10 March 2016

In my last post, I explained (an exercise in the unnecessary) how poetry is a particularly apt vehicle for writing about divine mysteries, inasmuch as poetry is simultaneously self-disclosing and self-concealing. It was made for mystery. This explains both why so much religious writing is done in poetry and why religious writing without poetry is often so unsatisfying.
But what if we turn that around? What about poetry that is not religious writing? After all, we no longer inhabit an overtly religio-form world, and while we certainly still have poets who pursue faith through their verse, our poets today are likely to claim no religious faith at all. Without the ready-made mystery of faith, what does a secular poet write about? If poetry is ideal for expressing hidden depths, where does the secular poet seek those depths? What hiddenness inspires an atheist poet?
This doesn’t actually seem to be a problem. Poets who eschew the built-in source of mystery that is a religious faith nevertheless seem to have no trouble at all finding depths to explore. Whitman sings of himself and finds his own soul inexhaustibly filled with meaning (and somehow, unlike many of his imitators, manages to do so without becoming revoltingly self-obsessed and arrogant). Others explore individual facets of human life: death, relationships, love. All of these involve more than enough mystery to warrant poetic expression.
As it happens, though, I’m currently reading through Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems, and not only does he appear to explore this precise question – what is the deep meaning for a poet to explore in a post-religious world? – but offers his own answer.
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.Take the moral law and make a nave of itAnd from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,The conscience is converted into palms,Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.We agree in principle. That's clear. But takeThe opposing law and make a peristyle,And from the peristyle project a masqueBeyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,Is equally converted into palms,Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,Madame, we are where we began. Allow,Therefore, that in the planetary sceneYour disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,Proud of such novelties of the sublime,Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,May, merely may, madame, whip from themselvesA jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.This will make widows wince. But fictive thingsWink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
One advantage of reading poetry simply because I want to is that I never have to read other people’s explanations of what poems mean. I intend never to read such stuff again. That being the case, I intend never in this blog to offer that which I myself will not read. All I will do is point to Stevens’s suggestion that religious fervor may arise from more than one source (the dullest of which is morality). Either way it manifests itself in fictive things – or, simply, poetry. The mystery is not just a feature of the content, but of the expression.
In practice, Stevens celebrates the mystery of the ordinary thing seen in a new light. From “The Comedian as the Letter C”:
            The melon should have apposite ritual,Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,When its black branches came to bad, belle day,Should have an incantation. and again,When piled on salvers its aroma steeped The summer, it should have a sacramentAnd celebration.
In tiny vignettes, or “anecdotes,” Stevens casts images on the wall and leaves them to be pondered or merely experienced. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” simply offers thirteen different gasps of recognition – Yes, I remember feeling that once – arbitrarily organized around the theme of blackbirds. The mystery is not what is there, but what is evoked.
And then there’s the glorious “Sunday Morning,” which begins with a languid Sunday morning on a sunny veranda. Perhaps raised in church, though, the woman there turns her thoughts reluctantly “to silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.” She thinks:
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?What is divinity if it can comeOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,In pungent fruit and bright, green wings or elseIn any balm or beauty of the earth,Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?Divinity must live within herself . . .
But is it enough?
She says, “But in contentment I still feelThe need of some imperishable bliss.”Death is the mother of beauty; hence from herAlone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires . . .
Maybe it is enough, though. In experiencing Stevens’s musings my own faith has been stirred, even when he turns away from the traditional forms that I still cherish. So what if he is experiencing mystery in the smell of ripe fruit on a sunny day with a green cockatoo nearby? I recognize the mystery, and it is holy. So what if Stevens organizes a chaos around a jar on a hillside in Tennessee? He has identified the chaos and responded by seeking an internal meaning beneath the visible reality.
The defining element is mystery, and I care more whether mystery is found than where. Some people, it seems to me, start out seeking within themselves, but if they do so without awe and a quest for mystery find only a shell in the shape of a human. Others start out seeking beyond themselves, looking for God, but if they pursue that quest without awe and a sense of mystery find only a distant tyrant.

But those who seek God with a sense of mystery end up finding themselves. And those who seek with awe in the mystery of themselves end up finding God.