THANKFUL FOR POETS

DIVINE EPIGRAMS (Richard Crashaw)

On the Miracle of multiplied Loaves.

SEE here an easy feast that knows no wound,

 That under hunger's teeth will needs be found :

A subtle harvest of unbounded bread.

What would ye more ?   Here food itself is fed.

To our Lord, upon the Water made Wine.

THOU water turn'st to wine, fair friend of life ;

 Thy foe, to cross the sweet arts of Thy reign,

Distils from thence the tears of wrath and strife,

 And so turns wine to water back again.

HEAVEN (George Herbert)

O who will show me those delights on high?
                            Echo.         I.
Thou Echo, thou art mortall, all men know.
                            Echo.         No.
Wert thou not born among the trees and leaves?
                            Echo.         Leaves.
And are there any leaves, that still abide?
                            Echo.         Bide.
What leaves are they? impart the matter wholly.
                            Echo.         Holy.
Are holy leaves the Echo then of blisse?
                            Echo.         Yes.
Then tell me, what is that supreme delight?
                            Echo.         Light.
Light to the minde : what shall the will enjoy?
                            Echo.         Joy.
But are there cares and businesse with the pleasure?
                            Echo.         Leisure.
Light, joy, and leisure ; but shall they persever?
                            Echo.         Ever.

Through his essay, The Metaphysical Poets (1921), T. S. Eliot proved to be hugely influential in re-introducing the world to the 17^th Century works of George Herbert, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughn, among others. He writes of their having obtained “a fusion of thought and feeling” which we have largely lost in our world marked by what he calls a “dissociation of sensibility.”

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

He comments further …

The poets in question have, like other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling. And this means both that they are more mature, and that they wear better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability.

The “amalgamating of disparate experience” to which Eliot refers and the “states of mind and feeling” for which ‘verbal equivalents’ must be found would have seemed neither strange nor impossibly esoteric  to the contemplative mind of early and medieval Christianity. The Metaphysical Poets and their fellow writers and dramatists were the inheritors of a great spiritual tradition which we continue to enjoy in our ancient prayers and liturgies. 

When we picture ‘a contemplative’ we imagine someone with his head in the clouds, unaware of his surroundings, taking no notice of the people near him, lost in his thoughts. However, this image is not an accurate portrayal of the contemplative life but is actually just a more intense version of the state we find ourselves in most of the time. We spend a good deal of our day lost in thought, mentally preoccupied, our body in one place and our mind in another. We rely heavily on repetition to establish routines and patterns so that as much as possible we can live life without having to be present for it.

Contemplative prayer as it was practiced in the Christian tradition in apostolic times and throughout the Middle Ages led to the reverse of what is described above. The spiritual exercises and contemplative disciplines of the church emphasized the taking up of the cross as a death unto self, and encouraged the faithful towards a diminishment of egocentrism and a lessening of self-centeredness which led them in turn to a far greater awareness not only of the truth of their inner lives but also of the world in which they lived. Being spared a little of the self-absorption narcissism craves, the contemplative became more fully conscious and far more appreciative of the greatness and beauty of creation. All of life was precious to one who felt God’s love in every blade of grass and saw eternity in a grain of sand. Not only did the contemplative notice those around him -- he sensed with great intensity the heaviness of their burdens just as he shed tears of joy over each of their blessings. Nurtured by stillness and centered in the silence of his deepest nature, the world was much more vivid and real to the contemplative precisely because he was not lost in his thoughts. Instead, he was wide awake to the beauty he saw in every nook and cranny of a created order ‘charged with the grandeur of God.’