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Essays
2004
Bouchard
Part II >>>
Address to The Association of Benedictine Colleges and Universities, June 22, 2004
The Shape of Song in a Flood of Words:
Benedictine Education and Poetic Truth
by Gary M. Bouchard, Saint Anselm College
(Continued from Part I)
When I ask English majors to name the other major on campus, besides Classics, with which they share the closest intellectual affinity, they suggest a half dozen other majors without ever mentioning Theology. So I instruct them that all literary analysis -- from allegorical interpretation to contemporary feminism -- employs the same essential exegetic techniques used by Jewish and Christian scholars interpreting sacred scriptures for the past two-and-a-half thousand years.
This is why Kathleen Norris, describing the potential impact of the Psalms upon a contemporary reader, sounds so very much like an English teacher, trying to rouse sleepy students towards the relevance of ancient poetry. "To the modern reader," she notes:
the psalms can seem impenetrable: how in the world can we read, let alone pray, these angry and often violent poems from an ancient warrior culture? At a glance they seem overwhelmingly patriarchal, ill-tempered, moralistic, vengeful, and often seem to reflect precisely what is wrong with our world. And that's the point, or part of it. As one reads the psalms every day, it becomes clear that the world they depict is not really so different from our own; the fourth-century monk Athanasius wrote that the psalms "become like a mirror to the person singing them," and this is as true now as when he wrote it. (vv 7-8; The Cloister Walk, pp 93).
Anyone who has lived within a monastic cloister for six or seven decades or visited for six or seven days can testify to the way in which a verse, a phrase, an image, a refrain or a word from one of the psalms penetrated their weary psyche in a way only poetry can, in a way that only God's poetry can. In fact, the best poetry is always a kind of prayer.
In the 1863, while this country of ours was still torn asunder by the blood and battles of the Civil War, a River Boat Pilot ferried a boat up the Mississippi River, and among his passengers was a group of German Benedictine nuns, wearing bonnets instead of habits. They were on their way to Atchison, Kansas. After dinner one night the pilot asked them to sing for him and his crew, and there on those muddy waters of the new world the nuns broke into song that pleased him so well that he offered them extra rations. The historian does not record what they sang, but my guess is that it was one of the same songs that David had sung to comfort Saul all those years ago, the same songs that had inspired Caedmon, and that England's landscape had been largely emptied of.
Apart from the obvious and rich poetic qualities of the Psalms, what connection do Benedictines have with poetry, and especially all those anthologized pages of non-sacred literature that England's Puritans disparaged. Setting aside the tools of deductive argument, I wish to offer here some of the ingredients that I believe are at the essence of the connection between Benedictine life and literary expression. The twentieth century American poet, Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), who had a deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism, wrote a famous poem entitled "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." I will imitate Stevens' ornithological observations and best him by one, offering fourteen ways of looking at Shakespeare's late birds and the qualities of poetry; offering as I go a variety of poetic examples, and inferring all the while that the monastic life well-lived in accordance with Benedict's Rule is, in fact, a kind of poem.
1. The life of the Benedictine and poetry both express a rhythm that is dependent upon form. William Wordsworth, the prolific nineteenth century Romantic poet, wrote among his many other works, more sonnets than any other poet in the English language, over three hundred of them. In one of those sonnets he took up the question of why he confined his poetic imagination within such a rigid form.
Interestingly, he compared his freely chosen confinement to the monastic cloister: "Nuns Fret Not At Their Convent's Narrow Room," he wrote: "And hermits are contented with their cells." As he completes the comparison, we hear the wisdom of Benedict and many a contented Benedictine: "In truth the prison, unto which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, / In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground; / Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be), / Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, / Should find some comfort there, as I have found."
2. The life of the Benedictine and poetry are both lyrical; that is, the rhythm to which their respective forms (monastic rule, patterned language) intends is harmony. Robert Frost in his brief essay entitled "The Figure a Poem Makes" asks how a poem can have an individual music within the strictures of a prescribed meter. We might ask, in making our comparisons, how the life of a monk or nun can have an individual rhythm within the confines of the Rule and the strictures of the cloister. Frosts' answer for poetry might or might not suffice perfectly for the measured steps of the Benedictine, but there are at least certain similarities that the vowed Benedictine will recognize:
It should be the pleasure of the poem itself to tell us how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in clarification of life -- not necessarily a great clarification . . . but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image.
3. The life of the Benedictine and poetry both depend upon a rich understanding of symbol, metaphor and allegory. Metaphor is essentially saying one thing in terms of another, and usually joins together two unlike things. It uses the familiar and the concrete to comprehend the unfamiliar and the abstract. Without an active and cultivated capacity for metaphor there is no reason for the nun to show up to morning prayer and say: "He shall cover thee with feathers, and under his wings shall thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler (Psalm 91, v. 4).
Symbol is similar to metaphor only it means with a literal precision. Without a deep and abiding apprehension of symbol the monk need not don a black habit, light the Easter Vigil fire or bow before the cross. The meaning of most poetry is not the same as the meaning of monastic life, but they mean in the same way.
4. The life of the Benedictine and poetry both require and encourage keen listening. Silence is not incidental to the cloister or to the life of a poem. In both cases, it is not just in the words, but in the silence surrounding the words that poetic and divine Truth is manifest. [Silent Pause] Amen.
5. The life of the Benedictine and poetry are both concerned with the interior life. William Stafford, who up until he died in 1993, was the poet Laureate of Oregon for decades. He was also of Quaker descent, having been born on the plains in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1914. He wrote a poem entitled simply "How These Words Happened" which illustrates as well as anything, the common attention to the interior life of which I speak:
In winter, in the dark hours, when others
were asleep. I found these words and put them
together by their appetites and respect for
each other . In stillness, they jostled. They traded
meanings while pretending to have only one.
. . .
And all this happens like magic to the words
in those dark hours when others sleep.
Somebody, we all know, is always awake in a monastery or a convent, though you typically won't know this by listening. Silence and aloneness furnish the space from which the monk, the nun and the poet all speak.
6. The life of the Benedictine and poetry are both richly private and fully communal. The rhythm which poetry and monasticism yields is not merely or ultimately a private rhythm. Though we do not hear the monk or poet, we often know that he or she has been there. Whenever we read a poem we are entering into a kind of communion with its author and maybe with fellow readers. We are simultaneously being let into the cloistered, private world of another human being. We ought to go there with a certain delicacy, the same delicacy with which one member of a monastic community approaches another. Such meeting within the cloister does not usually involve the outburst "Wassup!"
We recall in the Robert Frost Poem "The Tuft of Flowers" that the speaker, raking up the freshly mown hay that someone else has cut, arrives in the freshly mown meadow where the mower who preceded him has, amidst his cutting, spared a certain flower. The speaker feels a commune with man who has accomplished a chore while yielding to beauty. He offers the famous couplet: "Men work together I told him from the heart / Whether they work together or apart."
7. The life of the Benedictine, measured as it is in liturgical hours, fashions, like poetry, a life in miniature. In another poem by William Stafford entitled "The Gospel is Whatever Happens," he writes:
When we say, "Breath,"
A feather starts to fly,
to be itself.
When we talk, truth
is what we mean to say.A weather vane is
courteous and accurate:
the more it yields,
the more wind lies
where it points the way.
(Continue)