I am preaching next week at St Ebbe's on 1 Peter 5, the theme of which is humility (stop laughing family members!). Anyhow found this poem by George Herbert, who is one of my favourites. It takes a bit of looking at: he describes a scene where the Virtues are presented with symbols of submission by a series of animals.
Humilitie.
I Saw the Vertues sitting hand in hand
In sev’rall ranks upon an azure throne,
Where all the beasts and fowl by their command
Presented tokens of submission.
Humilitie, who sat the lowest there
To execute their call,
When by the beasts the presents tendred were,
Gave them about to all.
The angrie Lion did present his paw,
Which by consent was giv’n to Mansuetude.1
The fearfull Hare her eares, which by their law
Humilitie did reach to Fortitude.
The jealous Turkie brought his corall-chain;
That went to Temperance.
On Justice was bestow’d the Foxes brain,
Kill’d in the way by chance.
At length the Crow bringing the Peacocks plume,
(For he would not) as they beheld the grace
Of that brave gift, each one began to fume,
And challenge it, as proper to his place,
Till they fell out: which when the beasts espied,
They leapt upon the throne;
And if the Fox had liv’d to rule their side,
They had depos’d each one.
Humilitie, who held the plume, at this
Did weep so fast, that the tears trickling down
Spoil’d all the train: then saying, Here it is
For which ye wrangle, made them turn their frown
Against the beasts: so joyntly bandying,
They drive them soon away;
And then amerc’d2 them, double gifts to bring
At the next Session-day.
1 Mansuetude = Gentleness, meekness.
2 amerced = With a penalty of the amount expressed.
In short, without humility the other virtues fall easily prey to passions. But why humility?
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Friday, February 09, 2007
Les Murray's Collected Poems
[Yes, English readers: there are Australian poets who write about subjects other than sport...]
It's a body-prayer, a shower: you're
In touch all over, renewing, enfolded in a wing – (p.501)
I really think you should read some of Les Murray's poetry. Les Murray is arguably Australia's best regarded poet, both in Australia and internationally. The collecting of forty years of his work in a single volume shows just how impressive his achievement is. His unique accent – which he says is part of the soil up Bunyah way – and his extraordinary, prodigious gift of language combine in poetry that is at once chatty-colloquial and demanding. He doodles with words in the same way Shakespeare did. He writes with a mordant humour and a laughing sadness that is distinctively Australian and shows that a distinctively Australian poetry doesn't have to be of the bush-ballad variety.
I found at first, reading Murray, that his work was prickly, difficult and unyielding. What helped me was finding that a couple of common threads are wound into his work: the great Australian barbecue stoppers: politics and religion. Firstly, Murray has a fiercely independent vision of Australia and of the world. He sees himself articulating the languauge the common man against the elitism of the city-bound latte set. This slight paranoia is aimed at the urban media and academic castes who patronize the rural less-privileged – people like Murray himself.
…It's called Big Shame, my poison-brother fellow
says, this feeling abashed by proper people.
Before Racist and Beaut Authentic, we were Low…(p.480)
When Sydney and the Bush meet now
There is no common ground. (p.124)
He speaks the accent of the Aussie outsider, the "battler" of popular legend. For example, he rails against the Australian tendency to savage well-known females like Hanson, Lawrence, Chamberlain and Kernot:
In Australia, a lone woman
Is being crucified by the Press
At any given moment
With no unedited right
of reply, she is cast out
into Aboriginal space. (p.466)
This political no-woman's land is shared by the dirt farmers and the aborigines, adrift from privilege and the language of "rights". One of Murray's pet hates is the way in which (white) academics and bureaucrats have turned the language of Aboriginal rights against country people, as if their rural cousins are to blame for their bad conscience. The perhaps surprising affinity between rural whites and their aboriginal neighbours he captures in an early poem entitled "Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit":
Murray is a deeply religious poet and writes deeply religious poetry, in defiance of the secularism of the intelligentsia: "Snobs mind us off religion/ nowadays, if they can" (p.432).
Leaving behind the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his upbringing, Murray found in Catholicism the religious counterpart to his calling as a poet:
Prose is protestant-agnostic,
Story, discussion, significance,
but poetry is Catholic;
poetry is presence. (p.341)
He writes in his collection of prose The Quality of Sprawl that "in the Free Church service of my childhood, with its emphasis on the sermon, there wasn't enough receptive silence; there was no sense of ceremony deepened to the point where human activity briefly fell away and God was present." It is this "presence" that Murray tries to capture in his poetry. After all, as he writes in "Poetry and Religion" (p.265), "Religions are poems." What he means is that true religion is a "dreaming", an act of the imagination. Just as you can't pray a lie, so "you can't poe one either." God is "the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned."
It is this "presence" which fills Murray's luminescent nature poetry. The series of animal poems, entitled sure enough "Presence: Translations from the Natural World" (p.355-378), serve to illustrate. "Bat's Ultrasound" ends with this remarkable coda:
Ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
Ere your raw row) we air our array,
Err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery,
Our eerie u our ray, our arrow.
A rare ear, our aery Yahweh. (p.355)
Murray's eye captures the glint of God in the creation in a way that Gerard Manley Hopkins did a century ago; and as with Hopkins, the beauty and playfulness of his language mirrors what he sees in nature. It is a sublime tuning of the gift of language to the divine key. Murray's ear is also "rare". I am reminded in these poems of the playful and yet awe-some animal poems of the Bible, whose point is to draw glory to the creator from contemplation of the creatures: Job 38-39 and Psalm 104.
Murray has much to say in prose and poetry about the "religion" of Australia. He recognizes that the spiritual energy of Australians is more and more absorbed by the quest for "national and communal identity". The Anzac myth is not as sacred as we think:
In the dream, Clarrie Dunn
Sits naked with many thousands
In the muddy trench. He is saying
The true god gives his flesh and blood.
Idols demand yours off you. (p.554)
Australia is in a drift away from traditional Christianity, but has not found an adequate replacement; and so we have become a nation of unsatisfied spiritual longings which are only met by the shallowest of new-age mumblings. He urges Australian Christians not to "be tempted to see ourselves as a team that has to win for God; He is not helpless – and anyway His idea of a win is the Cross, which may be the place where the truly irresoluble contradictions, by which out life in the world is torn but also perhaps powered, meet and get the only resolution they can obtain, that is a living continuous one which we've agreed to take part in after all" (The Quality of Sprawl, p.47).
There is of course a great deal more to his poetry than politics and religion I would hasten to add. The Collected Poems contains poems that will never leave me for their wit, their beauty and their sadness. Read his poetry alongside the excellent biography by Sydney Anglican Peter Alexander.
It's a body-prayer, a shower: you're
In touch all over, renewing, enfolded in a wing – (p.501)
I really think you should read some of Les Murray's poetry. Les Murray is arguably Australia's best regarded poet, both in Australia and internationally. The collecting of forty years of his work in a single volume shows just how impressive his achievement is. His unique accent – which he says is part of the soil up Bunyah way – and his extraordinary, prodigious gift of language combine in poetry that is at once chatty-colloquial and demanding. He doodles with words in the same way Shakespeare did. He writes with a mordant humour and a laughing sadness that is distinctively Australian and shows that a distinctively Australian poetry doesn't have to be of the bush-ballad variety.
I found at first, reading Murray, that his work was prickly, difficult and unyielding. What helped me was finding that a couple of common threads are wound into his work: the great Australian barbecue stoppers: politics and religion. Firstly, Murray has a fiercely independent vision of Australia and of the world. He sees himself articulating the languauge the common man against the elitism of the city-bound latte set. This slight paranoia is aimed at the urban media and academic castes who patronize the rural less-privileged – people like Murray himself.
…It's called Big Shame, my poison-brother fellow
says, this feeling abashed by proper people.
Before Racist and Beaut Authentic, we were Low…(p.480)
When Sydney and the Bush meet now
There is no common ground. (p.124)
He speaks the accent of the Aussie outsider, the "battler" of popular legend. For example, he rails against the Australian tendency to savage well-known females like Hanson, Lawrence, Chamberlain and Kernot:
In Australia, a lone woman
Is being crucified by the Press
At any given moment
With no unedited right
of reply, she is cast out
into Aboriginal space. (p.466)
This political no-woman's land is shared by the dirt farmers and the aborigines, adrift from privilege and the language of "rights". One of Murray's pet hates is the way in which (white) academics and bureaucrats have turned the language of Aboriginal rights against country people, as if their rural cousins are to blame for their bad conscience. The perhaps surprising affinity between rural whites and their aboriginal neighbours he captures in an early poem entitled "Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit":
Murray is a deeply religious poet and writes deeply religious poetry, in defiance of the secularism of the intelligentsia: "Snobs mind us off religion/ nowadays, if they can" (p.432).
Leaving behind the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his upbringing, Murray found in Catholicism the religious counterpart to his calling as a poet:
Prose is protestant-agnostic,
Story, discussion, significance,
but poetry is Catholic;
poetry is presence. (p.341)
He writes in his collection of prose The Quality of Sprawl that "in the Free Church service of my childhood, with its emphasis on the sermon, there wasn't enough receptive silence; there was no sense of ceremony deepened to the point where human activity briefly fell away and God was present." It is this "presence" that Murray tries to capture in his poetry. After all, as he writes in "Poetry and Religion" (p.265), "Religions are poems." What he means is that true religion is a "dreaming", an act of the imagination. Just as you can't pray a lie, so "you can't poe one either." God is "the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned."
It is this "presence" which fills Murray's luminescent nature poetry. The series of animal poems, entitled sure enough "Presence: Translations from the Natural World" (p.355-378), serve to illustrate. "Bat's Ultrasound" ends with this remarkable coda:
Ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
Ere your raw row) we air our array,
Err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery,
Our eerie u our ray, our arrow.
A rare ear, our aery Yahweh. (p.355)
Murray's eye captures the glint of God in the creation in a way that Gerard Manley Hopkins did a century ago; and as with Hopkins, the beauty and playfulness of his language mirrors what he sees in nature. It is a sublime tuning of the gift of language to the divine key. Murray's ear is also "rare". I am reminded in these poems of the playful and yet awe-some animal poems of the Bible, whose point is to draw glory to the creator from contemplation of the creatures: Job 38-39 and Psalm 104.
Murray has much to say in prose and poetry about the "religion" of Australia. He recognizes that the spiritual energy of Australians is more and more absorbed by the quest for "national and communal identity". The Anzac myth is not as sacred as we think:
In the dream, Clarrie Dunn
Sits naked with many thousands
In the muddy trench. He is saying
The true god gives his flesh and blood.
Idols demand yours off you. (p.554)
Australia is in a drift away from traditional Christianity, but has not found an adequate replacement; and so we have become a nation of unsatisfied spiritual longings which are only met by the shallowest of new-age mumblings. He urges Australian Christians not to "be tempted to see ourselves as a team that has to win for God; He is not helpless – and anyway His idea of a win is the Cross, which may be the place where the truly irresoluble contradictions, by which out life in the world is torn but also perhaps powered, meet and get the only resolution they can obtain, that is a living continuous one which we've agreed to take part in after all" (The Quality of Sprawl, p.47).
There is of course a great deal more to his poetry than politics and religion I would hasten to add. The Collected Poems contains poems that will never leave me for their wit, their beauty and their sadness. Read his poetry alongside the excellent biography by Sydney Anglican Peter Alexander.
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