The poets we are hearing about in our series of Lenten Evensong sermons, were all chosen by our preachers, and there is nothing obvious in their work to connect these poets with the season of Lent. However, by dint of a curious piece of etymology they can be put in service to our Lenten reflections: the word �Lent� is connected to the verb �to lengthen� and so Lent is the season of months where the daylight is beginning to get longer as we leave winter behind. Lent is the season of lengthening days and so we might say that our selected poets all serve to lengthen our perspective on God and enable us to go deeper into the mystery of his creative spirit!
In my favourite poem by Thomas Hardy, the poet reflects on what people might say about him after his death � and is not untypical of Hardy�s preoccupation with endings imbued with a kind of wistful and reluctant pessimism.
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
�He was a man who used to notice such things�?
Hardy goes on to hope his neighbours will remember him as someone who strove for the protection of wild creatures, and who had an eye for the mysteries of the �full starred heavens.� And then in the final verse the symbolism of the recurring sound of a tolling bell interrupted by a crossing breeze hints just possibly at the fact that what is created can never finally be lost � but perhaps not � with Hardy you never can tell.
And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell�s boom,
�He hears it not now, but used to notice such things?�
What remains is the intensity of his observations and his devotion to conveying that intensity in words. And what we learn most from Hardy is an attentiveness and honesty with regard to the things and the emotions immediately under our gaze.
Our second poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, had a similar kind of attentiveness to nature, but heard something more in it than Hardy did. In �Hurrahing in Harvest� he gazes on the barbarous beauty of summer�s end and the glory of the heavens, and sees in them love�s rapturous greeting and the presence of Christ waiting to be gleaned like the corn.
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic — as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! —
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
The poet is the beholder who knows how rarely his sight is cleansed for such encounters. Contrary to the impression created by our customary self-preoccupation, what is �out there� waiting for us is more real, more communicative of the being of our creator, than what we are likely to discover for ourselves in ourselves. Spirituality begins not with a sought for inner experience � some mystical sense of the immaterial � but with the refining of our attention to what is materially given. All things have their ultimate ground in God�s knowledge and love and therefore religious experience should not be viewed as a specific kind of experience set alongside other non- religious experiences. God is to be experienced as mediated through the depth, freedom, purity and intensity with which all things can communicate themselves to us, as and when we are ready to behold them.
Our third poet WH Auden, unlike Hardy, has been set to music for choirs to sing, but those Christmas, Whitsuntide and St Cecilia poems are unsuitable for Lent. The Whitsuntide poem � �The Twelve� (set by William Walton) � speaks of the apostles who
�Went forth into a joyless world
Of swords and rhetoric
To bring it joy.�
The poem contrasts the rhetoric of the state, which persecutes and kills the messengers of the Word, with speech which is �Holy still� though there is no sacred tongue, �The Truth may be told in all.� In the middle of this largely celebratory poem, there is a solo, which prays the prayer of the tortured witness:
O Lord, my God,
Though I forsake thee
Forsake me not,
But guide me as I walk
Through the valley of mistrust,
And let the cry of my disbelieving absence
Come unto thee,
Thou who declared unto Moses:
“I shall be there.”
Just as Hopkins spoke of the absent Beholder, so Auden speaks of a disbelieving absence in the valley of mistrust, echoing the valley of death in Psalm 23 and the father in the gospel who prays, �Lord I believe help thou mine unbelief.� And again Auden finds a way of affirming Hopkins� sense of a divine presence, in his assertion of God�s words to Moses, �I shall be there�, there not only in the beauty of nature but also in the place of suffering and despair.
The same sense of desperation, �this strange innermost abandonment� comes and goes in the mind of the dying man in Newman�s poem �The Dream of Gerontius� which became famous in Elgar�s setting of a reduced version of the text, and which we shall hear in the final Evensong of our series. The part of the poem which gave Elgar the most trouble, concerns the approach of the departed soul to the presence of the Almighty. Elgar knew he must not be theatrical and in his response to the friend who raised this question he points out that �none of the action takes place in the presence of God. The soul says �I go before my God� but we don�t, we stand outside.� In this correspondence with Jaeger, Elgar argues hard for his way of presenting the crucial moment of encounter when the soul exclaims �I go before my judge. Ah!…� Jaeger wanted a Wagnerian climax! Elgar stuck to his own inspiration: there is a quiet echo of the voices praying for the soul on earth; the Angel sings:
�Praise to his name!
The eager spirit has darted from my hold,
O happy, suffering soul! For it is safe
Consumed, yet quickened, by the glance of God.
Alleluia! Praise to his name.
Then after a series of rising chords, as Elgar writes to Jaeger, �one semi-quaver value fffffffzzzz is the one glimpse into the Unexpressible� The soul then sings �Take me away, and in the lowest deep there let me be��
What has always moved me most in this poem is that extraordinary description of the soul at the moment of judgement, with its four paradoxical adjectives, �happy, suffering�, �consumed yet quickened�. It captures the feeling of that moment Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 13:13, �Then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.� To know what God has seen and fully understood in us must bring a suffering sense of being wholly consumed, and yet to know that it is the loving father of Jesus Christ who thus sees us must also be a life giving (quickening) moment of supreme happiness, the culmination of all those moments of insight to which our other poets have alerted us.
With my love and prayers
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker