Poetic Revelations

Word Made Flesh Made Word: The Power of the Word III

Mark S. Burrows, Jean Ward, Małgorzata Grzegorzewska, Mark S. Burrows, Jean Ward, Małgorzata Grzegorzewska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472468307
• eBook ISBN: 9781317079538
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

This book explores the much debated relation of language and bodily experience (i.e. the 'flesh'), considering in particular how poetry functions as revelatory discourse and thus relates to the formal horizon of theological inquiry. The central thematic focus is around a 'phenomenology of the flesh' as that which connects us with the world, being the site of perception and feeling, joy and suffering, and of life itself in all its vulnerability. The voices represented in this collection reflect interdisciplinary methods of interpretation and broadly ecumenical sensibilities, focusing attention on such matters as the revelatory nature of language in general and poetic language in particular, the function of poetry in society, the question of Incarnation and its relation to language and the poetic arts, the kenosis of the Word, and human embodiment in relation to the word 'enfleshed' in poetry.

Part I
Word made Word

Poetry and the re-making of the world

1
Poetry human and divine

Sir Michael Edwards

We ought to be surprised that in the opening of the Book of Genesis, God speaks the world into being. He does not make, build, paint, sing or dance it: he says it. He later gives to Moses tablets of stone ‘written with the finger of God’ (Ex. 31:18); the names of the faithful are ‘written in the book of life’ (Rev. 13:8). Those of us who are writers, and in particular poets or dramatists, can feel pleased that speaking and writing are involved in the creation of the universe and the salvation of humanity. At the same time, we all might tell ourselves that God’s creation of the world in speech is beyond our understanding, as is the relation between the book of life and our own man-made books. Prudence is the appropriate virtue. Nor do we know by what words God produced what we call light, the firmament and so on, since the author of Genesis naturally has recourse to human language, to Hebrew. The same is true of the second kind of divine speech act (should such vocabulary be appropriate), when God calls the light ‘day’ and the darkness ‘night’: his naming likewise escapes us. In a sense, being in the midst of God’s creation, we are surrounded by his words, yet for us they remain silent. We can sense that words and things, a divine language and the presences of the created universe, are at one, but we cannot hear, either, what seems to be the world’s speech in response. We can only listen by faith as ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament announces his handiwork’, as ‘Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night transmits knowledge’ (Ps. 19:2).

Jesus as the Word of God at the Creation and as the Word made flesh in the Incarnation is equally incomprehensible; any thoughts we may have on the subject are likely to be inept. We can most probably conclude, however, that, since one Person of what we perhaps wrongly call the Trinity is ‘the Word’, speech, words, language or something resembling them are to be found at the core of divine as of human experience. And, as we know, the Word on earth, in acting, utters words continually, in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, just as he speaks from elsewhere in the Acts and in the Book of Revelation. Like the writers of the Bible but with direct authority, he speaks a human language which is nevertheless other, and audibly so (even when translated, as it always is) if we are given grace to hear it. The Word on the Cross is also surrounded – suggestively, if one thinks about it – by words both human and divine, as the evangelists quote from the Psalms and from the prophets Isaiah and Zechariah: ‘They parted my garments among them’ (Mt. 27:35, citing Ps. 22:19); ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors’ (Mk. 15:28, citing Is. 53:12); ‘A bone of him shall not be broken’ (Jn. 19:36, citing Ps. 34:20); ‘They shall look on him whom they pierced’ (Jn. 19:37, citing Zech. 12:10); and as Jesus himself repeats at the deepest level other divine-human words of the psalmists: ‘I thirst’ (Jn. 19:28, citing Ps. 42:2); ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mt. 27:46, citing Ps. 22:1); ‘into thy hands I commend my spirit’ (Lk. 23:46, citing Ps. 31:5).

In a Christian perspective, language – or more particularly speech – reaches into the recesses of the Godhead and opens onto an arcanum far removed from and yet closely connected with English, say, or Polish, or Latin, with their grammar, syntax and vocabulary. The Word creates the world (the resemblance in English of word and world is one of those gifts of chance weighty with suggestion) as the words of a writer bring into existence a world not imagined before. But the relation between divine and human words is problematic, and requires in a fallen world that we advance with caution. God and man are certainly linked as beings that speak. Speech may well be included in the fact that man is made in the image of God, especially if one considers how that making is presented: ‘And God said, Let us make man in our image’ (Gen. 1:26). Language presents itself as a mystery, a secret, an initiation into what transcends it. On the purely human level, after the Fall and specifically after Babel, the capacity of each of the thousands of human tongues to disclose a world of its own, akin to all the others yet offering a unique vision of reality, already shows the exploratory virtue of words. However indistinctly human words are related to the divine Word, Baudelaire must be right in declaring: ‘There is something holy in language, in the word, which forbids us from using it lightly’ (117–118).

I

With that in mind, how may we at least begin to understand the bearing, on the poems we write or read, of the Word of God and the Word made flesh? The Word is clearly not made flesh in our poetry, and even the notion that, in our poetry, human words are made flesh seems to approach the question from the wrong angle. Even if what we call our inner life is deeply penetrated by the presence of Jesus, and we succeed in conveying something of that communion into a poem, maybe with the conviction that God was prompting and assisting us, we do not produce a page of scripture, and Jesus is present in the text with the same limitation as in any of our actions motivated by grace. Further, words are already flesh: their sounds emerge from our vocal apparatus and enter our ears (even when read); their rhythms (even monosyllables are rhythmic) move in our bodies. Thought does not wait to be embodied in poems: it is already bodied in our thinking and in the words we use to think it. The capacity peculiar to poetry is to make us aware of the flesh-ness or corporeality of language: by its concentration and its unconcern simply to convey a message, a poem invites us into the life of words, directs our attention to the sounds to be heard and the rhythms to be experienced. Poetry exists in part to reveal the sound of sense, the rhythm of meaning, the profundities of language that relate it to bodies full of mind and to a reality vibrating with logos, with intelligence.

The poem constitutes above all, in this perspective, a special kind of body. As an outlandish form of speech which seems nevertheless to have existed from very early in the history of language, it can fascinate by its form and by the life of that form. In the strictness of its lines, even when ‘free’, it clearly wishes to exist as an entity, a unity; it makes sounds and breathes like an animal body, yet it remains invisible and untouchable. It has a body unlike any other – except those of all art works. All the arts appear in strange bodies. A painting may be at once ‘Flatford Mill’ and a rectangle of canvas; a quartet is passion, mathematics, wood and catgut existing both where the players are seated and nowhere; a dance is human bodies along with configurations in space which dissolve into air; even the solidity of a building is etherealized by aesthetic volumes and views. A poem, a body teeming (like ourselves) with emotions, ideas, words, is the hint of a different manner of body, of what the Bible calls a ‘glorious body’ (Phil. 3:21) or, in the course of a stretch of argument both rigorous and poetic in the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, a ‘spiritual body’ (15:44). I’ve written elsewhere of the centrality of this latter expression, an astonishing oxymoron, for understanding the biblical stress not on the ultimate disappearance of the universe but on the creation of ‘new heavens’ and a ‘new earth’ (2 Pet. 3:13, Rev. 21:1), and of humans not as bodiless spirits to be ushered elsewhere but as soul and body finally transformed and living, as it were, here (Edwards 5–6). A poem is emphatically not a spiritual body, but an intimation in its order and otherness of that carnal possibility.

One so often senses, in writing or reading a poem, that one is treading on unaccustomed ground, that because of the potentiality of language and especially of language so organized, formed, sounded, cadenced, one is at the edge of what one knows; one crosses the threshold to something else. By its singular body, poetry names the world anew, it continues Adam’s naming of the animals but in a fallen world, where to rename reality is to recreate it in our perception with a view to the future, to the true Recreation of the world at the end of time. A poem draws the real into newness and song. A person, an event, an object, an emotion, an idea, approached anew and pervaded by the jubilant play of words, is transformed, and gives onto a world transcending ours. A Hampstead garden in which can be seen paths, moss, shadows and green vegetation becomes transfigured when Keats writes, in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, of ‘verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways’, and when these glooms and ways are travelled fitfully by light ‘from heaven … with the breezes blown’. The verdurous glooms are something other than green shadows: they renew our experience of the earth and suggest the ‘new earth’ itself. Lights which descend from heaven and which don’t simply come and go as the wind breathes in the foliage blocking the sun, but which are themselves blown by the wind, suggest a world hovering between the palpable and the impalpable and hesitating between the material sky and immaterial heaven. In our poetry the world appears otherwise.

To imagine that a breeze can blow light is at once irrational nonsense and poetic truth. We speak idly of poetry as revelation, for only God can reveal what is beyond us, yet the very existence of poetry is revealing. By its cunning body, its altered syntax, its unexpected associations of words, its recreative metaphors and other figures, it changes whatever it touches, evokes the possibility of a deeper change, hints of otherness in the same, and does so always, whatever the convictions, religious or otherwise, of the poet. Poetry is our word for looking beyond what meets the eye and the intelligence. As Jesus, the Word of God, is God’s most intimate way of entering his creation and approaching us, our poetic words in response are our feeling for what transcends us. Hence the archaic and still extant tradition claiming that poetry is, of its nature, inspired, that it comes from the gods and shadows forth their domain. Poetry has no doubt always seemed mysterious, except at moments when it becomes a matter of technique governed by rules, or the unwitting expression of underlying social and cultural forces, and the poet can believe himself ‘inspired’ in the sense that he is not fully in control, that he finds himself, in the act of writing, having experiences and using language that seem to arrive partly from elsewhere. This is to say that the poet, working well, is both blind and clairvoyant. One learns, by reading as well as by writing poetry, the complexity of self-knowledge, and that oneself is other. Poetry is only revelation in that poets themselves reveal where they have been, what they have seen, and the foreignness of what has been given them to discover. As our body is bettered in the perfect breathing and moving of the poem, so our emotions, ideas, perceptions, all of our inner life as indistinguishable from our outer, are transformed in the otherwhere of the poem.

II

One might also put it this way: we seem to realize without having to become conscious of the fact that our bodies and our minds, or souls, are intrinsically linked, for in Hebrew, hand indicates power, and face presence, while in Greek, bowels are the seat of the affections, and in many languages affections originate in the heart. Naturally incarnate, we are less a soul in a body, often conceived as a soul locked in the ‘prison’ of the body, than a body in a soul. According to Christian anthropology, we await the resurrection of the body (not of a soul freed from body), and meanwhile (and apparently forever) Jesus is incarnate in us, the church being his body and all Christians, according to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, ‘members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones’ (5:30), words which I find most puzzling. Incarnation is already with us, and does not await our poems. What poems offer is our mind-and-body appearing otherwise: the mind of the poem is not quite the poet’s, since he has written other than what he thought, and the poem’s body has a different nature from ours. In the unwontedness of what is said and of the way it is said, our mind and body are changed, for the better.

In other words, poetry is not essentially a making, a poïesis. Something is indeed made in the sense that the poet aims, in writing and revising, for a precision, a completeness, a perfection without which the emotions and ideas of the poem, being out of focus, would not have been discovered and would not be there, while the poem’s body would remain flabby and awkward. The underlying act of the poet and the underlying work of the poem, however, occur at a deeper level. This does not imply Paul Valéry’s disdain of the finished poem in favour of the study of its genesis, on the grounds that how a poem now is teaches us far less about the workings of the human psyche than the fascinating complications of how it came to be written. It implies that what is brought into being is less a new object than a new experience. As the poet finds, in the process of writing, someone else in himself and something else in the world, and does so as the poem itself finds its proper form, its just language, its right sounds and rhythms, so the reader finds in himself an unsuspected capacity and in the world an unseen possibility. In the case of Christian poetry, the reading of the poem can be a spiritual experience, not because the poet was literally inspired, but simply because writing a poem resembles the other acts of a Christian and may be assisted by the same grace. One can benefit from a Christian poem as from any act of Christian charity, humility, forgiveness, without recourse to a theory of poetry shuffling the Word of God and our words and so encroaching on the unknowable.

The uncommon body of the poem, while remaining in time, also draws us into a world out of time. I have nothing to add here to what T. S. Eliot saw clearly in the final section of ‘Dry Salvages’, except that one needs to read carefully those lines about Incarnation. Our curiosity, Eliot writes, searches past and future, whereas the present, lived fully and well, is where salvation occurs. To apprehend ‘The point of intersection of the timeless / With time’ is ‘an occupation for the saint’, who is required to know that another world beats through this one – that every instant is open to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: poetry, Incarnation and ‘the wonder of unexpected supply’
• PART I Word made Word: poetry and the re-making of the world
• PART II Flesh made Word: poetry as the shaping of the self
• PART III Word made flesh: the poem as body enclosed in language
• Epilogue: poetry as vehicle of divine presence
• Index of scriptural references
• Index of persons
• Subject index