Poetry Meditation
Some
years ago at Stanbrook Abbey in North Yorkshire a day of “Recollection Through
Poetry” was given on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Poetry can be very
edifying and can raise our hearts and minds to God like nothing else. Here is
an attempt to do just that.
I have
enjoyed reading the poet William Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
in which he deprecates “the degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation”
which was a feature of his day and still an aspect of ours! He wrote that “a
multitude of causes are now acting with a combined force to blunt the
discriminating powers of the mind and reduce it to a state of almost savage
torpor” and states he believes that “the human mind is capable of being excited
without the application of gross and violent stimulants… that the world is too
much with us - buying and selling we lay waste our powers”.
I
wonder how he would feel today with the galaxy of electronic resources
available to entertain and degrade us as never before! But a long time ago the
prophet Isaiah lamented: “Never a thought for the works of the Lord, never a
glance for what his hands have done. My people will go into exile for want of
perception”. (Isaiah 5:12-13) – the people will go into exile for want of seeing
or perceiving properly which is so important as we shall see later.
In a
London paper years ago there was a cartoon of two farmers leaning on a gate
looking down on a busy motorway on a public holiday and one says to the other:
“Have you ever seen tranquillity sought with such frenzy?!”
The
Little Prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s charming little book would say that
“what they are looking for could be found in one single rose, or in a little
water”. In one single rose one could mull over the delicacy of the petals, the
beautiful fragrance et cetera. The Little Prince goes on to say that “man can
raise 5000 roses in the same garden and they do not find in it what they are
looking for, what is essential is invisible to the eye”. It is only with the
heart that one can see rightly.
In St
John’s Gospel we read: “You will see heaven wide open and God’s angels
ascending and descending upon the Son of man”. (John 1:50). C. H. Dodd
maintains that in the whole story [i.e. the Gospel] and in each item of it, the
discerning reader will perceive a traffic between two worlds. He will read how in
this unique career [of Jesus] heaven and earth, God and man, were brought
together as nowhere else”.
The
conclusion of St John’s Gospel says: “happy are those who have not seen and yet
have believed”. (John 20:29). The point here is that the believer is the one
who really sees.
We
must become seers (see-ers) if we are really to appreciate life to the full and
see more to it than the merely empirical. The world is graced whether or not it
seems so to our jaded sensibilities.
The
poetess Elizabeth Browning wrote:
“Earth’s
crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God; And only he who sees
takes of his shoes. The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries”.
The latter
are the carnally minded who see nothing!
Baudelaire
maintained that “it is at once by poetry and by penetrating beyond it, by music
and by penetrating beyond it, that a soul catches a glimpse of the splendour on
the other side of the grave”.
Take
this sonnet for example by Hilaire Belloc:
Sonnet
to his daughter
Mortality
is but the stuff you wear
To
show the better on the imperfect sight.
Your
home is surely with the changeless light
Of
which you are the daughter and the heir.
For as
you pass, the natural life of things
Proclaims
the Resurrection; as you pass
Remembered
summer shines across the grass
And
somewhat in me of the immortal sings.
You
were not made for memory, you are not
Youth’s
accident I think but heavenly more;
Moulding
to meaning slips my pen’s poor blot
And
opening wide that long forbidden door
Where
stands the Mother of God, your exemplar.
How
beautiful, how beautiful you are!
Belloc’s
poem shows his awareness of the transcendent dimension in our lives for those
with eyes to see. This awareness can be triggered by the beauty of nature which
is charged with the grandeur of God. Gerard Manley Hopkins S. J. maintains that
“all things are charged with love, are charged with God and if we know how to touch
them give off sparks and take fire, yield drops and flow and ring and tell of
him”.
‘Him’
is obviously Jesus Christ, for “all things were created for Him and in Him”.
(Colossians 1:16)
This
poem is by Hamish Swanston, a Catholic priest and once a university lecturer in
Canterbury:
Your
print is on the wide white sand,
Within
the air I touch your hand,
And on
the silverfish I see
Hallmarks
of immortality;
Your
love within the sunlight flames,
And
love the shadowed moon proclaims,
Till
images and shadows pass
And we
discard our darkened glass.
(Hamish
Swanston, A meditation on Exodus 33:20 – God to Moses: ‘You
cannot see my face and live’ The Bible Today, March 1970)
Gerard
Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest but his heart was Franciscan! His poem on
the great Franciscan theologian, Duns Scotus said that Scotus “of all men most
sways my spirit to peace”.
One of
Hopkins’ best loved poems is The Starlight Night. He asks how do we win the
reward which this glorious night sky promises. His answer is by “prayer, patience,
alms and vows” – in other words by asceticism, as the carnally minded see
nothing!
The
Starlight Night
Look
at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look
at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The
bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down
in dim woods the diamond delves! The elves’-eyes!
The
grey lawns cold where gold, where quick gold lies!
Wind-beat
whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves
sent floating forh at a farmyard scare!
Ah
well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
By
then! bid then! – What? – Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look,
look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look!
March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These
are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The
shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ
home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.
Someone
wrote of this poem: “The significance of the exquisite poem lies beyond the
superficial pleasure that it may give. It stimulates the sensitivity to detect
beyond it the mystery that even exquisite language has hardly begun to convey.
The sensitive artist can give expression and make explicit what we have overlooked.
He can pull us up and make us say how we never imagined a thing in that way
before – due often to our jaded sensibilities.
Which
is the point Donovan makes in his delightful song in the movie Brother Sun and
Sister Moon.
Brother
Sun and Sister Moon,
I
seldom hear you, seldom hear your tune.
Preoccupied
with selfish misery.
Brother
Wind and Sister Air,
open
my eyes to visions pure and fair
that I
may see the glory around me.
I am God’s creature, of him I am part,
I feel his love awakening my heart.
Brother
Sun and Sister Moon,
now I
do see you, I can hear your tune,
so
much in love with all I survey.
“Who
has not found the heaven below will fail of it above. For angels rent the house
next ours whenever we remove!” (Emily Dickinson)
Not
only is there a “rumour of angels” for the perceptive, the people who have
become seers, but Christ is there too in man who is made in God’s image for “…
Christ plays in ten thousand places lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his.
To the Father thru’ the features of men’s faces”. (G.M. Hopkins)
Finally,
for those who try to turn away from the “inert finite to the resurgent
infinite” these words of Rainer Maria Rilke should be a positive encouragement:
“In
slumber also they continue seers:
from
dream and being, from laughter and from tears
a
meaning gathers… Which if they can seize,
and
kneel to Life and Death in adoration,
another
measure for the whole creation
it’s
given us in those right-angled knees”.
