A Poem for Good Friday

In order to honor Easter weekend, I though it would be good to have a poem each day for Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Today's poem is John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613: Riding Westward." I offer it with (blessedly) little commentary.

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this, 

The intelligence that moves, devotion is, 

And as the other Spheares, by being growne 

Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne, 

And being by others hurried every day, 

Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey: 

Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit 

For their first mover, and are whirld by it. 

Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West 

This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East. 

There I should see a Sunne, by rising set, 

And by that setting endlesse day beget; 

But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall, 

Sinne had eternally benighted all. 

Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see 

That spectacle of too much weight for mee. 

Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; 

What a death were it then to see God dye? 

It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke, 

It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke. 

Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, 

And tune all spheares at once peirc'd with those holes? 

Could I behold that endlesse height which is 

Zenith to us, and our Antipodes, 

Humbled below us? or that blood which is 

The seat of all our Soules, if not of his, 

Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne 

By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne? 

If on these things I durst not looke, durst I 

Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye, 

Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus 

Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us? 

Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye, 

They'are present yet unto my memory, 

For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee, 

O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree; 

I turne my backe to thee, but to receive 

Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. 

O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee, 

Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, 

Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, 

That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face. 

The conceit at the poem's beginning (and Donne was all about poetic conceits) is that he is like a heavenly body that is out of sync with the motion it should follow, being instead "subject to foreign motions." So, too, Donne, whose thoughts are focused to the east (presumably Jerusalem and the site of the crucifixion) is riding west and away from the place his motions ought to take him. He then moves into a paradox of the place of the sun's rising being linked to Christ's rising and falling and the now "endless day" that we get to live through on the other side of the cross. 

One of my problems with Donne as a poet is that he often feels cold to me. It is all very well and good, immensely talented poetically speaking, but his poetry often feels less like an expression of deep sentiment and more like a guy good at faking it and being awesome. The initial conceit and the paradox of the rising and falling fit into that for me. The poem shifts once Donne moves beyond this and begins reflecting on what it must have been to see God die. The two best lines in the poem, per my preference, are "Who sees God's face, that is self life, must die; / What a death were it then to see God die?". There is no relief for the eye in beholding this scene of death and therefore the poet looks away. The rest of the poem focuses on this averted gaze. 

Donne's characteristic strong language returns in the final ten lines as the poet demands God's overwhelming intervention in order that he can turn back and view Christ. Donne turns his back to "receive corrections," to be whipped. He wants to be worthy of God's chastisement, to be burned of his dross, to have his deformed image restored to its intended perfection, and be able to turn and face his Savior. Donne is utterly aware that this is all a matter of grace. It is grace, after all, to receive discipline from the Lord (Hebrews 12:4-12). 

It is a beautiful poem that finds its heart as it goes on. I couldn't help but thinking of the Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ as I read it this year. The desire to look away. Part of this impulse is obviously due to the fact that the act of crucifixion is revolting and horrific to behold. But part of the impulse stems from the fact of our complicity in this act. We look away because our own impurity is exposed. And since to look on and believe in the Savior as he is lifted up is to be saved, so by grace we need to be cleansed in order to turn back our ashamed eyes and gaze upon our Savior.

Have a blessed Good Friday.

The Road to Heaven and Hell

A week or so ago I posted an article about Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" that I had written for a course reader for our freshman students. I mentioned in that post that I am reconsidering my stance in that article. Not regarding the content of the poem, because I still largely agree with what I wrote then, but about the accuracy of Frost's metaphor for life.

I was prompted to think about this while reading Dennis Danielson's book, Milton's Good God. That book takes a broad look at the theodicy of Milton's epic poem and does so in large part by contextualizing Milton within seventeenth century (and prior) theologies. In the chapter on the importance of God's providence for any theodicy, Danielson discusses grace and free will within their Augustinian context. 

Danielson begins by noting that, for Augustine, "grace" is primarily related to matters of salvation and damnation. (This is not perfectly so. Augustine believed that "grace" included good works emanating from salvation, but grace has long maintained this inextricable association with salvation.) Upon this point he elaborates. . .

[T]his recognition that grace and free will primarily concern matters of salvation and damnation will discourage the uncritical acceptance of the pagan, ethical model of choice involving fundamentally a decision between vice and virtue. . . The parting of the ways is symbolized by 'the Pythagorean letter,' Y; and the general picture is of a person standing in neither the way of vice nor the way of virtue but having to choose between these ways.

Danielson asserts that Christians have historically rejected such a visual of decision-making. Piggybacking off of the work of the early church father Lactantius, Danielson claims that "in a Christian view, there is not one 'neutral' road with two ways forking off it in the divergent directions of virtue and vice; there is but one road, which can be traveled in two opposite directions, toward light or toward darkness, toward heaven or toward hell." In other words, we are all traveling on the same road; the question is, which way are we traveling? Danielson concludes, "And if one is traveling the road to death, one will find no fork in the road: The only way to change direction is precisely to be turned around, converted."

This last line immediately brought to my mind the great moment of moral decision of the title character in Shakespeare's Macbeth. After killing King Duncan and his friend Banquo (spoiler alert!), Macbeth is suffering deep pangs of conscience over his actions. When deciding what to do next, specifically in regard to the thane Macduff who has shown signs of disloyalty to Macbeth's rule, Macbeth metaphorically imagines himself in a river of blood, in an image I find resonant with the Christian image of a single road:

. . .                            I am in blood
Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

Macbeth acknowledges that he has put himself in an almost impossible situation. When I teach this section I always draw a (crappy) picture of a stick figure Macbeth stranded midway in a river of blood. If you've read or seen Macbeth, or know that it's a tragedy, you will know what decision he makes. He is going to try to "go o'er." He is going to press deeper into this river. 

He needs conversion, to be turned around, as Danielson puts it. While he rejects that as an option, Macbeth, at the very least, is clear-eyed about his prospects. He cannot magically extricate himself from this river and take an adjacent, blood-free tributary that gets him out of trouble. It is forward towards hell or backwards toward repentance. He makes his decision and damns himself. (He also, I think, importantly overlooks something: there is no end to this river of blood; once he has stepped out into it, he has entered upon a never-ending cycle of death and betrayal to keep his kingdom. He can keep going, but there is no conceivable end.)

Unsurprisingly, I like the Christian model better. I don't think Frost had this type of thing in mind when he wrote his poem. It is probably slightly uncharitable to lump him in here. But I think the Christian model is preferable to the pagan, Y-model because the Christian view comports more with reality. For we are ever moral creatures making morally-weighted decisions. And there is but one road: narrow at one end and wide at the other.

Two Roads Diverged

I don't teach freshmen anymore (thanks be to God), but I did my first year teaching high school. The spring semester started with a poetry unit and the linchpin of the unit was Robert Frost's famous "The Road Not Taken." We began the semester with the poem and the student's memorized it over the course of a month or so. Boy, do we ever mess up that poem.

I am posting below something I wrote for my students that semester. I am posting it now because I am reconsidering what I wrote. Not, it should be noted, that we royally screw up the interpretation of this poem. By golly, we sure do. But, the moral choice that is presented is, I think, slightly different than the conclusion I reached at the end of this. I will follow up in another post with what I am thinking these days.

Lessons in Paying Attention to Titles: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”

I do not remember everything that hung on the walls of my junior high classrooms, but there is one poster in the sentimental sloganeering covering the walls like vomit that does remain in my memory vault: my sixth grade English teacher had a poster of a verdant forest with a narrow path that split into two directions. At the bottom right-hand corner of the poster was the final words of Robert Frost’s classically misunderstood poem, “The Road Not Taken”: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference” (18-20). We might have talked about the poem; in fact, I am sure we did, but mostly I remember my eyes meandering away from whatever the text at hand was to ponder that picture and the wisdom of its final lines. It was, after all, a paean to the American dream: the rugged individual carving out his solitary path and becoming an iconoclast; the non-conformist; the, well, poet, I guess.

Imagine my surprise, then, reading this poem again as an adult and discovering that this sentimental notion of standing out from the crowd and making your way is not at all the message actually being conveyed in the poem. In fact, the actual message of the poem seems to be that life forces us to make decisions that we would rather not make; we therefore spend our time rationalizing what is essentially an irrational decision and then pick a path arbitrarily and hope it works out in the end. Generations of readers who have seen in this poem an affirmation of do-it-yourselfiveness seem to be ignoring something it always bears keeping in mind about a poem: its title. Frost, after all, did not call the poem “The Road Less Traveled” but “The Road Not Taken.”

The poem is an extended metaphor comparing life decisions to a split path in a “yellow wood” (1). Immediately we see that the tone is not one of triumph but resignation: the speaker is “sorry” (2) that he cannot take both paths, and though he strains down one path “[t]o where it ben[ds] in the undergrowth” (5) he is unable to clearly comprehend which path is better. Indeed, the other path is “just as fair” (6) and though he is tempted to create a fiction that it is worn less he eventually concedes that “the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same” (9-10). In other words, of the two paths neither is more clearly worn than the other, neither is more aesthetically pleasing, and neither offers a better path. The decision becomes one less of cold calculation or moral bravery than simply a coin flip. The speaker’s choice of the second path had nothing to do with rational decision-making processes, but pure randomness.

As the poem moves into its third stanza regret is mingled in with the randomness. For a fleeting moment the speaker sounds hopeful that he might “[keep] the first for another day” (13) and presumably return to this moment of decision. However, this hope is quickly replaced with the assurance that in life “way leads on to way” and it is impossible to return to the original moment of decision. Paths open upon other paths and the speaker will find himself at another split in the road before too long of an interval.      

Which brings us to the fourth stanza and the ending lines that stared down at generations of Mrs. Timmerman's students. The stanza begins and ends with lines of ambiguity as the speaker imagines narrating this event in the future. The stanza begins, “I shall be telling this with a sigh” (16). In many ways your interpretation of this poem hinges on how you read the single word “sigh.” Is this a sigh of regret? A sigh of relief? A sigh, perhaps, of pleasure? The text is unclear. The second ambiguity, and the one that ends the poem is the final line: “And that has made all the difference” (20). The ambiguity here, of course, is how to read the single word “difference.” I know from experience at various restaurants that the adjective "different"--as in, this tastes different--can be used both positively and negatively. How, then, do we decide?

I believe that the three lines between these two bookends can shed some light on this question. The speaker is imagining himself telling the story of this decision with the ambiguous sigh “[s]omewhere ages and ages hence” (17). The distinction is subtle, but it is clear that his telling of the story diverges from the actual experience of the story. When he imagines himself telling the story, he will create the self-serving fiction that he took the “road less traveled by” (19), but we know from the rest of the poem that there are absolutely no grounds for making this claim. Each road is equal. In a moment of stunning honesty and humanity, we see how the speaker will want to remember this moment: in the best possible light. But therein lies the rub: we do not know how the other road would have turned out; we can never know. It is this that haunts so much of human experience: the question of what could have been.

This question is the issue of the poem. We want to make our own choices; we want to believe that life is somehow rational and the less traveled path will work in our favor. But we cannot know. We can only pick a path and hope. To some this might be depressing, but for me this is liberating. Pick a path and go with it. It will not be the only time you come to such a crossroad. When you get to another one, pick again. This poem encourages me to get over my arrogance that says I can figure this out on my own and make my own go of things. As a wise man once said, “In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps” (Proverbs 16:9).

Happy choosing, friends.

You Shall Love Your Crooked Neighbor With Your Crooked Heart

One of my major personal afflictions is my self-righteousness. I want to believe, and generally do believe, that I am better than most other people out there. Humans are inveterate experts at self-righteousness and self-justification. Our motives are so clear to ourselves (or so we think) that if only people could see it from our perspective our actions would all make sense. Part of becoming an adult is realizing that you're actually a bastard. That your motives are neither pure nor clear. That your self is neither righteous nor just. Obviously, I still struggle living out this knowledge, but it's there now. Mercifully, God has revealed to me just how deep the depravity goes in my own soul. 

I was thinking about these things as I read W.H. Auden's poem "As I Walked Out One Evening" a few weeks ago and have incessantly returned to it in the meantime. I don't want to explicate the entire thing, but you should most certainly for the sake both of your humanity and your appreciation of beauty go and read this poem now. Here is a link for your convenience. 

Pertaining to self-righteousness and its nonexistence, I want to zero in on a few lines from the end of Auden's poem (again, I can't recommend highly enough to read it in its entirety). The conceit of the poem is a lover singing to his beloved about the depth of his love in ridiculous romantic diction: "I'll love you dear, I'll love you,/ Till China and Africa meet"; "I'll love you till the ocean/ Is folded and hung up to dry"; etc. 

The clocks in the city answer the lover's outlandish claims in rather more pessimistic language. They warn: "O let not Time deceive you/ You cannot conquer time." Time is a real douchebag in this poem. "Time watches from the shadow/ And coughs when you would kiss." Gah! What an image. The clocks assert that you are not going to be carpe-dieming your way through life. Rather, "in headaches and in worry/ Vaguely life leaks away." Vaguely, purposelessly, imprecisely--there goes life.

The clocks chill out after a bit, though, and add some dark encouragement to their admonition. Here it's worth quoting at a bit greater length:

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.'

That last stanza. It is hard not to cry reading that. This is not blithe moralizing. There are tears scalding your eyes. You are looking in desperation out of the window. Out at a world that often seems careless. At a world full of crooked people. But, you shall love your crooked neighbor, in the end. With your crooked heart. 

Self-righteousness gleefully recognizes the crookedness of your neighbor. Despair sees only your own. But this, this is something different altogether. This acknowledges your fundamental brokenness and that of your neighbor. And its command is love. When we see the crookedness in our neighbor we are not moved to self-righteous pity, but love that recognizes a fellow pilgrim. 

And that is beautiful, despite the tears. We will love each other in our crookedness until the day we are made straight.

After the Praying, I'm Still a Bastard

In my junior classes we just wrapped up a unit on faith poetry. We surveyed a broad range of poems, ranging from atheist screeds against belief to faithful endorsements of God's power and beauty.

My favorite (new) poem from the unit was "Unholy Sonnet: After the Praying" by Mark Jarman. I will reproduce it below and then explain what I loved about the poem:

After the praying, after the hymn-singing,
After the sermon's trenchant commentary
On the world's ills, which make ours secondary,
After the communion, after the hang wringing,
And after peace descends upon us, bringing
Our eyes up to regard the sanctuary
And how the light swords through it, and how, scary
In their sheer numbers, motes of dust ride, clinging
There is, as doctors say about some pain,
Discomfort knowing that despite your prayers,
Your listening and your rejoicing, your small part
In this communal stab at coming clean,
There is one stubborn remnant of your cares
Intact. There is still murder in your heart.

Ah! That last line. But to begin at the beginning, it took me awhile to move past a bit of a superficial interpretation of lines 2-3. I had read it fairly straightforwardly as the "world's ills" being stuff like poverty and pain and war and how our own ills are "secondary" in the face of the overwhelming suffering in so much of the world. However, Jarman isn't making a surface-level comment here, but indicting the preaching in both conservative and liberal churches for being too outward in their denunciation of evil. In both places, the world's ills are emphasized to the point that our own fallenness, our own depravity, somehow becomes secondary.

For conservative churches the world's ills are gay marriage or cohabitation or wealth redistribution, so as long as you aren't living with your gay partner and voting Democrat you are doing well. For liberal churches the world's ills are poverty and conformity and capitalism, so as long as you are against poverty in the abstract, heterodox in your religious beliefs, and can go on a good rant about the evils of major corporations you also are doing well.

This is a caricature, of course, and painting with too broad of a brush, but I think the point holds. The churches that appeal to me, the ones that will last when the liberal or conservative topic du jour has lost its intensity are the ones that speak to me not about how bad stuff is out there and how messed up other people can be--be they communists or capitalists, homosexuals or homophobes--but about the murder in my own heart. In other words, I need to be reminded regularly how big of a bastard I am. I can always readily nod along to condemnations of evil in others. Who can't? Part of being a really big bastard is that it is easy to see how other people are bastards. What I need when I sit before the word of God is to hear how bad I am and how good Christ is to me. Despite my bastardness. 

I love how Jarman forces us to consider the question of the efficacy of church: does church work? There is violence in this poem. The light swords through the sanctuary. The dust motes are scary in their sheer number and cling to the air, which for those paying attention is impossible to do. We make a stab at coming clean. And for our efforts we leave and feel better, but there is that unsettling small voice when we leave reminding us that this did not do the trick. What ruins us is not on the outside, but on the inside. Despite the prayers and the sermon and singing we are still murderers.  

My students seemed to view this as entirely cynical and hopeless. I let them think that for awhile. I try not to be too directive in guiding their interpretations. After their frustration mounted, I told them that this is the gospel. This is who we are. Murderers. Adulterers. Thieves. Greedy. Covetous. Blasphemous. There will always be murder in our hearts. No communal stab, no sermon, no song will cleanse us. In Christ alone our hope is found.

Identity Politics and Criticism

I am linking to a video of the inaugural poem written by Richard Blanco. Poetry is a difficult thing to evaluate, always has been. No one read John Donne until he was resurrected by T.S. Eliot 100 years ago, and by my lights he is the best (short) poet of all time. Yet he went unnoticed and unappreciated for 300 years. That's how it works. Tough to judge.

About Mr. Blanco's poem the most I can say is that it was, mercifully, better than Maya Angelou'spoem from Clinton's inauguration. But so were most of the poems I heard at the Manhattan dive bar's dismal weekly poetry night. Apart from that, I can't get too excited about it. There is a difference, after all, from being like WaltWhitman and being Walt Whitman. All in all, just not my thing.

It was also not RodDreher's thing. Dreher is a blogger at The American Conservative, one of the world's best magazines, and one of my favorite writers. Here was his most scathing comment, following an excerpt: "Yadda yadda. Bleah. Why do we even have inaugural poems? JFK had one written for him by Robert Frost, but after him, only Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have had them. I prefer the Republican strategy." He prefaced the excerpt with the equally odious "I just can't bring myself to enjoy [the poem]." That was all he said. 

He then issued a challenge to his readers to write their own inaugural limerick in the comments section so, disregarding my standard refusal to read blog comments, I decided to see what people came up with. Instead of good-natured response to his challenge, the comments section had been hijacked by liberal commenters charging Dreher with homophobia and anti-gay bias for not just love, love, loving the poem. Dreher's response was that he didn't even know the poet was gay, he just didn't like the poem. (Cards on the table: I did know Blanco was gay before I heard the poem, AND still found it wanting; surefire evidence of my bigotry.)

What I noticed in these critiques of Dreher's assumed homophobia was that no one was defending the merits of the poem (except for repeating the ad infinitum comparisons to Whitman), they were merely arguing that the only reason one could have for not approving was hate. And I was struck by how monumentally ridiculous that was. And then I was reminded of a clip from an episode of last year's Parks and Rec, when Leslie Knope is being interviewed by the dry host of a public radio program. After her segment she is asked to introduce the musical group the station will be playing next: Nefertiti's Fjord, a Norwegian lesbian duo. She takes off her headphones and complains about how terrible the music is. The host agrees, "Yes, it is quite awful. But they are lesbians." It is a perfect sendup of the less tolerable moments on NPR (an organization I love and give money to annually) and tells a salient truth of our culture--we are almost unable to critique anything produced by an aggrieved minority group. Much of what is praised in our culture is diversity for the sake of diversity. 

This is really easy to do in the arts because the experience of them and evaluation of their merit is so subjective. It would be hard for a physicist to be given the Nobel Prize for being gay or Latino (think of how condescending that would seem), but in the realm of arts being a member of a countercultural/minority group identity can certainly be an aid to recognition and praise. If the work is critiqued it is either because the critic just doesn't get it or the criticism was surely personal and motivated by hate. In other words, there is no way to critique stuff. 

I remember trying to read Toni Morrison's Beloved and only being able to make it through about 20 pages before I was mind-numbingly bored and refused to go on. And the thought flashed through my mind: are you only rejecting this book because it was written by a black woman? Shouldn't you give it a bit more time? The answer of course was much simpler: I just didn't enjoy it and didn't want to use my limited free time to read something I didn't enjoy. That was five years ago. Maybe I would like it better today. I loved Kerouac when I was 22; I read an excerpt from On the Road last year and wanted to go back in time and punch that smug sonofabitch in the face. Art is weird. At different times things have struck me as brilliant that I later come to look back on with embarrassment.

Perhaps 150 years from now cultural historians will hail Blanco's occasional verse as the sine qua non of early twenty-first century American letters. More than likely people will forget that it ever happened. However it is viewed, how ludicrous is it that any critique of it is viewed automatically as a critique of the author's sexuality and most likely veiled racial hatred towards the man of the day? When all criticism is personal, criticism is dead as an art form in its own right. Reasoned criticism or even mild dislike is met with pure emoting, and in our culture emotion trumps reason.

I suddenly realize that I have more thoughts on this subject but have already exceeded the proper bounds for the length of a blog post. More thoughts on our weird relationship toward criticism and the club-wielding use of identity politics to follow.