Since my book Faith Hope and Poetrywas published by Ashgate in the Autumn of 2010 a number of people have been asking me when, if ever, there would be a paperback version. This was both because the hardback was very expensive(£55 -their policy not mine!) and also because even the hardback sold out by the middle of last year! Well the good news is Ashgate agreed to a new paperback edition, which costs a lot less (£16.19 from their site!) and it is out now! Official publication date is March the 21st but it is actually available now both from Ashgate and from Amazon. Here is Ashgate’s own ‘flyer’ for the book, which gathers up some of the kinder things that have been said in the various reviews and also gives a link to their page. If you get to the site and the price is in the wrong currency for you then there is a button in the top right hand corner you can click to toggle between Europe and America (wouldn’t it be great if one could also toggle oneself between europe and North america at the touch of a button!) so here’s the flyer:
Faith Hope and Poetry takes you through an exploration and celebration of some of the greatest poetry in the English language, its really just me sharing my enthusiasm for these poems. But I had another purpose too. At its heart this book is a defence of the poetic imagination as a truth-bearing faculty, as an essential but sadly under-used way of apprehending the truths we need to know to flourish as human beings I tried to sum it all up, at the end of the book, in a two paragraph conclusion and I am going to paste that in here, the final words of the whole book, to give you an idea of what you might be in for if you decide to read it:
Conclusion
This book has been written as both a vindication and a celebration of the poetic imagination; a defence of its status as a truth-bearer and an exploration of the kinds of truth it is capable of bearing. In particular I have been concerned to demonstrate the essential power of imagination to bridge the gap between immanence and transcendence, to mediate meaning between unembodied ‘apprehension’ and embodied ‘comprehension’. I have also been concerned to show that a study of poetic imagination turns out to be a form of theology; that in seeking understand how multiple meanings come to be’ bodied forth’ in finite poems which ‘grow to something of great constancy’ we discover a new understanding of the prime embodiment of all meaning which is the Incarnation. And this new understanding of incarnation in its turn gives us a new confidence in the ultimate significance of our own acts of poetic embodiment. But if poetry as a manifestation of particular embodiment speaks of the immanence of God, then poetry as a means of cleansing and transfiguring vision speaks of God’s transcendence. Throughout this book I have sought to celebrate moments of transfigured vision in poetry, and also to help discern the source of that truth which transfigured vision sees, of that unexpected music which the imagination hears. In an age of faith it was possible for poets, from the anonymous poet of The Dream of the Rood, who saw the Cross transfigured in light, to Milton invoking ‘holy light’, to find the Source of transfigured vision and to name that source as Christ, the logos and the light of the world. From the mid-17th century onward, things could not be so simple again as poets and philosophers alike faced the challenge of a reductive science that pulled down shutters over the windows of vision, bearing the bleak inscription, ‘nothing else’. We have seen how the poets, to whom the clarification of our vision had been entrusted, fought a rear-guard action, and especially how Coleridge did this both by writing poetry full of clarified, imaginative vision, and also by undertaking the hard, philosophical work necessary to reinstate the imagination as an instrument with which we grasp reality rather than evade it. We have seen that in order to make sense of the actual experience of writing and reading poetry, he was compelled to rediscover the mystery of God as Holy Trinity. For Coleridge poetry is not a fanciful compensation for the irreducible bleakness of things; it is part of the evidence that all things are at least potentially luminous with the light of God. Coleridge was a prophet sent more for our own age than for his; he foresaw the inadequacy of the whole Cartesian/Newtonian model with its foreclosed rigidities and its too-easy submission to what he called the ‘despotism of the eye’. Now, we live in an age when that rigid system, against which Coleridge was protesting, is being overthrown. Those blinding shutters inscribed ‘nothing else’ are being drawn up; and now it is not only the major poets in our midst, like Heaney, but also the scientists themselves and the philosophers of science, rediscovering the vital role imagination has to play in their endeavours, who are helping to remove these ‘blinds’.
This cleansing and training of vision through a revitalised imagination, is a common task for Science, Poetry and Theology. My purpose has been to highlight the essential role, in fulfilling this common task, played by the poetic imagination.
Continuing with Sounding the Seasons, my sonnet-sequence journey through the Church year, we approach the 25th of January, the day the Church keeps the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. However often told or re-told, it is still an astonishing story. That Saul, the implacable enemy of Christianity, who came against the faith ‘breathing threats and slaughter’, should be chosen by God to be Christianity’s greatest proponant and apostle is just the first of a series of dazzling and life-changing paradoxes that flow from Paul’s writing. At the heart of these is the revelation of God’s sheer grace; finding the lost, loving the violent into light, and working everything through the very weakness of those who love him. Here’s a sonnet celebrating just a little of what I glimpse in the great Apostle.
As always you can hear the poem by clicking n the ‘play’ button if it appears, or on the title of the poem.
CS Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. JRR Tolkien: The Inklings!
Over the last month I have given a series of five talks at St. Edward King and Martyr in Cambridge, exploring the thesis that far from being backward-looking, reactionary or escapist, the Inklings were fully and prophetically engaged with the main streams of modernity, that they forsaw the coming crisis of meaning in the materialist West, and in particular the attendant crises of violence and environmntal degradation. I have tried to explain the way they forged a coherent alternative vision, which called for us to reintegrate Imagination and Reason as ways of knowing truth and relating to one another and the world. These talks have been recorded as audio and the last four were also filmed, and I have assembled on this page the complete set of links to these recordings so that anyone who wishes can return to this page when they have the time and follow the talks through in sequence.
Its been a remarkable experience putting together and delivering these talks, at once draining and exhilarating, and I have had a sense as they were delivered of a new synthesis coming together in my mind. I hope therefore, when I have the opportunity, to write these talks up and tfurther explore and develop these ideas in book form. Watch this space!
I will give the audio links first and then the video. I should say that the sound level is very low for the third talk, on Charles williams so people may prefer to take that talk from the video. I am very grateful to Daniel Son for filming the last four talks.
Now here are the links to the youtube video of the last four talks, on the individual Inklings, kindly provided by Daniel Son. The CS Lewis video starts a couple of minutes into the talk but the rest are complete.
June 8th Gwyneth Lewis and the Insights of Science
In the lecture whose audio I am linking here I offer a close reading of parts of Tennyson’s great poem In Memoriam and in particular I am concerned with the paradox wherby Faith is strengthened and deepened when it has the courage to pay serious attention to doubt, a process I try to trace through the course of this poem. Tennyson was Darwin’s exact contemporary and it is a great shame that when Darwin’s Centenary was so widely celebrated two years ago, Tennyson’s was, by contrast almost completely forgotten. Yet it was the intelligent and thoughtful response of poets like Tennyson to the challenge which Darwin’s thought appeared to offer to unexamined Faith which prevented our culture, and particularly our intellectual life ,from falling into the extremes of division and antipathy between “Science” and “Religion” which developed elsewhere and are still in need of healing. Tennyson’s famous lines
“There is more faith in honest doubt
Belive me than in half the creeds’
are often quoted as if he were approving doubt as an end in itself. Nothing could be further from the truth. Immediately after these oft quoted lines comes a verse that in some ways sum up Tennyson’s own own acheivement,:
He fought his doubts and gather’d strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
.
To find a stronger faith his own;
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone,
.
But in the darkness and the cloud,
As over Siniai’s peaks of old,
While Israel made their gods of gold,
Altho’ the trumpet blew so loud.
As always you can here the audio either by clicking on the ‘play’ button if it appears in your browser or by clicking on the title. The recorder failed for the second half of the talk ‘live’ so I have posted the rest of it, recorded at home, in two other links labelled tennyson 2 and 3 . In each case there should also be a ‘play button’ above the link. Below the audio I have posted the substantial extracts from in Memoriam I gave in the handout at the lecture.
In Memoriam consists of 133 cantos numbered in Roman Numerals, I give the Roman numeral references to each section I quote.
“Rhyme has been said to contain in itself a constant appeal to Memory and Hope. This is true of all verse, of all harmonized sounds; but it is certainly made more palpable by the recurrence of termination.” AH Hallam (The influence of Italian upon English Literature)
A recognition that grief is a price more than worth paying for the reality of love: repeated verse (from XXVII)
….I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Then this verse sets out the method: (from XLVIII)
Nor dare she trust a larger lay,
But rather loosens from the lip
Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away.
Evocation of atmosphere, perfect expression of emotion In the cadence of language, this passage especially praised by Eliot: (VII)
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp’d no more?
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank
A prayer of faith in the midst of doubt: (From L)
….Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
….
The substance of his doubts: (LVI)
‘So careful of the type?’ but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.
‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more.’ And he, shall he,
Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law?
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed?
Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal’d within the iron hills?
Assertion of hope even in the moment of admitting that it might be in vain (LXIV)
Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;
That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy’d,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;
That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivell’d in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another’s gain.
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last–far off–at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry
The witness of the heart: (From CXXIV)
If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep,
I heard a voice ‘believe no more’
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’
No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near;
A magical episode of soul-communion: (XCV)
By night we linger’d on the lawn,
For underfoot the herb was dry;
And genial warmth; and o’er the sky
The silvery haze of summer drawn;
And calm that let the tapers burn
Unwavering: not a cricket chirr’d:
The brook alone far-off was heard,
And on the board the fluttering urn:
And bats went round in fragrant skies,
And wheel’d or lit the filmy shapes
That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes
And woolly breasts and beaded eyes;
While now we sang old songs that peal’d
From knoll to knoll, where, couch’d at ease,
The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field.
But when those others, one by one,
Withdrew themselves from me and night,
And in the house light after light
Went out, and I was all alone,
A hunger seized my heart; I read
Of that glad year which once had been,
In those fall’n leaves which kept their green,
The noble letters of the dead:
And strangely on the silence broke
The silent-speaking words, and strange
Was love’s dumb cry defying change
To test his worth; and strangely spoke
The faith, the vigour bold to dwell
On doubts that drive the coward back,
And keen thro’ wordy snares to track
Suggestion to her inmost cell.
So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch’d me from the past,
And all at once it seem’d at last
The living soul was flash’d on mine,
And mine in his was wound, and whirl’d
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,
Aeonian music measuring out
The steps of Time–the shocks of Chance–
The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was cancell’d, stricken thro’ with doubt.
Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame
In matter-moulded forms of speech,
Or ev’n for intellect to reach
Thro’ memory that which I became:
Till now the doubtful dusk reveal’d
The knolls once more where, couch’d at ease,
The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field;
And suck’d from out the distant gloom
A breeze began to tremble o’er
The large leaves of the sycamore,
And fluctuate all the still perfume,
And gathering freshlier overhead,
Rock’d the full-foliaged elms, and swung
The heavy-folded rose, and flung
The lilies to and fro, and said,
‘The dawn, the dawn,’ and died away;
And East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day.
His response to Emily’s fear, (he speaks of Arthur but actually describes what he himself is doing, and is achieving in this poem): (from XCVI)
You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.
I know not: one indeed I knew
In many a subtle question versed,
Who touch’d a jarring lyre at first,
But ever strove to make it true:
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He fought his doubts and gather’d strength,
He would not make his judgment blind,
He faced the spectres of the mind
And laid them: thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own;
And Power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone,
But in the darkness and the cloud,
As over Siniai’s peaks of old,
While Israel made their gods of gold,
Altho’ the trumpet blew so loud.
He came at length to find ‘a stronger faith’, here is an example of that stronger combination of faith hope and love ringing clearly and wildly from his poem: (CVI)
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
…
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
…
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
The preface printed at the beginning of the poem, was written at the end:
We have lift off!! Launching liturgical rockets on Ascension Day at Girton!
The experience of writing Sonnets for Advent and for The Stations of the Cross has encouraged me to go a little further and to write a more extended sequence that will touch on the major moments and turning points of the church year, and so on the central mysteries of our faith.
So here is a sonnet for Ascension Day. The mystery of this feast is the paradox whereby in one sense Christ ‘leaves’ us and is taken away into Heaven ,but in another sense he is given to us and to the world in a new and more universal way. His humanity is taken into heaven so our humanity belongs there too, and is in a sense already there with him.”For you have died, says St. Paul, and your life is hidden with christ in God. In the ascension Christ’s glory is at once revealed and concealed, and so is ours. Anyway the sonnet form seemed to me one way to begin to tease these things out.
As always you can hear the sonnet by clicking on the ‘play’ button if it appears in your browser or by clicking on the title of the poem.
We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heaven-centred now, and sings,
Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed .
Over the centuries that St. Edwards has stood at the heart of Cambridge, the
city has been home to some great poets whose work can give us
new and imaginative insights into our faith. Over five weeks starting wednesday
may 11th I have been exploring some of the insights that these poets
can offer to us now.
May 25th Christopher smart and the insights of ‘madness’
June 1st Tennyson and the insights of doubt,
June 8th Gwyneth Lewis and the insights of science
Today we come to Christopher Smart a poet whose best work was writen when he had been confined to a lunatic asylum, but whose life and witness challenged his own and our society’s definition of ‘madness’. It is possible to see in Smart’s writing now, not, as his contemporaries thought, incomprehensible delusion, but clear prophetic utterance and a challenging poetry of faith and ecology which has crucial truths to disclose to the twenty-first century. As usual you can hear the audio by clicking on the ‘play’ button if it appears in your browser, or by clicking on the words ‘christopher smart’.The talk lasts about 55 minutes. Below the audio I have pasted the text of extracts from Smarts poetry from the handout I used in the lecture
He sang of God—the mighty source
Of all things—the stupendous force
On which all strength depends;
From whose right arm, beneath whose eyes,
All period, power, and enterprise
Commences, reigns, and ends.
The world, the clustering spheres, He made;
The glorious light, the soothing shade,
Dale, champaign, grove, and hill;
The multitudinous abyss,
Where Secrecy remains in bliss,
And Wisdom hides her skill.
Trees, plants, and flowers—of virtuous root;
Gem yielding blossom, yielding fruit,
Choice gums and precious balm;
Bless ye the nosegay in the vale,
130
And with the sweetness of the gale
Enrich the thankful psalm.
Of fowl—even every beak and wing
Which cheer the winter, hail the spring,
That live in peace or prey;
135
They that make music, or that mock,
The quail, the brave domestic cock.
The raven, swan, and jay.
Of fishes—every size and shape,
Which nature frames of light escape,
140
Devouring man to shun:
The shells are in the wealthy deep,
The shoals upon the surface leap,
And love the glancing sun.
Of beasts—the beaver plods his task;
145
While the sleek tigers roll and bask,
Nor yet the shades arouse;
Her cave the mining coney scoops;
Where o’er the mead the mountain stoops,
The kids exult and browse.
The pillars of the Lord are seven,
Which stand from earth to topmost heaven;
His Wisdom drew the plan;
His Word accomplish’d the design,
From brightest gem to deepest mine;
From Christ enthroned, to Man.
For Adoration all the ranks
Of Angels yield eternal thanks,
And David in the midst;
With God’s good poor, which, last and least
In man’s esteem, Thou to Thy feast,
O blessèd Bridegroom, bidd’st!
Glorious the sun in mid career;
Glorious the assembled fires appear;
500
Glorious the comet’s train:
Glorious the trumpet and alarm;
Glorious the Almighty’s stretched-out arm;
Glorious the enraptured main:
Glorious the northern lights a-stream;
505
Glorious the song, when God’s the theme;
Glorious the thunder’s roar:
Glorious Hosannah from the den;
Glorious the catholic Amen;
Glorious the martyr’s gore:
510
Glorious,—more glorious,—is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down,
By meekness called Thy Son;
Thou that stupendous truth believed;—
And now the matchless deed’s achieved,
515
Determined, Dared, and Done.
From Jubilate Agno
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For I bless God in the rising generation, which is on my side.
For I have translated in the charity, which makes things better and I shall be translated myself at the last.
For the merciful man is merciful to his beast, and to the trees that give them shelter.
For he hath turned the shadow of death into the morning,the Lord is his name.
For I am come home again, but there is nobody to kill the calf or to pay the musick.
For I pray God to bless improvements in gardening till London be a city of palm-trees.
For I pray to give his grace to the poor of England, that Charity be not offended and that benevolence may increase.
For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent me to sea for pearls.
For I rejoice like a worm in the rain in him that cherishes and from him that tramples
For the names and number of animals are as the name and number of the stars. –
For I pray the Lord Jesus to translate my MAGNIFICAT into verse and represent it.
For I bless the Lord Jesus from the bottom of Royston Cave to the top of King’s
For I am possessed of a cat, surpassing in beauty, from whom I take occasion to bless Almighty God.
For I pray God for the professors of the University of Cambridge to attend and to amend.
The Text from Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, drawn from Smart’s Jubilate Agno
CHORUS
1 Rejoice in God, O ye Tongues; give the glory to the Lord, and the
Lamb. Nations, and languages, and every Creature, in which is the
breath of Life. Let man and beast appear before him, and magnify his
name together.
2 Let Nimrod, the mighty hunter, bind a Leopard to the altar, and
consecrate his spear to the Lord.
Let Ishmail dedicate a Tyger, and give praise for the liberty in which
the Lord has let him at large.
Let Balaam appear with an Ass, and bless the Lord his people and his
creatures for a reward eternal.
Let Daniel come forth with a Lion, and praise God with all his might
through faith in Christ Jesus.
Let Ithamar minister with a Chamois, and bless the name of Him, that
cloatheth the naked.
Let Jakim with the Satyr bless God in the dance, dance, dance, dance.
Let David bless with the Bear—The beginning of victory to the
Lord—to the Lord the perfection of excellence
3 —Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah from the heart of God, and from
the hand of the artist inimitable, and from the echo of the heavenly
harp in sweetness magnifical and mighty, Hallelujah, Hallelujah,
Hallelujah.
TREBLE SOLO
4 For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his
way. For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with
elegant quickness. For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For I am possessed of a cat, surpassing in beauty, from whom I take
5 For the Mouse is a creature of great personal valour.
For—this a true case—Cat takes female mouse—male mouse will not
depart, but stands threat’ning and daring.
. . . If you will let her go, I will engage you, as prodigious a creature as
you are.
For the Mouse is a creature of great personal valour.
For the Mouse is of an hospitable disposition.
TENOR SOLO
6 For the flowers are great blessings. For the flowers are great blessings.
For the flowers have their angels even the words of God’s Creation.
For the flower glorifies God and the root parries the adversary.
For there is a language of flowers.
For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.
CHORUS
7 For I am under the same accusation with my Saviour—
For they said, he is besides himself.
For the officers of the peace are at variance with me, and the watchmen
smites me with his staff.
For Silly fellow! Silly fellow! is against me and belongeth neither to me
nor to my family.
For I am in twelve HARDSHIPS, but he that was born of a virgin shall
deliver me out of all, shall deliver me out of all.
RECITATIVE (BASS SOLO) AND CHORUS
8 For H is a spirit and therefore he is God.
For K is king and therefore he is God.
For L is love and therefore he is God.
For M is musick and therefore he is God.
And therefore he is God.
9 For the instruments are by their rhimes.
For the shawm rhimes are lawn fawn and the like.
For the shawm rhimes are moon boon and the like
For the harp rhimes are sing ring and the like.
For the harp rhimes are ring string and the like.
For the cymbal rhimes are bell well and the like.
For the cymbal rhimes are toll soul and the like.
For the flute rhimes are tooth youth and the like.
For the flute rhimes are suit mute and the like.
For the Bassoon rhimes are pass class and the like.
For the dulcimer rhimes are grace place beat heat and the like.
For the Clarinet rhimes are clean seen and the like.
For the trumpet rhimes are sound bound soar more and the like.
For the TRUMPET of God is a blessed intelligence and so are all the
instruments in HEAVEN.
For GOD the father Almighty plays upon the HARP of stupendous
magnitude and melody.
For at that time malignity ceases and the devils themselves are at peace.
For this time is perceptible to man by a remarkable stillness and
serenity of soul.
CHORUS
10—Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah from the heart of God, and from
the hand of the artist inimitable, and from the echo of the heavenly
harp in sweetness magnifical and mighty, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.
Another long-haired, lute-playing, Anglican priest
Over the centuries that St. Edwards has stood at the heart of Cambridge, the
city has been home to some great poets whose work can give us
new and imaginative insights into our faith. Over five weeks starting Wednesday
May 11th I will be exploring some of the insights that these poets
can offer to us now.
May 18th George Herbert and the insights of prayer,
May 25th Christopher smart and the insights of ‘madness’
June 1st Tennyson and the insights of doubt,
June 8th Gwyneth Lewis and the insights of science
So here is number two in the series. As always you can hear the recording either by clicking on the ‘play’ button, if it appears, or else by clicking on the title. I am also posting, below the link for the lecture, a copy of the poems read and discussed, together with a written commentary on the poem “Prayer” which covers some of the same ground as this talk and which is taken from my book Faith Hope and Poetry
softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the souls blood,
The land of spices; something understood
From Providence
O Sacred Providence, who from end to end
Strongly and sweetly movest! shall I write,
And not of thee, through whom my fingers bend
To hold my quill? shall they not do thee right?
Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes,
And put the penne alone into his hand,
And made him Secretarie of thy praise.
Beasts fain would sing; birds dittie to their notes;
Trees would be tuning on their native lute
To thy renown: but all their hands and throats
Are brought to Man, while they are lame and mute.
Man is the worlds high Priest: he doth present
The sacrifice for all; while they below
Unto the service mutter an assent,
Such as springs use that fall, and windes that blow.
….
Wherefore, most sacred Spirit, I here present
For me and all my fellows praise to thee:
And just it is that I should pay the rent,
Because the benefit accrues to me.
We all acknowledge both thy power and love
To be exact, transcendent, and divine;
Who dost so strongly and so sweetly move,
While all things have their will, yet none but thine.
…..Thou art in small things great, not small in any:
Thy even praise can neither rise, nor fall.
Thou art in all things one, in each thing many:
For thou art infinite in one and all.
Our first impression is of the sheer wealth, almost over-abundance, of beautiful images contained in striking and memorable phrases we are being offered. This is not the honing and concentration on the single vision, but a kind of rainbow refraction of many insights, a scattering of many seeds broadcast. For each of these images is in its own way a little poem, or the seed of a poem, ready to grow and unfold in the readers mind. And the different seeds take root at different times, falling differently in the soil of the mind each time one returns to this poem. I have been reading it for over thirty years now and I still find its images springing up freshly in my mind and showing me new things. For the purpose of this Introduction we will delve in and examine four of these little seeds, these poems in themselves within the images, before we take a wider view and see how they all fit together in the larger poem itself.
‘Prayer the churches banquet’.
This opening phrase carries, with the choice of the word ‘banquet’, a picture not of some puritan modicum, some strict or grudging allowance of necessity, but rather of largesse, generosity, and the good measure of a royal occasion. It’s a phrase that sets the poem’s tone, for of course a banquet is exactly what Herbert gives us; course after course, and layer after layer, of nourishing images. In fourteen lines he heaps up twenty-seven different images of the experience of prayer. But the phrase ‘churches banquet’ alludes to and summons up the rich complex of feast and banquet imagery in Scripture and the Church’s life. Behind this passage lies the covenant meal of the Old Testament, the great wedding feast with which Jesus so often compared the kingdom, to which we must bring ourselves ‘well drest’, but most importantly the Last Supper and through it the Holy Communion which is the foretaste of the banquet of heaven, to which, in another of Herbert’s poems Love himself bids us welcome.
‘God’s breath in man returning to his birth’
This line invites us into a very early tradition of prayer and meditation rooted in a reflection on the image of breath and breathing in the Bible. To understand this line we need first to remember that Hebrew, Greek and Latin all use a single word to mean both ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’. ‘God’s breath in man’ evokes that primal image in Genesis of God breathing the breath of life into humanity, the moment of our wakening as living beings, a moment of tender closeness to our Maker. But after that inspiration comes the equally decisive moment of expiration. We have to trace our history through fall and alienation pain and sin and death at last to the foot of the cross where a Second Adam, one in whom also the whole of humanity is bound and involved, stretches out his arms to embrace the pain of the world and breathes back to God that gift of life:
Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said ‘Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!’ And having said this he breathed his last[1]
. Then we must look beyond the cross, to the resurrection and the new breath of life that comes with the sending of the Holy Spirit. John’s account consciously parallels the first gift of the breath of life in Genesis:
And when he had said this he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’[2]
Contained in the pattern of our breathing is the whole story of our salvation. For a Christian in prayer the very act of breathing can become a return to our birth, a receiving of original life from the breath of God, as we breath in with Adam in the garden of our beginnings, an offering of all that needs letting go and redeeming, as we breath out with Christ on the cross; a glad acceptance of new life in the Holy spirit as we breath in again receiving our life and commission afresh from the risen Lord.
‘Engine against th’Almighty, sinners tower
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,’
This is as an extraordinary clutch of related images, all drawing on pictures of warfare and violence against God to describe of part of our relation with Him in prayer. Herbert achieves his effect by a sudden reversal of perspective, much as we saw in the Heaney poem, epitomised here in the phrase ‘reversed thunder’ We think of God in Heaven thundering down on us, but in prayer we are at liberty to thunder back at him as indeed in our desperation we sometimes do and perhaps those are our best prayers. The ‘Engine against the Almighty’ is almost certainly intended to conjure the image of a canon shot at God, since the other ‘engine’, the siege tower, is already covered in the phrase ‘sinners tower’. Herbert uses this image even more explicitly in his poem ‘Artillery’ where he says:
The image of prayer as a form of weaponry is of course rooted in St. Paul’s military metaphors[4] but here Herbert has dared to observe that it is not always the devil, but sometimes God himself whom we are fighting, as we struggle with our vocation to full humanity. In compressing this idea into the images of his poem Herbert may have been remembering a sermon by his friend John Donne:
‘Earnest prayer hath the nature of Importunity; Wee presse, wee importune God…Prayer hath the nature of Impudency; wee threaten God in Prayer…and God suffers this Impudency and more. Prayer hath the nature of Violence; in the publique Prayers of the Congregation we besiege God, saies Tertullian, and we take God Prisoner, and bring God to our Conditions; and God is glad to be straightened by us in that siege.’[5]
But after the thunders and towers and cannons of the siege imagery, Herbert brings the focus down and sharpens it with that single piercing image: ‘Christ-side-piercing spear’. We have become the centurion, making that terrible thrust, but this time it is not cold iron but our own agonies which are piercing the heart of Christ.
‘The six-days world-transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear’;
Transposition is very much what poetry and all literary art is about. To hear snatches from the huge unknowable symphony of experience, to catch them and transpose them to a key that resonates with our understanding, so that at some point they harmonise with that unheard melody from heaven we are always trying to hear, that is the purpose of poetry. ‘Transposition’ for Herbert in this poem involves taking of the whole story of creation and a reworking of it within our individual life of prayer. Meditating on the six days of creation as a key to understanding ones own place in the order of things was a tradition which had begun for the West with Augustine’s beautiful meditation on Genesis at the end of his Confessions. It had been continued in Herbert’s age by his older contemporary Lancelot Andrewes whose private devotions were ordered around the governing images derived in each day’s creation, and there is a beautiful contemporary example of ‘the six days world’ transposed literally in ‘an hour’ in a sermon of John Donne’s ‘Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth’[6], which takes us symbolically through every step in the genesis creation narrative and was written to be heard in exactly an hour.
These transpositions lead to the making of ‘a kind of tune’ and if this is true of prayer it is also true of poetry and of this poem for here again is Heaney’s ‘music that you never would have known to listen for’.
One might take each of these twenty-seven images in turn and find as much fruit in them: the window on the mysteries of communion in ‘exalted manna’, all the sense both of life and sacrifice packed into ‘soul’s blood’, the evocation of the riches of the enchanted and far away in ‘land of spices’, and perhaps most tellingly the superb compression and paradox in ‘Heaven in ordinary’, a phrase which in itself sums up the heart of the Gospel in God’s incarnation in a stable, but also stands for the heart of the kind of poetry we will explore in this book. It is precisely the restored vision that sees the ordinary afresh, and allows us to see heaven in it, to be with Blake in ‘The Auguries of Innocence’;
or as we were with Heaney, to enter heaven through the ear of a raindrop.
The Integration of the Poem as Whole:
We could meditate further on these individual images but I want to turn now to look at how they are related to each other and to the poem as a whole, for the ability to feel the energy that arises from the forces and tensions within the poem is part of what we need to rediscover in order to enjoy poetry at depth. Looking at the poem as a whole it seems almost modern in the way Herbert allows himself freedom from syntax and logic. The poem is technically a single sentence with only one full stop at the end of it bringing us to a rest after the roller-coaster ride through the images, with the quiescent phrase ‘something understood’. But it is a strange sentence. There is no main verb. It makes no statement. Its meaning is not carried on the surface of its grammar. It is a world away from Sprat’s ‘bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as we can’[8]. No, the meaning of this poem is carried not by the syntax of the sentence, but by the images themselves, by the way image speaks to image in point and counterpoint. For here there is both a congruence, which gives the poem flow and unity, and also a disparity, which gives it tension and energy. There are lines of congruence between ‘banquet’, ‘softness’, ‘manna, and gladness, well-drest’, ‘land of spices’, all suggesting sumptuousness and celebration. There is congruence between the music imagery of ‘transposing’…’kind of tune’. and ‘church bells beyond the stars heard’, but there is a power in the tension of a poem which in lines 4 and 5 has the loud violence of ‘engine against th’almighty’ and ‘reversed thunder’ yet has moved in line 9 to ‘softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss’. At the end of the poem something is understood precisely because the poem has been able to hold these extremes in tension with each other, which is of course exactly what the life of prayer does for the practising Christian.
Then there is the whole subtle achievement across this poem of transposition and paraphrase, both terms mentioned in the poem itself. The theme of giving back to heaven what heaven first gave, which is what prayer essentially is, is transposed across a series of different keys from ‘breath returning to its birth’ through ‘reversed thunder’, to its fullest expression in ‘exalted manna’, the offering to God of his own gift in the Eucharist. When Herbert speaks of prayer as ‘the soul in paraphrase’ he is using that term to describe the way in which through prayer we find a new language, a new set of terms in which to express ourselves and in paraphrasing ourselves to God in our hour of prayer we are, through the terms of our paraphrase, seeing ourselves afresh in His light. And this in turn is what the poem itself does. Each of the twenty-seven images it offers is itself a paraphrase of the experience of prayer. Between them they offer us a series of new understandings of who we are and what we are doing when we engage in prayer. These notions of ‘transposition’ and ‘paraphrase’ will be a key to understanding much of the poetry we encounter in this book.
The other thematic key which we have already noted both in this poem and in ‘Rain Stick’ is paradox and reversal, the sudden setting of things on their heads, the ‘reversed thunder’, the ‘up-ending’ of the rain stick. Through the break in our world made by the shock of paradox there sometimes flows a new light.
It is the combination of all these things, working together within the subtle unity of the poem which enables us to hear ‘a kind of tune’, that stirs ‘The souls blood’, and leads at last to ‘something understood’.
I am posting here a recording of the first of five lectures in a series I am giving called Christ and the Cambridge Poets. They are all delivered in St. Edward’s Church in Cambridge and you will occasionally pick up little references to the churh itself, and to its history and association with these poets and especially to Latimer’s Pulpit All five of our poets (Spenser, Herbert, Smart, Tennyson, Lewis) will have seen it. this is the pulpit
Latimers Pulpit all five of our poets would have seen it
from which I preach every week.
My first poet is Spenser, the audio for this talk lasts about 70 minutes (I over-ran!) feel free to dip in and out as you like. As usual you can hear the audio by clicking on the ‘play’ button if it appears or by clicking on the title
I post below the some extracts from the poems that I read and referred to in the lecture:
Spenser and the insights of Love extracts:
From the hymn to love:
The earth, the ayre, the water, and the fyre,
Then gan to raunge them selues in huge array,
And with contrary forces to conspyre
Each against other, by all meanes they may,
Threatning their owne confusion and decay:
Ayre hated earth, and water hated fyre,
Till Loue relented their rebellious yre.
He then them tooke, and tempering goodly well
Their contrary dislikes with loued meanes,
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Did place them all in order, and compell
To keepe them selues within their sundrie raines,
Together linkt with Adamantine chaines;
Yet so, as that in euery liuing wight
They mixe themselues, & shew their kindly might.
So euer since they firmely haue remained,
And duly well obserued his beheast;
Through which now all these things that are contained
Within this goodly cope, both most and least
Their being haue, and dayly are increast,
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Through secret sparks of his infused fyre,
Which in the barraine cold he doth inspyre.
Thereby they all do liue, and moued are
To multiply the likenesse of their kynd,
Whilest they seeke onely, without further care,
To quench the flame, which they in burning fynd:
But man, that breathes a more immortall mynd,
Not for lusts sake, but for eternitie,
Seekes to enlarge his lasting progenie.
From the hymn to heavenly love:
Till that great Lord of Loue, which him at first
Made of meere loue, and after liked well
Seeing him lie like creature long accurst,
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In that deepe horror of desperyred hell,
Him wretch in doole would let no lenger dwell,
But cast out of that bondage to redeeme,
And pay the price, all were his debt extreeme.
Out of the bosome of eternall blisse,
In which he reigned with his glorious fyre,
He downe descended, like a most demisse
And abject thrall, in fleshes fraile attyre,
That he for him might pay sinnes deadly hyre,
And him restore vnto that happie state,
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In which he stood before his haplesse fate.
In flesh at first the guilt committed was,
Therefore in flesh it must be satisfyde:
Nor spirit, nor Angell, though they man surpas,
Could make amends to God for mans misguyde,
But onely man himselfe, who self did slyde.
So taking flesh of sacred virgins wombe,
For mans deare sake he did a man become.
From the Amoretti
SONNET. I.
HAPPY ye leaues when as those lilly hands,
which hold my life in their dead doing might
shall handle you and hold in loues soft bands,
lyke captiues trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines, on which with starry light,
those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look
and reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,
written with teares in harts close bleeding book.
And happy rymes bath’d in the sacred brooke,
of Helicon whence she deriued is,
when ye behold that Angels blessed looke,
my soules long lacked foode, my heauens blis.
Leaues, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone,
whom if ye please, I care for other none.
SONNET. XLV.
LEAUE lady in your glasse of christall clene,
Your goodly selfe for euermore to vew:
and in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane,
most liuely lyke behold your semblant trew.
Within my hart, though hardly it can shew,
thing so diuine to vew of earthly eye:
the fayre Idea of your celestiall hew,
and euery part remaines immortally:
And were it not that, through your cruelty,
with sorrow dimmed and deformd it were:
the goodly ymage of your visnomy,
clearer then christall would therein appere.
But if your selfe in me ye playne will see,
remoue the cause by which your fayre beames darkned be.
SONNET. LXVIII.
MOST glorious Lord of lyfe that on this day,
Didst make thy triumph ouer death and sin:
and hauing harrowd hell didst bring away,
captiuity thence captiue vs to win.
This ioyous day, deare Lord, with ioy begin,
and grant that we for whom thou didest dye
being with thy deare blood clene washt from sin,
may liue foreuer in felicity.
And that thy loue we weighing worthily,
may likewise loue thee for the same againe:
and for thy sake that all lyke deare didst buy,
with loue may one another entertayne.
So let vs loue, deare loue, lyke as we ought,
loue is the lesson which the Lord vs taught.
SONNET. LXXVI.
FAYRE bosome fraught with vertues richest tresure,
The neast of loue, the lodging of delight:
the bowre of blisse, the paradice of pleasure,
the sacred harbour of that heuenly spright.
How was I rauisht with your louely sight,
and my frayle thoughts too rashly led astray?
whiles diuing deepe through amorous insight,
on the sweet spoyle of beautie they did pray.
And twixt her paps like early fruit in May,
whose haruest seemd to hasten now apace:
they loosely did theyr wanton winges display,
and there to rest themselues did boldly place.
Sweet thoughts I enuy your so happy rest,
which oft I wisht, yet neuer was so blest.
From Epithalamion
BRING with you all the Nymphes that you can heare
both of the riuers and the forrests greene:
And of the sea that neighbours to her neare,
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Al with gay girlands goodly wel beseene.
And let them also with them bring in hand,
Another gay girland
my fayre loue of lillyes and of roses,
Bound trueloue wize with a blew silke riband.
And let them make great store of bridale poses,
And let them eeke bring store of other flowers
To deck the bridale bowers.
And let the ground whereas her foot shall tread,
For feare the stones her tender foot should wrong,
50
Be strewed with fragrant flowers all along,
LOE where she comes along with portly pace,
Lyke Phoebe from her chamber of the East,
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Arysing forth to run her mighty race,
Clad all in white, that seemes a virgin best.
So well it her beseemes that ye would weene
Some angell she had beene.
Her long loose yellow locks lyke golden wyre,
Sprinckled with perle, and perling flowres a tweene,
Doe lyke a golden mantle her attyre,
And being crowned with a girland greene,
Seeme lyke some mayden Queene,
Her modest eyes abashed to behold
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So many gazers, as on her do stare,
Vpon the lowly ground affixed are.
Ne dare lift vp her countenance too bold,
But blush to heare her prayses sung so loud,
So farre from being proud.
Nathlesse doe ye still loud her prayses sing,
That all the woods may answer and your eccho ring
….
Now al is done; bring home the bride againe,
bring home the triumph of our victory,
Bring home with you the glory of her gaine,
With ioyance bring her and with iollity.
Neuer had man more ioyfull day then this,
Whom heauen would heape with blis.
Make feast therefore now all this liue long day,
This day for euer to me holy is,
Poure out the wine without restraint or stay,
Poure not by cups, but by the belly full,
Poure out to all that wull,
And sprinkle all the postes and wals with wine,
That they may sweat, and drunken be withall.
Crowne ye God Bacchus with a coronall,
And Hymen also crowne with wreathes of vine,
And let the Graces daunce vnto the rest;
For they can doo it best:
The whiles the maydens doe theyr carroll sing,
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To which the woods shal answer & theyr eccho ring
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AND thou great Iuno, which with awful might
the lawes of wedlock still dost patronize,
And the religion of the faith first plight
With sacred rites hast taught to solemnize:
And eeke for comfort often called art
Of women in their smart,
Eternally bind thou this louely band,
And all thy blessings vnto vs impart.
Thou glad Genius, in whose gentle hand,
The bridale bowre and geniall bed remaine,
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Without blemish or staine,
And the sweet pleasures of theyr loues delight
With secret ayde doest succour and supply,
Till they bring forth the fruitfull progeny,
Send vs the timely fruit of this same night.
And thou fayre Hebe, and thou Hymen free,
Grant that it may so be.
Til which we cease your further prayse to sing,
Ne any woods shal answer, nor your Eccho ring.
And ye high heauens, the temple of the gods,
410
In which a thousand torches flaming bright
Do burne, that to vs wretched earthly clods:
In dreadful darknesse lend desired light;
And all ye powers which in the same remayne,
More then we men can fayne,
Poure out your blessing on vs plentiously,
And happy influence vpon vs raine,
That we may raise a large posterity,
Which from the earth, which they may long possesse
With lasting happinesse,
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Vp to your haughty pallaces may mount,
And for the guerdon of theyr glorious merit
May heauenly tabernacles there inherit,
Of blessed Saints for to increase the count.
So let vs rest, sweet loue, in hope of this,
And cease till then our tymely ioyes to sing,
The woods no more vs answer, nor our eccho ring.
CD Cover for Dancing Through The Fire (thanks to Karen Wells for the design, and Lancia Smith for the photo)
My new CD Dancing Through The Fire should be out this summer and I have begun to play some of the songs on it at gigs. The title track has provoked quite a lot of comment, so I thought I’d make some brief remarks here, give you a sneak preview (or should that be prelisten?), if you havn’t heard it live, and post the lyrics for you to read.
I’ve always been a big fan of Joni Mitchell’s song Woodstockwhich I first heard sung by CSNY. I loved the lines “We are stardust, we are golden, we are caught in the devil’s bargain, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” but at the same time it seemed a little simplistic and naive to think that we could simply wish ourselves back to Eden, that we could simply dream ‘the bomber jet planes turning into butterflies above our nation’ and it would just happen. Well it didnt ‘just happen’ and for all the good dreams of the Woodstock Nation, human evil and everything that is anti-Edenic seems as deeply entrenched as ever. However, not long after I heard Woodstock I began to read a great poem in which the poet also recogised that we needed to get back to the garden but with this difference; he recognised that we needed to grow, to be purged and changed, to be made ready for the garden again. He saw that we would have to go through hell and recognise it for what it is, that we would have to climb a holy mountain and pass through water and fire before we got back to the garden. He knew that we could only make that pilgrimge if we had grace, good friends, and the love of God in Christ as our companions. That poet was Dante, and at the end of his Purgatorio (the second book of his Divine Comedy) he describes how he was enabled by his love of Beatrice and the love of Christ shining through her, to dance through the last circle of fire and meet her again in the garden. Dante’s desription of that moment was also crucial for TS Eliot in his life journey and he wrote in Little Gidding
“From wrong to wrong the exapserated spirit proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire where you must move in measure like a dancer”
Here’s Botticelli’s beautiful image of that moment
I guess Joni Mitchell and Dante and Eliot were all in my mind when I decided to write my own song about life as an acompanied pilgrimage, through which we are trying to break free from ‘the devil’s bargain’ and ‘get back to the garden’
I’m very grateful to members of Mystery Train who play on this track, to the wonderful Sophie Davies, who sings with me on this one, and to Mike Boursnell of Cambridge Riffs who plays on it arranges, and produces the whole thing.
so just click on the play button or the link below to listen to to an early mix (3.8) of my song and you can also read the lyrics below
You were born to be a pilgrim.
born to walk the dusty road
born to scan the changing skyline
born to haul a heavy load
you’ve got friends to walk the road with
you’ve got music to inspire
and you will get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire
you have crossed through many rivers
left many memories behind
you have followed many footsteps,
gone down pathways you cant find
all the sirens on the sidewalks
cannot sell what you require
you will get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire
Br: And for all the hell you been thru
theres a mountain still to climb
and all that’s happened to you
can be seen there as a sign
at the summit is a garden
all encircled by the flame
where they burn away your burden
and they call you by your name
So you came out to the cross-roads
but you’ve got no-where to turn
you followed all the best roads
tried to read the signs and learn
theres an easy road goes down ward
but the true roads climbing higher
you will get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire
When you make it to the border
You’ll have nothing to declare
Just a heart that kept on beating
on the far side of despair
its time to give away your burden,
burn it on your funeral pire
so you can get back to the garden
by dancing through the fire.
When you finally climb the mountain
you’ll see the river through the flame
you’ll remember where you came from
you’ll hear the sound of your true name
on the other side of heart-ache
lies the heart of your desire
and you’ll get back to the garden
just by dancing through that fire
After an interlude of poetry posts, I want to return in this post to my theme of translation, sparked by the celebrations of the 400th anniversery of the King James Version of the Bible. At the heart of that effort was a desire for openness and availability. The introductory epistle spoke of “removing the cover from Jacobs well” so that people could come and draw deeply of the waters for themselves. That effort to make something fresh and available is not confined to the meticulous translation of the exact wording of a sacred text, vital and primary as that effort is. It also applies to every telling and retelling of the mysterious and ever-fruitfull stories contained in the Bible.
Every parent who tells their children a Bible story in language they know their childen will understand, is also ‘uncovering the well’, and maybe dipping down to a depth their children cannot yet reach to lift up story-shaped a cup of that living water thats just the right size for their children to enjoy. Of course these tellings and retellings are not a subtitute for the source from which they are drawn, but more like a series of tasters and appetisers whch will prepare for a lifetime of encounters with ‘the real thing’.
So its important that when a book of ‘Bible Stories’ is published they should be told by someone who both understands the art of story telling and also knows that their stories are not a ‘definitive’ version, but rather an evocation, an invitation to love and grow into a reading of the Bible itself. By that meaure this Lion Classic Bible is a real success. Andrea Skevington has achieved a clear, compelling, and elegant story-teller’s voice. Though she simplifies things for her young audience she also knows when to elaborate and explain and at all times she seems alert to the need to invite and evoke an imaginative response. For a child’s imagination will often apprehend in a Bible story more than an adult’s cool reaon ever comprehends. So for example in her version of Genesis, ‘dividing the waters of the firmament’ she has:
‘..separate the blue above from blue below. so the wide expanse of sky unfolded shining and full of light’
This is lovely both because it has the child’s sense of pleasure in simple colour and yet with that slightly more ‘grown up’ language of ’the wide expanse of sky unfolded’ she is lifting her young listener up into a wider and higher region, linguisticly as well as imaginitively.’
Young listener, is a key term here. These retellings are clearly designed to be read aloud (as indeed the KJV was) and they seem to have been shaped on the tongue, for clarity, and simplicity, but also for their evocative sound and resonance. Here for example is her description of the ‘mighty rushing wind’ at Pentecost:
“It started with a sound- a sound like the wind – but this was no gentle harvest breeze. This was a shaking and a roaring: a sound of power whooshing and roaring about the house, rattling every door and shutter. The sound seemed to come down from heaven itself, and filled the house as the wind fills sails.”
This is fine writing. All the assonance of sound,power, about and house are working in her favour, and the choice of the onomatopeic ,but also child-like and celebratory ‘whoosh’ is excellent. Then she follows through all the exciting ‘whooshing’, with the phrase ‘down from heaven itself’ and the telling simile of wind in the sails, a power to move and change, which together bring out the theological depth of the event she is describing.
This book is also superbly illustrated, something of a feature of Lion’s childen’s books. As with Andrea Skevington’s text, Sophy Williams’ illustrations whilst attractive and colourful, are not at all cartoony or condescending, (a fault with many childens Bibles). Like the text, these illustrations work with the imagination to open out into mystery, rather than close down possibilities. Jacob’s lader for example, perhaps one of the most vital and numious symbols in the whole of the Old Testament, and an image that Christ applied to himself in John’s gospel, is beautifully done. I love the balance of light and shadow, the sense of mysterious purple night as well as the gold light from the angels wings that also seems to glimmer as gold dust on the ground at Jacob’s feet. But best of all here is the beautiful, spiralling, living trunk of the tree beneath which Jacob sleeps,whose top we cannot see, half lit by Heaven’s light and half shadowed by our world. That seems to me a profound image which will help readers ultimately to apprehend something of the mystery of Gethsemane and the cross.
These lovely pictures which are scatterd through the text as well as given full pages seem a good image with which to summarise the role of such a retelling as this.
This collection of well-told stories are to the text of the Bible, what pictures are to a landscape; evocative and well wrought glimpses that invite you to leave the gallery and set off on your own for some adventures in the mysterious terrain from which the pictures were drawn.
Since my book Faith Hope and Poetry was published by Ashgate in the Autumn of 2010 a number of people have been asking me when, if ever, there would be a paperback version. This was both because the hardback was very expensive(£55 -their policy not mine!) and also because even the hardback sold out by the middle of last year! Well the good news is Ashgate agreed to a new paperback edition, which costs a lot less (£16.19 from their site!) and it is out now! Official publication date is March the 21st but it is actually available now both from Ashgate and from Amazon. Here is Ashgate’s own ‘flyer’ for the book, which gathers up some of the kinder things that have been said in the various reviews and also gives a link to their page. If you get to the site and the price is in the wrong currency for you then there is a button in the top right hand corner you can click to toggle between Europe and America (wouldn’t it be great if one could also toggle oneself between europe and North america at the touch of a button!) so here’s the flyer:
