Introduction to The Saint Mary's Anthology of Christian Verse

As it happened, Miss Jones proved the wisdom of Larkin's diffidence by doing a brilliant job with the Oxford anthology.  The collection she edited with Larkin is catholic, lively, surprising and just.  Whether I have relied upon the right friends to come to the rescue of my diffidence remains to be seen.

My object in undertaking the anthology was simple: I wished to put together a collection that would show the upper school students of the Schools of Saint Mary, an admirable K-12 Catholic preparatory School in Manhasset, New York, and, indeed, all Catholic readers, young and old, how splendidly their Catholic faith is reflected in some of the best poetry ever written.  I decided on a collection of Christian, rather than Catholic verse because the broader scope would give me a happier hunting ground, without causing me to lose the Catholic character of the book I had in mind.

Of what exactly does that Catholic character consist?  To define my terms, I shall borrow a good description of Catholic poetry from one of our very best contemporary poets, Dana Gioia:

Catholic writers tend to see humanity struggling in a fallen world.  They combine a longing for grace and redemption with a deep sense of human imperfection and sin.  Evil exists, but the physical world is not evil.  Nature is sacramental, shimmering with signs of sacred things.  Indeed, all reality is mysteriously charged with the invisible presence of God.  Catholics perceive suffering as redemptive, at least when borne in emulation of Christ's passion and death.  Catholics also generally take the long view of things—looking back to the time of Christ and the Caesars while also gazing forward toward eternity.

This is a useful description because it can readily apply to Catholic and Protestant poets alike.  All Christian poets yearn for grace and redemption.  And while the Anglo-Welsh Catholic convert David Jones saw "signs of sacred things" even in the trenches of Flanders, no poet saw the sacramental in Nature with anything like the incandescent radiance of Wordsworth.  Other emblems also constitute the character I was after: praise, remembrance, thanksgiving, eulogy, devotion, lament, prayer; and all of them can be found in abundance in the poems that follow.

Yet there is another element that distinguishes Christian poetry: its fidelity to love—true love, not the counterfeit article peddled in the thoroughfares, or, it may be, the groves of academe.  J.V. Cunningham, one of Yvor Winters' acolytes, attempted to give the article a certain epigrammatical finish.

And what is love?  Misunderstanding, pain,
Delusion, or retreat?  It is in truth
Like an old brandy after a long rain,
Distinguished, and familiar, and aloof.

Here is an expression of love as vacuous as it is pretentious.  The love of God being altogether different, the best Christian poets not only honor its primordial glory but decry its travestying.  What are those lines of Herbert's?

Immortal Love, author of this great frame,
Sprung from that beauty which can never fade,
How hath man parcel'd out Thy glorious name,
And thrown it on that dust which Thou hast made,
While mortal love doth all the title gain!

In contrast to other anthologies of Christian verse, I have included poems by Christian poets on matters other than their faith, even though their faith informs most of what they write.  Thus, I include Jonson on bereavement ("On my First Son"), Swift on virtue ("Stella's Birthday, March 3, 1727"), Crabbe on character ("An English Peasant"), Mary Alcock on the perennial ingredients necessary for anti-Christian revolution (Instructions, Supposed to be Written in Paris for the Mob in England), Mary Coleridge on alms ("An Insincere Wish Addressed to a Beggar"), Hopkins on the beauty of the created world ("Binsey Poplars"), Belloc on Vanity Fair ("Discovery"), Kipling on the certitudes of peril ("The Storm Cone"), Langton Hughes on maternal love ("Mother to Son"), James Weldon Johnson on paternal love ("A Poet to His Baby Son"), Walter de la Mare on newspapers ("Incomprehensible") and Dana Gioia on what the epistolary dead can tell us about the fortunes of love ("Finding a Box of Family Letters").

This is why English poetry, even the most seemingly unRomish English poetry, is never without echoes of the Catholicism of England's inexpellably Catholic past.

The anthology I have compiled also leaves me free to argue, as I will here, that even though there is only a fitful tradition of Catholic poetry in English, there is a very long and fruitful relationship between English poetry and the Catholic faith.  After all, the only reason why Protestant poetry in English manages to be Christian in any legitimate sense is that it never manages to free itself of what Milton dubbed the "Babylonian woe."  If this sounds paradoxical it is because the cultural and religious reality to which I refer is paradoxical.  English poetry takes shape in the 13th century with poems to Our Lady, the patroness of all the arts after the collapse of pagan Rome.  By rights, these lovely hymns to the first of Catholics ought to have ushered in a great tradition of Catholic poetry.  But, of course, they did not.  "Altar, sword and pen," as Wordsworth reminded his fellows, "forfeited their ancient English dower."  After the English Reformation in the 16th century—when English literature begins to arrive on the scene in all of its splendor—English poetry becomes Protestant poetry.  While it is true that this is the poetry of a people who had the national Church of England foisted upon them by the uniquely venal Reformation gentry, it is also true that theirs is a poetry that never leaves off delighting in the King James Bible.  Accordingly, there are great glories in England's Protestant literature—comprising as it does the poetry of Herbert, Donne, Milton, Smart, Johnson, Crabbe, Coleridge, Cowper, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, and Eliot, but it is also a literature haunted, as England herself is haunted, by the unlaid ghosts of her ancient faith.  And this is why English poetry, even the most seemingly unRomish English poetry, is never without echoes of the Catholicism of England's inexpellably Catholic past.

Gerard Manley Hopkins stands fairly outside of this tradition, being at once perfervidly Catholic and breathtakingly innovative.  (Crashaw may have been the one but he was not the other.) Consequently, in determining how much to include of his verse I have chosen to be lavish.  After all, when he starts writing his fiercely Catholic verse in the late nineteenth century, he may be writing verse that pays mind to other poets in England or America—whether Tennyson or Walt Whitman—but he is largely writing as though he had no alternative but to create a poetic tradition of his own.  This accounts not only for the surprising beauty of his poetry but its occasional eccentricity.  To express his radically Catholic convictions he had a great work of invention to do, and if the cost of accomplishing that work was the most daring experimentation, he was happy to pay it, even though the experimentation made him unpublishable in his own lifetime.  As Hopkins told his friend and literary executor, the poet Robert Bridges, "No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. … But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music, and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry."  And while he recognized that the risk he ran in trying to capture such inscape was "oddness," he was confident that the music of his verse would resolve any difficulties.  "But take breath," he told Bridges, "and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right."

This is true of any rich, perdurable poetry.  Allowing oneself to be moved by a poem's music, even before one understands the meaning of the poem, is the first step to entering into its meaning.  "All art aspires to the condition of music," Walter Pater rightly recognized.  Good poetry always does.

After Hopkins, the Catholic note in English poetry can be seen in the elegant verses of Lionel Johnson, Yeats' crapulous friend, who might have spent too much time in the Café Royal but did manage to write some splendidly Catholic poems, especially "Lambeth Lyric," which has all of Newman's fine satirical mockery.  In The Trembling of the Veil (1922) Yeats recalled how Johnson was given to sharing with him what he claimed were bits of conversations he had had with Newman, all of which turned out to be imaginary.  Yet here Johnson replicates the Oratorian's voice with an eerie nicety.  Walter Savage Landor, a favorite author of my father's, would have been impressed.  I also include the equally elegant verses of Johnson's friend, Ernest Dowson, who not only shared his friend's fondness for whiskey but followed him into the Church.  "Why are these strange souls born everywhere to-day," Yeats asked, "with hearts that Christianity … cannot satisfy?"  The question that needs asking is not whether the Church somehow failed her converts, a supposition that no one, least of all Yeats, could possibly verify; but why they were drawn to the Church in the first place.  Worldweariness figured in their conversion but so, too, did their need for grace and redemption.  Nothing concentrates the heart like fear of damnation.  In this sense, despite their many differences, Johnson and Dowson had more in common with John Newton, the repentant slave ship captain than they had with the table-tapping Yeats.  Certainly, the converts understood the lesson of Bartimaeus.

Amazing grace!  (how sweet the sound!)
That sav'd a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

In "Where All Roads Lead," G.K. Chesterton says that there are really only two reasons why anyone converts to the Catholic Faith.  "One is that he believes it to be the solid objective truth, which is true whether he likes it or not, and the other is that he seeks liberation from his sins."  Here, one can see Chesterton's characteristic pellucidity, which distinguishes both his prose and his verse.  "The Rolling English Road," for example, may not have inspired much attention from literary critics but that is only because it is a perfect poem, criticism of which would be either superfluous or impertinent.  Also included here is Belloc's "Lines to a Don," in which the witty apologist comes to the defense of his brilliant friend, who continues to be plagued with donnish obloquy.  The most sympathetic of men must now be shown no sympathy himself.  As for T.S. Eliot, that great cham of literature, I have made room for "East Coker" (1943), the second of his Four Quartets, a profoundly beautiful meditation on "ends and beginnings," as he told a friend, written during the Blitz.

Some of Shakespeare's verses do the same: they express the despair to which Christianity is the only antidote.

After this burst of what the poet-critic William Empson called "malign neo-Christianity," the Catholic element in English verse becomes more oblique.  Accordingly, in the later section of the anthology, readers will encounter the American poet Wallace Stevens, the inclusion of whose work might seem unpersuasive special pleading.  Nevertheless, I would argue that Stevens' work merits inclusion in any anthology of Christian verse not only because he eventually converts to Catholicism but because he sets his often inchoate but real Christian preoccupations squarely in the realms of unbelief, where such preoccupations naturally find their impetus.  He is the aesthete trying to make sense of the absence of belief in the beauty of the created universe, and his exquisite poems vouch for the nobility of that enterprise, even if he had to know something of the desolation of unbelief before he could see conversion's urgency.  Some of Shakespeare's verses do the same: they express the despair to which Christianity is the only antidote.

One could say the same of Larkin, whose poems may be strewn with nihilism but who nevertheless wept whenever he heard Newman's "The Pillar of the Cloud," otherwise known as "Lead, Kindly Light."  (The church-going Monica Jones made sure that the hymn was included in the order of his funeral service at Westminster Abbey.)  If there was an agnostic in Larkin—an Anglican agnostic, as he described himself—he had an odd soft spot for the gift of faith that he could not accept himself.  "An Arundel Tomb" captures this ambivalence by capturing his ambivalent response to death and love.  A charming Catholic response to Larkin's timor mortis is Crashaw's "An Epitaph Upon Man and Wife Who Died and Were Buried Together," which appears in these pages alongside his celebrated rhapsody to St. Teresa.

Since poetry is not theology, readers should not see any of the poems included here as advertisements for the editor's faith.  I have included poems not simply because they reflect my own preferences but because they are good in and of themselves.  Yes, to warrant inclusion, poems had to have something worth saying about the Christian faith but they also had to be well-made and memorable.

Accordingly, most of the poems assembled here are written in traditional forms: hence the title of the collection.  Free verse has drawn to its colors too many pseuds and duffers.  As the good Catholic poet Alexander Pope once observed, he whose "fustian's so sublimely bad" writes "not poetry, but prose run mad."  Traditional form, on the other hand, as the present anthology shows, has played midwife to the altogether more artful work of James McAuley, Charles Causley, Ruth Pitter, Elizabeth Jennings, Richard Wilbur, and Dana Gioia, not to mention nearly every good poet from Chaucer onwards.

At the same time, in all of my editing, I have been guided by Newman, who told his young charges in the Catholic University in Dublin in the Idea of a University (1875):

Man's work will savour of man; in his elements and powers excellent and admirable, but prone to disorder and excess, to error and to sin.  Such too will be his literature; it will have the beauty and the fierceness, the sweetness and the rankness, of the natural man.

This is the distinction that has kept me from producing something merely for the piety stall.  In making my selection, I have never bundled away what Hardy called "the world's vaporous, vitiate air."  To capture the natural man's road to Christian faith, which is of the very essence of Christian verse, one can never leave out the disorder and excess, the error and sin that made his taking that road so vital to his otherwise improbable resipiscence.  Then, again, Newman recognized a profound truth about the nature of Christian poetry when he wrote in his great sermon on development in his Oxford University Sermons (1843):

It is a question whether that strange and painful feeling of unreality, which religious men experience from time to time, when nothing seems true, or good, or right, or profitable, when Faith seems a name, and duty a mockery, and all endeavours to do right, absurd and hopeless, and all things forlorn and dreary, as if religion were wiped out from the world, may not be the direct effect of the temporary obscuration of some master vision, which unconsciously supplies the mind with spiritual life and peace.

Here, one might say, is the forge of divine truth, out of which much good Christian poetry is made, hammering the penitent free from the shackles of his demons.

What I hope the anthology shows as a whole is that Christian poetry exemplifies an admirably coherent aesthetic—one that is at once humanizing and civilizing.  The good Australian poet James McAuley nicely itemizes some of the principles of the aesthetic I have in mind in a poem of his entitled "An Art of Poetry," where he urges his fellow poets to "Scorn then to darken and contract / The landscape of the heart / By individual, arbitrary / And self-expressive art."  Why?

Not in opaque but limpid wells
Lie truth and mystery.

And universal meanings spring
From what the proud pass by:
Only the simplest forms can hold
A vast complexity.

We know where Christ has set his hand
Only the real remains:
I am impatient for that loss
By which the spirit gains.

One of the chief objects of the good Christian poet is to proclaim that reality.  In their separate ways, Anne Ridler and Dana Gioia do this by celebrating what one rarely sees celebrated in more recent lyric poetry: the heaven-planted peace of faithful marriage—a welcome celebration at a time when that sacramental peace is not always prized or understood.  Richard Greene does something similar in "Thole," a masterly eulogy for his mother.  In essence, a prayer for the living and the dead, it is accompanied by an epigraph from James Joyce, who might have renounced the faith of his Catholic countrymen but always acknowledged the undeniable force of amor matris.

The Catholic poet Sarah Cortez offers readers a rather more lurid reality by sharing with them her experiences as a policewoman in Texas, where she is confronted daily by the mystery of iniquity, a mystery, for the great Dominican theologian Garrigou-Lagrange, even obscurer than the mystery of grace, since while the one is "sovereignly luminous," the other is of "darkness itself."

Fortunately, this Christian recognition of the real comes with a concomitant sense of humor.  If Robert Louis Stevenson is right that "Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in good spirits," no one can see the truth of this more deeply than the disciple of the crucified Christ.  Newman certainly recognized as much, telling his friend Lord Braye, "It is the rule of God's Providence that we should succeed by failure."  Readers will see examples of this in Walter de la Mare's "A Dull Boy," which puts the very art of the poet in the judgment seat and Elizabeth Jennings' "Euthanasia," which describes the elderly in nursing homes spending most of their days contriving to elude the culture of death's angels of mercy.

The law's been passed and I am lying low
Hoping to hide from those who think they are
Kindly, compassionate.  My step is slow.
I hurry.  Will the executioner
Be watching how I go?

Others about me clearly feel the same.
The deafest one pretends that she can hear.
The blindest hides her white stick while the lame
Attempt to stride.  Life has become so dear.

The best example of the sort of wit that Christian poets exhibit can be found in Charles Causley's "Timothy Winters," the hero of which may be unprepossessing and scarcely educable but whose 'Amen' at morning prayers gloriously reaffirms the comedy of God's unswerving love for His fallen creatures.

To give the collection unity, I have chosen poems that speak to one another across the centuries.  For instance, while I include Lionel Johnson's beautifully austere threnody, "By the Statue of Charles the First in Charing Cross," I also include "Tory Pledges," Thomas Moore's witty castigation of everything the Stuart king came to represent.  Similarly, I allow William Cowper to answer Newman's rather fierce verses, "Zeal and Love," with his more emollient "The Nightingale and the Glow-Worm."  To answer Cowper and Newman, I include Blake's "The Little Vagabond," which puts what we sometimes hear the Vatican call 'pastoral theology' in an instructive light.  In addition, several poets naturally take up the theme of Christmas in the book, including St. Robert Southwell, S.J., Charles Wesley, Tennyson, Eliot, Auden, and Betjeman.

It is in the very persistence with which he doubts and even derides God's love that we can see his unrelenting need of that love.

To show how central Christian verse is to English poetry, I have been at pains to include poets who are generally regarded as beyond the Christian pale.  In the case of Shelley and Hardy, for example, their professed hostility to Christianity is never without undertones of faith.  Certainly, no one has ever put together a description of hell on earth—what Ivor Gurney called "sensual hell"—better than Shelley.  Unfortunately, the radical poet studied too much logic at Oxford to follow the dons of University College into upholding any rationalist belief in Anglicanism, and, consequently, his aversion to Christianity became unshakable.  Still, for someone in Regency England to understand the Christian hell as vividly as Shelley understood it is proof that at least one vital aspect of the faith was not lost on him.  As for Hardy, it is in the very persistence with which he doubts and even derides God's love that we can see his unrelenting need of that love.  With this most honest of poets to reject God is never to replace Him.  Spiritual longing suffuses nearly every verse he writes—a terrible longing which no Christian can encounter without recognizing how humbling the gift of faith is.  George Orwell once complained that Catholics behaved as though they were members of some impossibly exclusive club: only they knew what it was to be fallen and in need of salvation.  To read Hardy is to realize that Christian poets are not the only poets who write Christian verse.

A.E. Housman's "Easter Hymn" is another example of a Christian poem written by a non-Christian (the poet abandoned High Church Anglicanism when he was 13) which shows how importunate the appeal of belief is even for the unbelieving.  In Housman's case, the appeal was baffled by a peculiarly English hedonism, as one can see from his correspondence.  "Burlington House … contains more of value than the galleries of either Dresden or of Munich," he writes to one correspondent.  "Not that I should be able to tell.  Stout and oysters are more on my level … If ever I repine, I think of the lot of a friend of mine to whom I have just been writing, who was born with a distaste for beer."  Here were the sentiments behind some of Housman's most famous lines.

Oh, many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.

Yet the poet's justification for his not altogether facetious claim is telltale.

Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world's not.
And faith, 'tis pleasant till 'tis past:
The mischief is that 'twill not last.

For the English after the English Reformation, the new faith in the National Church did not last, though their unbelief has never been able to supplant the ancient faith they threw aside.

A few explanations.  I have not been consistent as far as spelling is concerned.  Some poets—for example, Chaucer—I leave unmodernized; others—like Milton—I modernize; and I do this because, while in the first case modernization would spoil the poetry's beauty, in the second case modernization renders the poetry's beauty more accessible without spoiling it.  As for the number of poems allotted each poet, I have set this without any reference to any given poet's place in any conceivable pecking order.  The book gives priority to poems, not poets.  That there are more poems featured by Hopkins than by Shakespeare does not mean that I imagine Hopkins a better poet than Shakespeare.  Conversely, that I have only given Arnold two poems and Belloc five does not mean that I regard Arnold as inferior to Belloc.  It simply means that Arnold wrote fewer poems useful for my purposes.

What else?  I left out William Langland because his work is not altogether conducive to anthologizing; and, in any case, Donald Davie did an unmatchably excellent job with the poet in his anthology of Christian poetry for Oxford, even though he excluded the Chesterbelloc from his pages, an unaccountably mean omission.  Despite a few dissentient murmurs, I have quoted considerable swathes of Paradise Lost, convinced that its wonderful music recommends itself.  After all, this is an anthology largely addressed to the young, and since the young are always attuned to the music of poetry, I am sure that what I have included of Milton's music will win them over.  T.S. Eliot, it is true, complained that Milton's music was too luxuriant, leaving the reader with little more than "mazes of sound," the meaning of which were always secondary to their auditory appeal.  Well, this may be so, but even if the meaning of the music is not all that it might be, its beauty is still worth having, especially for the young, who have their taste for the music of poetry to develop, and I would give them Milton for this purpose before Shakespeare or Tennyson.

Notwithstanding the famous strictures of Samuel Johnson against the poem in his Lives of the Poets (1783), I have chosen to include Milton's "Lycidas"—both because it is perfect for memorization and because it is a glorious meditation on the virtue of friendship, which might have been recognized by Aristotle and Cicero among the ancients but receives its truest embodiment in the lives of the saints.  The inclusion of the poem here will also show my readers my editorial preference for masterpieces over what Milton nicely calls "lean and flashy songs."

To those who might wonder whether the selection I have made is too sophisticated for young readers, I will simply say that when I was a child my dear discriminating mother only bought clothes for my brothers and sisters and me at Best & Co. on Fifth Avenue—the finest maker of children's clothes in the country—and there she would only buy things that we could "grow into."  Anthologies are the same.  One has to fill them with the best and be confident that the young will "grow into" them.  Mollycoddling only stultifies the young.  Another point to bear in mind is that anthologies are not purchased one year and discarded the next.  At some point in our young lives, we were all given Palgrave's Golden Treasury or Q's or Helen Gardner's Oxford anthology, and I would wager that most of us still have one or the other or some equivalent somewhere in our libraries.  I certainly have mine.

One last point.  Whatever objections might be made to the choice I have made, I do hope it reaffirms one fundamental truth—that the best Christian poetry helps us to eschew false and bear true witness: it is our most elemental cri de coeur, a cry Hopkins epitomized so movingly in his poem, "In the Valley of the Elwy":

God, lover of souls, swaying considerate scales,
Complete thy creature dear O where it fails
Being mighty a master, being a father and fond.