Henry Vaughan

Henry Vaughan (1622?–1695) was a Welsh physician and poet. He is one of the 17th century metaphysical poets — a group which includes John Donne and George Herbert. There was no metaphysical school, but a similar approach beginning with Donne, growing in Herbert, and developing further in Vaughan. What their poems have in common is a colloquial manner and a characteristic reflectiveness about their personal relationships with God.

Prior to 1650 his poetry was primarily secular, however, after a serious illness, Henry Vaughan experienced a spiritual awakening. He attributed this awakening to Herbert’s poetry, and his style is significantly influenced by Herbert. His best-known book, Silex Scintillans (which means Sparkling Flint) was published in 1650, with an expanded edition in 1655. Vaughan tried to suppress his earlier poetry, and is today primarily known for his poems of faith.

Peace

My Soul, there is a country
------Afar beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged sentry
------All skillful in the wars:
There, above noise and danger
------Sweet Peace sits, crown'd with smiles,
And One born in a manger
------Commands the beauteous files.
He is thy gracious Friend,
------And (O my Soul awake!)
Did in pure love descend,
------To die here for thy sake.
If thou canst get but thither,
------There grows the flow'r of peace,
The rose that cannot wither,
------Thy fortress, and thy ease.
Leave then thy foolish ranges,
------For none can thee secure,
But One, who never changes,
------Thy God, thy life, thy cure.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Henry Vaughan: second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Jeanne Murray Walker

Jeanne Murray Walker is a powerful poet of varied voice. She is equal to both the task of portraying the darkness in our world, and that of expressing real hope. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, and is also well-known for her plays, which have been staged in such cities as Chicago, Boston, Vancouver and London. She lives in Philadelphia, and has been a professor at the University of Delaware for over thirty years.

The following poem is from her new collection, New Tracks, Night Falling (Eerdmans, 2009),

Thanks

— After Gerard Manley Hopkins

for September sun like a sharp thread
----that strings and pulls me
down the footpath, nearly blind, toward
----the dark woods. For the hawk kiting

on high sheen above the field
----as I cross the footbridge.
For the water’s slather, for bittersweet,
----stone flowers, slagmire, silt, sediment

rushing into the slurp of gravity. Thanks even
----for seek and cover, for the seam that
opens in the hay, mouse tail splitting the gold,
----ears sleeked back, frozen against

the plummet, wings folding silent
----as umbrellas, bill hooked, steel
cables grabbing, hauling up. Thanks
----for fierce, fast, for finality,

for let-go, limp, at last. Thanks for not
----covering up what I can’t grasp,
and for sunlight, still as strong
----as harp strings, holding earth to heaven.

(Posted with permission of the poet)

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Jeanne Murray Walker: second post

Read my Books & Culture review of Jeanne Murray Walker’s poetry collection, A Deed To The Light (2004, University of Illinois Press) here

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot (1888—1965) is perhaps the most influential poet of the 20th century. In 1922, Eliot’s landmark poem “The Waste Land” transformed poetry in ways that are still obvious today. Although he was born and raised American, in 1927 he became a British citizen. Although he had lost faith in western civilization, in 1927 he was also confirmed in the Church of England. He experienced a profound Christian faith, which is significantly expressed in much of his poetry. His finest poetic achievement, according to the poet himself, was Four Quartets (1935–1942). The following poem appeared in 1928.

A Song for Simeon

----Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

----Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have taken and given honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come ?
They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.

----Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel’s consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

----According to thy word,
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about T.S. Eliot: second post, third post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Czeslaw Milosz

Czeslaw Milosz (1911—2004) was born in Lithuania, he lived in occupied Warsaw during WWII, and witnessed the oppression imposed by both Nazis and Stalinists upon his people. For more than 35 years he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1980 he received the Nobel Prize for literature.

Czeslaw Milosz wrote in Polish — including his own translation of the Psalms. The poem below was translated into English by the author and Robert Hass. He was as ready to talk about his faith as his doubt, and he was dedicated to and critical of both Poland and traditional Catholic faith.

The following is a selection from a sequence entitled “Treatise On Theology”. In the prose-like section that precedes this one, Milosz says, “Whoever places his trust in Jesus Christ waits for His coming and the end of this world, when the first heaven and the first earth pass, and death is no more.”

Religion Comes

Religion comes from our pity for humans.

They are too weak to live without divine protection.

Too weak to listen to the screeching noise of the turning of infernal wheels.

Who among us would accept a universe in which there was not one voice

Of compassion, pity, understanding?

To be human is to be completely alien amidst the galaxies.

Which is sufficient reason for erecting, together with others, the temples of an unimaginable mercy.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Czeslaw Milosz: second post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Margaret Avison

Margaret Avison (1918–2007) is one of Canada’s foremost poets, and the recipient of numerous awards. Twice she has won the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and is an officer of the Order of Canada. When she received the Griffin Poetry Prize for Concrete and Wild Carrot (2002), the judges described her as “a national treasure”.

Her conversion to Christian faith came in early 1963, and has been a dominant feature of her poetry ever since. What makes her poems stand out, among the work of so many poets, is the way they grow deeper and deeper with subsequent readings. Their density, initially obscured through her unorthodox sentence structure, slowly reveals their meanings. The following poem comes from her collection Momentary Dark (2006).

Exposure

Every living thing
as a mass or a
morsel, or one who moves with
the speed of light, alike —
each, in His miracle of
particularity,
the Lord knows.

What is left, as though unknown
by the Knower’s and
the rebel’s mutual
consent, the psalmist calls
chaff in the wind.

Even a pear on a
leafy July bough,
or a begrimed
pear on a downtown fruit stand,
or a pale piece of pear in a
hospital dish proffered
a toothless mouth,
blank now toward
sustenance, and breath:
even such pears also are
known.

But unlike other
living things
being slow, slow to learn
in this interlude,
life, just being under
the sun, we
vacillate between awe, and
apprehension lest we be known.

The Knower, knowing, waits
our turn.

Posted with permission of McClelland & Stewart, and of Joan Eichner.

My interview with Margaret Avison appeared in Image in 2005. Subsequently it was republished in Margaret’s autobiography, I Am Here And Not Not-There in 2009 by The Porcupine’s Quill.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Margaret Avison: second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Robert Browning

Robert Browning (1812–1889) is one of the major figures of 19th century poetry. Ironically, prior to the death of his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he was not well known, and was overshadowed by her. In his youth he had become an atheist, but later he rejected atheism to embrace Christianity. He clearly views this world as the place where imperfect souls are prepared for the perfection of heaven. His views only come through over the distance because his poems are “dramatic monologues” from the perspective of his characters; this makes it hard to know Browning himself.

In one poem — in the form of a letter from an incredulous Arab physician, named Karshish — we read of this man meeting with Lazarus. Karshish writes to a colleague the story of the man Christ raised. (Read the poem here)
He considers Lazarus to be mad, since “This grown man eyes the world now like a child” and believes that the one who raised him is “God himself / Creator and sustainer of the world”.

Some have accused Browning of being overly optimistic, but as The Norton Anthology of English Literature puts it: “Browning’s optimism was not blind. Few writers, in fact, seem to have been more aware of the existence of evil.” With this in mind we can read the following poem more in context.

Pippa’s Song

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearl'd;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in His heaven—
All's right with the world!

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Robert Browning: second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Robert Cording

Robert Cording is an award-winning, contemporary poet living in Connecticut, and teaching English and creative writing at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He has five poetry books to his credit, the most recent being Common Life (CavanKerry Press). He tends to write from a faith point-of-view but often in a way that doesn’t primarily focus on the spiritual.

When I asked Robert Cording about the relationship between his role as a poet, and that of a Christian, he referred me to something he had said when his book Against Consolation received the Arlen Myer Prize. He'd said: "My task of late has been to evoke what I would call the primordial intuitions of Christianity. What are they?—that we live in a world we did not create; that God’s immanent presence is capable of breaking in on us at every moment; that most of the time we cannot 'taste and see' that presence because we live in a world of self-reflecting mirrors; that only by attention alone...can we live in the world but outside of our existing conceptions of it."

The following poem does this: causing us to look at ourselves but then to look well beyond ourselves.

Angels

They’re everywhere, baby-cheeked cherubs flying
On boutique signs, on cards and magazine covers,
In the serene sky of coffee table books.

They surround us like a halo that is no more
Than a suggestion, a dim waking to something
At the edge of our gaze when we look up.

Trees sway, a bird sings, propelling us to worship
Some source of warmth that will fill in the blank
Spaces of our hearts. Our angels never flash swords,

Flap their six monstrous wings like the sound of chariots,
Mete out judgement, or announce unexpectedly
A precocious child. They tell us to forgive ourselves

And love who we are; they focus us on abundance
So we may have enough for car and house payments,
The kids’ tuition bills. They whisper— there’s a god

Inside of you—and we believe. How good we feel
About ourselves, how unencumbered and free,
As if some transformation had surely taken place.

And so our days unravel in summer pastels,
The sun a mild version of itself, its trellised light
Nearly graspable, dappling the patio bricks and a table

Where a book is opened by the wind, a sign
Without meaning but beautiful, serving almost
No purpose at all except to create a kind of mild
Annunciatory sense that, yes, everything is about us.

(Posted with the poet's permission)

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Robert Cording: second post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca