CHICHESTER 4 MARCH 2013 - Welcome to Chichester ... have all heard poetry and sometimes memorable...
Transcript of CHICHESTER 4 MARCH 2013 - Welcome to Chichester ... have all heard poetry and sometimes memorable...
CHICHESTER CATHEDRAL 4 MARCH 2013
‘Literature as Liturgy: Uncommon Prayer’
Several years ago, I was asked to contribute a chapter on ‘Literature as Liturgy’ to a
handbook of English Literature and Theology.1 This idea seemed almost incomprehensible,
and I concluded that the editors had made a mistake. Surely they had meant to request an
essay on ‘Liturgy as Literature’ – a much more logical idea? In the event, that was the agreed
title of the piece, but the order of the words has bothered me ever since. Was there after all
something that should have been said, a challenge that should have been met? The Dean’s
invitation has made it possible to make up for that rather cowardly act of avoidance and to
take up the challenge of talking about literature as liturgy. So I am grateful for this
opportunity and delighted to be in Chichester.
Various ways of addressing the subject spring to mind. We have all heard poetry and
sometimes memorable prose being recited in church or introduced into sermons and
intercessions. Anecdotal evidence of this might certainly be collected as one approach. A
different approach would be to gather and comment on examples of literary works being
quoted, or echoed, or adopted almost wholesale into the authorised texts used in liturgical
rites. George Herbert’s ‘Love bade me welcome’ and Charles Wesley’s ‘Christ, whose glory
fills the skies’ are two examples. Taking yet another angle, it would be possible to argue that
certain works of literature are prayers in their own right, and in that case we might turn to
John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, or the Terrible Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins, or some of
the bleakly truthful works of R.S. Thomas. But does that turn literature into liturgy? And is
that even the question that requires to be answered?
The problem lies in treating both literature and liturgy as well defined and easily identified
acts of language, belonging respectively to the realms of culture and religion. Since these
worlds are not completely separated, it is an easy step to proceed to ask whether they can be
interchangeable. That is to miss the point about both. Concentrating on what each is means
that we ignore what each does and is capable of doing.
1 Bridget Nichols ‘Liturgy as Literature’ in Andrew Hass, David Jasper & Elizabeth Jay (eds) The Oxford
Handbook of English Literature and Theology Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 669-690.
2
The ritual studies expert, Catherine Bell, reminds us that ritual language is not separable from
ritual action – a kind of decoration or add-on – it is part of the ritual act. She turns for
endorsement to another scholar, Stanley Tambiah, who ‘shares with many other ritual
theorists a concern to show how ritual communication is not just an alternative way of
expressing something but the expression of things that cannot be expressed in any other
way.’2
Looking at the subject through the eyes of those who talk first about ‘ritual’ and then about
how it is performed opens up a large and fertile territory which liturgy shares with literature.
It takes us outside of the Church, to forms of words which describe or accompany some of
the most ordinary activities, or which record the observation of apparently commonplace
events. These might include things so taken for granted that they are the largely unnoticed
background of our lives, like listening to the radio, or going for a walk in spring. They take
on a ritual identity when they are drawn to our attention, and made the property of shared
human experience which we may not realise we have had until we see it shaped and crafted.
I am talking here chiefly about poetry. Poetry does many of the things we encounter in the
structures of worship: it celebrates cycles of time and the cycle of human existence. It deals
in a wide range of human emotion: love, grief, anger, loss. It affirms ordinary good things
and illuminates the extraordinariness at their heart. Yet I am deliberately not looking for
examples in religious poetry – I don’t want to talk about prayers and meditations in verse.
Instead, I am interested in the imaginative organisation in literary form of what for
convenience I will call ordinary perception, feeling, and emotional response, though this is
both crude and inaccurate. This leads to new interpretations of the familiar, in ways that
probe human experience, celebrate its goodness and face its realities, often with staggering
honesty.
That honesty – sometimes shocking in its force – is possible because poetry is capable of
acting in ways which are forbidden to us in liturgical gatherings. It takes risks of self-
exposure and pushes at the boundaries of belief and orthodoxy in the course of examining
personal doubt and darkness. It does not always strive to proclaim a salvific outcome. It
2 Catherine Bell Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 111. Bell quotes from
Tambiah’s chapter in Roy Rappaport (ed.) Ecology, Meaning and Religion, 1979.
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insists on a measure of realism in its treatment of birth, marriage and death. Perhaps that is
why increasingly there are requests for readings from secular sources at marriages, baptisms
and funerals – not because people are braver, but because the confident claims of the liturgy
of the Church leave little space for reserve or hesitation.
Why not fiction? Undoubtedly, some very fascinating ritual acts can be found. The
beautifully accurate study of manners in Jane Austen’s work could happily be mined. So
could the dark comedy of Beryl Bainbridge (The Bottle Factory Outing provides a splendid
example) and the less dark comedy of Dickens. Both show how disturbingly odd quite
humdrum events can be. But the portrayal of ritual in fiction is descriptive. It illustrates
modes of behaviour for particular purpose: satire, comedy, tragedy, narrative continuity. It is
about doing rather than doing itself.
The Ordinariness of Ritual Language
It is time to lodge some of this more securely. We start with a poem that looks at the
disposition to reverence in the midst of very mundane and unglamorous patterns of living.
The writer is the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and you may recognise the words:
Prayer
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itelf. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.
Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.
Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.
4
Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin, Dogger. Finisterre.3
This poem uses the classic form of a Shakespearean sonnet – three quatrains plus a final
couplet – to open the idea of prayer as a human activity fundamental to being human, rather
than in some way taught or conditioned by organised religion. Or is it an activity at all? Here,
it has become autonomous, capable of uttering itself, and of praying for us in two senses – on
our behalf when we are without words, and in an intercessory way when we reach out for
inspiration, consolation, and connection. It depends neither on belief nor on fidelity, as the
richly ambiguous adjective ‘faithless; suggests. It is experienced internally (‘that small
familiar pain’) but it is also voiced in external things: the singing of a tree, the rhythmic
sound of a train in the distance, a beginner practising the piano, the calling of a name, or the
litany of the shipping forecast. It is a modest, undemanding assurance of human
connectedness, whose elegantly modulated chanting cadences fall so naturally that they
disguise their own skill. They are much less dramatic and attention-grabbing than the spirit
groaning within with sighs too deep for words, so powerfully described to the first Roman
Christians by St Paul.4 Because of that, the poem captures scenes in which we can see
ourselves, even if we could not have found the words to describe the depth of the experience.
That is the chief criterion: that we can recognise ourselves, and recognise what we hold to be
enduringly important, even if we didn’t know it, in certain acts of language. The same
stripping down to fundamentals has its parallels in liturgical thinking. Gordon Lathrop, an
American Lutheran liturgist, has usefully defined the ordinary basics of our liturgical action
and identity – word, bath, table. Around these things we have developed an elaborate,
beautiful, evocative way of acting and speaking, finding our sacramental identity in baptism
and the eucharist, informed by scripture. Yet we are doing very commonplace things: reading
and studying together, admitting newcomers to the fellowship, sharing food. 5
3 Carol Ann Duffy ‘Prayer’ Mean Time London: Anvil Press, 1993. New edn 1998 repr. 1999. 52.
4 Romans 8.26.
5 Gordon Lathrop Holy People: a liturgical ecclesiology Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999. 11.
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Ritual Cycles
These things happen again and again. They are the patterning of existence. There is another
kind of recurrence, built on a longer cycle, and learned through an observant relationship with
the natural world of which we are part and the world which has been consciously engineered
around us. Here is Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘The Trees’:
The Trees
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.6
The ritual unfolding of each year’s new spring growth is noted, wondered at, probed, and
finally accepted for what it appears to mean now. The observer has seen the fresh leaves
many times before and has perhaps had the uncanny sense of being addressed, or at least of
hearing something not voiced but somehow suggested. While the ‘kind of grief’ that the buds
opening into green leaves express (or even enact) could be taken for a fall from innocence
into experience, I don’t think it is that simple. Whose grief is it, after all? The speaker’s or the
trees’?
6 Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 76-77.
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The speaker tries out and rejects a first idea – that the trees are reborn but human life has a
relentless chronology from birth to death – but rejects this. This new life is all illusion. The
trees are growing older too, as their interior rings reveal. The theologian David Ford has
written about repetition particularly in relation to the eucharist. He uses the phrase ‘non-
identical repetition’ to describe what can be done again and again, without losing its novelty
and uniqueness on each occasion: ‘[Eucharistic] language [he says] (especially in print) can
also give an impression of exact repetition which is untrue to a temporal process in which
such repetition does not happen.’7
But back to the trees, and in that extraordinary image of an ‘annual trick’ lies the suggestion
of real mischief. One way of looking at it, is as a game played year after year between the
natural and human worlds in which both parties know how it works, know that trees do not
speak, know that death lies somewhere in the heart of all life, but play anyway. Another way
is to see it as a contract of understanding in which what is ‘almost being said’ at the outset
finally succeeds in being heard: ‘Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.’ There is an encouragement to
live, even if we can never really be sure whether it actually was said, and to seize at a new
chance of life, in an adult world that has learned from experience without losing its ability to
wonder.
Illusions of Permanence
I turn now from repetition to continuity, or if you like, durability. This too has its illusions.
Philip Larkin once again provides an account in ‘An Arundel Tomb’ – a poem now
inseparably associated with this Cathedral:
An Arundel Tomb
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
7 David F. Ford Self and Salvation: Being Transformed Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 143.
Ford acknowledges his debt to Catherine Pickstock, who first coined this expression. See Pickstock After
Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.
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And that faint hint of the absurd –
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.
They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
8
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.8
Larkin was never entirely happy with this poem.9 He battled with the final stanza,
experimenting with ‘our nearest instinct nearly true’ and ‘all that survives of us is love’. He
felt frustrated in communicating what he wanted to express, writing to his long-term lover,
Monica Jones in 1956:
It starts nicely enough, but I think I’ve failed to put over my chief idea, of their
lasting so long, & in the end being remarkable only for something they hadn’t
perhaps meant very seriously.10
Yet, interviewed years later in 1981, he firmly denied feeling sceptical about the possibility
of such enduring fidelity:
No. I was very moved by it. Of course it was years ago. I think what survives
of us is love, whether in the simple biological sense or just in terms of
responding to life, making it happier, even if it’s only making a joke.11
8 Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 71-72.
9 Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 436-437. Burnett
meticulously lists the problems of the factual description of the tomb effigy identified by Larkin himself and by
correspondents following the poem’s publication. This in itself provides an instructive demonstration of the
differences between truth and fact. 10
Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 436. 11
Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 436. (From Anthony
Thwaite (ed.) Philip Larkin: Further Requirements 2nd
edn London: Faber and Faber, 2002. 58)
9
This is still a slightly qualified assurance. But the poem is a remarkable enactment of the
ritual coupling of two forms of representation and indeed interpretation – in this case,
language and the visual. The subject is the stone tomb effigy in the north aisle, which the poet
viewed on a visit to Chichester, and the poem is likely to be well known to you. Its genius is
to show how convention seems to be flouted in the portrayal of a noble husband and wife
holding hands through eternity. Further, it illustrates the subtle shift in emphasis from the
inscription round the base of the monument, recording a significant local name, to the effigy
itself.12
As time and visitors gradually wear away the letters, so the figures become their own
explanation. And people largely believe what they see, or at least invent explanations for it
(maybe these are nearly the same thing). In this case, what appears to be there is constant
human love, causing the ‘sharp tender shock’ of discovering the personal in the conventional.
The rest of the poem develops an extended denial, seeking other explanations and pieces of
counter-evidence for something obviously untrue to anyone who has read the standard claims
that pre-modern marriage did not involve love. Precisely because this testimony to eternal
affection cannot be true, there has to be some reason why it has become the popular
interpretation. As the third stanza points out, the couple themselves could never have meant
to immortalise a devotion they probably didn’t feel. So perhaps what we see is merely the
sculptor’s compliment, and a bought compliment at that, a ‘sweet commissioned grace’. Then
there are the successive waves of visitors, no longer the ‘tenantry’ who would have known
what they were looking at, but those who stop reading and instead only look. History has
worn away any explanatory inscription, to leave only an ‘attitude’.
Yet the last stanza appears unable to believe this rationalising argument. There is no accident
in the choice of ‘transfigure’ in its first line. Even if the transfiguration in question has
paradoxically delivered ‘untruth’, it remains a spiritually and theologically loaded word,
carrying on the one hand scepticism about all religious feeling; and on the other hand
admitting a change that is rationally assailable, yet wholly convincing to the viewer who
simply sees and believes. The couple will be defined for as long as the monument lasts by a
devotion they probably didn’t feel, though that proposition lures us into other generalisations
about what it meant to be human in times earlier than our own.
12
In fact, there never was an inscription. This was a detail Larkin thought he had remembered. He was later
pedantically put right by readers of the poem with an eye for accuracy.
10
Here, the poem slips from third person to first person. The sculpted feeling which the narrator
has tried so hard to resist proves finally irresistible, and not only that – it becomes a maxim
which the solid permanence of the monument appears to endorse: ‘what will survive of us is
love’. Discomfort is easy to detect here, but not cynicism. More powerful is the unavoidable
recognition that human beings will try to find what they would like to be true against
everything they may think they know. What we have here, is the working out of how a
conventional truth (that marriage partners love each other) has become a kind of prophetic
truth thanks to the sheer belief of generations who have looked at the effigy and accepted
what they saw. In this light, the comments Larkin received from those eager to correct a
number of inaccuracies in description of the sculpture, laboriously collected by his latest
editor, become both irrelevant and wildly comical.13
Like the autonomous prayer in Carol
Ann Duffy’s poem, and the confident call to new life from trees which are in fact quite old,
there is something compelling about the testimony to love which commentary and
contextualisation cannot confine. It would probably be accurate to say that this is conceded
rather than celebrated in the closing line. There are enough popular assumptions about
Larkin (professionally pessimistic, curmudgeonly and reclusive) to make his readers expect
that he would not let us have this ending too easily.
Denial : Literature as Anti-Liturgy
So far, we have looked at what could be loosely called ritual encounters with some of the
most resilient longings and emotions of human life. Death has a part in these, of course, but it
does not take a starring role. I draw a third time on Larkin, whose work often returns to the
slow, unglamorous winding down towards death, though perhaps not in the defining way that
some of his detractors suggest. His long poem about a hospital outpatients’ department is
called simply ‘The Building’. So even before it begins, it is playing out the reluctance to
speak of illness and death by their proper names. The poem uses a bald language of
avoidance that concentrates on facts largely unadorned by adjectives and metaphors. It begins
bravely enough, but two lines in, and the struggle to reimagine the place has been lost in the
face of its realities:
Higher than the handsomest hotel
13
Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 437.
11
The lucent comb stands up for miles, but see,
All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall
Like a great sigh out of the last century.
The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up
At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall
As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.
We move through the shabby waiting room, and the description of patients and staff, to what
defines the common purpose of so many unconnected people in the same place. They are all
‘Here to confess that something has gone wrong.’ The almost naïve comment that follows
becomes a grim secular analogy of the mawkish association of sickness and death as
punishment for sin:
It must be error of a serious sort,
For see how many floors it needs, how tall
It’s grown by now, and how much money goes
In trying to correct it.
A strange bond begins to form as, one by one, patients are called to appointments along
corridors on different floors. ‘[A]s they climb/ To their appointed levels . . . their eyes’
Go to each other, guessing; on the way
Someone’s wheeled past, in washed-to-rags ward clothes:
They see him too. They’re quiet. To realise
This new thing held in common makes them quiet,
For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those,
And more rooms yet, each one further off
And harder to return from; and who knows
Which he will see, and when?
The relentless factual detail has a documentary quality and there is a notable absence of
adjectives and figurative devices, apart from the searingly accurate ‘washed-to-rags ward-
clothes’. Verbal photo-realism is juxtaposed to the rapidly receding world outside. Not that it
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is in any way an enticing or beautiful place, but it sustains ‘a touching dream’ of being vitally
alive which continues unchallenged until the summons to inner regions of the hospital
intrudes the truth of mortality:
. . . Some will be out by lunch or four;
Others, not knowing it, have come to join
The unseen congregations whose white rows
Lie set apart above – women, men;
Old, young; crude facets of the only coin
This place accepts. All know they are going to die.
Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,
And somewhere like this. This is what it means,
This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend
The thought of dying, for unless its powers
Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes
The coming dark, though crowds each evening try
With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers. 14
These final stanzas ruthlessly parody the picture of the Communion of Saints, whether it be in
the majestic style of the Letter to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation, or embodied in
coy phrases like ‘those who have passed over’. The upper regions are populated not by
glorious creatures but by the unrecognisably worn remnants of the divine image: for the place
demands to be paid in damaged life, dulled by illness, on the wager that it can achieve what
human knowledge cannot do and overcome death itself. That too is an illusion, colluded in
by visitors bringing ‘wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers’. The isolated final line does what it
says. It is physically surplus to the neat organisation of the rest of the poem, and though it is
part of its rhyme scheme, it can neither add to the existing bleakness nor alleviate it. They are
magnificently quotable and also completely unnecessary words.
14
Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 84-86. The full text of
the poem appears at the end.
13
The poem is a triumph of one kind of realism over hope. It has no room for miracle or even, it
would seem, for healing, since even that has only temporary value in the face of the
knowledge that we all die in the end. This is to tell the truth in a way that leaves absolutely no
consolation, exposing all illusions and attempts to pretend, to find enough euphemisms to
cover fear and fatalism if only for a short time.
Wanting to know the truth – or what is reliably true – is not confined to death. That other
great mystery, love, has harnessed just as much – and more – creative energy. It is not often
treated in the teasing mode adopted by W.H. Auden.
Auden’s ‘Tell me the truth about love’ became a household poem after it was read as part of a
funeral scene in the enormously successful film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. It does not
immediately resonate of solemn ritual or even the customary seriousness attached to the
metaphysical question at its heart. Only when we look more closely does its clever mix of
relentless teasing frivolity and alternating stanzas of jazz rhythm and ballad (it is one of a
collection of twelve songs) begin to suggest an enquiry similar to Job’s dialogue with God
about the mystery of the created world, or the quests in some of the Psalms.15
It is too long to
read in full, so let me give you a flavour of it.
Some say love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round,
Some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.
Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
15
Job 37.1 – 42.6. See also Psalm 139.
14
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.
You could be forgiven for thinking this was highly intelligent nonsense in the mode of
Edward Lear, Ogden Nash or even A.A. Milne, and the mock solemnity of attempts at
definitions and references to love is surely designed to entertain:
Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It’s quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I’ve found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway guides.
Yet the subject escapes trivialisation. Love is at the same time familiar and like nothing we
know, and this is why attempts to personify it or tie it down to analogies find it always
escaping, always evading definition:
I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn’t over there;
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead
And Brighton’s bracing air.
I don’t know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn’t in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.
The penultimate stanza tries to give it human characteristics:
Can it pull extraordinary faces?
15
Is it usually sick on a swing?
And it is here that the search for an answer stops – because, of course, the wrong question is
being asked. The truth about love lies not in what it is, but in what it does. If it is worth
having, it is life-changing. Hope and fear stand alongside each other in the final stanza:
When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I’m picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.16
Why do we need a non-ecclesiastical ritual language?
Unlikely example though it is, this poem suggests to me something striking about the way
language is used to explore the things most significant in our understanding of what it is to be
human. It adds a certain weight to the conviction that we do not need a non-ecclesiastical
ritual language, capable of framing secular prayers. We already have a language that can be
ritually shaped, and which can participate in the conscious ritual shaping of what we do as
liturgical creatures and what we do and experience simply as human beings. It is the same
language. Presumably this is why David Frost, the composer of the well-loved post-
communion prayer, ‘Father of all, we give you thanks and praise . . .’, writes in this way
about the language of liturgy:
If liturgy is to justify its existence, its language must be such that minister and
people can return to it again and again and discover further meanings at each
repetition: it must have rhythm, imagery and verbal punch such as can only be
achieved by leaving yourself a wide variety of ways in which to say
something: in other words, it needs something of the quality of poetry. For this
16
W.H.Auden Collected Poems ed. Edward Mendelson London: Faber and Faber, 1994. 143-144. The full text
appears at the end.
16
reason the churches have commonly drawn material from Scripture, which has
this richness and density of meaning.17
Frost is describing liturgical language as a vehicle capable of carrying the weightiest subject
matter – human life and emotion in relation to God and the world. Behind it, as behind the
best literary creation, there will lie what T.S. Eliot called ‘the intolerable wrestle with words
and meanings’; and the struggle to use words at all, having realised that meaning and
expression are ‘more than an order of words’.18
I suggested at the outset that we should be more concerned with what literature and liturgy
did than with what they were. At this stage I want to suggest that what defines their common
territory is a search for ways of telling the truth, of representing accurately. Both strive for the
absolutely precise shaping of ordinary language to admit extraordinary insight and enable
extraordinary expression. It is a multi-faceted truth, beautifully described by the Irish poet,
Seamus Heaney, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1995. He gives an account of a
lifelong and maturing relationship with poetry:
To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and
rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of
the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against. Even as a
schoolboy, I loved John Keats's ode "To Autumn" for being an ark of the
covenant between language and sensation; as an adolescent, I loved Gerard
Manley Hopkins for the intensity of his exclamations which were also
equations for a rapture and an ache I didn't fully know I knew until I read him;
I loved Robert Frost for his farmer's accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness;
and Chaucer too for much the same reasons. Later on I would find a different
kind of accuracy, a moral down-to-earthness to which I responded deeply and
always will, in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, a poetry where a New
Testament sensibility suffers and absorbs the shock of the new century's
barbarism. Then later again, in the pure consequence of Elizabeth Bishop's
style, in the sheer obduracy of Robert Lowell's and in the barefaced
17
David L. Frost The Language of Series 3 Bramcote, Notts: Grove Books, 1973. 9. 18
T.S. Eliot Four Quartets: ‘East Coker’ Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1974; 3rd
pre.
1980. 196-204. 198 & 202-203.
17
confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh's, I encountered further reasons for
believing in poetry's ability - and responsibility - to say what happens, to ‘pity
the planet,’ to be ‘not concerned with Poetry.’19
‘To be not concerned with poetry’: is that a paradox in creative art? It seems to me that he is
describing the kind of writing that can only tell the truth by risking all its certainties, and its
sense of secure identity in the process. To try to illustrate this better, I turn finally to another
poet, the American Wallace Stevens, who wrote a long poem called ‘The Man with the Blue
Guitar’, inspired by one of Picasso’s blue paintings. Here are just the first ten lines. We need
to imagine a scene in a small, rural town (somewhere in the western United States?) and a
guitarist who may or may not belong to the people who notice the unusual quality of his
guitar and his music:
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."20
The search for a language truthful enough to speak of ourselves, our experience, our
connection to the world and to each other, and truthful enough to tell us what we can be
19
"Seamus Heaney - Nobel Lecture: Crediting Poetry". Nobelprize.org. 17 Sep 2012 1995
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-lecture.html. Accessed 24 February
2013. 20
Wallace Stevens ‘The Man With the Blue Guitar’ in The Collected Poems, New York: Vintage, 1990. 165-
183. 165.
18
rather than what we think we are must always be both beyond us and completely
recognisable. Most of us want to be transformed. Most of us probably want transformation
with guarantees of safety. There is a distinction implied in the dialogue between the
shearsman and his audience, between what is so true that it remains true even when translated
in a new creative process, and what is only ever self-referentially true (‘things exactly as they
are’). That first and constant truth involves what is durable, what enables us to endure, what
allows us to grow to our full potential. It involves tradition and memory. It gives shape and
meaning to experience. It dignifies the ordinary without losing the dignity of sheer
ordinariness.
These are literary and theological questions, tested again and again in forms that are crafted
to bear repetition and which reveal new meaning each time they tell familiar truths and voice
familiar needs and longings:
What will survive of us is love
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord
That is where literature and liturgy intersect.
19
The Building Philip Larkin
Higher than the handsomest hotel
The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,
All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall
Like a great sigh out of the last century.
The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up
At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall
As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.
There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup,
Like an airport lounge, but those who tamely sit
On rows of steel chairs turning the ripped mags
Haven't come far. More like a local bus.
These outdoor clothes and half-filled shopping-bags
And faces restless and resigned, although
Every few minutes comes a kind of nurse
To fetch someone away: the rest refit
Cups back to saucers, cough, or glance below
Seats for dropped gloves or cards. Humans, caught
On ground curiously neutral, homes and names
Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,
Some old, but most at that vague age that claims
The end of choice, the last of hope; and all
Here to confess that something has gone wrong.
It must be error of a serious sort,
For see how many floors it needs, how tall
It's grown by now, and how much money goes
In trying to correct it. See the time,
Half-past eleven on a working day,
And these picked out of it; see, as they c1imb
To their appointed levels, how their eyes
Go to each other, guessing; on the way
Someone's wheeled past, in washed-to-rags ward clothes:
They see him, too. They're quiet. To realise
This new thing held in common makes them quiet,
For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those,
And more rooms yet, each one further off
And harder to return from; and who knows
Which he will see, and when? For the moment, wait,
Look down at the yard. Outside seems old enough:
Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking by it
Out to the car park, free. Then, past the gate,
Traffic; a locked church; short terraced streets
Where kids chalk games, and girls with hair-dos fetch
20
Their separates from the cleaners - O world,
Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch
Of any hand from here! And so, unreal
A touching dream to which we all are lulled
But wake from separately. In it, conceits
And self-protecting ignorance congeal
To carry life, collapsing only when
Called to these corridors (for now once more
The nurse beckons -). Each gets up and goes
At last. Some will be out by lunch, or four;
Others, not knowing it, have come to join
The unseen congregations whose white rows
Lie set apart above - women, men;
Old, young; crude facets of the only coin
This place accepts. All know they are going to die.
Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,
And somewhere like this. That is what it means,
This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend
The thought of dying, for unless its powers
Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes
The coming dark, though crowds each evening try
With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.
O Tell Me the Truth About Love W.H. Auden
Some say love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go around,
Some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.
Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.
21
Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway guides.
Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.
I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn't over there;
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.
Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.
When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.