Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Words of Devotion

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-3328937

2164-0041

David Danoff,

Medieval Literature and History

poetry and prayer have been tangled up from the start. For most cultures, the earliest extant poetry is a mixture of psalms and spells: language intended to do something supernatural, to bring forth blessings or curses, bridging the divide between the human and the divine. As Sir Philip Sidney reminds us in his A Defence of Poesie and Poems, the Romans called the poet “vates, which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet,” and other ancient cultures had similar terminology. The mysterious “inspiration” that yielded poems was not far removed from that which yielded visions or oracles.But this relationship, even as it has continued to the present day, is not without its problems. Does a prayer need to be well written? Does it matter if it’s beautiful? Will God be more likely to listen if it is? Is God really the audience, or is the devotional poem intended for one’s fellow mortals, eavesdropping as it were on the poet’s performance? Is addressing a poem to God just another literary convention — like the Petrarchan beloved, only bigger? To what degree does sincerity matter? What is a devotional poem really meant to do?A new anthology from Yale University Press, Before the Door of God, edited by Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson, surveys English-language devotional poetry from its roots in the Hebrew psalms, Greek Homeric hymns, and early Christian lyrics, up through a variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century practitioners. It’s a beautifully produced volume, with high-quality paper, attractive layouts, and generous margins. (Compared with the tissue-thin paper and miniscule print size of some anthologies, this one is designed for pleasurable reading.) Brief but thought-provoking essays introduce each section, and cogent headnotes introduce each author. In the early sections, the original Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Old English texts are provided alongside the translations.One of the pleasures of this collection is the way it illustrates changes in poetic style through the centuries. The choppy, alliterative lilt of Cædmon’s Hymn (modernized by Kimberly John-son), written in the seventh century,Now must we praise heaven-kingdom’s guardian,the measurer’s might and his mind-thoughts,the work of the Gloryfather, how he of each wonder,Eternal Lord, established a beginning.gives way to the honeyed Elizabethan eloquence of George Gascoigne’s version of Psalm 130, De Profundis:From depth of doole wherein my soule doth dwell,From heauy heart which harbours in my brest,From troubled sprite which sildome taketh rest.From hope to heauen, from dreade of darkesome hell.O gracious God, to thee I crye and yell.which in turn yields to the Cavalier playfulness of Robert Herrick’s “To God”:Lord, I am like to mistletoe,Which has no root, and cannot growOr prosper, but by that same treeIt clings about; so I by Thee.which in time is succeeded by the earnest emotionalism of Christina Rossetti’s “A Better Resurrection”:My life is like a broken bowl,A broken bowl that cannot holdOne drop of water for my soulOr cordial in the searching cold;Cast in the fire the perish’d thing;Melt and remould it, till it beA royal cup for Him, my King:O Jesus, drink of me.and so on, up through the plainspoken directness of Marie Howe’s “Prayer”:Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more importantcalls for my attention — the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggageI need to buy for the trip.Along with stylistic shifts, there’s a notable change in the poets’ relation to the divine. In the first quarter or so of the anthology, there’s a sense of corporate orthodoxy. The poems are expressions of communal values more than individual experience, and their truths seem delivered ready-made rather than discovered or worked out in the course of the poem. This begins to change in the late sixteenth century with Sidney, and even more a few decades later with George Herbert and John Donne, whose “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward” depicts spiritual struggle in brutally tactile terms:I turne my backe to thee, but to receive Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face.Donne’s poems have the sense of personal investment, of a subjective consciousness expressing private emotions, not to mention a more acute sensuality, often tinged with masochism, that we associate with so much subsequent lyric poetry. An emotional drama is enacted, spiritual truths are embodied in physical reality, and the intensity of expression draws the reader’s attention more to the humanity of the poet than to any external divinity.Communal orthodoxy returns with a selection of eighteenth-century hymns (Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and others), but then we come to the doctrinal idiosyncrasies of Christopher Smart, William Blake, and Emily Dickinson. And the scope of belief expands to encompass the deism of Alexander Pope (“The Universal Prayer”), the pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (“A Noiseless Patient Spider”), and the pained agnosticism of Thomas Hardy (“To the Unknown God”). Under the influence of the Romantic movement, devotional poetry is increasingly a mode to investigate possible truths, to probe at inner doubts and fears, and to challenge metaphysical boundaries — like Whitman’s spider launching “filament, filament, filament, out of itself,” seeking a connection somewhere.By the turn of the twentieth century, with traditional religious observance on the decline and spiritual practices taking a wider variety of forms, the distinction between religious and antireligious poetry begins to blur. Paeans to nature could be an assertion of faith — or just the opposite. A spiritualist writer like Yeats could be seen as extending — or completely breaking with — the old traditions of religious poetry. At this point, the anthology begins to include quite a few poems that may or may not be devotional at all, depending on how one reads them.For many modernists, the devotional impulse expressed itself in attention to physical things, a sense of worship via pure description. Turning away from traditional observances, paradoxically, could bring one closer to God (just as rebellion against the traditional strictures of meter and rhyme could bring one closer to authentic poetry). In “Sunday,” William Carlos Williams juxtaposes a series of small sounds and scraps of overheard conversation with the unstated fact that the people he describes are not going to church; and yet, for Williams, this unadorned reality is the church:Small barking soundsClatter of metal in a panA high fretting voiceand a low voice musicalas a string twanged —Among contemporary postmodernists, eclecticism, fragmentation, indirectness, and irony have become so pervasive that it’s hard to distinguish devotional poetry from poetry on any other subject — or every other subject. For instance, each of Josh Bell’s sequence of “Zombie Sunday” poems begins with an identical invocation: “Gentle handed holy father, or whomever.” Then, by a series of associative leaps, they meander through nature, personal gripes, literary history (often profanely funny), and bursts of surreal imagery. He’s talking to God, he’s talking to a friend, or lover, or enemy, or possibly a muse figure, or probably some combination of all of these at once, and the references to God are on the same level as references to T.S. Eliot, a cartoon gopher, and a list of flowers whose names begin with the letter d. One subject is as good as another; God is just another trope, another dip into inherited texts.That’s not to say there aren’t more traditional religious poets still at work. Two recent collections demonstrate very different uses for the divine in contemporary poetry. For Greg Miller, religion and poetry both seem to function primarily as soothing agents, softening the rough contours of the world, asserting harmony and design where at first one sees only pain or ugliness. In The Sea Sleeps: New and Selected Poems, Miller writes with a measured, thoughtful tone about people he’s known, places he’s visited, artworks he’s seen, and subjects he’s read about, and a quiet spirituality is everywhere apparent. It seems to be inherent in his mildness of manner.There is devotion in the clear-eyed, undeceived, yet still optimistic witness Miller pays to everything around him — and in the refusal to indulge in hysterics. Even during Hurricane Katrina (“Wake”), his lines retain their stately pace and well-balanced clarity:In the wake of the eye, our oak cracks one thicklimb on a pivot, then lifts, about to split.From the dark we watch the neighbor’s pear splay,wind fling green pecans, wires block the driveway,one low black wire (alive?) swinging the road.A number of poems examine the traumatic experiences of a group of South Sudanese refugees who were relocated to his region of Mississippi and taken in by his church. In “Forgiveness,” the example of a Sudanese priest challenges Miller to struggle against anger and fear, against the “reptilian / root of the brain.” The lineation is unusually skittish for Miller, but the message is one of rock-solid grace:The young priestin the Khartoum campsburied so manywith his own handsthat for a while he was driven mad.He has cometo teach the prieststo make their hearts clean.A key element of faith for Miller is music, particularly choral singing. Many of his poems speak of the way people from disparate backgrounds can merge into something greater. In “Broken Consort,” the private histories and preoccupations of a group of amateur singers are briefly enumerated, before they come together to perform Brahms:breaking repetition andvariation, praise echoingshaped praise,making me feel whole, heldin how I’m not.Miller’s poems of faith may be a means to access something he’s not — something more serene and thoughtful and decent than anyone really could be. Raising his songs of “shaped praise,” he finds ways to make from an unruly, often unbearable world something beautiful and whole, pouring balm on the ugliness he sees with the measured cadences of poetry.For Christian Wiman on the other hand, nothing is soothing, least of all poetry or religion. The poems in his new collection, Once in the West, struggle to understand the place of God in a world filled with suffering and loss. In the face of illness and premature death, when nothing remains but bittersweet memory and more painful days to come, faith — and the beauties of art, of poetry — can offer some comfort, but only a very cold comfort. The more intensely Wiman’s poems peer into the divine, the more troubled they seem to become.In 2005, at the age of thirty-nine, less than a year after getting married and two years after taking over the editorship of Poetry magazine, Wiman was diagnosed with a rare, incurable blood cancer. Around that time, having left behind the Baptist faith of his childhood years earlier, he and his wife began praying and attending church together. He became a believer and he began writing religiously oriented poetry. Today, he has two young daughters and teaches at the Yale Divinity School. In interviews, he talks of his cancer being in remission and a feeling of joy in his life. But his poems have, if anything, become more anguished, more restless and searching. The new book opens with a tentative “Prayer”:even now, my prayeris that a mind blurredby anxiety or despairmight find herea trace of peace.Wiman’s new poems are emaciated — almost skeletal at times, with just a word or two per line — and for long stretches they withdraw into a shadowy world of memories, into the attenuated lives of people he grew up with and the barren West Texas landscape he remembers, as in “Sunday School”:A city of loss lit in me.Childhood: all the good Godcoddled childrenchiming past the valley of the shadow:old pews, old views of the cotton fieldsnorth, south, east, west,foreverness sifting down like dustThere are intermittent rhymes, and sometimes the lines seem possessed by a sort of rhyming tic that generates new ideas from the play of sounds (“I fear I swear I tear open / what heart I have left // to keep it from being / and beating and bearing down on me”). There are frequent compound words (“stabdazzling darkness,” “icequiet,” “blacksleek streets”), as well as sharp enjambments that break words across the line breaks (“little up- / ruptures re- / settling / as of dust,” “in that back- // seat, sweat- / soaked, skin- // habited heaven / of days”). The language alternately inches along, squeezing out each word with difficulty, or tumbles headlong in a blur, as though driven by powerful compulsions.There are a handful of more expansive poems in the book, even gentle or tender ones, and some that find glimmers of hope or joy in unlikely places. In “My Stop is Grand,” the poet describes a cold morning on the Chicago El when the trainscreechingly peacocked a grace of sparksso far out and abovethe fast curve that jostled and fastened usinto a single shock of — I will not call it loveWiman’s work represents a tireless, often agonizing quest to understand the darkest truths of life — as well as a few of the brightest, sometimes where they’re least expected. He uses faith as a tool, alongside the music of poetry and the workings of the intellect, to peer ever further. His temperament is that of a seeker, for whom no previous answer is ever quite complete, and his poems refuse any easy solutions or obvious resting places.Taken together, these books demonstrate a variety of strategies still available to the contemporary writer to engage with age-old matters of faith without abandoning the imperative of modern verse to “make it new.” One of the oldest tasks of poetry remains vital, even if the results are sometimes veiled or ambivalent or slippery: to reach for the divine and to investigate the place of humanity in a vast, hard, and often inscrutable world.