![\"S4-img1\"](\"https:\/\/www.vaughanassociation.org\/files\/2015\/12\/S4-img1.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nLorna Graves. “The Temple”, ceramic sculpture, 12″ wide.<\/em><\/p>\nAnd, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong
\nwind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks
\nbefore the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and
\nafter the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in
\nthe earthquake:
\nAfter the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not
\nin the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
\n(1 Kings 19, 11-12)<\/p>\n
And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame
\nof fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and,
\nbehold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not
\nconsumed.
\nAnd Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this
\ngreat sight, why the bush is not burnt.
\nAnd when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see,
\nGod called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and
\nsaid, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.
\nAnd he said draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes
\nfrom off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest
\nis holy ground.
\n(Exodus 3, 2-5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
What is sacred poetry? I have written this paper because I would like to know,
\nrather than because I think I have the answer. The question is a difficult one,
\nnot least because of the diversity of religious traditions. In this paper I shall
\naccordingly be concentrating on poetry in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and
\nattempting to frame some definitions, while remaining open to the force of
\nthe sacred, that answers the questioner with a presence that questions him. I
\nhave chosen to begin, therefore, with two passages in which that force manifests
\nitself, and from which we can derive ideas fundamental to the Western
\nreligious tradition.
\nAnalysis can take us some way towards answering the question. First, the
\nsacred is a power. Genesis begins with God’s creation of the universe (‘the
\nheaven and the earth’). He is Creator of all things, and he has the power of
\ndestruction over his creation. Man is subject to this power, and knows of God
\nonly what God chooses to reveal to him. Rudolf Otto’ described the holy as
\nthe tremendous and fascinating mystery, the ‘wholly other’, which is experienced
\nas numinous.
\nSecondly, the sacred disconfirms human ideas.’ God disposes of human
\nideas and images as, on Horeb, he breaks the mountains and burns but does
\nnot consume the bush. We expect him to be in the storm, or the earthquake,
\nor the fire. But he is not in these. He speaks with ‘a still small voice’. But God
\ndoes speak.
\nThirdly, God manifests himself in creation. Mircea Eliade designates ‘the
\nact of manifestation of the sacred’ by the term hierophony.3 In the first
\npassage quoted above, God speaks to Elijah. In the second, he addresses Moses
\nby name. God, then, enters into dialogue with his prophets. He establishes
\nwith his people what Martin Buber called an ‘I-Thou’ relationship.4 Sometimes
\nGod speaks directly. More often, He speaks through his mouthpieces,
\nthe prophets. In the Western tradition, prophecy and poetry are closely allied,
\nsometimes identified with one another. Prophecy is a high calling, but the
\nexalted prophet is humbled in his worldliness. The tradition of poet as prophet
\ndescends through the Metaphysical poets, John Milton, William Blake.
\nWe may hear echoes of it in the twentieth centur y, in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’
\nfor example:<\/p>\n
You are not here to verify,
\nInstruct yo urself, or inform curiosity
\nOr carry report. You are here to kneel
\nWhere prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
\nThan an order of words, the conscious occupation
\nOf the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
\nAnd what the dead had no speech for, when living,
\nThey can tell you, being dead: the communication
\nOf the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language
\nof the living (5)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I thought I knew these lines from Four Quartets, but I did not know their
\nprophetic power until I visited Little Gidding, and was unexpectedly confronted
\nby them, on a wall in the church. In that context, I felt their force as a
\npersonal address, and experienced them, as every visitor surely must, as a
\nreligious command.
\nFourthly, hierophanies, manifestations of the sacred, occur in place, so that
\nsacred places, like Horeb or Little Gidding, are centres of holy power in the
\nprofane world. The sacred awe, the wonder and fear, that is felt in holy places
\ntestifies to their liminality: they are thresholds, or frontiers between the sacred
\nand the profane, the natural and the supernatural. David Jones described man
\nas ‘a “borderer”, he is the sole inhabitant of a tract of country where matter
\nmarches with spirit’ .6 In the twentieth century liminality, and associated ideas
\nsuch as ‘rites of passage’, survive as richly suggestive metaphors for writers
\nwho would not necessarily think of themselves as religious.
\nIdeas about sacred power drawn from the Bible would have been integral to
\nthe structure of the minds of the Metaphysical poets in the seventeenth
\ncentur y. It wasn’t, however, primarily the Old Testament that inspired their
\nidea of the sacred, but the Incarnation, which was read back into the Old
\nTe stament so that ancient events were seen to prefigure the life and death of
\nChrist. The Metaphysical poets were incarnational poets.
\nWhat this means may be expressed most succinctly by quoting a verse of
\nChristopher Smart’s:<\/p>\n
God all-bounteous, all-creative,
\nWhom no ills from good dissuade,
\nIs incarnate, and a native
\nOf the very world he made (7)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
By taking on human flesh, God became ‘a native of the very world he made’.
\nThis idea has many poetic manifestations; here, I want to mention only two of
\nthem. First, making and re-making, or restoration. Man was made in the
\nimage of God; he fell from grace, and was restored by the redemption. To this
\nfaith we owe poetry in which the poet is intensely, abjectly, conscious of his
\nphysicality.<\/p>\n
[1] Das Heilige, Breslau, 1917; transl. John W Harvey as The Idea of the Holy, 1923.<\/span>
\n[2] My use of “disconfirmation” , and the thinking behind it, have been influenced by Stephen<\/span>
\nPrickett, Words and ‘The Word’, Cambridge, 1986, especially by his treatment of Elijah on Horeb.<\/span>
\n[3] The Sacred and the Profane, New York, 1959.<\/span>
\n[4] lch and Du, 1922; transl. Ronald Gregor Smith as I and Thou, Edinburgh, 1937.
\n[5] T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Faber 1944, pp. 50-51.
\n[6] David Jones, Epoch and Artist, Faber 1959 , p.86.
\n[7] ‘Hymn 32: The Nativity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ’, in Christopher Smart:
\nSelected Poems, ed., Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh, Penguin Books, 1990, p.193.
\n<\/span><\/p>\nIn Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example:<\/p>\n
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me
\nflesh,
\nAnd after it almost unmade, what with dread,
\nThy doing.8
\nIn Henry Vaughan:
\nYou draw nearer and break that mass which is my rocky
\nheart, and that which was formerly stone is now made flesh (9)<\/p>\n
…
\n0 knit me, that am crumbled dust!
\n(R, p. 165)<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
0 how in this thy choir of souls I stand
\n(Propped by thy hand)
\nA heap of sand!
\nWhich busy thoughts (like winds) would scatter quite
\nAnd put to flight,
\nBut for thy might;
\nThy hand alone doth tame
\nThose blasts, and knit my frame …
\n(R, p. 182)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
In each instance, dissolution or reintegration is felt intensely, and absolutely
\ndepends upon God the creator and redeemer. The poet, abjectly conscious of
\nhis fragile physical being, is also filled with hope at the promise of being made
\nwhole in Christ and of the resurrection of the bod y.
\nSecondly, it is the sense of God being ‘a native of the very world he made’
\nthat gives such vitality, such quickness, to natural imagery and organic metaphors
\nin Metaphysical poetry, as in the following passages from Vaughan:<\/p>\n
[8] ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, in Poems and Prose of Gerald Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H.<\/span>
\nGardner, Penguin Books, 1953, p.12.<\/span>
\n[9] Henry Vaughan. The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum, Penguin Classics, 1995 (1976),<\/span>
\np.137. Further Vaughan verse quotations are from this edition referenced R in the text.<\/span><\/p>\nSome drops of thy all-quickening blood
\nFell on my heart; those made it bud
\nAnd put forth thus, though Lord, before
\nThe ground was cursed, and void of store.
\n(R,p.145)<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
with what flowers,
\nAnd shoots of glory, my soul breaks, and buds!
\n(R, p. 179)<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
How rich, 0 Lord! how fresh thy visits are!
\n‘Twas but just now my bleak leaves hopeless hung
\nSullied with dust and mud …
\n(R, p. 198)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
The supreme instance is George Herbert’s ‘The Flower’:<\/p>\n
How fresh, 0 Lord, how sweet and clean
\nAre thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring …
\nWho would have thought my shrivel’d heart
\nCould have recover’d greennesse …
\nAnd now in age I bud again,
\nAfter so many deaths I live and write … (10)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
We may wonder what writing has got to do with it. Has Herbert confused a
\nwriter’s block with a spiritual crisis? Does he value ‘versing’ more than a priest
\nshould? Of course not. In the Christian scheme of things, human creativity is
\nbound up with God’s creative act. In the early nineteenth century Coleridge
\nwould found upon this a complex theory of the imagination: ‘a repetition in
\nthe finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’.” In the
\n[10] The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides, Everyman, 1974, pp.171-2.<\/span>
\nFurther Herbert quotations are from this edition referenced H in the text.<\/span>
\n[11] Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Everyman, 1947 (1817), pp.145-6.<\/span><\/p>\ntwentieth century the Russian religious thinker Nicolas Berdyaev12 would
\ndefine man as the being of the Eighth Day whose function is to continue
\nGod’s original act of creation. But it all seems to have been much simpler for
\nGeorge Herbert, whom we can envisage walking in his garden, feeling like the
\nflowers he sees, and knowing himself part of God’s native realm. As a created
\nbeing, he too makes: ‘in age I bud again\/After so many deaths I live and write’.
\nThrough the creation and the Incarnation the human soul, as God’s image,
\nis connected to the divine. This belief had a shaping influence on ideas
\nof distance and depth, on internal and external space in Western religious
\nthought. In his indiv idual way, Meister Eckhart affirmed a traditional truth:<\/p>\n
What the masters tell us about the dimensions of the
\nheavens beggars belief, and yet the least power in my
\nsoul is broader than the heavens, not to mention the
\nintellect, in which there is breadth without breadth.
\nIn the head of the soul, in the intellect, I am as
\nclose to a point located a thousand miles beyond the
\nsea as I am to the place where I am presently standing.(13)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Here there is nothing of Pascal’s terror at ‘the eternal silence of those infinite
\nspaces’ between the stars.14 Nor is there in Thomas Traherne:<\/p>\n
That things are finite … we learn by our senses but
\ninfinity we know and feel by our souls: and feel it so
\nnaturally, as if it were the very essence and being of
\nthe soul. The truth of it is, it is individually in the
\nsoul; for God is there, and more near to us than we are
\nto ourselves. So that we cannot feel our souls,
\nbut we must feel Him, in that first of properties,
\ninfinite space. (15)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The sense of being at home with infinity gives the soul limitless depth. But
\nthis is of course only part of the story. The Fall, and belief in hell, are causes
\nof terror. Intimacy with God and fear of absolute separation from Him are
\n[12] See for example Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act, Gollancz, 1955.<\/span>
\n[13] Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, Selected and Translated by Oliver Davies, Penguin<\/span>
\nBooks, 1994, p.114.<\/span>
\n[14] Blaise Pascal, The Pensees, Penguin Books, 1961, p.57.<\/span>
\n[15] Thomas Traheme, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Alan Bradford, Penguin Books, 1991,<\/span>
\np.220.<\/span><\/p>\nthe poles of the Christian experience, and often they are experienced in rapid
\nsuccession – as in Herbert’s ‘The Temper (l)’:<\/p>\n
How should I praise thee, Lord! how should my rymes
\nGladly engrave thy love in steel,
\nIf what my soul doth feel sometimes,
\nMy soul might ever feel!<\/p>\n
Although there were some fourtie heav’ns, or more,
\nSometimes I peere above them all;
\nSometimes I hardly reach a score,
\nSometimes to hell I fall.<\/p>\n
0 rack me not to such a vast extent;
\nThose distances belong to thee:
\nThe world’s too little for thy tent,
\nA grave too big for me.
\n{H., p74)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
For Herbert, as for Henry Vaughan, and for biblical man generally, God is
\n‘Thou’. But God is also immeasurably greater, and more powerful, than any
\nhuman image or concept can grasp. Herbert knows that it doesn’t matter
\nwhether he discerns ‘some fourtie heav’ns, or more’, because the act of measuring
\nis absurd. What he knows is his feeling of swinging between spiritual
\nheight and terrible depth, salvation and damnation: his soul’s vertigo. The
\n‘distances belong’ to God; they are altogether too much for Herbert. Any
\nmeasurement of man against God is absurd. The most Herbert can do is say
\n‘the world’s too little for thy tent,\/ A grave too big for me’. The latter is an
\nimage in which we not only see a man in his grave, which has to be bigger than
\nhis body if he is to fit into it, but hear that the small space is more than he
\ndeser ves, which is tantamount to saying death is too good for him! There is
\nonly one way in which the immeasurable disproportion can be resolved:<\/p>\n
Whether I flie with angels, fall with dust,
\nThy hands made both, and I am there:
\nThy power and love, my love and trust
\nMake one place ev’ry where.
\n(Ibid)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As for John Donne’s lovers in ‘The Good-Morrow’ love makes ‘one little
\nroome, an everywhere’, so in Herbert’s poem the mutual love between God
\nand man makes ‘one place ev’ry where’. Donne’s ‘little roome’ suggests retreat
\ninto privacy. Herbert’s ‘one place’ is the ground where man and God meet; it
\nmakes the distances between earth and heaven and earth and hell bearable.
\nHenry Vaughan’s incarnational poetry shows a complete structure of religious
\nthought. ‘Cock-Crowing’ begins with the exclamation ‘Father of lights!’,
\nand is filled with imagery of light. With the aid of Alan Rudrum’s notes, (R,
\npp.597-99), we can assign the images to several different spiritual and intellectual
\nsources: Epistle of James, Thomas Vaughan’s idea of ‘a spiritual metaphysical
\ngrain, a seed or glance of light’, the Cambridge Platonists, alchemy, 1
\nCorinthians, Song of Solomon. As so often with Henry Vaughan, the diverse
\nsources on which he has drawn show the integrative power of his imagination.
\nThe underlying idea of ‘Cock Crowing’, as Rudrum notes, seems to be ‘the
\nhermetic notion that animals fulfil their God-ordained functions by instinct,
\nwhereas in man instinct is astray, so that men can only act rightly by following
\nreason’, (Ibid., p.597). This idea recurs in Vaughan’s poetry, and is the main
\nsource of that reverence for nature which is one of its most attractive features
\nto a modern reader. The question doesn’t arise of Vaughan reverencing nature
\nfor its own sake. Nature is God’s creation; it is Christ’s ‘all-quickening blood’
\nthat sanctifies the natural world and all that exists.
\nWhat Vaughan especially values in the nature he perceives is its expectancy.
\nHe would surely have sympathised with the following passage in Martin
\nBuber’s I and Thou<\/em>:<\/p>\nBelieve in the simple magic of life, in service in the
\nuniverse, and the meaning of that waiting, that
\nalertness, that ‘craning of the neck’ in creatures will
\ndawn upon you. Every word would falsify; but look!
\nround about you beings live their life, and to whatever
\npoint you turn you come upon being. (16)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
A similar reverence, with the same biblical background, animates Buber’s
\nthought and Vaughan’s poetry, though they do of course represent different
\nreligions. Vaughan’s ‘And do they so?’ is based on the text from Romans: ‘For
\nthe creatures, watching with lifted head, wait for the revelation of the sons ?f
\nGod’.<\/p>\n
[16] Ed. cit., p.15.<\/span><\/p>\nIn ‘Cock Crowing’:<\/p>\n
Their eyes watch for the morning hue,
\nTheir little grain expelling night
\nSo shines and sings, as if it knew
\nThe path unto the house of light.
\nIt seems their candle, howe’r done,
\nWas tinned and lighted at the sun.<\/p>\n
If such a tincture, such a touch,
\nSo firm a longing can impower
\nShall thy own image think it much
\nTo watch for thy appearing hour?
\nIf a mere blast so fill the sail,
\nShall not the breath of God prevail?<\/p>\n
0 thou immortal light and heat!
\nWhose hand so shines through all this frame,
\nThat by the beauty of the seat,
\nWe plainly see, who made the same.
\nSeeing thy seed abides in me,
\nDwell thou in it, and I in thee.
\n(R, p. 251)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
The poem is instinct with an apprehension of God’s creative and redeeming
\npower: in the light by which nature and man (‘thy own image’) were made,
\nand which shines in the creation, and dwells in ‘seeds’ of light in the creatures.
\n‘Cock Crowing’, and Henry Vaughan’s poetry generally, constitutes a model
\nof the Christian universe as complete as a medieval cathedral. Ironically, he
\nconstructed his cathedral in words at the moment when the Church itself had
\nbeen stripped and closed. Vaughan’s thought had, nevertheless, a good deal in
\ncommon with that of the sectaries. Neither party could have foreseen the ruin
\nof the Christian order, which we, in retrospect, can see underway, as far as
\nEngland is concerned, in the Civil War. But ruin of a spiritual and intellectual
\norder, while it dismays the faithful, also releases energies which may empower
\nnew ideas.
\nTwo lines in particular in ‘Cock Crowing’ – ‘O thou immortal light and
\nheat!\/Whose hand so shines through all this frame’ – recall another great
\npoem about sacred power:<\/p>\n
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
\nIn the forests of the night,
\nWhat immortal hand or eye
\nCould frame thy fearful symmetry? (17)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
William Blake’s poem, too, generates a feeling of awe at a mysterious and
\nterrible power, so that we may describe it, in Otto’s terms, as numinous. The
\ntyger, however, is not ‘wholly other’ like the Creator of ‘Cock Crowing’.
\nBlake’s imagery of fire, of twisting and grasping and framing, of hammer and
\nchain and furnace and anvil, is drawn from industrial manufacturing
\nprocesses. His poem is not about the God of Moses and Elijah, the God of
\nHenry Vaughan, but the man-made idea of God that presides over the
\nIndustrial Revolution. The chief text that stands behind Vaughan’s hymns, by
\ncontrast, is: ‘That they should seek the Lord, if happily they might feel after
\nhim, and find him, though he be not far off from every one of us, for in him
\nwe live, and move, and have our being’. (Acts XVII 27-28).
\nVaughan’s sacred poetry is about living, and moving, and having our being
\nin Christ. Blake’s universe turns Vaughan’s inside out: ‘All deities reside in the
\nhuman breast’.18 In retrospect, we may see this view, which inverts the traditional
\nreligious idea of divine creativity in the West, as one of the origins of
\nthe modern thought world, which psychologises the metaphysical, making the
\ndivine a construct of human thought or emotion. But for Blake the deities
\nremain deities: powers, energies. Blake constructs a dynamic idea of the human
\nimagination, and shows man making and unmaking his world, liberating or
\nenslaving himself. For Blake, imagination is a creative and destructive human
\npower, as it is for many poets who follow him. For Roy Fisher in A Furnace,
\nfor example:<\/p>\n
This age has a cold blackness of hell
\nin cities at night. London
\nis filled with it, Chicago cradles it
\nin ice-green glitter along
\nthe dark of the lake. Birmingham Sparkbrook,
\nBirmingham centre, Birmingham Castle Vale
\nhang in it as holograms. For now<\/p>\n
Puritan materialism dissolves its matter,
\nits curdled massy acquisition; dissolves
\nthe old gravity of ponderous fires
\nthat bewildered the senses,
\nand for this
\nglassy metaphysical void. (19)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
[17] Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, Nonesuch Press, 1961,<\/span>
\np.72.<\/span>
\n[18] ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, ibid., p.185.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
While Blake exposed the metaphysics that fuelled the furnace of the Industrial
\nRevolution, Fisher is the poet of that world in decline, his poetry fired by
\ntransformative energies.
\nThe idea that sacred poetry is dead comes with the Victorians. Matthew
\nArnold mourned Wordsworth’s death as that of ‘a sacred poet’ ‘in an age
\nwhich can rear them no more!’20 Arnold saw Wordsworth as Adamic: ‘a priest
\nto us all\/Of the wonder and bloom of te world’. The partiality of this view
\ncompared to biblical holy power, and incarnational poetry, exposes the limitations
\nof Arnold’s idea of the sacred, and sells Wordsworth short.
\nPerhaps the principal way in which Wordsworth was a sacred poet was
\nthrough his naturalising and psychologising of the soul’s depth. One of the
\nfinest examples is ‘There was a boy’, in which Wordsworth recalls the boy
\nwho ‘blew mimic hootings to the silent owls\/That they might answer him’. As
\nthe owls did, ‘responsive to his call, with quivering peals,\/And long halloos,
\nand screams, and echoes loud\/Redoubled and redoubled’.<\/p>\n
And, when it chanced
\nThat pauses of deep silence mock’d his skill,
\nThen, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
\nListening, a gentle shock of mild surprize
\nHas carried far into his heart the voice
\nOf mountain torrents, or the visible scene
\nWould enter unawares into his mind
\nWith all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
\nIts woods, and that.uncertain heaven, receiv’d
\nInto the bosom of the steady lake. (21)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
Thomas De Quincey commented on this passage, or his misremembered
\nversion of it: ‘This very expression, “far”, by which space and its infinities
\nare attributed to the human heart, and to its capacities of re-echoing the sublimities
\nof nature, has always struck me as with a flash of sublime revelation’ .(22)<\/p>\n
[19] Roy Fisher, A Furnace, Oxford, 1986, p.35 .<\/span>
\n[20] ‘The Youth of Nature’, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 2nd edition ed. Miriam Allot,<\/span>
\nLongman, 1979, pp. 261-62.<\/span>
\n[21] Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, Routledge, 1991, (1800), p.134.<\/span>
\n[22] Thomas De Quincey, Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, ed. David Wright,<\/span>
\nPenguin Books, 1970, p.161.<\/span><\/p>\nIn the thought of Eckhart, in the tradition that Traherne and Vaughan and
\nHerbert inherited, ‘space and its infinities’ are attributes not of the human
\nheart but the soul. It is the soul, moreover, that might be said to re-echo ‘the
\nsublimities of nature’ – it depends how it is said. Poets such as Vaughan, in the
\ntradition of mystical theology, would not have understood what the phrase
\nmeant to De Quincey.
\nWordsworth, here, is naturalising a religious vision: ‘the sublime revelation’
\nis of a reciprocal relationship between man and nature, and it is expressed in a
\nlanguage drawn from nature – unlike the voice of God which speaks to Elijah
\nand Moses, and intervenes in poems by Herbert and Vaughan, the owls do not
\nspeak human words; the boy borrows the owls’ cries in order to elicit a
\nresponse. The image of ‘that uncertain heaven, receiv’d\/Into the bosom of the
\nsteady lake’ is, as it were, a double undoing of the universe of the Metaphysical
\npoets. It contrasts the uncertainty of heaven with the steadyness of
\nnature, and it reverses the Christian idea of God’s fatherhood by returning
\n‘heaven’ to a feminized nature (the ‘bosom’ of the lake). The direction of
\nreverence in the poem is towards nature and the human mind. That is the
\nemphasis of Wordsworth’s feeling in all the poetry which he did not twist into
\nthe shape of his religious orthodoxy.
\nFundamentalists naturally favour an absolute idea of the sacred. Thus
\nPhilip Sherrard writes: ‘the very idea of the sacred presupposes to start with
\nthe presence of the Divine or the existence of God. Without the Divine –
\nwithout God- there can be no holiness, nothing sacred’.23 It sounds as though
\nSherrard almost allows an idea of the Divine without God, but won’t let
\nhimself. One supposes this kind of absolutism holds for believers in specific
\ncreeds, but it cannot be true for all who claim to reverence the sacred. Among
\nthe Biblical verses which follow the Preface to Silex Scintillans Henry Vaughan
\nincludes: ‘The living, the living, he shall praise thee’, from Isaiah 38. The same
\nwords are carved on Llewelyn Powys’s sarsen memorial stone which stands
\nnear a high cliff on the Dorset coast.
\nStanding beside the stone, one may recall Powys’s atheistic sense of reverence:<\/p>\n
At the hour when the foxes are stirring out of their
\nholes, if we stand on the edge of a high chalk cliff
\noverlooking the sea, all is made clear. The rounded
\nform of the earth is outlined against infinity and
\nfeathered grasses are waving free against the tattered
\nbanners of the masterless clouds.
\nThe vision before us is God-empty, God-void. The
\nexcited spirit trembles with regenerate exultation. All
\nis prepared for the celebration of an unhallowed mass.
\nFar below ancient world-waves break upon the
\ncongregated pebbles, break and surge back as they have
\ndone without cessation from the earliest ages. All the
\naeons of geology are in the sound of this recurrent
\nsea-muttering, all that has been and will be. (24)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
One is aware here both of Powys’s post-Darwinian reaction against his
\nevangelical family background and of the influence upon him of Thomas
\nHardy – the writer whose favourite biblical passage was the one about the still
\nsmall voice, which Elijah heard on Horeb. But in Hardy and Powys the power
\nof the sacred has passed from that voice to the elements in which God was not
\npresent. A sense of sacred presence investing the elemental world owed a great
\ndeal both to Wordsworth and to scientists such as Charles Darwin and Charles
\nLyell. While the geologists led to some Victorians, like John Ruskin, losing
\ntheir religious faith, they excited in others a new sense of reverence for the
\nEarth, and awe at temporal depth. Except in devout Christian poets such as
\nHopkins and Christina Rossetti, visionary manifestations of time and space in
\nland and sea tended to replace hierophany in Victorian religious poetry.
\nThis feeling for the Earth is still with us, enhanced now by our perception
\nof the planet from space, and by the web of life – the vision and the idea that
\nhave so influenced the sense of the sacred during the past twenty or thirty
\nyears. ‘The rounded form of the earth’ is available to us as an image as it was
\nnot to Llewelyn Powys. In the words of Lewis Thomas: ‘Viewed from the
\ndistance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the
\nbreath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of
\nthe moon in the foreground, dead as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath
\nthe moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only
\nexuberant thing in this part of the cosmos’.L’
\nIn the words of John Keats: ‘The poetry of earth is never dead’. In our time,
\nit is newly alive. As well as the vision of Earth from space, and the paradigm
\nshift from the idea of nature as an arena of competition to the idea of the web
\nof life, another major influence upon sacred nature poetry has been the
\nfeminist revolution, especially that aspect of it which has been described as the
\nreturn of the Goddess. The implications of this are well described by Elinor
\nW Gadon:<\/p>\n
[23] Philip Sherrard, The Sacred in Life and Art, Golgonooza Press, 1990, p. l.<\/span>
\n[24] Llewelyn Powys, Glory of Life and Now That The Gods Are Dead, Bodley Head, 1949, pp.<\/span>
\n17-18.<\/span>
\n[25] Quoted in Louise B. Young, The Unfinished Universe, Oxford, 1993, p.113.<\/span><\/p>\nWholeness is not the hero’s journey of individuation
\nand separation, which has been glorified since Homer.
\nIn the way of the Goddess the path leads to a
\nconsciousness that is responsible to all that is alive.
\nWhat we have called matter is not separated from
\nspirit; matter is impregnated with spirit. (26)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
There are links between Blake and Wordsworth and the energies released by
\nscientific and feminist ideas in the twentieth century. We apprehend a fluid
\nworld, closer to the Ta oist conception of reality than the Old Te stament.
\nEinstein’s revolution replaced a world of static objects with a field of dynamic
\nforces. Towards the end of a weekend of dialogue the physicist David Bohm
\nsaid: ‘we discussed that there may be a universal energy pervaded with intelligence
\nand love which is the ground of everything – without belief and without
\ndisbelief. What I suggested was that saying the name of “I am” signified
\nthis universal energy’. 27 Rather than rejecting the idea of God, it seems that
\nBohm believed it ‘was originally rather limited, then came the notion of this
\nuniversal God; but perhaps chis notion has to develop or evolve further by
\ninquiry’. The sculptor Lee Grandjean, influenced by ideas drawn from the
\nnew physics, has spoken of: ‘that ground of elemental energy from which all
\nmatter emerges and into which all things are eventually enfolded’ . 28
\nFor Grandjean, ‘God’ is a human construct that gets in the way of the
\nwonder of the universe, as new scientific ideas and technologies are revealing
\nit. With our microscopes we see deeper into the structure of cells and with our
\ntelescopes we see farther into the universe than previous generations. There
\nare affinities between the creative forces we see and the apprehension of
\nfluidity and connectedness associated with the way of the Goddess. To invoke
\nthis idea is not to identify woman as nature, which has been a ploy of
\npatriarchal ideology. The revolution in consciousness made available to us by
\nscience and feminism concerns men and women equally. Changing gender
\nideas and images make possible a new, enlarged human image which we may
\ndescribe as androgynous: a new version of a traditional idea of wholeness, an
\nidea that is a perennial human aspiration rather than the last word of a dogmatic
\nabsolutism.
\nOne may feel about the return of the Goddess that it is, among other things,
\nan answer to the image-breakers, from Josiah to the Puritans, who violently
\ninsisted upon a discarnate idea of the sacred. They broke what they thought
\nof as pagan images. Now, though, it is the patriarchal God who has been
\nknocked off his pediment and broken into pieces, like some statue of a
\ndictator in a former communist state. In his place, the numinous is strongly
\ninvested in nature and an idea of the Goddess. We are in danger perhaps of a
\nnew idolatry, in which nature receives all reverence, and the idea of ‘God’ is
\nout of bounds.
\nThe sacred, the ‘wholly other’, both causes us to make images and requires
\nus to break them, because it is beyond our comprehension. God manifested
\nhimself to Elijah and to Moses in unexpected ways. R. S. Thomas, in ‘The
\nWhite Tiger’, says: ‘you can imagine that\/God breathes within the confines\/of
\nour definition of him, agonising\/over immensities that will not return’. (29) We
\ncan ‘imagine’ this; but why should we suppose ‘immensities … will not
\nreturn’? The sacred has always defied our definitions, disconfirmed our
\nnotions. That is how it has retained a sense of possibility that mocks human
\nlimitations. To Henry Vaughan, ‘life is, what none can express, IA quickness,
\nwhich my God hath kissed’. (R, p. 308) To the author of a modern book called
\nThe Unfinished Universe: ‘There is something within life, within nonliving
\nmatter, too, that is not passive – a nisus, a striving that is stimulated by challenge’
\n. (30) To the religious thinker Leon Shestov: ‘The fundamental property of
\nlife is daring; all life is creative daring and thus an eternal mystery irreducible
\nto anything finished or intelligible’. Whether for Moses and Elijah, or for men
\nand women at the end of the twentieth century, the sacred reveals itself as a
\npower that humbles attempts to define it, and opens the mind to a new sense
\nof creative possibility.
\n[26] Elinor W. Gadon, The Once and Future Goddess, Harper Collins, 1989, p.370.<\/span>
\n[27] David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, Routledge, 1985, p.172.<\/span>
\n[28] Lee Grandjean , ‘The Background to the “Four Winds” Drawings’, Scintilla 2, 1998, p.155.<\/span>
\nSee also Groundwork: Sculpture by Lee Grandjean and Poems by Jeremy Hooker, Djanogly Art<\/span>
\nGallery, University of Nottingham, 1998.<\/span>
\n[29] R. S. Thomas, Frequencies, Macmillan, 1978 , p.45.<\/span>
\n[30] Louise B. Young, op. cit., p.87.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Table of Contents Author Title # Jeremy Hooker What is Sacred Poetry? 7 Kim Taplin Possible Openings 23 Jeremy \u2026<\/p>\n
Read<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3515,"featured_media":55,"parent":179,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-224","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"meta_box":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/scintilla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/scintilla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/scintilla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/scintilla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3515"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/scintilla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/scintilla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1323,"href":"https:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/scintilla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/224\/revisions\/1323"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/scintilla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/179"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/scintilla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.cardiff.ac.uk\/scintilla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Scintilla-04-cvr\"](\"http:\/\/www.vaughanassociation.org\/files\/2014\/02\/Scintilla-04-cvr.jpg\")
<\/a><\/h2>\n