George Herbert by candlelight

By MICHAEL CAINES 

If you���ve attended a poetry reading in the past, say, twenty years, you���ve probably heard it: the Portentous Hush. This is what Joseph S. Salemi, a poet and Professor of English in New York, once provocatively identified as ���the single most destructive and off-putting characteristic of contemporary confessional lyrics���: an attitude of reverence that cancels out criticism, and would merely have you listen to the recitation of morally earnest verses ���as if they were a religiously sanctioned revelation���.

���You can find Portentous Hush at every level of current poetic composition���, Salemi observed in 2001, ���from the whining of some lovesick adolescent in a collaborative workshop to the boring but well-remunerated exhalations of Diane Wakoski and Rita Dove���. Salemi is talking here about the writing of poetry, but I���ve heard plenty of poetry readings infected, in turn, by the same phenomenon ��� ���the oracular tone, the inflated self-importance, the complete failure to perceive that poetry need not be overheated vatic utterance��� ��� and seen audiences fail to respond to poets who take a irreverent, satirical line, seemingly because they don���t know that they can. . . .

At the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last night, the Hush seemed to abate in the presence ��� of all things ��� of the genuinely religious poetry of George Herbert and a series of sensitive responses to Herbert by contemporary poets, some of them (though maybe not enough of them) written for the occasion.

This was the second in a short series called The Voice and the Echo (the next one, devoted to William Blake, is tonight, then it���s Gerard Manley Hopkins on September 9; the first event was inspired by John Donne, and included a new poem by Paul Muldoon, "From His Mistress Going to Bed", published in the TLS last month). Actors, in this case Alex Jennings and Hattie Morahan, read out the poems; the cellist Jacqueline Thomas provided apt musical interludes. This being the Sam Wanamaker, the candles were lit and lowered; a few of the Herbert-inspired poets were there to read out and elucidate their works for themselves. It was all beautifully prepared, and set up, you might think, for a bad case of Portentous Hush: Live!

Or perhaps that���s to take the religious poet tag too . . . seriously. Herbert���s devotion, his springing into formal innovation, his confessions of doubt and failure, and all-consuming conversation with God, make him not a humourless bore but a more amusing and, in the best sense, conceited writer. (Jennings conveyed that in his reading of ���The Sonne���, Herbert���s son-net piously in praise of the usual, but also in praise of the English language: ���How neatly doe we give one onely name / To parents issue and the sunnes bright starre!���)

Today���s poets, as John Greening noted before reading his own ���Near Leighton Bromswold, Huntingdonshire���, tend to write more ���obliquely��� about religion than Herbert did. For his part, Herbert would perhaps have understood us all too well: a fluent scholar, who enjoyed the best of (Jacobean) First World privileges by birth and education, and was drawn to the world of the Court and a political career (before, in one impressively wicked swoop, fate carried off his two patrons at the same time). Born in 1593, he died of tuberculosis in 1633, not long after taking holy orders and becoming Rector of Bemerton, an obscure Wiltshire village (it���s now on the cusp of Salisbury). His poetic collection, The Temple, appeared posthumously, within a year of his death. W. H. Auden reckoned him ���ingenious, though never . . . obscure���, ���capable of clever antitheses that remind one of Pope���, or even Mallarm��:

Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices; something understood.

The Voice and the Echo showed a loving but not over-sombre respect for Herbert���s poetry, helped by the rhythm it fell into: music; a male or female voice reading Herbert; the other voice responding with a modern piece of writing. Vikram Seth was present for the reading of his poem ���Host���, from a cycle of six poems written in 2007; three were first published in the TLS, with a note by Seth about the "deep affinity" he feels for Herbert. "Host", for example, recounts Seth's doubts over moving into the Old Rectory in Bemerton, where Herbert lived for the last few years of his life. As Herbert was instructed to ���sit and eat��� (at the feast of ���Love���), so Seth did find himself permitted to ���sit and write���.

In response to Herbert���s ���Death��� (which aptly followed a neat prose summary of Herbert���s Life-story), Daljit Nagra���s ���8��� imagined the deceased, were their ���punctual // heart-stop��� to be serenely timetabled and foretold by an hour, receiving visitors ���taking / turns to embrace you with private words���. (The word ���palimpsest��� ought to make its predictable entrance here.) Morahan made ���In search of sleep��� by Grace Nichols (���I took my insomnia to the sea���) sound like a very Herbert-like quest for peace, prompting a collective gasp of appreciation from the galleries; Jennings read ���Affliction (I)��� and persuaded the audience to laugh along with the perturbed lines about the poet being betrayed ���to a lingring book��� and wrapped ���in a gown���. Glyn Maxwell���s response, ���The White���, meditated on a poet���s creative progress from optimistic youth to maturity, increasingly haunted and hemmed in by the blankness around the written word. ���The black-and-white [of the inscribed page] is the creature against the Eternal���, he said. Written down, perhaps that appears portentous than it was.

Other, more lately lost poets were invoked: Lee Harwood, to whom the performance was dedicated, and Seamus Heaney. We were not, as in Nagra���s ���8���, comfortably ahead of fate this time. But there were moments of clarified peace, all the same ��� hushed for all the right reasons.