Boris Pasternak*

Boris Pasternak (1890—1960) is a Russian poet, whose father was a painter who taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, and whose mother was a concert pianist.

His poetry collections include My Sister, Life (1922), Second Birth (1932), and Selected Poems (1946). Pasternak is the author of just one novel, Doctor Zhivago (1957), for which he won the Nobel Prize.

At the time the Soviet government pressured him into rejecting the award. In a 1958 article interpreting these events, Time Magazine reported, “Pasternak wrote his novel Doctor Zhivago out of a passionate Christian conviction that salvation is possible only through the individual human spirit.” In Israel the novel was criticized as assimilationist, because Pasternak was in favour of his fellow-Jews converting to Christian faith.

After World War II, a series of his Christian poems on Easter themes, were said to have been written as a form of protest against communism.

The following poem draws an unlikely parallel betweeen an actor in a Shakespearean play and Christ fulfilling the role set out for him.

Hamlet

The murmurs ebb; onto the stage I enter.
I am trying, standing in the door,
To discover in the distant echoes
What the coming years may hold in store.

The nocturnal darkness with a thousand
Binoculars is focused onto me.
Take away this cup, O Abba Father,
Everything is possible to Thee.

I am fond of this Thy stubborn project,
And to play my part I am content.
But another drama is in progress,
And, this once, O let me be exempt.

But the plan of action is determined,
And the end irrevocably sealed.
I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a walk across a field.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Boris Pasternak: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

William Cullen Bryant*

William Cullen Bryant (1794—1878) is one of the most significant poets in early American history. He studied law privately and was admitted to the bar when he was 21years of age. His dislike of the profession led him and his wife to move to New York in 1829 where he became the editor of the New York Review, and shortly thereafter became editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post; he continued in that role for the rest of his life.

His poetry collections include Thanatopsis (1817), A Forest Hymn (1824), and Poems (1839). He is known as an American Romantic for his nature poetry, being significantly influenced by William Wordsworth.

Under the influence of his father, Bryant had started shifting toward Unitarian belief away from the Calvinism of his childhood. In his blank verse poem “A Forest Hymn,” however, he demonstrated a return toward Christian orthodoxy — seeing nature as the most suited place for communion with God.

The William Cullen Bryant Homestead, in Massachusetts, is a National Historic Landmark. It is located on a hillside overlooking the Westfield River Valley, on the site of the original Cummington community which was founded in 1762.

The Battle-Field

Once this soft turf, this rivulet's sands,
Were trampled by a hurrying crowd,
And fiery hearts and armed hands
Encountered in the battle-cloud.

Ah! never shall the land forget
How gushed the life-blood of her brave, —
Gushed, warm with hope and courage yet,
Upon the soil they fought to save.

Now all is calm and fresh and still;
Alone the chirp of flittering bird,
And talk of children on the hill,
And bell of wandering kine, are heard.

No solemn host goes trailing by
The black-mouthed gun and staggering wain;
Men start not at the battle-cry, —
O, be it never heard again!

Soon rested those who fought; but thou
Who minglest in the harder strife
For truths which men receive not now,
Thy warfare only ends with life.

A friendless warfare! lingering long
Through weary day and weary year;
A wild and many-weaponed throng
Hang on thy front and flank and rear.

Yet nerve thy spirit to the proof,
And blench not at thy chosen lot;
The timid good may stand aloof,
Men start not at the battle-cry, —
The sage may frown, — yet faint thou not.

Nor heed the shaft too surely cast,
The foul and hissing bolt of scorn;
For with thy side shall dwell, at last,
The victory of endurance born.

Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again, —
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain,
And dies among his worshippers.

Yea, though thou lie upon the dust,
When they who helped thee flee in fear,
Die full of hope and manly trust,
Like those who fell in battle here!

Another hand thy sword shall wield,
Another hand the standard wave,
Till from the trumpet's mouth is pealed
The blast of triumph o'er thy grave

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about William Cullen Bryant: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Allen Tate*

Allen Tate (1899—1979) is a Southern writer, born in Kentucky and educated at Vanderbilt University, where his roommate was Robbert Penn Warren. Rather than identifying primarily as an American, he saw himself as a Southerner — holding traditional agrarian values which reflect artistic beauty, rather than adopting Yankee industrialism and materialism.

He was not naïve to the sins of the South — first among these being bigotry and slavery — nor was he seeking to turn back towards an idealized past. He wrote, “A society which has once been religious cannot, without risk of spiritual death, secularize itself.” He was essentially a critic of American culture.

His poetry collections include Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928), The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936), The Winter Sea (1944), and Two Conceits for the Eye to Sing, If Possible (1950), His Collected Poems appeared in 1970.

Tate was poetry editor at Sewanee Review from 1944 to 1947, and a professor of English at the University of Minnesota from 1951 until his retirement. He converted publicly to Roman Catholicism in 1950.

Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky

Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
And I must think a little of the past:
When I was ten I told a stinking lie
That got a black boy whipped; but now at last
The going years, caught in an after-glow,
Reverse like balls englished upon green baize—
Let them return, let the round trumpets blow
The ancient crackle of the Christ's deep gaze.
Deafened and blind, with senses yet unfound,
Am I, untutored to the after-wit
Of knowledge, knowing a nightmare has no sound;
Therefore with idle hands and head I sit
In late December before the fire's daze
Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Allen Tate: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Chad Walsh*

Chad Walsh (1914—1991) wrote six poetry collections, and several other books. He served as an English professor for more than thirty years at Beloit College in Wisconsin. His name comes up frequently these days, as Beloit College has named a poetry prize in his honour, as well as the Chad Walsh Chapbook Series from Beloit Poetry Journal. His anthology Today’s Poems: American and British Poetry since the 1930s was published in 1964.

He is also remembered by C.S. Lewis devotees. It’s hard to look into Walsh without being swamped by information about him in relation to Lewis. It was through reading Lewis — particularly the novel Perelandra — that he was first drawn to faith. Walsh had first written an article about Lewis in The Atlantic Monthly, and then travelled to Oxford to interview him, in preparation for his book C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (first published in 1949, and recently republished by Wipf & Stock in 2008). This book led to the growing popularity of Lewis in the US, which had already started in the UK.

A Quintina Of Crosses

Beyond, beneath, within, wherever blood,
If there were blood, flows with the pulse of love,
Where God’s circle and all orbits cross,
Through the black space of death to baby life
Came God, planting the secret genes of God.

By the permission of a maiden’s love,
Love came upon the seeds of words, broke blood,
And howled into the Palestine of life,
A baby roiled by memories of God.
Sometimes he smiled, sometimes the child was cross.

Often at night he dreamed a dream of God
And was the dream he dreamed. Often across
The lily fields he raged and lived their life,
And Heaven’s poison festered in his blood,
Loosing the passion of unthinkable love.

But mostly, though, he lived a prentice’s life
Until a singing in the surge of blood,
Making a chorus of the genes of God,
Flailed him into the tempest of a love
That lashed the North Star and the Southern Cross.

His neighbors smelled an alien in his blood,
A secret enemy and double life;
He was a mutant on an obscene cross
Outraging decency with naked love.
He stripped the last rags from a proper God.

The life of God must blood this cross for love.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Chad Walsh: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.