Poetry and Theology
Poetry ... I find it hard to understand, but it conveys something about religion that reasoned arguments and footnoted essays can't. Theology Today usually has poetry in each issue, and in the article quoted below (October 1995 - Vol. 52, No. 3), Patrick D. Miller writes about why that is so.
.... If one starts with some reflection on the place of poetry in the Christian tradition, then the combination of poetry and theology is not all that surprising. From Milton and Dante to Donne and Herbert, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Eliot and Auden, there is a powerful and highly influential strain of poetic articulation of religious and specifically Christian sentiments and tradition.
(snip)
The play of poetry allows a play in theology that is less permissible in theology's more discursive forms. The ambiguity of expression that is intrinsic to poetry permits paradox, contradiction, multivalency, and open-ended articulation of matters of faith. The elliptical style of poetry, which means it may leave out as much as it includes, also gives room to play and resists finality, completion, and closure at every point. That is why poetry is often "difficult." What eye and ear perceive and hear make us aware that there is more here than meets the eye and ear. The images of poetry speak to startle and puzzle us, to provoke us and cause us to think. They set the imagination free, opening the reader to theological possibilities that might be less acceptable or even unthinkable in the essay mode. Images, dreams, personal experiences, sensual realities-all these aspects of our life that are often filtered out of theological work are front and center when poetry is the medium of faith's expression ....
I don't always (ever? :-) really get poetry, but it touches me. Here's an example ...
The Angels
They all have weary mouths
and bright souls without marge.
And a yearning (as for sin)
sometimes haunts their dream.
They all seem so alike;
in God's garden silent they remain,
like many, many intervals
in his power and melody.
Only when their wings spread out,
they are the awakeners of a wind:
as if God with his broad hands
of a sculptor went through the pages
of the beginning's dark book.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
.... If one starts with some reflection on the place of poetry in the Christian tradition, then the combination of poetry and theology is not all that surprising. From Milton and Dante to Donne and Herbert, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Eliot and Auden, there is a powerful and highly influential strain of poetic articulation of religious and specifically Christian sentiments and tradition.
(snip)
The play of poetry allows a play in theology that is less permissible in theology's more discursive forms. The ambiguity of expression that is intrinsic to poetry permits paradox, contradiction, multivalency, and open-ended articulation of matters of faith. The elliptical style of poetry, which means it may leave out as much as it includes, also gives room to play and resists finality, completion, and closure at every point. That is why poetry is often "difficult." What eye and ear perceive and hear make us aware that there is more here than meets the eye and ear. The images of poetry speak to startle and puzzle us, to provoke us and cause us to think. They set the imagination free, opening the reader to theological possibilities that might be less acceptable or even unthinkable in the essay mode. Images, dreams, personal experiences, sensual realities-all these aspects of our life that are often filtered out of theological work are front and center when poetry is the medium of faith's expression ....
I don't always (ever? :-) really get poetry, but it touches me. Here's an example ...
The Angels
They all have weary mouths
and bright souls without marge.
And a yearning (as for sin)
sometimes haunts their dream.
They all seem so alike;
in God's garden silent they remain,
like many, many intervals
in his power and melody.
Only when their wings spread out,
they are the awakeners of a wind:
as if God with his broad hands
of a sculptor went through the pages
of the beginning's dark book.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
posted by crystal | 7:55 PM
5 Comments:
Thank you for the poem. Very fine!
Do you know this other translation from Rilke?
How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
Hi Rob - I believe I've seen that one before at your blog? Very nice :-)
You mention GM Hopkins, a poet and monk living, I think, in the 19th century... I read a few things of his as an undergraduate and really loved them: God's Grandeur, Pied Beauty, and Spring. The first has this wonderfully abrupt ending that takes you by surprise...
That's true, that poetry's indirection, and feeling-orientation, and metaphor, certainly take you places that other forms of religious and spiritual discourse can't.
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Darius - I believe Hopkins was a Jesuit priest ... I like his poetry too. I think in an earlier post, I had a prauer/poem by Francis Xavier that is translated by Hopkins, and sounds like him :-)
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