Whose sparkling light access denies

Having submitted final grades my first semester teaching is complete. I had known it would be intense, but wow, what a blur! With that behind me I will fill the next couple weeks wearing out my knees playing with my kids, devouring a stack of fiction next to the bed, and swimming around in a good deal of poetry (ahhhh).

From George Herbert as I laid by the fireplace last evening:  “Ungratefulness”.

Lord, with what bounty and rare clemency

Hast though redeemed us from the grave!

If thou has let us run,

Gladly had man adored the sun,

And though his god most brave;

Where now we shall be better gods than he.

Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,

The Trinity, and Incarnation:

Thou has unlocked them both,

And made them jewels to betroth

The work of thy creation

Unto thyself in everlasting pleasure.

The statelier cabinet is the Trinity,

Whose sparkling light access denies:

Therefore thou dost not show

This fully to us, till death blow

The dust into our eyes.

For by that powder thou wilt make us see.

But all thy sweets are packed up in the other;

Thy mercies thither flock and flow:

That as the first affrights,

This may allure us with delights;

Because this box we know;

For we have all of us just such another.

But man is close, reserved, and dark to thee:

When thou demandest but a heart,

He cavils instantly.

In his poor cabinet of bone

Sins have their box apart,

Defrauding thee, who gavest two for one.

New poetry from Rowan Williams: Headwaters

A new collection of poetry from Archbishop Rowan Williams has just been released, Headwaters. This is my first exposure to Williams’ poetry and I have to say, it is elegant, challenging, and rewards with some rereading. Like his theological writings you have to spend some time getting a feel for his cadence and use of language. Altogether there are forty-five selections including some translations of the Russian poet Inna Lisnianskaya and a couple translations of Gwenallt Jones from the Welsh.

In one of my favorites, “Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro”, Williams watches the ‘black eyes fixed half open’ of Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection (pictured at right) and waits, ‘paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring’.

Today it is time. Warm enough, finally,
to ease the lids apart, the wax lips of a breaking bud
defeated by the steady push, hour after hour,
opening to show wet and dark, a tongue exploring,
an eye shrinking against the dawn. Light
like a fishing line draws its catch straight up,
then slackens for a second. The flat foot drops,
the shoulders sag. Here is the world again, well-known,
the dawn greeted in snoring dreams of a familiar
winter everyone prefers. So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
their flood can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like
drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.

“Dappled things” & Doctrines of Creation

In a letter to Robert Bridges dated October 25, 1879, Gerard Manley Hopkins penned “Pied Beauty”:

Glory to God for the dappled things -

For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings; Landscape plotted and pierced – fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.

Wrapped up in his idiosyncratic vocabulary and unique sense for rhythm and pacing, Hopkins captures something one rarely finds in doctrines of creation: note of dappled things. In his own way, Hopkins reminds us that the triune God “father[ed] forth” the diversity and difference in creation, the “couple-colour as a brindled cow” and the “finches wings.”