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Edward Taylor, My Shattered Fancy.1

06 Friday Nov 2020

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Edward Taylor, Meditation 29, My Shattered Fancy, poem, Poetry

Meditation 29

John 20:17

My shattered fancy stole away from me

(Wits run a-wooling over Eden’s Park)

And in God’s Garden saw a Golden Tree,

Whose heart was all divine, and gold its bark.

Whose glorious limbs and fruitful branches strong 

With saints and angels bright are richly hung.

The opening image of this poem is remarkable. His “fancy” runs away! At this time “fancy” referred particularly to the creative imagination. We would say this is a “flight of fancy,” a running away of the imagination. 

It is interesting that his fancy has been “shattered.” Why or how it became shattered is not said. It as if we have come upon a crime scene or a moment of chaos. His imagination has taken off.  His “wits” – his thoughts have run off.

The phrase “a-wooling” does not appear in the Shorter OED. The verb “wooling” appears in the Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases from 1854 where it refers to picking up scraps of wool (this usage is also attested by the OED). The meaning her seems to mean something like our usage in the phrase, “wild and woolly” – his wit is completely out of control.

But where is it out of control? In Eden’s Park. This is an interesting turn of phrase: it is meant to allude to the Garden of Eden – but he uses the word “Park” would here mean a very orderly garden – a wealthy estate, well laid out and maintained. But his imagination is blasting through this precise park.  

The use of the word wool suggests a ram running wild across a pristine green park with well-attended trees.

This park is not merely Eden, it becomes “God’s Garden” which transports us from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22:

Revelation 22:1–5 (KJV 1900) 

And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. 2 In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner offruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: 4 And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. 5 And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever. 

And here with find the Tree of Life transported from Eden to God’s Garden.

Thus, Taylor’s wild fancy has run from Eden to the New Heavens and New Earth in one wild run.

Since we will look more at the tree and branches later in the poem, we will pass that and look to the tree: it has a heart. What sort of tree has a heart? This is not a normal tree but it is something more. 

And there is one final point which cannot be missed here: Taylor is laying hold upon a sight of Christ by his imagination. I do not mean that he is speculating. As we will see, he is intensely scriptural in each place. This is a sort of picturesque theology. But he is imaging this event: he is making it present and real by seeing it. 

This is certainly not the most common of spiritual practices of present– at least for someone who would hold Taylor’s theology.  I do not believe I have ever heard a sermon which extolled imagination. This of course is what Taylor is doing throughout his meditations. But in this place he makes that paramount.

The only explanation I can have for his fancy being shattered is the overwhelming beauty of his vision. 

Edward Taylor, 28th Meditation.5

13 Tuesday Oct 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Edward Taylor, John

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28th Meditation, Edward Taylor, Gospel of John, Grace, Living Water, poem, Poetry

Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?: The Samaritan Woman encounters Christ at the Well of ...
Paolo Veronese: Christ and the Samaritan woman at the well.

In this last stanza, Taylor shifts the metaphor slightly. Now rather than wine from a cask it is water in a spring. Just as he never directly uses the word “wine,” but rather makes the allusion, here he never uses the word “water.”

The concept of water is apparent from the words “font,” “sea,” “spring,” and to a lesser extent “flow.” The dispersion of the grace from God to Taylor is still one of great to small: a “sea” of grace which “drops” into a “vessel.” The vessel is still “earthen.” 

But here there is something new. The intake of the grace results in dispersion of the grace from Taylor, “Spring up O well. My cup with grace make flow.” The grace which comes to him is not stagnant, but flows out. 

Finally, there is one additional new movement: The reception of grace itself becomes praise: “They drops will on my vessel sing thy praise.” And finally, this will become the basis for Taylor’s praise, “I’ll sing this song, when these drops embrace.” This actually makes for an interesting move in Taylor’s poetry: As he works through a matter, we realize that the poem is not the recollection of some earlier event but is itself the working through the difficulty with God. The poem in the end is the praise which he is seeking to bring at the beginning. 

My earthen vessel make thy font also:

And let thy sea my spring of grace in’t raise

Spring up O well. My cup with grace make flow.

They drops will on my vessel sing thy praise.

I’ll sing this song, when these drops embrace.

My vessel now’s a vessel of thy grace.

In making this movement to the reception and then dispersal of grace under the image of water, Taylor is again mining the Gospel of John. There are two places in John which distinctly makes this move. The first is in John 4, where Jesus sits with the Samaritan woman at the well. He asks her for drink of water. She says the well is deep, and I have nothing to draw water. He then turns the question on her and says, she should ask him for living water:

11 The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water? 12 Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle? 13 Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: 14 But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. 15 The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw. 

John 4:11–15. This is precisely the position of Taylor: He wants that living water. He knows that if he has this water, the water will well up within him so that he becomes a spring of the water:

My earthen vessel make thy font also:

And let thy sea my spring of grace in’t raise

Spring up O well. My cup with grace make flow.

He wants to become a font of the grace: it flows into and then through him.

The next source for Taylor’s imagery is found in John 7:

37 In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. 38 He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. 39 (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.) 

John 7:37–39. Again, water flows in and then through. However, on this instance, the imagery is further complicated by introduction of the new element of the Spirit. 

Thus, in this accumulation and complication of imagery, Taylor is not operating in the “normal” vein of a poet who carefully develops a single image. But he is mining his source text for imagery concepts and is not operating in a manner contrary to John’s Gospel.

The final element in the poem comes from the final scene in John’s Gospel. When the Risen Christ appears to the Disciples, Thomas is not present and famously doubts. But when Thomas himself meets Jesus, Thomas praises, “My Lord and my God!” John 20:28.

Edward Taylor, 28th Meditation.3

08 Thursday Oct 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Edward Taylor, Grace, Martin Luther, Puritan

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28th Meditation, Edward Taylor, Grace, John 1, Literature, poem, Poetry

Thou, thou my Lord, art full, top full of Grace,

The golden sea of grace whose springs thence come

And precious drills, boiling in every place.

Untap they cask and let my cup catch some

Although it is in an earthen vessel’s case

Let it no empty vessel be of grace.

This stanza begins with two stressed syllables separated by a pause: THOU — THOU my LORD…. The emphasis thus falls most heavily upon the addressee. This functions almost as a new invocation: he has asked to fill him, and here he repeats and makes even more emphatic the call for grace. 

In the second half of the line, Taylor does something similar where he repeats “full” with an emphasis falling on the second full (which is not merely full, but is “top full”). 

Although it is a “fault” with the line, it ends with an emphasized “grace”. The fault is that Taylor has put 6 stresses in a 5 stress line. Yet even though it is a technical fault, it helps underscore the desire of the poet. I truly need this. 

The second line smooths out with a fine alliteration of “g” from the end of the first line: grace … golden … grace.

The springs are rising up from the depth of the sea: the sea is so completely filled with grace, and grace wells-up continually so that the surface is “boiling” with rising streams of grace. And so matches the nature of the gospel of our grace: Our need is continual, but the grace of God in Jesus Christ is greater, inexhaustible. No matter the depth of our need, it cannot begin to exhaust the supply. 

A hymn has it

Grace, grace, God’s grace

Grace that is greater than all our sin.

The theology which underlies Taylor’s prayer in this poem: his own inability and need vs. Christ’s inexhaustive grace owes much to Luther’s statement in the Heidelberg Disputations no 18, “It is certain that one must utterly despair of oneself in order to be made fit to receive the grace of Christ.” Whether Taylor ever read the disputations, I do not know. But the theology set forth there was much developed by Lutheran and Reformed theologians and showed up theology which Taylor would have known.

He then uses the image of a cask filled with wine: He asks that the cask be tapped and that the grace flow into the empty, earthen vessel, until it is full:

Untap they cask and let my cup catch some

Although it is in an earthen vessel’s case

Let it no empty vessel be of grace.

Edward Taylor, 28th Meditation.1

26 Saturday Sep 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Edward Taylor, Literature, Puritan

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28th Meditation, Edward Taylor, Meditation, poem, Poetry, Puritan Poetry, When I Lord send some bits of glory home

The 28th Meditation of Edward Taylor takes as its text John 1:16. In context, the passage (as it would have stood in Taylor’s Bible) reads as follows:

14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth. 15 John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was before me. 16 And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. 17 For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. 18 No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. 

John 1:14–18  

The poem will center upon the receipt of the grace which is in the Word made Flesh. However, as is a consistent theme in Taylor, it begins with the distance from God and the disorder of mind. Although not discussed in this place, the noetic effect of sin – the disordering effect of sin upon the thoughts, affections and behavior – lies behind  his description of his sense as “bewildered” and his “befogged dark fancy”. 

It should be noted that the effects are not simply in a cause-and-effect relationship with some particular sinful action, but are inherent in any human being on this earth. The damage done by Adam’s fall is not completely removed prior to one’s death and personal resurrection.

The poem begins with a self-conscious discussion of the poem itself as a matter of praise, sending some “glory home”. But this glory is returned in small sums, “bits” rather than in “lumps.” (Incidentally, “lumps” does not have the negative connotations it does in contemporary vernacular.) The first stanza reads:

When I Lord, send some bits of glory home

(For lumps I lack) my messenger, I find,

Bewildered, lose his way being alone

In my befogged dark fancy, clouded mind.

Thy bits of glory packed in shreds of praise

My messenger doth lose, losing his ways.

The first line creates an interesting rhythmic effect by beginning with a Bacchic foot: “when I LORD” followed by a pause.  The unusual English rhythm ending on a stress followed by a pause is difficult to read. The awkwardness creates an emphasis on the words. The vocative, Lord, would normally stand at the beginning of a clause, “Lord, when I send ….” Thus, the relationship between “I” and “Lord” is foregrounded.

The remainder of the first line and the second then flow along more easily. However, the poem introduces a puzzling reference, “my messenger”. The messenger is the means by which he is returning glory to the Lord. The precise identity of the messenger is not otherwise clarified. What is the means by which he is sending glory home: the messenger is the poem itself.

And so, as is common in Taylor, his poem is in part about the poem itself. His thinking which creates the poem is bewildered. His “befogged dark fancy” would be the weakness of his ability to conceive and create the poem.

And here comes the problem: he seeks to return some glory to the Lord within the praise which is the poem itself, but the glory falls out (is lost) from the poem:

Thy bits of glory packed in shreds of praise

My messenger doth lose, losing his ways.

Notes on “Item” a Poem by William Carlos Willam

06 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature

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Item, Literature, poem, Poetry, William Carlos Williams

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.

Edward Taylor, Oh Wealthy Theme.4

01 Saturday Aug 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Christology, Edward Taylor

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christology, Edward Taylor, Justice, mercy, poem, Poetry

All office fulness with all office gifts

Embossed are in thee, whereby thy grace

Doth treat both God and man, brings up by hifts

Black sinner and white justice to embrace:

Making the glory of God’s justice shine

And making sinners to God’s glory climb.

Office:  At this point, Taylor is using the standard theological language of “office” to describe the work of Jesus Christ. It is a reference to particular aspects of Christ’s work as prophet, priest and king. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, questions 23-27 read as follows:

Q. 23. What offices doth Christ execute as our Redeemer?

A. Christ, as our Redeemer, executeth the offices of a prophet [a], of a priest [b], and of a king [c], both in his estate of humiliation and exaltation.

[a]. Deut. 18:18; Acts 2:33; 3:22-23; Heb. 1:1-2

[b]. Heb. 4:14-15; 5:5-6

[c]. Isa. 9:6-7; Luke 1:32-33; John 18:37; 1 Cor. 15:25

Q. 24. How doth Christ execute the office of a prophet?

A. Christ executeth the office of a prophet, in revealing to us, by his Word [a] and Spirit [b,] the will of God for our salvation [c].

[a]. Luke 4:18-19, 21; Acts 1:1-2; Heb. 2:3

[b]. John 15:26-27; Acts 1:8; 1 Pet. 1:11

[c]. John 4:41-42; 20:30-31

Q. 25. How doth Christ execute the office of a priest?

A. Christ executeth the office of a priest, in his once offering up of himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice [a], and reconcile us to God [b]; and in making continual intercession for us [c].

[a]. Isa. 53; Acts 8:32-35; Heb. 9:26-28; 10:12

[b]. Rom. 5:10-11; 2 Cor. 5:18; Col. 1:21-22

[c]. Rom. 8:34; Heb. 7:25; 9:24

Q. 26. How doth Christ execute the office of a king?

A. Christ executeth the office of a king, in subduing us to himself, in ruling and defending us [a], and in restraining and conquering all his

and our enemies [b].

[a]. Ps. 110:3; Matt. 28:18-20; John 17:2; Col. 1:13

[b]. Ps. 2:6-9; 110:1-2; Matt. 12:28; 1 Cor. 15:24-26; Col. 2:15

What Taylor means is that Christ fulfills the work of prophet, priest and king in the Incarnation, and that also Christ has the “gifts,” the abilities to fulfill such work.

Treat God and man: Christ, in his unique position as God Incarnate can deal equally with God and with Human Beings. He can communicate between the two as a bridge before the finite and infinite, the creator and creature. 

Justice and mercy: The concept which causes Taylor to so praise, is that Christ, by means of his unique position being God and Man, can reconcile two completely opposite demands. 

Justice by its nature requires satisfaction of the guilty party. If one is guilty, it is unjust for the law to ignore the demand. To understand this point, perhaps you need to feel it. 

Imagine that someone you dearly loved was victimized by a brutal criminal. This criminal was then brought before a judge, where the fact of the crime was unquestionably established. However, the judge simply determined to let the criminal free without any penalty. You would rightly be angry: the law was unjust in permitting the guilty to go free. 

Thus, God – to be God – must be perfectly just and cannot ignore crime. 

However, this presents an unsolvable problem for humanity. The wrong done to an infinitely perfect being does not permit an easy resolution. What could we possibly do to satisfy the justice of God? 

The prophet Micah put it this way:

Micah 6:6–7 (ESV) 

            6           “With what shall I come before the Lord,

and bow myself before God on high? 

                        Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, 

with calves a year old? 

            7           Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, 

with ten thousands of rivers of oil? 

                        Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, 

the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” 

What we need is mercy from God. 

How then can God be perfectly just (fully punishing crime) and merciful (passing over crime)? 

Jesus as God and Man stands in for humanity. God’s justice is brought upon Jesus who suffers as a substitute and thus obtains mercy for human beings. In the act of faith and repentance, God transfers our guilt to Christ and Christ’s righteousness to us and so the sinner and justice “embrace.”

William Blake, To Tirzah

31 Friday Jul 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Hermeneutics, Literature

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Context, hermeneutics, Interpretation, Literature, poem, Poetry, Romantic Literature, Songs of Experience, To Tirzah, William Blake

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?

Edward Taylor Oh Wealthy Theme.3

24 Friday Jul 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Christology, Edward Taylor

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Christ, Edward Taylor, poem, Poetry, Puritan Poetry

Oh! Wealthy box: more golden far than gold

A case more worth than wealth: a richer delph

Than rubies; cabinet than pearls here told

A purse more glittering than glory ‘tiself

A golden storehouse of all fullness: shelf

Of heavenly plate. All fullness in thyself. 

The box which holds the fullness of Christ, then must be Christ himself. He compares Christ to a box, a case, a cabinet, a purse, a storehouse, a shelf.  For each compared container, Christ is worth more than any earthy good which could be placed into the container; of more worth than gold, rubes, pearls, silver. 

Delph would be variant of a delft, a decorative box. 

Oh! Godhead fullness! There doth in thee flow

All wisdom’s fulness, fulness of all strength:

Of justice, truth, love, holiness also

And grace’s fulness to its upmost length

Do dwell in thee. Yea and thy Father’s pleasure

Thou art their cabinet and they thy treasure.

This stanza makes two points. First, it details the elements of the fullness, which is a summary of biblical statements about Christ. Second, there is a statement of the Father’s pleasure in the Son. 

This stanza is then linked up to the preceding argument by use of the word “cabinet”. Christ is the “cabinet” in which these virtues reside. And the Father then takes pleasure in the cabinet filled with treasure, which is the Son incarnate.

Wisdom:

Colossians 2:1–3 (ESV) 

For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, 2 that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, 3 in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. 

Strength:

1 Timothy 1:12 (ESV) 

12 I thank him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he judged me faithful, appointing me to his service, 

Justice:

Matthew 12:18–21 (ESV) 

            18         “Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, 

my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased. 

                        I will put my Spirit upon him, 

and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. 

            19         He will not quarrel or cry aloud, 

nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets; 

            20         a bruised reed he will not break, 

and a smoldering wick he will not quench, 

                        until he brings justice to victory; 

            21         and in his name the Gentiles will hope.”

Truth:

John 1:17 (ESV) 

17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 

Holiness:

Romans 1:4 (ESV) 

4 and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, 

Grace

2 Corinthians 8:9 (ESV) 

9 For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich. 

Pleasure:

Mark 1:9–11 (ESV) 

9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. 11 And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

Edward Taylor, Oh Wealthy Theme.2

22 Wednesday Jul 2020

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Edward Taylor, Meditations, Oh Wealthy Theme, poem, Poetry

What shall I say? Such rich fullness would

Make stammering tongues speak smoothly, and enshrine 

The dumb man’s mouth with silver streams like gold

Of eloquence making air to chime

Yet I am tongue-tied, stupid, senseless stand,

And drier drained than is my pen I hand.

There is an irony in this stanza: The theme of the fullness of Christ would make a “stammering tongue speak smoothly”. And yet, Taylor is unable to speak smoothly – the theme which would make the dumb speak, fails to make him – a man of some talent – able to speak at all. 

In fact, he does not merely fail to rise to the occasion, he fails completely: his speaking tongue is tied, he has less ability to write than his quill pen without ink.

There is another level of irony in this structure: lines 1-4 run smoothly, they are eloquent. The meter and sentence structure are free and the lines run easily. And so the thought of the theme creating eloquence is in fact eloquent. 

But when Taylor comes to himself, in the last two lines, the lines stammer. The fifth line is simply ungrammatical:

Yet I am tongue-tied, stupid, senseless stand,

If we remove the middle phrases it reads, Yet I am senseless stand. The necessary addition which must come before final clause (I… senseless stand) is missing, and so the line is tongue-tied. He is becoming stupid (unable to speak) in the act of considering his senselessness. 

Likewise the last night also ends with poor grammar – forced by the length of the line and the need for a rhyme:

And drier drained than is my pen I hand.

The last word must be “hold” “that is my pen I hold.” But “hold” will not rhyme, and so Taylor forces “Hand” into that space. Interestingly a modern writer would like use hold – if rhyme were the only rule being broken. But Taylor maintains the rhyme and kills the sense. It is a deft touch.

It would be easy to read this stanza as merely being ill-constructed, perhaps a draft waiting for the final version. But I think it is purposeful. I make that conclusion because the first four lines do run smoothly. It is in the act of considering his own lack of merit that the poem begins to “lack merit.” 

The poem in structure is what means by sense: I am a bad writer, and thus he writes poorly. He begins to write poorly as soon as the question of his ability presents itself. 

Edward Taylor, Oh Wealthy Theme.1

21 Tuesday Jul 2020

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Edward Taylor, Oh Wealthy Theme, poem, Poetry

Oh! Wealthy theme!

The Scripture reference for this poem (Taylor’s Meditations were mediations on particular passages of Scripture) is Colossian 1:19. This particular verse comes in a midst of a poem concerning the unique nature of Jesus Christ, as both God and man. The particular verse chosen by Taylor reads

For in him [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

This passage is related to another passage also by Paul describing Christ found in 1 Corinthians 1:30

Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption..

One way to think of the Christian understanding of Christ is to see Jesus Christ holding a position between God and humanity. God does us good in Christ; and God reconciles us to Him in Christ.  When Jesus says, “No one gets to the Father except through me,” that is built up in the concept. 

It is this extraordinary concept, that the fullness of God dwells in Jesus – which is both wonderful and paradoxical in the extreme (the infinite and the finite bound up) which leads Taylor to begin (By “fancy” he means “imagination”)

Oh! Wealthy theme! Oh! Feeble fancy: I

Must needs admire, when I recall to mind

That’s fullness, this it’s emptiness, though spy

I have no flowering brain thereto incline. 

May damps do out my fire. I cannot, though

I would admire, find heat enough thereto.

The first line has an odd structure, because it has three major breaks. The final “I” following the colon hurries the thought over into the second line; it feels like falling down a stair.

The third line is difficult to. I believe that it should be elongated as follows:

That is its (the theme) or that is his (Christ’s or God’s) fullness; this it’s emptiness (the it must be Taylor’s “fancy” or Taylor himself). 

Though spy: must mean: notice this: look.

The idea must be a contrast between the theme of “fullness” and Taylor’s “emptiness”. 

The fourth line is a good example of Taylor’s poetic reasoning: Rather than elaborate a single metaphor at length, he tends to pull up imagery, even when it does not have obvious connections. In these last three lines he moves from flowering to a furnace. 

His “flowering brain,” would be a brain which could produce the necessary understanding and language – he does not have a “flowering brain,” which is another way of stating that he does not have sufficient “fancy”. (The term “fancy” had a very particular intellectual meaning in the 17th Century. 

Jonathan Edwards, a generation after Taylor, uses the phrase, a “very fruitful brain and copious fancy.”  [Jonathan Edwards, “‘Images of Divine Things’ ‘Types,’” in Typological Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson, vol. 11, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1993), 32.] Which is similar to flowering brain and fancy being mixed.

Edwards also draws together fancy and fire in the following passage:

“Observe the danger of being led by fancy; as he that looks on the fire or on the clouds, giving way to his fancy, easily imagines he sees images of men or beasts in those confused appearances.” Jonathan Edwards, “‘Images of Divine Things’ ‘Types,’” in Typological Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson, vol. 11, The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1993), 116.

Perhaps some such thinking (seeing images in a fire) lead Taylor to draw fancy and a fire(furnace) together.

The last two lines draw upon the concept of “heat” as the basis for human conduct and intellectual production. Although perhaps uncommon to us, it was not a strange way of thinking for one of Taylor’s time. (For example, “   Christians are to receive such as are weak in the faith into their hearts by love, and not to trouble or heat their heads with cramping disputes.” James Nichols, Puritan Sermons, vol. 4 (Wheaton, IL: Richard Owen Roberts, Publishers, 1981), 372.)

The “damps” are the dampers on a furnace to keep a furnace from overheating. His natural inclinations and dullness prevent a sufficient rise in his imagination.

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