In Piers Plowman book 18, which describes the crucifixion and the harrowing of Hell, Mercy and Truth, Righteousness and Peace are four free-speaking, quarrelsome women who argue with comic ferocity about what has been going on that Good Friday. Peace says that 'Jesus jousted well, joy beginneth to dawn' because God has ordained: 'Mercy, my sister and I mankind should save.' Righteousness rudely interrupts her: 'Why ravest thou? Or art thou right drunk?' Peace and Mercy, you think too much of yourselves! What about me, Righteousness? They continue to argue until Mercy and Truth agree and Righteousness and Peace kiss and make up (as in Psalm 85).
In George Herbert’s poem ‘Love’, quoted by David Perman in his article on page 6, Love is personified as a gracious host treating an unworthy-feeling guest with great kindness and courtesy. The poem describes in very concrete terms how Love behaves; its power and grace come from the particular details with which Love is shown in action. The guest feels fit only to serve at the table. Love replies: ‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’ So I did sit and eat.
I was thinking some more about the first Advent ‘O’ antiphon, quoted in the editorial, in which Wisdom is personified:
O Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from end to end to look after everything strongly and sweetly, come and teach us carefulness.
The antiphon is based on the great Wisdom poem in the Old Testament apocryphal book, Wisdom of Solomon, and its lines 2-3 are taken directly from that book’s chapter 8 verse 1. Fascinatingly for a patriarchal religion, in this poem Wisdom is a woman and divine. She is ‘a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty’. The poet is ‘enamoured of her beauty’. Of course, in John the Evangelist’s poem on the incarnation, with which his Gospel opens, the feminine Sophia becomes the masculine Logos: Jesus was a man.
I was pondering why in the original poem Wisdom was a woman and whether it had something to do with ‘carefulness’. I don’t think that women are ‘naturally’ more careful than men. But carefulness is the hard lesson every new mother has to acquire fast, when, possibly after years of careless student days or jolly nights out, she becomes responsible for the minutiae of a hugely vulnerable newborn life and has constantly to look after small material details.
In Jane Duran’s poem ‘Rug from the Atlas Mountains’ on page 17 dedicated for Redha, the two of them carefully examine a rug, the beautiful pictures woven into it, the skilful workmanship, the unfaded colours at the back. The rug’s lovingly evoked reality is what gives poetic force to her final line: ‘how little it takes for you to move me’. She has put her feelings ‘for Redha’ into the rug, so that it becomes a metaphor (metaphor = ‘carry over’) for those feelings. It is only in the last line that we realise this is a love poem. Similarly, although a very different poem, ‘Summer by the Swale’ on page 23, dedicated for Ian, has a brisk walking rhythm with many local words and place names, which graphically evoke a walk they go on together in Swaledale. The limestone landscape with its rushing waters becomes a metaphor for the poet’s own body and feelings: where water dives through limestone bone by bone into the heart’s four caves.
This poetic charging of physical experience with feeling and imagination is very close to the religious impulse to ‘animate’ or personify ‘deep encounters’ as spirits or gods.
Both express the spiritual richness of human life dealing with the material world.
Poetry is made of very concrete things that we can see, hear, taste, smell and feel. A poem is itself also an articulated body of words in a particular order, with its own rhythm, sound and shape. We respond to rhythm because our own hearts beat and may beat faster. Supernatural beings don’t exist; God is not real. But the Earth and its inhabitants are real. The poet Hopkins, who wrote ‘Binsey Poplars’ said he felt a terrible physical pain when the trees were cut down. What I find disagreeable about calling the Earth and its inhabitants ‘non-real’ is the carelessness of their physical particularity, which in poetry is to miss the point (and in politics 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians can become ‘collateral damage’ – just words). A ‘non-realist’ attitude to a poem is to discount all the physical particularities it possesses or conveys, because the ‘non-realist’ philosopher merely wants to extract a philosophical point from it, rather like that beef essence we were given as children.
At the end of William Morris’s News from Nowhere the heroine, Ellen gives her great cry: ‘How I love the Earth, and the seasons and weather, and all things that deal with it, and all that grows out of it!’ It is the physical reality of the Earth and its creatures (including ourselves), that sustains, gives life, body and thisness to all the feelings, imaginings and creations of the poetic genius with which we load them.