Gerald Morris's Blog, page 2

Seeking a Shared Emptiness

16 January 2016
I said earlier that poetry differs from story and rhetoric largely in terms of depth and mystery. Story suggests meaning behind the randomness of experience, and rhetoric seeks to hold back the waters of chaos by constructing calcified walls of rules around our perimeter. Poetry, by contrast, faces the chaos, plumbs it, and occasionally plunges in.
But if poetry is distinguished by its depth, it is fair to ask, “Depth of what?” Going deeper into a hole only yields a deeper emptiness. This week I’m reading Sylvia Plath – Ariel, written just months before her suicide. Plath is so desperate, seeking so hard, gazing so deeply – but only into her own darkness. No wonder she dreams of the starless night, like dark waters of death closing over her. It would still be empty, but it would no longer be her own lonely emptiness.
How did she even have energy to write?
There are those who, rejecting the notion of an external God "out there," claim that they seek God within themselves. That’s fair enough; God is in there, too. But for the most part, all their digging within the depths of their selves only turns up bits of themselves that they hadn’t ever noticed. Then, if they don’t examine this rough ore too closely, they can even pretend that it is God that they’ve found.  Plath is too honest for that. She recognizes the darkness that she finds. Kyrie eleison.

The Moon and the Yew Tree
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetaryThe trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were GodPrickling my ankles and murmuring of their humilityFumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.Separated from my house by a row of headstones.I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,White as a knuckle and terribly upset.It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quietWith the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky —Eight great tongues affirming the ResurrectionAt the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.The eyes lift after it and find the moon.The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.How I would like to believe in tenderness –The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are floweringBlue and mystical over the face of the starsInside the church, the saints will all be blue,Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.

A Shaking

15 January 2016

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for youAs yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bendYour force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.I, like an usurp'd town to another due,Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,But am betroth'd unto your enemy;Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,Take me to you, imprison me, for I,Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
This is, perhaps, the best known of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and I think the best. Where the other sonnets have a tendency to wallow in confessions of abject sinfulness, to obsess especially over the stain of lust on the soul (suspicious, or at least ironic, in one who also wrote such memorable erotic poetry), this one does not. Oh, it maintains the general theme in that it confesses guilt and begs for God’s deliverance, but it manages to do so without focusing just on what they used to call “unclean thoughts,” with the happy result that this sonnet, at least, doesn’t sound like a conventionally devout adolescent boy wracked with guilt for thinking so much about sex.
But this one is just great poetry, both in the marriage of its pounding rhythms and its sense, and in the wealth of evocative images, smashed chaotically together. The conceit of being an occupied city held against the rightful king by a rebellious force is thrown together with that of being a lover separated from her true love and now unwillingly betrothed to another. But the poet is unable to escape. Even his reason has been overpowered (or seduced) by the occupying enemy, and he is helpless to do anything but cry for help – and to submit to whatever force is necessary.
But this time through was a little different, because after reading it once it suddenly occurred to me go back and read it again – but this time to read it as if I were a woman. Suddenly “Batter” had a different feel. “Bend your force to break, blow, burn” did not come across as deliverance but simply as an exchange of one abuser for another. As for the last line, calling for God’s cleansing rape – that was surely intended to be jarring, and it is, but reading it as a woman, it is not just a stark image. It is a threat. The sonnet is still a great poem. But this time I realized that its truth is not equally true for everyone.
This is not an earthshaking discovery. I would imagine that somewhat more than half the people who read this poem for the first time every year have these same thoughts. No, what’s shaking is that as many times as I have read this sonnet over the past thirty-five years, this is the first time they have occurred to me.