By William Brown
IWU '22
This post is part of our series on "The Arts and Spirituality" Check out more by following the "The Arts and Spirituality" tag.
Poetry and matters of spirituality have been intertwined for a very long time. Enheduanna, the first individually known poet of the world, wrote religious hymns in praise of the goddess Inanna as early as the twenty-third century B.C.E. Following in her metaphorical footsteps, most religions have produced some form of poetry in praise of the beliefs they espouse. The influence that various spiritual beliefs have had on poetry is undeniable. What I find perhaps even more interesting, though, is how poetry can provide a model to help clarify or change the spiritual beliefs and practices in question. Whether we are talking about haiku (yes, the plural of haiku is haiku) composed by Buddhist monks in Japan, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or, really, most poetry that is interested in spirituality, tensions often arise between the poetry itself and the spiritual beliefs that poetry is espousing. These tensions, I hold, allow opportunities for poems to grapple with some of the intricacies of the the spiritual point of view they are written from. For a simple example, let’s examine this haiku, written by the Buddhist monk Kobayashi Issa:
the world of dew
is the world of dew
and yet, and yet
With the understanding that I am far from an expert on Buddhism, allow me to explain the way I interpret this poem to you. Dew is a symbol of impermanence, and so the fact that existence is described as “the world of dew” very much fits into the Buddhist worldview that believes everything is ephemeral, and that all things must eventually pass into nothingness. However, the third line greatly complicates this. To me, the line “and yet, and yet” signifies a sort of yearning for something permanent, something beyond this world, and, thus, something that possesses a certain tension with the Buddhist perspective that everything is transient. This is not to say that this line is incompatible with traditional Buddhist beliefs. For example, I have encountered a reading where what was being gestured towards with that final line was the insight that the only constant thing in “the world of dew” is the perpetual change that Buddhism acknowledges, which is a reading that makes a lot of sense to me, and, I think, very successfully reconciles the poem’s yearning for something greater with the poem’s very Buddhist worldview. However, I think there is still a degree of tension there, tension that is indicated by the very need to explain why a poem that is this grounded in Buddhism is gesturing towards something intransient. For me, this is part of what poetry about spiritual topics can accomplish: poetry, as a literary medium in which (in my opinion) contradictions and incongruities are, in many cases, more prevalent and accepted than in other literary mediums, can be uniquely well-positioned to encapsulate some of the less certain areas of various spiritual beliefs, and through their existence force those who encounter those poems to reconcile and/or clarify seemingly disparate parts of their spiritual beliefs. With that in mind, I would like to examine one more poem in this blog post, one that is very personally important to me. This is “Pied Beauty,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
In this poem, which looks rather tame on the surface, Hopkins, a Catholic priest, is praising God for the diverse beauty on Earth. The tension I am interested in lies within the fact that the beauty that Hopkins is praising is “pied,” or possessing two or more colors, and the fact that the unknowability of God’s methods or intentions is of central importance to the poem. The first part of the tension that I mentioned is fairly straightforward: Hopkins is praising (in addition to God) “dappled things,” or things that have contrast within them. From my point of view, this is a poem in praise of diversity, both in the terms of the actual, literal “dappled things” Hopkins describes as well as what we would understand diversity to be from a social justice point of view. This is in tension with some of the Catholic church’s problematic historical beliefs on issues such as the rights of women and people of color, as the Catholic church, during the time in which Hopkins wrote this poem, in the late nineteenth century, was at the very least complicit in the societal disenfranchisement of racial minorities, and was actively harmful regarding the equality of men and women. One might expect this tension of praising diversity while also expounding the beliefs of an institution that does not value diversity to be resolved in a manner that emphasizes the potential complementarity of diverse things, leaving the door open for the interpretation that some things are complementary in the sense that some are meant to serve others, or fulfill lesser roles than others, or something of that nature.
To be sure, complementarity plays a part in the poem: in the second stanza, Hopkins emphasizes how God has created slow things to go with swift things, sweet things to go with sour things, and so on. However, that, to me, is only part of the method through which that tension is resolved in this poem. Instead, much of the weight of what I interpret to be the poem’s meaning relies on the idea that God is ultimately unknowable and inscrutable for human beings, and that humanity’s attempts to comprehend and interpret God’s designs are (assuming that the Christian conception of “God” exists) in vain (this is reflected in the parenthetical “who knows how?”). When combined with the second stanza’s emphasis on the complementary nature of things, this makes me interpret the poem as saying something akin to the following: things may be complementary in nature, and this may be because of God’s design, but ultimately, human interpretation of God’s design is going to be flawed, and so as such, we should just appreciate the diverse beauty of the things that God has created, rather than trying to interpret the order that God has created. I have one final piece of evidence to back this claim up: this poem is itself a kind of representation of the diversity of things. The poem is written in a form that Hopkins invented, which he called a “curtal sonnet”; basically, it is a poetic form designed to represent three-quarters of a Petrarchan sonnet, and, depending on how you define what a “sonnet” is, you might not even consider this poem to be a sonnet. Nonetheless, though, it is a sonnet, after a fashion, and it is what one might consider an example of the diversity of the sonnet form, that something so different from “traditional” sonnets could still be itself a type of sonnet. As such, to me, at least, the poem seems to be implicitly taking the side of those potentially dismissed by the Catholic church, arguing for a more diverse and accepting vision of Catholicism through the form of the poem itself as much as through its content. Ultimately, as someone who grew up in the Catholic faith (even if I now consider myself to be agnostic), bearing in mind that some of the Catholic church’s doctrines (particularly those surrounding their perception of queer people) are still harmful, this poem represents a more inclusive form of Catholicism for me, and I think that is valuable, and a worthwhile use of that tension I have spent so much time talking about.
Comments