world, drawing him to it and away from the spiritual:

He preserves himself against the repugnant rain
By an instinct for a rainless land, the self
Of his self, come at upon wide delvings of wings.

The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:
The instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room,
The gay tournamonde as of a single world

In which he is and as and is are one.
For its counterpart a kind of counterpoint
Irked the wet wallows of the water-spout.

The rain kept falling loudly in the trees
And on the ground. The hibernal dark that hung
In primavera, the shadow of bare rock,

Becomes the rock of autumn, glittering,
Ponderable source of each imponderable,
The weight we lift with the finger of a dream,

The heaviness we lighten by light will,
By the hand of desire, faint, sensitive, the soft
Touch and trouble of the touch of the actual hand.

Because of his “instinct for heaven,” the protagonist in this drama of de-creation finds the rain “repugnant” rather than refreshing, and he “preserves himself against” it by “an instinct for a rainless land.” Against the backdrop of this rainless land, the biblical desert of purification, Stevens situates the protagonist’s “self / Of his self:,” the hidden “I” spoken of by Weil (“My ‘I’ is hidden for me . . . it is on the side of God, it is in God, it is God” [Gravity And Grace 33]); and the discovery of this hidden “I” is accompanied by the traditional sign of contact with the holy, the “wide delving of wings. But this is poetic drama, not platitude, and set against the man’s “Instinct for heaven” is an equally powerful “Instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room, / The gay tournamonde as of a single world / In which he is and as and is are one.”

“Tournamonde,” providing as it does a strong echo of Weil’s notion of spiritual gravity, is central here, and in a letter to Herbert Weinstock, his editor at Knopf, Stevens gives the following explanation of the word. “Tournamonde,” Stevens says, “is a neologism. For me it creates an image of a world in which things revolve and the word is therefore appropriate in the collocation of is and as. . . I think the word justifies itself in the sense of conveying an immediate, even though rather vague, meaning.” If the movement to God’s spiritual reality is outward, away from the apparent self and the created world, the movement here is centripetal and inward, in which the man revolves in tighter and tighter circles of the illusory self. It is not the joy of God that attracts but the gaiety of appearances, the world whose constant movement creates the illusion of being where “is” and “as” are the same.

Canto XVI heightens the drama of de-creation with further evidence of the pull of gravity emanating from creation and time:

Among time’s images, there is not one
Of this present, the venerable mask above
The dilapidation of dilapidations.

The oldest-newest day is the newest alone.
The oldest-newest night does not creak by,
With lanterns, like a celestial ancientness.

Silently it heaves its youthful sleep from the sea
The Oklahoman—the Italian blue
Beyond the horizon with its masculine,

Their eyes closed, in a young palaver of lips.
And yet the wind whimpers oldly of old age
In the western night. The venerable mask,

In this perfection, occasionally speaks
And something of death’s poverty is heard.
This should be tragedy’s most moving face.

It is a bough in the electric light
And exhalations in the eaves, so little
To indicate the total leaflessness.

The opening of this canto presents one of time’s most powerfully attractive images in the spectacle of the natural world continually renewing itself, but it is the figures of youth and old age, renewal and exhaustion, birth and death that give it its dramatic structure. Moreover, subtending the canto’s entire drama is the notion of nudity, the total purity achieved, according to Weil, at only two points of existence: birth and death (Gravity and Grace 32),

Death, an emphatic point of nudity for Weil and Stevens alike, is suggested by the “dilapidation of dilapidations” and by the late-autumn tree bereft of its leaves, reduced from the image of fecundity to the bare line of “a bough in the electric light,” to “total leaflessness.” The second point of nudity, birth, is suggested by the two paradoxes of the “oldest-newest day” and the “oldest-newest night”; or rather the two points intersect, since as the day dies the night is born as “Silently it heaves its youthful sleep from the sea” and encroaches on “The Ok1ahoman — the Italian blue” disappearing beyond the mind’s horizon. This symbolic intersection of birth and death resonates with and reinforces a similar intersection in canto XV where Stevens juxtaposes winter, the season of death, with spring, the season of new life, through “The hibernal dark that” hangs “In primavera.”

Moreover, in both cantos XV and XVI, the opposites of youth and age, renewal and exhaustion, birth and death combine in a metamorphic process resulting in a denudation of existence synonymous with Weil’s notion of de-creation. In canto XV, the darkness of winter already present in the spring landscape in the “shadow of rock” is transformed into the “rock of autumn”; in canto XVI, the “masculine” light of the “oldest-newest day” retreating from the implicitly feminine darkness of the “oldest-newest night” is metamorphosed into the asexual, barren “electric light” illuminating the once youthful lips and eyes (“Their eyes closed, in a young palaver of lips”) now shrunk into “The venerable mask” of age. Finally, both cantos conclude with emphatic symbols of existence stripped bare: the “rock of autumn” and “total leaflessness.”

A major part of the drama of de-creation derives from Weil’s postulating a God who “could create only by hiding himself’ (GG 33) with the consequence that “God and the supernatural are hidden and formless in the universe” (Gravity and Grace 49: As Gustave Thibon points out in a comment on a related text, “contact with supernatural reality is first felt as an experience of nothingness” since “God does not exist in the same way as created things which form the only object of experience for our natural faculties” (Gravity and Grace 19n) Stevens meditates on the hiddeness of uncreated reality throughout “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” but a particularly clear example of such meditation presents itself in canto XVII where Weil’s absent God, the hidden holiness, is poetically evoked as “The dominant blank, the unapproachable:

The color is almost the color of comedy,
Not quite. It comes to the point and at the point,
It falls. The strength at the centre is serious.

Perhaps instead of failing it reflects
As a serious strength rejects pin-idleness.
A blank underlies the trials of device,

The dominant blank, the unapproachable.
This is the mirror of the high serious:
Blue verdured into a damask’s lofty symbol,

Gold easings and ouncings and fluctuations of thread
And beetling of belts and lights of general stones,
Like blessed beams from out a blessed bush

Or the wasted figurations of the wastes
Of night, time and the imagination,
Saved and beholden, in a robe of rays.

These fitful sayings are, also, of tragedy:
The serious reflection is composed
Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace.

In discussing Weil’s argument that perfect love of God is possible “only in actual affliction” and His “total absence,” Eric O. Springsted, in Christus Mediator: Platonic Mediation in the Thought of Simone Weil, points to Weil’s emphasis on parallel notions in Saint John of the Cross and Plato. Springsted emphasizes Weil’s singling out of “two periods of void” described in Plato’s “Cave Analogy,” two periods, which in Well’s words, “correspond exactly to the two dark nights described by Saint John of the Cross.” The first of these occurs “when one is unchained and walks out of the cave without being able to use his customary, but illusory, bearings”; the second occurs “when one emerges from the cave and is blinded by the light”

If Stevens evokes the hidden God through “The dominant blank” and the problematic of affliction through his opening rejection of comedy, he also, like Weil, reinforces these notions with imagery drawn from the Bible, the literature of mysticism, and Plato. For example, Stevens’ “wasted figurations of the wastes / Of night” evokes not only the Old Testament prophet’s desert of purification and Christ’s agony in the garden but the mystic’s dark night of the soul. Moreover, drawing upon the imagery of Plato’s cave and upon the Old Testament figure of the Burning Bush, Stevens renders the relation between uncreated and created reality as light reflected in darkness, and at the same time hints at the hidden God suddenly revealed in a “robe of rays.”

These major themes of Weil — de-creation of self in and through time, the pull of gravity exerted on the spirit by the world of appearances, affliction that leads to a freeing of the spirit, and a God who is hidden—resonate throughout “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” with the world of appearances receiving particularly strong emphasis in its opening cantos. Canto I, a meditation on spiritual gravity, first postulates a Platonic world of appearances and then suggests the way in which man under the force of this gravity produces an illusory God fashioned on the model of self:

The eye’s plain version is a thing apart,
The vulgate of experience.
Of this, A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet –

As part of the never-ending meditation,
Part of the question that is a giant himself:
Of what is this house composed if not of the sun,

These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate
Appearances of what appearances,
Words, lines, not meanings, not communications,

Dark things without a double, after all,
Unless a second giant kills the first–
A recent imagining of reality,

Much like a new resemblance of the sun,
Down-pouring; up-springing and inevitable,
A large poem for a larger audience,

As if the crude collops came together as one,
A mythological form, a festival sphere,
A great bosom, beard and being, alive with age.

Starting with the “eye’s plain version” dramatically contrasted to the “experience” of transcendence, then focusing his attention on the first of these, Stevens ponders the material world as manifested in the houses and streets of New Haven and offers the possibility that these creations of light are illusions lacking substance, “Dark things without a double.” This pessimistic questioning of created reality leads to a second question that, displacing the first, relates the material site of existence to the “crude collops” coming together in the imagination as an androgynous “mythological form” with “great bosom, beard, and being.”

The figure of the giant, with his great height but also his great weight, dramatically displays man operating under the force of gravity, first dismissing plain reality because he is not the uncreated self supporting it and then filling the “dominant blank” of the absent God with one of his own making. In each case, the figure of the giant, Polyphemus translated to Plato’s cave, emphasizes the obscured vision of the questioner and implies an ultimately unsatisfactory answer to the question of being. Stevens demonstrates his emphatic rejection of this second “giant,” the anthropomorphic god of mythology, in canto XXIV where this god in the guise of “The statue of Jove” is blown up “among the boomy clouds.” This can be construed as a de-creative act in that it conforms to Weil’s notion that we must empty ourselves of “false divinity” (Gravity and Grace, 30); Jove as an anthropomorphic divinity modeled on self is an emphatic example of such falseness. Leonora Woodman sees this as a “token of Stevens’ repeated effort to banish mistaken forms of the divine” (Woodman, Stanza My Stone, 109)

“The reality of the world,” Weil asserts, is “the reality of the self which we transfer to things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment.” Having examined New Haven, the material site of existence, as appearance and reflection, Stevens in canto II meditates on Weil’s notion of the world as an extension of self

Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves,
So that they become an impalpable town, full of
Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound,

Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self,
Impalpable habitations that seem to move
In the movement of the colors of the mind,

The far-fire flowing and the dim-coned bells
Coming together in a sense in which we are poised,
Without regard to time or where we are,

In the perpetual reference, object
Of the perpetual meditation, point
Of the enduring, visionary Jove,

Obscure, in colors whether of the sun
Or mind, uncertain in the clearest bells,
The spirit’s speeches, the indefinite,

Confused illuminations and sonorities,
So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart
The idea and the bearer-being of the idea.

If one answer to the question of being lies in the direction of Plato’s shadow-world of appearances, and another in the direction of the god of mythology, still a third looks to external reality as spiritualized self. On one hand, this version of reality has the advantage of freeing the self from limitations of “time” and space; it has a second advantage of situating the self at the metaphysical center. From this central point of intersection issue the “transparencies of sound” and the “colors of the mind” that come “together” as the impalpable town the way the “crude collops” came together as “mythological form.” The disadvantages are that although situated at the metaphysical center and poised between created reality and the “visionary love” of the uncreated, the self has in Weil’s sense transferred its reality to the reality of the created world with the effect of confusion. Subject-object distinctions vanish; and in “the indefinite, I Confused illuminations and sonorities” that result “The idea,” the “Impalpable town,” the “transparent dwellings of self” can no longer be distinguished from “the bearer-being of the idea.”

Turning from the versions of created reality postulated in the first two cantos, Stevens, in canto III, further heightens the drama of de-creation by directing his attention to the hidden holiness to be discovered through affliction and selfless love:

The point of vision and desire arc the same.
It is to the hero Qf midnight that we pray
On a hill of stones to make beau mont thereof.

If it is misery that infuriates our love,
If the black of night stands glistening on beau mont,
Then, ancientest saint ablaze with ancientest truth,

Say next to holiness is the will thereto,
And next to love is the desire for love,
The desire for its celestial ease in the heart,

Which nothing can frustrate, that most secure,
Unlike love in possession of that which was
To be possessed and is, But this cannot

Possess. It is desire, set deep in the eye,
Behind all actual seeing, in the actual scene,
In the street, in a room, on a carpet or a wall,

Always in emptiness that would be filled,
In denial that cannot contain its blood,
A porcelain, as yet in the bats thereof

In drawing a distinction between the actualities of holiness and love and their potentialities, Stevens places the same weight as Weil on possession and the need to relinquish possession if divine holiness and divine love are to be attained.

Weil’s paradoxical distinction between being and having is echoed in Stevens’s distinction, which in its elaboration situates desire “Behind all actual seeing” and raises its value above that of actual possession. For Weil, only “having,” Stevens’s “possession,” belongs to man situated in the ordinary world; or as Weil puts it: “Being does not belong to man, only having. The being of man is situated behind the curtain, on the supernatural side…The curtain is human misery: there was a curtain even for Christ” (GG 33-34). For Stevens and Weil alike, the divine, true holiness and true love, lie behind the curtain. Stevens alternately examines and embraces, wraps himself in, and steps through this curtain of the ordinary. Or as Stevens expresses it in the last two triads of canto III, behind the “actual scene,” the “street,” the “room,” the “carpet,” the “wall,” there is always the “emptiness that would be filled” and that can only be filled by being.

As the drama of de-creation unfolds in canto III, the afflicted Christ, “the hero of midnight…On a hill of stones,” displaces the self at the point of intersection between “vision and desire,” between the created and uncreated. The imagery conflates two figures central to the notion of the afflicted Christ: the figure of Christ as “the hero of midnight” undergoing the nightlong agony in the garden of Gethsemane; and the crucified Christ “On a hill of stones,” on Calvary. In his suffering, the afflicted Christ is the avatar of holiness and sainthood and in this sense becomes “ancientest saint ablaze with ancientest truth” whose holiness not only transforms the “hill of stones” into the “beau mont” but who embodies in his humanity the desire for the “celestial ease” of God’s love, “which nothing can frustrate.”

Stevens returns to Weil’s notion of affliction in canto XIX with the introduction of”A figure like Ecclesiast” (19.16). In this Old Testament guise, the afflicted Christ functions as a bridge to uncreated reality, although the imagery providing the backdrop against which the figure appears is more emphatically that of Plato’s cave rather than Calvary. A dominant figure of affliction emerges in two images: things not only shrouded in darkness but lying “Prostrate” (19.3) in the reflected light of the moon; and the transformation of daylight splendor into the privately sterile, the “public green turned private gray” (19.4).

Negative changes wrought by time reinforce the sense of affliction, as the “man who was the axis of his time” (19.9) is reduced to the “infantines” of the original “Image” (19.10). “What is the radial aspect of this place,” asks the afflicted speaker, “This present colony of a colony / Of colonies, a sense in the changing sense / Of things?” (19.13-16). In his affliction, the speaker looks to a “figure like Ecclesiast,” the embodiment of Old Testament wisdom in regard to suffering resulting from the depredations of time and the insubstantiality of created reality: “A figure Like Ecclesiast, / Rugged and luminous, chants in the dark / A text that is an I answer, although obscure” (19.16-18).

If the hero of midnight and a figure like Ecclesiast point toward Weil’s notions of the uncreated and of affliction that leads to a freeing of the spirit, two other of Stevens’s chief dramatis personae, Professor Eucalyptus and the black shepherd, restage Weil’s drama of de-creation with renewed vigor, as they show the self torn from gravity’s pull by the assault of time and death. Through Professor Eucalyptus, Stevens refocuses attention on the world of appearances, and in canto XIV where Stevens first introduces him and canto XXII where he returns, Professor Eucalyptus provides another powerful example of man operating under the force of Weil’s spiritual gravity

In the first of these two cantos, Professor Eucalyptus seeks God not in the realm of the transcendent but “In New Haven with an eye that does not look / Beyond the object” (14.3-4); more particularly “He seeks / God in the object itself, without much choice” (14.6-7). Caught by this powerful attraction to the created yet longing to discover the uncreated, professor Eucalyptus presents a theological paradox echoing those of Weil. On one hand, filled with self he freely proclaims his own divinity in the “commodious adjective” (14 8), the paradisal parlance” (14 13) that substitutes god-like word for plain thing. On the other hand, he achieves partial de-creation, release from gravity’s pull, through an “Indifference of the eye” that remains “Indifferent to what it sees.” (14.15-16) This neutrality of vision, if not of speech, sets up the possibility of a bridge to the uncreated through the unsparing presentation of its opposite, not “grim / Reality but reality grimly seen” (14.11-12).

With the return of Professor Eucalyptus in canto XXII, the philosopher and the poet conduct parallel searches “For reality” (22 2), in the philosopher’s case the “search / For an interior made exterior” and in the poet’s the search “for the same exterior made / Interior” (22.4-6). Like Professor Eucalyptus in canto XIV, the poet presents a paradox in that he demonstrates the powerful force of spiritual gravity through his emphasis on recreation of the here-and-now and at the same time discovers through this recreation a bridge to the uncreated. Intimated in “breathless things broodingly a breath / With the inhalations of original cold / And of original earliness” (22 6-8), the uncreated prompts the poet “To re-create” (22 12), to search” (22 14) a possible for its possibilities” (22 18).

Just as in canto XIV, where “The tink-tonk / Of the rain” serves as a bridge to an ‘essence not yet well perceived (14 16-18), here it is “the evening star, /The most ancient light in the most ancient sky” (22 14-15) that serves as such a bridge. In a similar manner, Professor Eucalyptus, the philosopher operating under the force of gravity and self, is like his natural namesake “The dry eucalyptus” that seeks “god in the rainy r cloud” (14.1). Moreover, as symbolic comment on the Professor’s search  for God, the eucalyptus suggests the hidden flower of spirit still enclosed within its base material covering, and paradoxically this spirit will emerge g not with spring rain as is the case in the natural world but only when / total leaflessness, Weil’s de-creation of self, has been achieved

The introduction of the black shepherd in canto XXI further  intensifies the drama of de-creation, since through his meditation on the black shepherd’s approach, Stevens, like Weil, stresses the painful rending of self from the world of appearance and necessity through the twin assaults of time and death “Necessity,” for Weil, “is the screen set between God and us so that we can be,” and she declares that it “Is for us to pierce through the screen so that we can cease to be” (Gravity and Grace 28). Stevens turns his attention to this “will of necessity, the will of wills” (21.3) with the appearance of the black shepherd, but as a prelude canto XX evokes New Haven and the individual self assaulted by what Weil calls “Time’s violence” (Gravity and Grace 134):

The imaginative transcripts were like clouds,
Today; and the transcripts of feeling, impossible
To distinguish. The town was a residuum,

A neuter shedding shapes in an absolute.
Yet the transcripts of it when it was blue remain,
And the shapes that it took in feeling, the persons that

It became, the nameless, flitting characters –
These actors still walk in a twilight muttering lines.
It may be that they mingle, clouds and men, in the air

Or street or about the corners of a man,
Who sits thinking in the corners of a room.
In this chamber the pure sphere escapes the impure

Because the thinker himself escapes. And yet
To have evaded clouds and men leaves him
A naked being with a naked will

And everything to make. He may evade
Even his own will and in his nakedness
Inhabit the hypnosis of that sphere.

Under the force of necessity’s will, the apparently solid forms constituting New Haven vanish until the town becomes “a residuum, / A neuter shedding shapes in an absolute” and its even more substantial inhabitants partially dematerialize into “nameless, flitting characters” dimly seen and faintly heard as they “walk in a twilight muttering lines.”

In response to time’s assault, the man withdraws from the world into his “chamber,” into the “corners of a room,” into the self where “the pure sphere escapes the impure / Because the thinker himself escapes.” Transformed through partial de-creation into “A naked being with a naked will,” the protagonist through his emphasis on the imagination shows himself to be still under the influence of gravity. “The imagination,” says Weil, “is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass,” and this is the role of the imagination here (Gravity and Grace, 16). Instead of inciting the protagonist to acts of further de-creation, the void (because it leaves “everything to make”) becomes a test for the imagination, gravity’s call for recreation in resistance to de-creation. The canto con-eludes by reemphasizing, as a possible alternative to the self drawn by gravity into time’s process of recreation, the earlier escape of self into the Platonic ideality of “the pure sphere”: “He may evade / Even his own will and in his nakedness / Inhabit the hypnosis of that sphere” (20.16-18).

Now, as the black shepherd looms up at the edges of the dominant blank, Stevens, in canto XXI, considers still another possibility:

But he may not.
He may not evade his will,
Nor the wills of other men; and he cannot evade
The will of necessity, the will of wills –

Romanza out of the black shepherd’s isle,
Like the constant sound of the water of the sea
In the hearing of the shepherd and his black forms,

Out of the isle, but not of any isle.
Close to the senses there lies another isle
And there the senses give and nothing take,

The opposite of Cythére, an isolation
At the center, the object of the will, this place,
The things around — the alternative romanza

Out of the surfaces, the windows, the walls,
The bricks grown brittle in time’s poverty,
The clear. A celestial mode is paramount,

If only in the branches sweeping in the rain:
The two romanzas, the distant and the near,
Arc a single voice in the boo-ha of the wind.

Emanating from the black shepherd’s isle and “In the hearing of the shepherd and his black forms,” the sound of necessity is the sound di death’s approach. This sound strips away the illusory pleasures of Cythére, and draws attention to a contrapuntal sound, “an alternate romanza,” emanating from “an isolation at the center.” An end result of a decreative process spurred by “time’s poverty,” this “isolation at the center” affirms Weil’s paradox that time aids de-creation by “tearing appearance from being and being from appearance” (Gravity and Grace, 34). If the black shepherd defines one limit of creation and naked being another, the sounds of death and isolation marking these limits are contrapuntal; but paradoxically, like the decreative process in which the self gains the uncreated through annihilation, these opposites merge into the single voice” of “A celestial mode” that “is paramount.”

In their turn, Professor Eucalyptus, the hero of midnight, and the black shepherd evoke Weil’s notions of spiritual gravity, salvational affliction, and time’s violent rending of the self from the world of appearance and necessity. They also make it possible to discern Weil’s drama of de-creation in the otherwise perplexing roles of Alpha and Omega, the “Immaculate interpreters” of canto VI:

Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.

It is the infant A standing on infant legs,
Not twisted, stooping, polymathic Z,
He that kneels always on the edge of space

In the pallid perceptions of its distances.
Alpha fears men or else Omega’s men
Or else his prolongations of the human.

These characters are around us in the scene.
For one it is enough; for one it is not;
For neither is it profound absentia,

Since both alike appoint themselves the choice
Custodians of the glory of the scene,
The immaculate interpreters of life.

But that’s the difference: in the end and the way
To the end. Alpha continues to begin.
Omega is refreshed at every end.

Omega, whose “dense investiture” suggests the weight of the human and whose “twisted” shape testifies to the force of gravity’s pull, is, like Professor Eucalyptus, tied to the thingness of things. As “Custodians of the glory of the scene” and the “Immaculate interpreters of life” both characters, despite their apparent differences in that Alpha is “the infant A standing on infant legs” and Omega the “stooping, polymathic Z,” demonstrate a similar inability to become disentangled from the created.

However, considered in another way, Alpha and Omega present a demonstration of Weil’s distinction between the different modes of God’s presence. “The presence of God,” says Weil, “should be understood in two ways. As Creator, God is present in everything that exists as soon as it exists. The presence for which God needs the cooperation of the creature is the presence of God, not as Creator but as Spirit. The first presence is the presence of creation. The second is the presence of de-creation” (Gravity and Grace, 33). Stevens, through his personification of Alpha and Omega, Greek letters traditionally understood as signifying God, offers a strong echo of Weil. Not only does he evoke the created world through symbolic types, he also presents a poetic figure of God’s presence.in the created and subtending it. The figure is that of created reality as a circle closed at the point where Alpha and Omega meet: “But that’s the difference: in the end and the way / To the end. Alpha continues to begin. / Omega is refreshed at every end.”

From the standpoint of God’s support of it, created reality, as is suggested in Alpha’s continuing “to begin” and Omega’s being “refreshed at every end,” is continuously created, and in this sense “Reality is a beginning not the end, / Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega.” But for Stevens, as for Weil, this manifestation of God’s presence is not to be confused with God as Spirit, the Spirit behind the dominant blank, the “profound absentia” to which creation points.

“Time,” says Weil, “is an image of eternity, but it is also a substitute for eternity” (Gravity and Grace, 18); and for Weil and Stevens alike, the Spirit behind the dominant blank can be attained only through the renunciation of time. In the final cantos of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Stevens presents the most emphatic example of Weil’s link between the renunciation of time and spiritual ascesis. The penultimate canto, canto XXX, in preparation for this final renunciation, opens with a scene whose barrenness powerfully echoes that of “The dilapidation of dilapidations,” “total leaflessness,” “The dominant blank”:

The last leaf that is going to fall has fallen.
The robins are là-bas, the squirrels, in tree-caves,
Huddle together in the knowledge of squirrels.

The wind has blown the silence of summer away.
It buzzes beyond the horizon or in the ground:
In mud under ponds, where the sky used to be reflected.

The barrenness that appears is exposing.
It is not part of what is absent, a halt
For farewells, a sad hanging on for remembrances.

It is a coming on and a coming forth.
The pines that were fans and fragrances emerge,
Staked solidly in a gusty grappling with rocks.

The glass of the air becomes an element – 
It was something imagined that has been washed away.
A clearness has returned. It stands restored.

It is not an empty clearness, a bottomless sight.
It is a visibility of thought,
In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.

Unlike Omega’s men who attach themselves to the past with their prolongations of the human, the protagonist rejects any such “sad hanging on for remembrances,” any “halt / For farewells.” Rather the “barrenness” of the present moment readies the de-created self for a final renunciation of time and for the approach of the uncreated: “The barrenness that appears is exposing”; “It is a coming on and a coming forth.” Within the context of barrenness the de-creation of self hurries toward completion as it finds its own relation to the uncreated repeated in the upward movement of the pines in their “grappling with the rocks” and in the transparency replacing the darkness of the cave with its flickering reflections:

“The glass of the air becomes an element — / It was something imagined that has been washed away. / A clearness has returned.” What is exposed is an Argus-eyed reality: “It is a visibility of thought, / In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.” At the conclusion of this penultimate canto, then, the hidden God stands revealed and the passage from the created to the un-created, Weil’s de-creation, is all but finished.

The powerful final triad of the poem’s final canto brings Stevens’ drama of de-creation to an emphatic close through a second extraordinary evocation of Weil’s hidden God:

It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

In this canto, as in the poem as a whole, Stevens employs figures of incompletion and emptiness, “dead candles at the window” (31.5), “Mr. Blank” (31.9), a woman’s canceled note (31.15), to mark the world of time and prepare for its renunciation. And if the black shepherd’s approach can be discerned in the evening’s “spectrum of violet” (31.14), so too does the earlier figure of the “fire-forms” (316), like that of the “blessed beams from out a blessed bush” of canto XVII, announce the uncreated and prepare for the final triad’s disclosure of God. In these last lines, not only does Stevens invoke Weil’s God as Creator, her “presence of creation” (UG 33), through the Biblical figure of Adam’s creation inhering in the “shade that traverses / A dust”; he also invokes Weil’s hidden God, God as Spirit, God as the “presence of de-creation” (Gravity and Grace 33), in the paradoxical figure of the force behind creation, the “force that traverses a shade.” For Stevens, as for Weil, reality and God are one, and with these mystical hints of the spiritual fullness awaiting the de-created self the poem ends.

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Poems by Wendell Berry

May 25, 2010

Berry is the first of four children born to John Berry, a lawyer and tobacco farmer in Henry County, and Virginia Berry. The families of both of his parents have farmed in Henry County for at least five generations. Berry attended secondary school at Millersburg Military Institute, then earned a B.A. and M.A. in English at the University of Kentucky.

In 1957, he completed his M.A. and married Tanya Amyx. In 1958, he attended Stanford University’s creative writing program as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, studying under Stegner in a seminar that included Edward Abbey, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ernest Gaines, Tillie Olsen, and Ken Kesey. Berry’s first novel, Nathan Coulter, was published in April 1960.

A Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship took Berry and his family to Italy and France in 1961, where he came to know Wallace Fowlie, critic and translator of French literature. From 1962 to 1964, he taught English at New York University’s University College in the Bronx. In 1964, he began teaching creative writing at the University of Kentucky, from which he resigned in 1977. During this time in Lexington, he came to know author Guy Davenport, as well as author Thomas Merton and photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard.

In 1965, Berry moved to a farm he had purchased, Lane’s Landing, and began growing corn and small grains on what eventually became a 125-acre homestead. Lane’s Landing is near Port Royal, Kentucky, in north central Kentucky, and his parents’ birthplaces, and is on the western bank of the Kentucky River, not far from where it flows into the Ohio River.

Berry has farmed, resided, and written at Lane’s Landing down to the present day. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he edited and wrote for the Rodale Press, including its publications Organic Gardening and Farming and The New Farm. From 1987 to 1993, he returned to the English Department of the University of Kentucky. Berry has written at least twenty-five books (or chatbooks) of poems, sixteen volumes of essays, and eleven novels and short story collections. His writing is grounded in the notion that one’s work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one’s place.

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

The Peace Of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

What We Need Is Here

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

Like The Water

Like the water
of a deep stream,
love is always too much.
We did not make it.
Though we drink till we burst,
we cannot have it all,
or want it all.
In its abundance
it survives our thirst.

In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill,
and sleep,
while it flows
through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us,
except we keep returning to its rich waters
thirsty.

We enter,
willing to die,
into the commonwealth of its joy.

Ripening

The longer we are together
the larger death grows around us.
How many we know by now
who are dead! We, who were young,
now count the cost of having been.
And yet as we know the dead
we grow familiar with the world.
We, who were young and loved each other
ignorantly, now come to know
each other in love, married
by what we have done, as much
as by what we intend. Our hair
turns white with our ripening
as though to fly away in some
coming wind, bearing the seed
of what we know. It was bitter to learn
that we come to death as we come
to love, bitter to face
the just and solving welcome
that death prepares. But that is bitter
only to the ignorant, who pray
it will not happen. Having come
the bitter way to better prayer, we have
the sweetness of ripening. How sweet
to know you by the signs of this world!

Testament

1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death –
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.

2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say

Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all’s despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle

Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.

I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought’s unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord!

3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don’t muck up my face

With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.

Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.

Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day’s round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.

4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.

He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,

Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,

Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule

To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After

Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you

Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.

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Notes on the Blue Guitar of Wallace Stevens

May 24, 2010

Picasso, The Old Guitarist, 1903. In 1977 David Hockney authored a book of etchings called "The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso". The book included the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The etchings were inspired by and were meant to represent the themes of Stevens's poem, "The Man With The Blue Guitar", which was inspired by a 1903 painting by Pablo Picasso titled "The Old Guitarist". It was published as a portfolio and as a book in spring 1997 by Petersburg Press.

The following can be sourced at no less than seven or eight locations on the Web. What I enjoy so much about Stevens (aside from a lengthy relationship I have with many of his poems) is that he appears to be the most secular of poets, someone who has disposed of the divine to seek the essence of reality. It is as if the divine has subverted our understanding of reality and it is only by disposing of it that we can come to grips with a true reality. Yet the more Stevens demands of his Supreme Fiction and true reality, the closer he brings us to what I see in Fr. Aidan Nichol’s developing the habit of Christian wonder (see the Habit of Theology: Faith Lives In Theology As “Christian Wonder”). The story is that on his death bed he received the last rites of the Catholic Church. See Fr. Arthur Hanley’s recollections here.

I
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”
II
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
Say that it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled “Phases” in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the “best and most representative” American poet of the time, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius.

Stevens’s first book of poetry, a volume of rococo inventiveness titled Harmonium, was published in 1923. He produced two more major books of poetry during the 1920s and 1930s and three more in the 1940s. He received the National Book Award in 1951 and 1955.

Imagination and reality
Stevens, whose work was meditative and philosophical, is very much a poet of ideas. “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,” he wrote. Concerning the relation between consciousness and the world, in Stevens’s work “imagination” is not equivalent to consciousness nor is “reality” equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. Thus Stevens would write in The Idea of Order at Key West (my thoughts on the poem here)

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

In his book Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible.

Stevens suggests that we live in the tension between the shapes we take as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order that our imagination imposes upon the world. The world influences us in our most normal activities: “The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible.” Likewise, were we to place a jar on a hill in Tennessee, we would impose an order onto the landscape.

As Stevens says in his essay “Imagination as Value”, “The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them.” The imagination is the mechanism by which we unconsciously conceptualize the normal patterns of life, while reason is the way we consciously conceptualize these patterns.

The jar is a striking example of an order that does not feel a part of the land, and so seems to violate the existing order: “It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee”. Contrast this to the feeling one gets while looking over the water where boats are anchored in darkness, with lanterns hanging on poles, “Arranging, deepening, enchanting night”. When the imagination is available to reality and does not try to force itself, reality becomes like a bar of sand onto which the imagination naturally washes and recedes.

The imagination can only conceive of a world for a moment — a particular time, place and culture — and so must continually revise its conception to align with the changing world. And as these worldviews come and go, each person is pulled in his or her normal life between the influence the world has on imagination and the influence imagination has on the way we view the world.

For this reason, the best we can hope for is a well-conceived fiction, satisfying for the moment, but sure to lapse into obsolescence as new imaginings wash over the world.

Supreme fiction
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.

Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that our old notions of religion no longer suffice. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a “Supreme Fiction.” In this example from the satirical “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” Stevens plays with the notions of immediately accessible, but ultimately unsatisfying, notions of reality:

Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms
Like windy citherns, hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began.

The saxophones squiggle because, as J. Hillis Miller says of Stevens in his book, Poets of Reality, the theme of universal fluctuation is a constant theme throughout Stevens poetry: “A great many of Stevens’ poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement.” In the end, reality remains.

The supreme fiction is that conceptualization of reality that seems to resonate in its rightness, so much so that it seems to have captured, if only for a moment, something actual and real.

I am the angel of reality,
seen for a moment standing in the door.

I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash;

an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

In one of his last poems, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”, Stevens describes the experience of an idea which satisfies the imagination, “This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. / It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, / Out of all the indifferences, into one thing.” This one thing is “a light, a power, the miraculous influence” wherein we can forget ourselves, sensing a comforting order, “A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, / within its vital boundary, in the mind.”

This knowledge necessarily exists within the mind, since it is an aspect of the imagination which can never attain a direct experience of reality.

We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Stevens concludes that God is a human creation, but that feeling of rightness which for so long a time existed with the idea of God may be accessed again. This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in a way that God can never again be. But with the right idea, we may again find the same sort of solace that we once found in divinity. “[Stevens] finds, too, a definite value in the complete contact with reality. Only, in fact, by this stark knowledge can he attain his own spiritual self that can resist the disintegrating forces of life . . . . Powerful force though the mind is . . . it cannot find the absolutes. Heaven lies about the seeing man in his sensuous apprehension of the world . . .; everything about him is part of the truth.”

. . . Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place

In this way, Stevens’s poems adopt attitudes that are corollaries to those earlier spiritual longings that persist in the unconscious currents of the imagination. “The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning / And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, / To an immaculate end.” The “first idea” is that essential reality that stands before all others, that essential truth; but since all knowledge is contingent on its time and place, that supreme fiction will surely be transitory. This is the necessary angel of subjective reality — a reality that must always be qualified — and as such, always misses the mark to some degree — always contains elements of unreality.

Miller summarizes Stevens’s position: “Though this dissolving of the self is in one way the end of everything, in another way it is the happy liberation. There are only two entities left now that the gods are dead: man and nature, subject and object. Nature is the physical world, visible, audible, tangible, present to all the senses, and man is consciousness, the nothing which receives nature and transforms it into something unreal . . . .”

The Role Of Poetry
Stevens often writes directly about poetry and its human function. The poet “tries by a peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general, / To compound the imagination’s Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima.” Moreover, “The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.” In a manner reminiscent of Wordsworth, Stevens saw the poet as one with heightened powers, but one who like all ordinary people continually creates and discards cognitive depictions of the world, not in solitude but in solidarity with other men and women.

These cognitive depictions find their outlet and their best and final form as words; and thus Stevens can say, “It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.” In a poem called “Men Made out of Words,” he says: “Life / Consists of propositions about life.” Poetry is not about life, it is intimately a part of life. As Stevens wrote elsewhere, “The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it. / The poet speaks the poem as it is, // Not as it was.” Modern poetry is “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.”

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.

His poem An Ordinary Evening in New Haven is a self-conscious digression about the creation of poetry.

We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality.

To create a stage is, for Stevens, a metaphor for the need of modern poetry to make its own new arena or realm in which it should be presented and in which it can be understood. Modern poetry is like “an insatiable actor” because it continually must be in “the act of finding what will suffice.” Stevens puns on the meaning of “act.” In one sense, poetry is an act, learning the speech, meeting the women, facing the men, etc. In another sense, it is a dramatic performance meant to be heard by an audience, as it speaks words that echo in the mind of the listener. The audience is “invisible” in the sense that a poet rarely meets his or her readers.

The typical reader picks up a book of poems and reads a poem or two, and the author never sees this happening. The reading of poetry is often a conversation between strangers. In this poem the two people are the actor that is the poem and the audience that is the listener, and their emotions should become “one.” The poet should find the words that will speak to the delicatest ear of its modern listeners, echoing what it wants to hear but cannot articulate for itself. The poet, in the act of the poem, finds the sufficing words and for the audience and they allow the listeners to hear what is in their ear, their mind. As a result, the emotions of speaking and listening, of poet as actor and listeners as audience, should become one.

Reputation And Influence
From the first, critics and fellow poets praised Stevens. Hart Crane wrote to a friend in 1919, after reading some of the poems that would make up Harmonium, “There is a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail.” In the 1930s, the critic Yvor Winters criticized Stevens as a decadent hedonist but acknowledged his great talent. Beginning in the 1940s, critics such as Randall Jarrell spoke of Stevens as one of the major living American poets, even if they did so (as Jarrell did) with certain reservations about Stevens’s work. Stevens’s work became even better known after his death. Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode are among the critics who have cemented Stevens’s position in the canon as a great poet. Many poets — James Merrill and Donald Justice most explicitly — have acknowledged Stevens as a major influence on their work, and his impact may also be seen in John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, John Hollander, and others.