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Notes on “Item” a Poem by William Carlos Willam

06 Thursday Aug 2020

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Item

This, with a face

like a mashed blood orange

that suddenly

would get eyes 

and look up and scream 

War! War!

clutching her

thick, ragged coat

A piece of hat

broken shoes

War! War!

stumbling for dread

at the young men

who with their gun-butts

shove her

Sprawling—

A note 

At the foot of the page

Observations:

The first word, “This” is jarring: When “this” begins a sentence it acts to specify a particular noun: This particular apple (as opposed to all the other apples in the basket). But here, there is no specified noun: simply “This” – which then receives a modifying phrase: “with a face”. But there is no noun to be modified, only a pronoun without an original noun.

However, this lack of specificity is part of the meaning of the poem. In the third stanza we find a possessive, “her”. So we know it is a woman – especially as contrasted with the “young men” of the fifth stanza.

By not immediately identify the woman as a person – but rather as some unspecified object (note the title of the poem is “Item” – which could be the entire poem as in a “news item” or be a reference to the noun specified by “this”; she may be a woman, or simply be reduced to the story about the woman). 

We can a strange hint that there may be a person in this story, when we see the word “face”. But then why “with”; it makes it sound as if the face were an accessory which could be added or removed. Moreover, the image is immediately coupled to a “mashed blood orange”. 

When read of the young men with their gun-butts, the mashed face returns: She has been struck and her face has been destroyed. She also was seen “sprawling”.

The event comes to us out of historical order, but rather in order of comprehension: We move from the image before us – a mashed face of who knows what (it is a “this” not a “her” at first). 

Then the poet picks through the realization: eyes, a voice (she screams) hands which are known only by their action – clutching – he sees the coat, then the broken shoes, then woman now stumbling away from the young men; and here he sees the cause of her distress the young men with guns. 

Another point here: the face is indistinguishable, not quite comprehensible – because he did not see eyes at first. Note the 

that suddenly

would get eyes

The gap brought about by removing the adverb “suddenly” from the stanza of the verb “get” creates a strange distance in the realization. It seems that the poet noticed something which came out of nowhere and then too a moment to realize, oh, these are eyes looking at me.

So now we have a story, the poet comes upon a woman who has been struck in the face by a young man (they must be soldiers because they are identified with “War! War!”). She has sprawled onto the street, her face a bloody mess. She opens her eyes, clutches her old coat about her and tries to stumble to safety away from the soldiers. 

The line breaks come at grammatical structures, rather than completed concepts. As notes, “suddenly” separated not merely in a different line, but also a different stanza from its verb.

Or take these images:

clutching her

thick, ragged coat

A piece of hat

broken shoes

Clutching her what? What is clutching? Next line thick – pause – ragged coat – longer pause – A piece of hat (where is the rest of the hat) – doubled pause – broken shoes. 

By breaking up the images into distinct lines, we can imagine ourselves looking around for the hat, then the shoes – what has happened her? 

Then she begin dread stumbling to escape, standing, falling for broken shoes – trying to escape. 

And now we come to the answer about the “item” – is it the woman or the story? Well the woman certainly is being dehumanized, she is an item. But the poem uses her degradation to make her even less human: She is not the woman the poet saw, rather she is relegated to the news item. When the men strike, they render her so inhuman that they dash clean out of life and into a story: 

at the young men

who with their gun-butts

shove her

Sprawling—

A note 

At the foot of the page

When they strike her, she becomes a footnote in the story about the war. She is not important enough to consider at length, she is merely one of the many who are struck.

What then does the poem do? The poem causes us to toggle between the story about the woman and the reality of it. But it does it in a very different manner than an essay about this event could do. 

An essay has two natural starting places: the writer could start with the news item and then move backwards to the woman who is mentioned in the footnote. A sort of history of the overlooked. I am working through a biography of Napoleon at the moment. In the story of the retreat from Russia in 1812, he is listing the horrifying ravages to soldiers and peasants. The biography accounts in brief stories of soldiers being buried alive by angry peasants, prisoners of war being skinned alive, women being raped and murdered. The horror is unimaginable for me. 

One could take the time and develop more personally who has murdered or flayed or raped. 

Another way to tell this story would be start with the writer: As I was walking, I saw this woman lying in the street. At first I couldn’t tell she was a woman. 

But this poem does something which an essay could not easily do: It causes the reader to experience the event along with the poet. Rather than reading about through an essay – which would ironically make sure that she is reduced to a note on a page, an “item” – the poet forces us to confront the woman and watch her be physically injured and then reduced even further to being the note in the news item. 

The poem paradoxically gets us around the distance of the words which would make the woman an item by using words force us to experience the woman.

William Blake, To Tirzah

31 Friday Jul 2020

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This poem is a good example of how difficult it can be know what the poet intends, particularly when the poet is as deliberately ironic as William Blake. 

This poem also raises the issue of what it means to read something “in context.” Shakespeare and the Bible are famously misused by people who take a particular line wildly out of context. There is a television commercial which advertises a luxury automobile and plays a song which – in its original context — attacks pretension and put-on with material goods. But by using only a portion of the song lyric, the song meant to attack pretension is used to sell pretension.

This short poem is standing by itself one context. In that context, this poem seems to convey a sort of Gnostic Jesus, the body is bad, the soul is good, the hope of life is to be released from the body. “Tirazh” is used as a name for the Northern Kingdom of Israel, following the division of the kingdom into two after the death of Solomon. It is contrast to “Jerusalem,” which would be the heavenly and best.

Tirazh is called a mother of our earthly body which reproduces by means of sexual union, which traps us into a world of sense. The goal of this life is to be finally freed from the body – which the poet claims has been made possible by the “death of Jesus”.

But the poem was a late addition to a collection of poems known as Songs of Experience, which is paired with another collection known as Songs of Innocence. The poems also exist in a larger corpus of poems which develop Blakes philosophy, such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

To this difficulty of context, we must remember that Blake is often deliberately ironic. We can never take anything he says at “face value.”

While not at all exhaustive, the following simply raises some questions as to how to interpret this poem when it is put into the context of Blake’s remaining (and largely earlier) work and Blake’s ironic posture as a poet.

To Tirzah

Whate’er is born of moral birth

Must be consuméd with the earth

To rise from generation free, 

Then what have I do to with thee?

Whatever is born will die and return to the earth. The last line is an ironic reworking of Jesus’ words recorded in John 2:4, where Mary tells Jesus that the wedding has run out of wine and Jesus responds, “Woman, what have I to do with thee? My hour is not yet come.” So the poet, seeking to be freed from the enslaving earth says, “What have I to do with thee?”

It also seems to state the poet’s aspiration, to be freed from generation, to be freed from this mother.

He then turns to the manner in which life is continued in this world:

The sexes sprung from shame & pride

Blow’d [blossomed] in the morn: in evening died;

But mercy changed death into sleep;

The sexes rose to work & weep.

This poem was added in the latter versions of his poems, Songs of Experience, and seems to have been written around 1805. But the collection also contains poems such as The Garden of Love (1794) which contend that shame and sexual repression are the result of the “Chapel” whose doors were shut and the words “Thou shalt not” were written over the door. 

Here the shame seems to be something inherent in the fact of mortality and the body.  Is Blake now arguing that sexual shame is not the result of societal norms and oppressive morality, but rather something inherent in birth and death of the body? Was it shame and pride which gave rise to this problem prior to the body?

Thou, Mother of my Mortal part,

With cruelty didst mould my heart

And with false self-deceiving tears

Didst bind my nostrils, eyes & ears.

This stanza echoes the poem The Tyger, also from the same collection and also from 1794. The poet meditates upon the dangerous tiger, who is quite dangerous (“the fearful symmetry”). 

This dangerous beast is blamed upon God

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the lamb make thee? 

[The lamb is addressed in a poem from Songs of Innocence.]

In that poem, Blake asks

And what shoulder & what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

In Tirzah, Blake blames the heart upon the earth – the physical part. Is God from Tyger the equivalent of mother in Tirzah? Is his heart cruel like the tigers, or is it merely the product of another’s cruelty? Does his heart give rise to the outrages elsewhere discussed in Songs of Experience?

This discussion of the senses in Tirzah also sits uneasily with Blake’s longer work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

In that poem, Blake praises physical desire as “energy” and writes such “Proverbs of Hell” as 

The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.

This mortal body of energy is now the moulder of cruelty and death. Does he celebrate the energy of the body, or does he see it as destructive?

And finally

[Thou mother]

Didst close my tongue in useless clay

And me to mortal life betray

The death of Jesus set me free

Then what have I to do with thee?

Jesus, in a Gnostic vein, is used as a trope to argue for an utter freedom from the “useless clay” of the body. How exactly Jesus’ death performs this feat is not clearly stated.

The question then becomes, does this poem reflect a change in Blake’s thinking (it would not be accurate to say that his earlier position was purely a sex-drugs-rock-n-roll ethos, but it was certainly not conventional middle class anachronistically called Victorian piety)? Blake constantly writes with great irony. His poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell seeks a new negotiation of the body and soul along his idiosyncratic lines. 

But in this poem, one could read it as a movement beyond his earlier position (which was written during the early days of the French Revolution) to more escapist, Gnostic vision — complete with the common aspect of Gnostic asceticism due to its distrust of the body.

And one final question, should the context of Blake’s personal life be used to answer the question of what Blake means by this poem?

Robert Frost, A Patch of Old Snow

16 Thursday Jul 2020

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Robert Frost is a deceptive poet. His poems seem obvious and simplistic – at first blush and certainly when compared a contemporary like T.S. Eliot. But the simplicity is a trick. In this way he reminds me of St. John as opposed to St. Paul. St. John writes seeming simplicity and candor, but the sheer apparent simplicity is the means of the depth. 

To take another comparison: Shakespeare last play, The Tempest is seemingly the simplest of all his plays (except perhaps his early comedies) and yet it child like simplicity conceals its depth. Here is a seeming simple poem 

There’s a patch of old snow in a corner

That should I have guessed

Was a blow-away paper the rain

Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if 

Small print overspread it,

The news of a day I’ve forgotten—

If I ever read it.

There is a sense in the world is invisible to us. We fill in spaces, create meaning, ignore this or that. It is not that pure blank fills our mind, it is that a re-construction, a distortion or domestication takes up our mind. Thus, we see things and yet don’t. 

This poem is an invitation in the moment where something invisible becomes visible for a moment. At first read, the poem is remarkably simple: Frost notices something in a corner. It is a scrap of snow, but it really looks like some crumbled newspaper. 

But as we consider the poem there is a bit more. He didn’t actually mistake the snow for a newspaper: Rather, there seems to be a missing step in the thought: if I had not noticed it was snow, I probably would have thought it was just a newspaper. 

But there is yet another twist: Rather than merely mistaking the snow as if it were old newspaper, his contemplation actually turns the snow into newspaper:

It is speckled with grime as if 

Small print overspread it,

Thus, it is not that he mistook the snow for newspaper and then realized it was snow. Rather, he saw it was snow and then by the power of imagination transformed it into newspaper. 

So rather than being a snow which has mistaken for a newspaper and so passed by without consideration, the snow has become a newspaper in the fact of his consideration:

The news of a day I’ve forgotten

The grime in the snow is the recordation of some day. And now we come to the twist of the knife, the thing that was missed:

If I ever read it.

Thus, the patch of snow is a newspaper of some day that Frost may have actually missed. There was something which is passed, which he did not see. This patch of snow is a newspaper from that day. This also brings up another point: a thing is not comprehensible, really, until it is turned into words. You listen to music or see and painting – but to communicate what has happened, you must turn that event into words. You don’t hum the symphony, you speak of it. You don’t repaint the painting, you explain it. 

And this brings us to one more consideration here: the poem itself. 

The poet seems snow and thinks of a newspaper – a written record — from a day he had missed. He then turns that event into a written record of human words and brings us into his moment. I, by reading the poem and thinking along with him, am looking – by means of his words – at the snow, which is itself a kind of record something missed. And now, Frost’s missed day becomes my missed day. 

Thomas Campion: When to Her Lute Corinna Sings

30 Tuesday Jun 2020

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This little song by Thomas Campion (1567-1620) speaks of the beauty of Corinna’s voice as she sings. The poem works in two stanzas with a quick development of a seemingly simple idea. And yet this simple idea in its perfectly balanced symmetry of concept and structure is deceptive. 

When to her lute Corinna sings

Her voice revives the leaden strings, 

And doth in highest notes appear

As any challenged echo clear;

But when she doth of mourning speak

Ev’n with her signs the strings do break. 

And as her lute doth live or die,

Led by her passion, so must I:

For when of pleasure she doth sing,

My thoughts enjoy a sudden spring,

But if she doth of sorrow speak,

Ev’n from my heart the strings do break.

In the first stanza, the lute which accompanies her voice is made better and is commanded by the beauty of her song. The strings are “lead” until they are revived by her voice. The word “revived” is interesting, because it is to live again – not to live at all. But it seems the idea is that the lute is silent until Corinna starts to sing. 

Accompanied by her lute, Corinna sings “to her lute”.  The singer and the lute form a closed circle. The strings come to life (as presumably did last time only to die when she stopped singing last); and the strings become filled with sorrow, when her voice becomes filled with sorrow. 

This reminds of Orpheus, whose song could make rocks and trees dance. As Shakespeare’s short poem reads:

ORPHEUS 

Orpheus with his lute made trees

And the mountain tops that freeze

    Bow themselves when he did sing:

To his music plants and flowers

Ever sprung; as sun and showers

    There had made a lasting spring.

Every thing that heard him play,

Even the billows of the sea,

    Hung their heads and then lay by.

In sweet music is such art,

    Killing care and grief of heart

    Fall asleep, or hearing, die.

That remarkable power of song then works not merely upon the inanimate lute, but upon the poet.  The poet enters this closed circle: What happens between Corinna and the lute now brings him into its charm: 

And as her lute doth live or die,

Led by her passion, so must I:

The passions in Corinna’s voice bring along the poet. The lute which perhaps changes insensibly changes the sensible poet. The passions of her voice are so profound that he no longer has say over himself:

So must I. 

It is involuntary. 

The circle is then completely closed: the poet is subsumed back into the image of the lute. Note the progression here from “thoughts” (which belong to the man), to “strings” which belong to the lute:

For when of pleasure she doth sing,

My thoughts enjoy a sudden spring,

But if she doth of sorrow speak,

Ev’n from my heart the strings do break.

His very heart has become the lute. This ability to bring the conceit (the controlling thought) from lute to poet to lute is an aspect which raises Campion from the great mass of versifiers. 

There is then one final twist to the poem: the poem itself is an artifact. Corinna is gone. I have no idea who she is. Her voice was there in a moment and has disappeared forever. But this poem remains being as the echo of her voice

And doth in highest notes appear

As any challenged echo clear;

The reader who follows along with Campion can, by the work of imagination, enter into this circle of Corinna and her lute by means of the poem. Corinna’s voice does charm by means of this echo and we enter into this singular moment by means of the poem from 400 years ago. 

And in that the moment is no loner singular, but is transported across time and space. Such things may not “mean” anything to the great powers of countries and armies and economies and science. But there is a beauty here in art which should make the mighty blush. The politics of James (King of England) cannot affect now like Corinna’s song has by means of Campion’s poem.

One final note: I have always found it striking that the Bible routinely portrays heaven as filled with music.

The soprano Jennifer O’Loughlin:

Edward Taylor, Was there a palace of pure gold.3

24 Wednesday Jun 2020

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Having fully set out the problem, Taylor prays for a resolution. If he is not adequate by nature, then he seeks to be made adequate by grace. That is, it is not a work of Taylor’s effort, but a work of God, “this worthy work of thine.”

The prayer is threefold: first that his heart be made a sacred vessel (thy golden box); second, filled with the correction disposition (love divine); third, offered up to God.

Oh! That my heart was made thy golden box

Full of affections and of love divine

Knit all in tassels, and the true-love knots,

To garnish o’re this worthy work of thine.

This box and all therein more rich than gold

In sacred flames I to thee offer would.

The image of gold is used for those things most proper to God.  In the previous stanza the poet notes that he had tied “knots” – had decorated the “earth’s toys” lovingly with flowers; but in this stanza, the God-given new heart would decorate the be a “golden box” impossibly knit together from tassels and flower (knots). 

The box would contain “affections” and “love divine”. 

The golden box so decorated would be more wonderful than a mere gold box. 

And last, the box would then be offered up as a sacrifice to God. He would spend this box “in sacred flames.”

The concept of sacrifice here may sound odd, because a fiery sacrifice would be the destruction of the golden box. While Taylor is perfectly willing to mix metaphors (a golden box made of flowers), the concept here is more likely the concept of a “living sacrifice”:

Romans 12:1 (AV) 

1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. 

If he so reworked and remade, then he will be fit for that heavenly pleasure he desires:

With thy rich tissue my poor soul array:

And lead me to thy Father’s House above.

Thy graces’ storehouse make my soul I pray.

Thy praise shall then wear tassels of my love.

If thou conduct me in thy Father’s Ways,

I’ll the golden trumpet of thy praise. 

The word “tissue” does not here mean an insubstantial paper. The older meaning was a cloth interwoven with gold or silver: the clothing of royalty. And so dress me like a prince and lead to the Father’s House. 

Father’s House comes the Lord’s words in the Upper Room:

John 14:1–2 (AV) 

1 Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. 

By the way, “mansion” does not mean separate enormous houses: the Greek here speaks of a place to live, a dwelling place. 

The prayer to be led, is a common prayer in the Psalms; which undoubtably was behind Taylor’s prayer in the poem. For instance:

Psalm 43:3 (AV) 

3 O send out thy light and thy truth: let them lead me; 

let them bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy tabernacles. 

He prays not merely to be led, but rather for the entire renovation of the soul to be a storehouse filled with grace. The idea of grace is free work of God in him: it is the good which God does and gives. 

Then finally being filled with God’s grace and no longer a “leaden mind”, a “blockhead”, he will burst forth in praise. In fact, the praise will be “tassels” a decoration of his love: thus bringing the image of a decorated heart again into view.

This time, if God will bring Taylor to that “Palace of Pure Gold” he will no longer be dumb but will now offer praise. 

Thomas Hardy On a Fine Morning

19 Friday Jun 2020

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How can one have comfort in an impersonal accidental universe? This was a great problem for Hardy. The world will simply calmly destroy us.

So he asks the question where can I find solace?

It can’t be from our actual experience:

Whence comes Solace?—Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Nor from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.

There is just an accident a surprise which permits him to see grey appear to be gold. Even shadows are turning to sun.


Thus do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its irised embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man.

That last line is the key: I am somehow meaningful. The earth is meant for human life.

This is the point where Hardy differs from Lewis. That surprise of joy led Hardy to have a moments accident – a dream. For Lewis the surprise of joy requires an explanation: it can’t be grounded in life experience which is suffering. Where then?

Misery requires no explanation of life is a bare cosmic accident: why should the ends meet? Darwin only requires existence not the good true or beautiful: those have no anchor in a world of chance. Beauty is purposeful, ordered.

Hardy can’t give a better explanation for his morning than “dream.”

Edward Taylor, Would God I in that Golden City Were.3

13 Wednesday May 2020

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At this point, the poet continues on with the absurdity which lies at the heart of Christianity: How and why could or would God be joined to us?

I have heard atheist mock Christian belief with the ridiculous thought that God – if there were a God – would concern his Godship with a particular set of beasts roaming around on a small planet around an insignificant star in the midst of an enormous universe.

However, that absurdity is the nature of the Christian claim. One can reject it; but it is silly to think that one has come upon some novel insight. Even before we realized the size of the universe, we were well aware of the ridiculous claim.

Here Taylor presses home the point: it would be more reasonable to believe a king married a flea than to believe God should have dealings with us:

My Maker, he my husband? Oh! Strange joy!
If kings wed worms and monarchs mites we should
Glory spouse shame, a prince a snake or fly
An angel court an ant, all wonder would.
Let such wed worms, snakes, serpents, devils, flies.
Less wonder than the wedding in our eyes.

At this point, it would be useful to take time to consider what is meant by “marriage in this context. It plainly cannot mean an actual human marriage. Rather, marriage is one of the many images which God has given in the world to help us understand what it means for God to love us.

First, it is not the only image: other incompatible images are used such as Father and son or Lord and servant or Creator and creature. There are, for instance, 95 different images used to describe the Church in the New Testament.

To understand this marriage imagery, John Piper helps in his bookSex and the Supremacy of Chirst:

In answering this question let’s remember that knowing someone in the fullest biblical sense is defined by sexual imagery. Genesis 4:1, “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.” Knowing here refers to sexual intercourse. Or again in Matthew 1:24- 25 we read, “When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.” He “knew her not” means he did not have sexual relations with her.

Now I don’t mean that every time the word know is used in the Bible there are sexual connotations. That’s not true. But what I do mean is that sexual language in the Bible for our covenant relationship to God does lead us to think of knowing God on the analogy of sexual intimacy and ecstasy. I don’t mean that we somehow have sexual relations with God or he with man. That’s a pagan thought. It’s not Christian. But I do mean that the intimacy and ecstasy of sexual relations points to what knowing God is meant to be.

The language of marriage and sex helps as a metaphor to understand God’s love. Since we could not understand God directly, God created metaphors in the world so that could understand God analogically. The metaphor helps to understand the original.

Taylor continues on with this theme of the absurdity of God’s love. The analogy of a King wedding a mite is insufficient. Christ’s love for me makes less sense than a king marrying an ant:

I am to Christ more base, than to a King
A mite, fly, worm, serpent, devil is,
Or can be, being tumbled all in sin,
And shall I be his spouse? How good is this?
It is too good to be declared to be thee.
But not too good to be believed by me.

Human sin makes a human being more unfitting of relation to God than does mud make a worm less fitting to an emperor. And yet this Good News (which is the meaning of Gospel) is not too good to be rejected

The heart of the Gospel is not going to heaven, it is being with God. We are not seeking a place but a friend and more than a friend.

In this stanza, Taylor hits upon the grace of God which first works upon us before we believe and love Him. The Spirit first speaks these words to us before we believe. As it reads in 1 John, we love Christ because he first loved us:

Yet to this wonder, this found in mee,
I am not only base but backward clay,
When Christ doth woo, and till his Spirit be
His spokesman to compel me I deny.
I am so base and forward to him, he
Appear as wonders wonder wedding me.

The poem ends with a prayer that Spirit work upon his heart to make him into the man who can be conformed and fitting to this call:

Seeing, Dear Lord, it’s thus, thy Spirit take
And send thy spokesman to my soul, I pray.
Thy saving grace my wedding garments make:
Thy spouses frame into my soul convey.
I then shall be thy bride espoused by thee
And thou my bridegroom dear espoused shalt be.

Marriage is the beginning and end of the Bible. In the Garden of Eden God performs the first marriage. The eschatological hope of the Church is the marriage party of the Lamb.

Edward Taylor, Would God I in that Golden City Were.2

09 Saturday May 2020

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May my rough voice and blunt tongue but spell

My tale (for tune they can’t) perhaps there may

Some angel catch an end of’t up and tell

In Heaven when he doth return that way

He’ll make thy palace, Lord, all over ring

With it in songs, thy saint and angels sing.

The poet cannot now come to heaven; for as Paul writes, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. And thus, he prays that perhaps his song spoken on earth might be heard by an angel and delivered to Heaven – and there it might be sung.

The idea that an angel might hear his song and deliver it to Heaven is a remarkable conceit, but that precise idea does not appear in the Bible. There are numerous instances of an angel speaking to a human being, but I can think of no instance in which an angel delivered an earthly message to heaven. It should be understood that the word “angel” means messenger.

The idea of speaking with a rough voice and a blunt tongue seems to be most related to two passages. First, when God calls Moses to speak to Pharaoh, Moses protests that he cannot deliver the message because he is a defective speaker:

Exodus 4:10 (AV)

 10 And Moses said unto the LORD, O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.

The related passage which also may have informed Taylor’s poem comes from the book of Romans where Paul explains that the Holy Spirit corrects our prayers:

Romans 8:26–27 (AV)

 26 Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. 27 And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.

In the next stanza, Taylor continues with the theme of his inability. He then addresses the rank absurdity which lies at the heart of Christianity – if God is so great, so perfect, so holy, how could God also love us:

 

I know not how to speak’t, it is so good;

Shall Mortal and Immortal marry? Nay,

Man marry God? God be a match for mud?

This King of Glory wed a worm? Mere clay?

This is the case. The wonder too in bliss.

Thy maker is thy husband, hear’st thou this?

That marriage was given not merely for human comfort but ultimately as the basis for understanding the relationship between God and human beings is intrinsic to the Christian understanding of redemption. A parable by Kierkegaard can help open this idea:

Once upon a time, there was a prince who was single and very eager to marry a lovely maiden for his future queen. Near his palace was a large city, and often he rode his carriage down to the city to take care of various chores for his father. One day, to reach a particular merchant, he had to go through a rather poor section. He happened to glance out of the window and right into the eyes of a beautiful maiden.

He had occasion on the next few days to return to the section of the city–drawn as he was by the eyes of the maiden. And more than that, he had the good fortune once or twice actually to meet this young girl. Soon he began to feel that he was in love with her. But now he had a problem. How should he proceed to procure her hand?

Of course, he could order her to the palace and there propose marriage. But even a prince would like to feel that the girl he marries wants to marry him. Or perhaps, somewhat more graciously, he could arrive at her door in his most resplendent uniform and, with a bow, ask her hand. But even a prince wants to marry for love.

Again, he could masquerade as a peasant and try to gain her interest. After he proposed, he could pull off his ‘mask.’ Still, the masquerade would be ‘phony.’ He really could not manage it.

Finally a real solution presented itself to his mind. He would give up his kingly role and move into her neighborhood. There he would take up work as, say, a carpenter. During his work in the day and during his time off in the evening, he would get acquainted with the people, begin to share their interests and concerns, begin to talk their language. And in due time, should fortune be with him, he would make her acquaintance in a natural way. And should she come to love him, as he had already come to love her, then he would ask for her hand.

Or a passage from Thomas Watson:

Christ is full of love, as he is of merit. What was it but love, that he should save us, and not the angels? Among the rarities of the loadstone, this is not the least, that leaving the gold and pearl, it should draw iron to it, which is a baser kind of metal; so, that Christ should leave the angels, those more noble spirits, the gold and pearl, and draw mankind to him, how doth this proclaim his love? Love was the wing on which he did fly into the virgin’s womb. 1. How transcendent is Christ’s love to the saints! The apostle calls it a love ‘that passeth knowledge,’ Eph. 3:19. It is such a love as God the Father bears to Christ; the same for quality, though not equality, John 15:9. ‘As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you:’ A believer’s heart is the garden where Christ hath planted this sweet flower of his love. It is the channel thro’ which the golden stream of his affection runs. 2. How distinguishing is Christ’s love, 1 Cor. 1:26. ‘Not many wise, not many noble are called.’ In the old law God passed by the lion and the eagle, and took the dove for sacrifice; that God should pass by so many of birth and parts, and that the lot of free grace should fall upon thee; O the depth of divine grace! How invincible is the love of Christ! ‘It is strong as death,’ Cant. 8:6. Death might take away his life, not this love; and as death, so neither sin could wholly quench that divine flame of love; the church had her infirmities, her sleepy fits, Cant. 5:2 but though blacked and sullied, yet still a dove; Christ could see the faith, and wink at the failing.

 

Thomas Watson, “A Christian on the Mount, or a Treatise Concerning Meditation,” in Discourses on Important and Interesting Subjects, Being the Select Works of the Rev. Thomas Watson, vol. 1 (Edinburgh; Glasgow: Blackie, Fullarton, & Co.; A. Fullarton & Co., 1829), 212–213.

The picture of the love between God and humanity being symbolized as marriage is the backdrop for the book of Hosea. In Isaiah, the particular image of maker and husband is given:

Isaiah 54:4–5 (AV)

4 Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame: for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more. 5 For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth shall he be called.

And in the letter to Ephesians, Paul makes plain this point:

Ephesians 5:30–33 (AV)

30 For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. 31 For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. 32 This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. 33 Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.

 

 

 

William Carlos Williams, “The Farmer”

25 Wednesday Mar 2020

Posted by in Genesis, Literature, Uncategorized

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(Photo by Ian Livesey)

The farmer deep in thought

is pacing through the rain

among his black fields, with

hands in pockets,

in his head

the harvest already planted.

A cold wind ruffles the water

among the browned weeds.

On all sides

the world rolls coldly away:

black orchards

darkened by the March clouds-

leaving room for thought.

Down past the brushwood

bristling by

the rainsluiced wagonroad

looms the artist figure of

the farmer – composing

antagonist

 

 

There are so many things wonderful about this poem. In no systematic form are some observations:

The portrait: The portrait is remarkably well-drawn. Notice the farmer is shown in silhouette: we see his posture, but we have no description of his personal features. We don’t know the color of his clothes, his eyes, his hair, et cetera.

But the world has colors: browned weeds, black orchards, darkened.

We see the world around the farmer in fine details the wind ruffles the water, there are March clouds, the road is “rainsluiced”. But there are other aspects which are missing from the description.

The parties: The poem ends with the word “antagonist”. The farmer is plotting his attack upon this deranged world by putting it in order and planting his harvest. The farmer is also an artist, who has a vision of beauty which he is going to wrought in the world.

The world is cold, forbidding and filled with death: even the orchards are “black”. The world is one of chaos, and the farmer is going to overcome the chaos and make a thing of use and order.

There is an interesting aside, “the world rolls by … leaving room for thought”. To the farmer, the chaos is an opportunity for order. He sees his harvest and nothing has yet been planted.

The combination of artist and antagonist may be an echo of Genesis 1. The world having come into existence is still without order, “The world was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” But God overcome the disorder as both antagonist and artist. The farmer here does the same thing.

In fact, God plants a garden and places the first human beings in that garden. The farmer here is planning on planting a garden and obtaining a harvest himself.

I cannot say that Williams is explicitly thinking of Genesis here. There are no unambiguous allusions to the English text of Genesis. But the form is here.

So the question: is it proper to make a connection or consider the comparison where the author has not necessarily forced the connection between the two?  Yes.

Here are some reasons: First, a comparison between any two things has the potential for providing information about both. A comparison may lead one to realize a connection which was not previously apparent. Whenever come to some-thing or some-one, we are making comparisons with other similar things or ones we already know. We understand the thing we are looking at by comparing it to our previous knowledge.

Thus, making a purposeful comparison may help us to see something which was already there but not previously noticed.

Second, there are certain forms of thought which seem to be inherent in human beings. The Golden Bough is an mountain of cultural comparisons of forms from many cultures and times. There are certain ideas which just seem to make sense to us people.

That store of common forms is even greater within a culture. The ideas of Genesis would likely be familiar to Williams merely by living in his world at that time. Biblical references would be commonplace. For example, in Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain makes a memorable joke based upon Tom’s lack of Biblical knowledge, but Twain’s counting on the reader knowing the facts immediately and without explanation.

There are myriad of details about the poem which deserves consider, such as three prepositional phrases built around “in” at the beginning of the poem: the farmer is in thought, his hands are in his pocket, his harvest is in his head.

Compare that to his pacing in his black fields – where he is thinking and the black orchards leave room for thought.

The structure of the poem is a marvel.

A final observation: Williams is an artist who is composing a portrait of the farmer. The farmer is an artist who is composing a portrait of a harvest.  Williams takes all of the unorganized, but very present details of the scene (there is a man walking on a blustery March day) and turns this into ordered art.

Edward Taylor, When Thy Bright Beams

18 Wednesday Dec 2019

Posted by in Edward Taylor, Uncategorized, Worship, Worship

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(2009 photo contest winner for the Nature / Landscapes category. Photo by Kurt Svendsgaard/USFWS)

When thy bright beams, my Lord, do strike mine eye,

Methinks I then could truly chide out-right

My hidebound soul that stands so niggardly

That scarce a thought gets glorified by’t.

My quaintest metaphors are ragged stuff,

Making the sun seem like a mullipuff.

 

When I am struck evidence of your glory, I see how little right effect that glory works into my soul. I chide myself that I show so little effect up me. The words which I produce are of so little value.

“chide out-right”: Scold, upbraid.

“My hidebound soul”: his soul is unresponsive.

“Niggardly”: selfish, tightfisted: It is as if his soul is a miser which will pay out no praise.

“scarce a thought get glorified”: The glory of God does not translate into transformed thinking.  In Romans 12:2 Paul calls up us to be “transformed by the renewal of your mind”

“quaintest metaphors”: my most clever metaphors. The style of writing exercised by Taylor gives great emphasis to the cleverness of metaphor. He here raises his most able talent and says that it means nothing: it is “ragged stuff”.

He ends the stanza with a comic comparison: rather than raise what I know in admiration by means of comparison, I turn the very sun into a fuzzball.

 

It’s my desire, thou shouldst be glorified:

But when thy glory shine before mine eye,

I pardon crave, lest my desire be pride,

Or bed thy glory in cloudy sky.

The sun grows wan; and angels palefac’d shrink

Before thy shine, which I besmear with ink.

 

It is my aim – my desire – that you, God, should be honored by my work. But I see your already existing glory, rather than thinking of some means of providing you greater honor; I feel myself ashamed. I ask that you should forgive me (I pardon crave).

 

Rather than my writing providing something honoring to, I fear that I will dishonor you with my words. Rather than adding a luster to God’s glory, Taylor’s words will have the effect of being a “cloudy sky” to the sun. His poem will merely “besmear with ink” the glory of God.

 

This realization that (1) his soul has not responded rightly to the realization of God’s glory and (2) his complete inability to glorify God, leads to a crisis: What will I do? That crisis is set forth in the third stanza:

 

But shall the bird sign forth thy praise and shall

The little bee present her thankful hum?

But I who see thy shining glory fall

Before mine eyes, stand blockish, dull, and dumb?

Whether I speak, or speechless stand, I spy,

I fail thy glory: therefor, pardon cry.

 

Even the most simple things give glory to God: birds singing, bees humming.  This matter that all nature praises God is a theme in Scripture. For instance, Psalm 149

 

Psalm 148:7–10 (AV 1873)

7          Praise the Lord from the earth,

Ye dragons, and all deeps:

8          Fire, and hail; snow, and vapour;

Stormy wind fulfilling his word:

9          Mountains, and all hills;

Fruitful trees, and all cedars:

10         Beasts, and all cattle;

Creeping things, and flying fowl:

 

I do like “dragons”, but the contemporary translations render as something like “great sea creatures”.  All of nature praises God, “All thy works shall praise thee”. Ps. 145.10.

 

So, if all of creation praises God, then certainly Taylor – who has better reason and better ability to praise God – must do something. It is particularly wrong for Taylor to stand agape and say nothing,

 

But I who see thy shining glory fall

Before mine eyes, stand blockish, dull, and dumb?

 

So Taylor has no escape: If he praises God or he fails to praise, both will be wrong:

 

Whether I speak, or speechless stand, I spy,

I fail thy glory: therefor, pardon cry.

 

What can he possibly do but seek mercy?

 

 

 

But this I find: my rhymes do better suit

Mine own dispraise than tune forth praise to thee.

Yet being chide, whether consonant, or mute,

I force my tongue to tattle, as you see.

That I thy glorious praise my trumpet right

Be thou my song, and make Lord, me thy pipe.

 

He acknowledges that his best ability in terms of poetry is to note his own deficiency rather than God’s glory:

But this I find: my rhymes do better suit

Mine own dispraise than tune forth praise to thee.

 

And God, you also see since I deserve no matter I do (“whether consonant or mute”), but you also see that I cannot help but speak and praise you.

 

So then, Taylor prays that God will work in Taylor’s praise to remedy his defect. In making this prayer, Taylor is seeming relying upon the promise of Romans 8:27 that when we pray the Holy Spirit will intercede for us – that He will effectively correct our defective prayers.

 

He then ends with a praise to God’s great glory which shall be revealed on Judgment Day.