The Authentic Bard

Performing Shakespeare’s Plays in the Original Accent and Pronunciation

This is rather neat.

  Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

"Tolers, You Absolutely Astonish Me"

Lewis and Tolkien Debate Myths and Lies

On Twitter, @TonyReinke points out that “On the evening of September 19, 1931, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis went for a walk, one of the most important walks in church history.”

At this stage, Lewis was not a Christian; Tolkien was.  Shortly after this conversation, Lewis became a Christian, being “surprised by joy”, as he put it. There are sketchy accounts of the conversation–some from Lewis himself.  Tolkien wrote Lewis a poem to make his points more clear, entitled Mythopoeia.

After that late-night conversation with Lewis, Tolkien wrote a poem called Mythopoeia, in which he set out his views of myth, legend, and fairy story.  he wrote this poem for Lewis, and he put at the head of his poem the words that Lewis had used: “For one who said that myths ‘are lies breathed through silver”.

The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him.  Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost or wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned . . . . 

[Jerram Barrs, Echoes of Eden: Reflections on Christianity, Literature, and the Arts. (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2013.)   p.94f.]

Here’s a dramatic reenactment of their conversation, which attempts to capture the issues if not the exact conversation itself:

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor.

Books

Echoes of Eden

In his recent book, Echoes of Eden, Jerram Barrs [Echoes of Eden: Reflections on Christianity, Literature and the Arts (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2013)]  has a series of chapters on literature and the arts in general and then turns to some exemplars which exemplify his general theme.  Barrs argues that all art worthy of the designation reflects what he calls “echoes of Eden” in one way, shape or form. 

To make reference to Eden is to introduce the great underlying themes of all stories: the innate goodness of the creation in its original perfection, the brokenness of nature and of man which we experience daily, and the longing for redemption and deliverance.  In the latter portion of the book, Barrs turns to some examples or case studies of his theme: namely, Lewis, Tolkien, J K Rowling, Shakespeare and Jane Austen. 

The chapter on Tolkien alone is worth the price of the book.  Tolkien understood that myths are powerful in a culture because they inevitably sustain memories of God.
  Myths–that is, stories which pass down through generations–echo Eden.  He

saw them as containing memories of the truth about God, about the origin and desiny of our world, about the battle against supernatural evil that characterizes every age, and about the hope for redemption through God’s intervention in human history.  Myths hold within them the treasure of echoes of Eden.  Myths and fairy stories are vessels containing truth–and the gospel itself is the greatest of these.  (Op cit, p. 107)

In his elaborate and extensive history of Middle Earth, Tolkien set his stories in a time prior to the coming of Christ into the world.  He always denied his work was allegory–it clearly is not.  But he did describe it as myth.  He lamented the fact that the British had no myths any longer.  They had expunged the mythical stories of their past which were vessels carrying intergenerational truth about God, the creation, man, the Fall, and redemption.  He set out to produce a new mythical story, using the ancient poem, Beowulf as his inspiration which would recapture these truths and infuse them again into our modern culture.  In the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings,

just as in Beowulf, there will be no explicitly Christian story or message, but there will be hints, hope, courage, heroism, love, and self-sacrifice in the fight against evil that characterizes the whole of our age.  (Ibid., p.106.)

The question is, How successful has he been?  Did he achieve his objectives.  It is too early to tell, but the early signs are quite encouraging.  As is so often the case, Tolkien repeatedly tried and failed to get The Rings published.  It was too long, too detailed, too “unreal”, etc.  Thankfully it eventually made its way into print.  No-one could foresee how barren and empty a world relentless materialism would wreak.  Consequently few could have predicted how hungry the modern world would become for myth, for echoes of Eden.  Jerram Barrs asks,

So why do people enjoy these books so much?  Why are books published in the 1950’s creating such a stir today?  Even before the release of the movies there were more than fifty million copies of  The Lord of the Rings in print.  Today, after the huge success of the movies, even the publishers are hesitant to give figures for the overall sales of The Lord of the Rings. Besides the various editions of the book in English, there are translations into many languages. . . . (A)t the turn of the millennium Tolkien was declared the author of the century.  He won this hands down over James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, the authors that the scholars and critics doing the poll, wanted to win; in fact the pollsters were so unhappy that Tolkien won easily, they did their poll a second time hoping for a different result, but to no avail.  In a poll conducted by BBC television The Lord of the Rings was voted the best-loved book of the British people. (Ibid, p. 113.)

Barr puts this success down to the quality of the story itself; to the beauty of the writing; to the depth, complexity and realism of the central characters; and to the realism of Middle Earth itself where almost everything has a long lineage and historical depth and complex authenticity (people after all today communicate and correspond in Tolkien’s invented languages, Quenya and Sindarin).  But above all the popularity of the work rests upon, its mythical character, the echoes of Eden found therein, which have drawn a desperately empty people, living in a bleak and barren and voided land. 

It is certainly true that the books are influenced greatly by Germanic and Norse myths and sagas.  But they are much more deeply influenced by a Christian account of the world.  The stories reflect the Bible’s account of creation, the fall of humanity due to rebellion against God, and the redemption that God will accomplish.  (Ibid., p.117.)

It is for this very reason that some writers have expressed not just a disdain of Tolkien (and Lewis) but hatred.  One, Phillip Pullman, himself a fantasy writer, has said that he is fed up with the Christian impact of Tolkien and Lewis.

Other passionate humanists have said they hate Tolkien and Lewis, whom they see as “riding in on a white horse,” trying to rescue civilization by turning people back to the Christian faith.  (Ibid.)

The Lord of the Rings is not Scripture.  It cannot substitute for the Word of God, by which we are born again and brought to new life.  Tolkien would have abhorred such a notion.  But in a culture which is rapidly  integrating into the void such literature serves a powerful purpose.  It can capture the hearts of people making them long once again for another world, where those who believe that might makes right are defeated and broken by those who believe in honesty, loyalty, oaths and vows, integrity, courage, and righteousness.  Such works of literature so powerfully echo Eden, they can awaken again  a general longing for a Redeemer. 

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, as the works of the Evil One become more manifest, such literary works can prepare hearts, can unclog ears, to long to hear the declaration of Him who says, “I am the Light of the World.”

Arts And Letters

How to Think Like an Editor: A Conversation with John Wilson

Justin Taylor 2:47 pm CT

Doug Wilson talks with one-of-a-kind Books & Culture founder and editor John Wilson:

HT: @wesleyhill

A Novelist Speaks of Cultural Prejudice

Mere Anarchy

Larry Waiwode used to be a celebrated novelist and literary figure in the US.  Now, not so much.  By the time he was writing and published his third novel (Poppa John) his Christian faith became more apparent.  Suddenly, he was not so attractive to critics and the literati.  In a later piece, Acts, he explains how he came to embrace the Lord Jesus Christ:

For me, a writer aware of how much more complex each book becomes with each sentence added, it was the clarity of the patterns and structure in Scripture and their ability to intermesh with one another through as many levels as I could imagine that convinced me that the Bible couldn’t be the creation of a man or any number of men, and was certainly not the product of separate men divided by centuries, but was of another world: supernatural.  I was forced to admit under no pressure but the pressure of the text itself that it could be only what it claimed it was, the Word of God. [Cited by the author in the essay entitled, “Using Words, a Continual Spiritual Exercise,” Words for Readers and Writers: Spirit Pooled Dialogues, (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 2013),  p.51].

In the same essay, “Using Words . . .” he explains that he never had to make a convoluted leap of faith.  Such an idea belongs to the irrational school of philosophy (Kant, Kierkegaard).  Rather, “[t]he Word chooses and calls its listeners–‘Those with ears to hear, let them hear!’ . . . .”  Clearly, the Word called Waiwode, and its call could not be gainsaid.

Waiwode goes on to charge the West with a burgeoning anti-Christianism:

More Christians were martyred in the twentieth century than in the previous nineteen added together.  Ponder that.  Christians are discriminated against by universities and intellectual gatekeepers, even on the daily news, where anybody who takes the Scriptures seriously, whether Baptist or Greek Orthodox or Catholic, is a right-wing fundamentalist.  A state religion reigns and its purpose seems to be to banish or at the minimum denigrate Christianity.  (Waiwode, “Using Words . . . “, op cit. p. 53)

This anti-Christianism necessarily amounts to a rejection of the past, of our heritage.  In that culture rejection, the centre of Western civilization produced by the Christian faith, cannot hold.

You don’t have to be a seminarian or law student to understand that Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy are the basis of common law; that the religious leader Oliver Cromwell enacted the first anti-discrimination laws that opened England to Jews; or that the commandments of the Pentateuch–including prohibitions against murder, slavery, rape, kidnapping, and the abuse of women, to list a few–are the basis of what most of us today consider inviolable human rights. (Ibid.)

Take way the Scriptures and reject the Lord Jesus Christ and there is absolutely nothing firm upon which to ground human rights.  There are only sky hooks upon which to hand one’s passing prejudices. 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
W. B. Yeats

One of the Greats

Flannery O’Connor Reads “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Justin Taylor
June 24, 2013

On April 22, 1959, the 34-year-old southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor visited Vanderbilt University and read her best-known story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” first published in 1955:

When she gave a reading of this story at Hollins College in Virginia on October 14, 1963—just 9 months before she died from complications of lupas—she prefaced it with some remarks.

Among other things, she addressed “what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story.” She answered:

I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies.  This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity.  The action or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it.  It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make.  It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.

She identifies the place of such a “gesture” in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”:

The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture.
I find that students are often puzzled by what she says and does here, but I think myself that if I took out this gesture and what she says with it, I would have no story. What was left would not be worth your attention. Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violence which precede and follow them.  The devil’s greatest wile, Baudelaire has said, is to convince us that he does not exist.

On the violence in her stories, O’Connor comments:

In my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.

O’Connor knows that some people label this story “grotesque,” but she prefers to call it “literal.”

A good story is literal in the same sense that a child’s drawing is literal. When a child draws, he doesn’t intend to distort but to set down exactly what he sees, and as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion. Now the lines of motion that interest the writer are usually invisible. They are lines of spiritual motion. And in this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother’s soul, and not for the dead bodies.

O’Conner elsewhere expanded on the comparison of stories and drawings:

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock-to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

Quotes from: Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” in her Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), pp. 107-118. The “stick figures” quote is from “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” Mystery and Manners, p. 34.

For her short stories, see Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories.

For a guide to her short stories, see Jill Peláez Baumgaerter, Flannery O’Connor: A Proper Scaring.
For biographies, see Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor and Jonathan Rogers, The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography.

For an analysis of her literature and thought in relation to the culture of South, see Ralph Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South.

The Witness of Les Mis to A Lost Generation

The Implacability of Law, the Wondrous Gift of Grace

Justin Taylor asks an interesting question about the testimony of Les Miserables to our modern culture.  (We recall reading somewhere that Les Mis was the favourite book carried in the saddlebags of officers in the Confederacy.  It remains one of the finest novels in the Western literary corpus.)

We are eagerly anticipating the release of the movie in December (see the trailer below), along with The Hobbit, of course.

Les Misérables

In recently watching the first few numbers from the 10th anniversary of the musical Les Misérables, I wondered: in contemporary culture is there another example of something so popular where the Christian themes are so numerous and explicit?

See, for example, the number of themes you can identify in these first 10-15 minutes:

The Funniest Thing

A Really Good Interview

Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, December 02, 2011

Douglas Wilson’s son, Doug is now not just an accomplished author, but has achieved a degree of public attention.

Below is a fascinating piece on his background, the home in which he grew up, and on his life’s work to date.

http://www.ustream.tv/embed/recorded/18452254

Tolkien, C S Lewis, and Rowling?

One of the Great Christian Literary Figures?

The video below was posted by Justin Taylor.  It is an excellent piece.

Jerram Barrs on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Jerram Barrs—Professor of Christian Studies and Contemporary Culture at Covenant Theological Seminary, and Resident Scholar of the Francis A. Schaeffer Institute—talks about his love for the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (Warning: contains spoilers!)

A Christian Classic

What Makes A Christian Classic

Here is an interesting piece from Justin Taylor, presenting an assessment by Leland Ryken on The Scarlet Letter.

Is The Scarlet Letter a Christian Classic?

In his excellent essay “Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter: What Is a Christian Classic?” (in Realms of Gold: The Classics in Christian Perspective [Wipf & Stock, 2003], pp. 133-154) Leland Ryken rightly says that The Scarlet Letter “is probably the most widely misinterpreted of all the classics. It is commonly mistaught in literature course. The misrepresentation comes from naive equation of the Puritans portrayed in the story with Christianity, accompanied by a suppression of the Christian elements late in the story. It is a particular pity that most people’s ideas of what the Puritans were like come from Hawthorne’s story.” (For a helpful corrective see Ryken’s own Worldly Saints: The Purtians as They Really Were.)

Ryken uses Hawthorne’s masterpiece as test case for the question of “What makes a Christian classic?”

Five Fallacies

He begins by identifying five fallacies at play in answering this question:

1. The Scarlet Letter is Christian if most readers and critics say it is.
“Majority opinion,” he writes, ‘is no guarantee of correct interpretation.” “The text itself must reveal the Christian allegiance of Hawthorne’s masterpiece.

2. The Scarlet Letter is Christian because it is well written.
“Superior artistry does not make it Christian.” Ryken distinguishes between form and content, and says “the religious element in literature is found primarily in the attitude that a work takes toward the man experiences that it portrays.”

3. To know whether The Scarlet Letter is Christian we need to know whether its author was Christian.
On the one hand, “that an author is a believing Christian does not guarantee that what he or she writes embodies a genuinely Christian viewpoint.” On the other hand, “it is possible for an unbeliever to embody a Christian viewpoint in his or her writing.” (And regarding Hawthorne: “what we know about [his life] is decidedly inconclusive on how he stood toward Christianity.”)

4. The Scarlet Letter is Christian because it contains Christian situations, terms, and allusions.
“The Christian element in a story is ultimately measured by the work’s implicit and philosophic patterns. Christian situations and allusions are often a signpost to, or a vehicle for, a Christian world view, but they are not the final test of Christianity in literature.”

5. The Scarlet Letter is Christian because it deals with profound issues.
“The fact that The Scarlet Letter is concerned with such issues as sin, guilt, prejudice, moral responsibility, and forgiveness does not make it Christian. It only means that the story deals with issues to which the Christian faith speaks. Whether Hawthorne’s story is Christian in orientation depends on how the work deals with these issues.”

Four Reasons The Scarlet Letter Is a Christian Classic

1. Artistry
“Although superior artistry does not make The Scarlet Letter a Christian classic, one thing that needs to be asserted strongly is that a Christian classic is first of all a classic.” In other words, “Before a work can be a Christian classic, it must be a classic. As such, it must display superior artistry that moves us to admiration and amazement. Hawthorne’s story is . . . one of the best-old stories the world has known.”

2. Truthfulness to human experience
“I want to insist that a Christian classic meets the criterion of truthfulness to reality and experience, even though that does not constitute the distinctively Christian aspect of a Christian classic.” “A Christian classic achieves that identity partly by doing what any classic does at that level of content: it touches upon life powerfully at many points. . . . One level of truthfulness in The Scarlet Letter is truthfulness to human experience in the social, moral, and psychological realms.”

3. Interpretation of life

“The Christian interpretation of experience in The Scarlet Letter consists partly of how the story get us to share the writer’s negative assessment of the Puritan and Romantic world views. Using the affective strategies of the storyteller, Hawthorne influences us to disapprove of the Puritan community’s behavior throughout the story and Hester’s Romantic values in the late stages of the story.”

4. The triumph of grace

“To merit the title of Christian classic, a work must do more than portray a Christian viewpoint on a chosen aspect of experience. It must also give a convincing presentation of what is most important in Christian experience—the triumph of God’s saving grace in the forgiveness of a sinner. Stated another way a Christian classic portrays a protagonist who attains belief in salvation and eternal life.” [This happens in The Scarlet Letter.] Ryken quotes a critic who observes that The Scarlet Letter “is a complete vision of salvation.”

>Clive James on Approaching Mortality

>The Falcon Growing Old

The falcon wears its erudition lightly

As it angles down towards its master’s glove.

Student of thermals written by the desert,

It scarcely moves a muscle as it rides

A silent avalanche back to the wrist

Where it will stand in wait like a hooded hostage.

A lifetime’s learning renders youthful effort

Less necessary, which is fortunate.

The chase and first-strike kill it once could wing

Have grown beyond it, so some morning soon

This bird will have its neck wrung without warning

And one of its progeny will take its place.

Thinking these things, the ageing writer makes

Sketches for poems, notes for paragraphs.

Bound for the darkness, does he see himself

Balanced and forceful like the poised assassin

Whose mere trajectory attracts all eyes

Except the victim’s? Habit can die hard,

But still the chance remains he simply likes it,

Catching the shifting air the way a falcon

Spreads on a secret wave, the outpaced earth

Left looking powerless. This sentence here,

Weighed down by literal meaning as it is,

Might only need that loose clause to take off,

Air-launched from a position in the sky

For a long glide with just its wing-tip feathers

Correcting for the wobble in the lisp

Of sliding nothingness, the whispering road

That leads you to a dead-heat with your shadow

At the orange-blossom trellis in the oasis.

— Standpoint, September 2010
Clive James’s recent poetical work can be found at his website, here.  

>Maori Language Week

>The Harmony of the Universal and the Particular

T. S. Eliot in Christianity and Culture writes on how a nation, as part of a cluster of nations, can achieve real and lasting peaceful unity. Many who write upon such themes veer toward one of two extremes: either peace will be achieved by the suppression of differences (which are seen as the root cause of quarrels), or it will come through universal isolation and fracturing (where everyone is concerned exclusively with their own business). Eliot, however, argues that true lasting unity and peace can only be achieved if people are loyal both to general corporate values, while at the same time being loyal to the local and particular.

He writes:

The unity with which I am concerned must be largely unconscious, and therefore can perhaps be best approached through a consideration of the useful diversities. Here I have to do with diversity of region. It is important that a man should feel himself to be, not merely a citizen of a particular nation, but a citizen of a particular part of his country, with local loyalties. These, like loyalty to class, arise out of loyalty to the family. (T. S. Eliot, Culture, p.125)

This view captures an essential, Christian construct: the equal importance of the universal and the particular. This distinctly Christian doctrine is derived from the being and nature of God Himself. Our God is triune: within the Godhead, the particulars–namely the three Persons of the Godhead–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–are equally ultimate with the oneness of God. Thus, in the Being of God Himself, the one and the many are equally ultimate.

Unbelieving thought, captured by the machinations of a finite creature, will always drive toward either making the “many” absolute, or the “one”. We see this tension everywhere in our modern Unbelieving culture. The libertarian or the anarchist absolutises the individual, seeing the collective as intrinsically dehumanising and destructive. The statist absolutises the one state. All diversity, when presented, exists only at the good pleasure of the social collective–provided it is within the bounds of the tolerable. So, the oneness of the collective squashes all diversity under the blanket of what is deemed politically correct.

The Christian position stands in sharp contrast to all Unbelieving ideologies and thought. “Oneness” and the “manyness” mutually co-inhere throughout the creation. Eliot illustrates this Christian distinctive by pointing to the essential power of local, regional languages to enrich a wider universally used language.

The question we may ask about such a language as Welsh, is whether it is of any value to the world at large, that it should be used in Wales. But this is really as much as to ask whether the Welsh, qua Welsh, are of any use? not, of course, as human beings, but as the preservers and continuers of a culture which is not English. The direct contribution to poetry by Welshmen and men of Welsh extraction, writing in English, is very considerable; and considerable also is the influence of their poetry upon poets of different racial origins. . . . But it must be remembered, that for the transmission of a culture–a particular way of thinking, feeling and behaving–that for its maintenance, there is no safeguard more reliable than a language. And to survive for this purpose it must continue to be a literary language–not necessarily a scientific language but certainly a poetic one: otherwise the spread of education will extinguish it.

The literature written in that language will not, of course, make any direct impact upon the world at large; but if it is no longer cultivated, the poeple to whom it belongs (we are considering particularly the Welsh) will tend to lose their racial character. The Welsh will be less Welsh; and their poets will cease to have any contribution to make to English literature, beyond their individual genius. And I am of the opinion, that the benefits which Scottish, Welsh and Irish writers have conferred upon English literature are far in excess of what the contribution of all these individual men of genius would have been had they, let us say, all been adopted in early infancy by English foster-parents.” (Eliot, Culture, pp. 129–131)

In the light of this, let us make a few comments upon Maori Language Week. The preservation of the Maori language (and, therefore, culture) is commendable–as is the languages of all cultural groups in New Zealand (Polynesian, Asian, Middle-Eastern and so on). But this is something which must come from within Maoridom itself. We believe that Maori has probably made a classic blunder in attempting to make the language an official language, as if bilingualism would somehow contribute to the oneness and unity of our society.

Hanging the language upon the hook of co-governance, which in turn is based upon a spurious notion of Treaty “partnership” will fail to achieve the aims. In the long run it will bastardize the language–as is happening now. Maori is so full of neologisms that it is becoming increasingly swamped by a phonetic tsunami of English transliterations or clumsy verbal manufactures for English equivalents. Consequently its ability to preserve and transmit Maori culture is being lost.

If Maori language is worth preserving at all–and it is–it would be to preserve and keep alive Maori culture, history, and tradition (shorn of the evil of course–which is true of every language reflecting pagan roots and beliefs). But, that requires that the Maori language be intensely Maori! not a bastardized polygot of verbal confusion in a foolish attempt to modernise the language and make it quasi-universal. Above all we need Maori poets and writers steeped in the beauties of their own language who can also write powerfully and fluently in Maori, and who can teach Maori literature and arts to Maori. 

We also need these cultural icons to write in English so that we can all be enriched by Maori culture and made the better for it.

>The Language of Poetry

>Poetry and Words

Dr. Michael Flinn

Poetry (and this is true of all literature) makes use of words. If there were no words, there would be no poetry. The reason why there are words is because God himself is the Word (John 1:1). To use a title from one of Francis Schaeffer’s books, He is There and He is not Silent, God speaks. In Genesis 1:3ff we read that God created the world by speaking words. Of course, God’s ability to create something out of nothing merely by speaking words is something that is unique to him. As human beings, we cannot create in this way. But this is not the only way in which God uses words. As Schaeffer indicates in his book, God reveals both himself and his plan of redemption for the world by speaking to his image bearers in language that can be understood by them.

This last sentence needs an important qualification. Although God’s words to man are clear and true, and able to be understood in and of themselves, man has chosen to deny and suppress God’s clear revelation of himself (cf. Romans 1:20,21). The sinful mind is hostile to God and does not (in fact: cannot) submit to God’s laws (Romans 8:7) and it cannot understand the things of the Spirit of God without the Spirit’s enlightenment (1Corinthians 2:14).

Because we human beings are created in the image of the One who made us, we also possess the ability to communicate with others by means of words. God has made us with the ability to express thoughts in language. We can articulate emotions, instincts, concerns and needs. We can speak of beliefs and aspirations and we can express theories and viewpoints. We can express with words not only what is happening in our lives, or what the world is like, but we can also explore why it is happening or why the world is the way that it is and how we feel about the answers we have given to these questions.

In the following post, we’ll explore some of the ways in which poetry uses words.

Poetry and Word Choice

In a novel or even a short story, the author has more time to develop his or her ideas or to “paint a picture” using words. By contrast, in poetry, there is a premium on words. Words are chosen very carefully by the poet. They often evoke or picture something that the reader is expected to think about and “fill in” rather than describe or express something in great detail, leaving nothing at all to the imagination.

As an example, have a look at this well-known sonnet by Percy Shelley, called Ozymandias of Egypt:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal those words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias is another name for Ramses the Great, Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. The central theme of the poem is the inevitable decline of human empires and dictators no matter how intimidating, perpetual, and enduring they might appear when at the height of their power. Ramses the Great had a monument built to his own greatness. Calling himself “king of kings”, a title reserved for Christ in the Scriptures, he wanted all other great men to look with wonder and awe at his works, knowing with despair that they could never compete with him.

Notice the way in which Shelley describes the scene and the words that he chooses. Egypt is not an ancient land, but an antique land. Antiques are ancient things of rarity and value. The “antique” that is presented in the poem is the monument that was constructed in order to perpetuate the memory of this ancient king and his greatness. But this monument, once a thing of splendour and greatness, is now a “shattered visage”, “lifeless”, a “colossal wreck”. It is a thing of death and decay, broken and worthless. Notice also that what remains upon the statue, etched in the stone itself, is the attitude and demeanor of the king. His “frown and wrinkled lip” and his “sneer of cold command” have been carved in stone by the sculptors who “well those passions read”. These are the things that survive, on the “half sunk” and “shattered visage”. In this way, it is not the king’s greatness that is commemorated in the broken statue, but his futile human pride and the disdain he showed for others. Now the king and his empire are no more. And the only “companion” that the statue has is the “lone and level sands” that “stretch far away”, “boundless and bare”. The sand has survived unchanged across the centuries; the monument, however, is a lonely, pathetic and broken relic.

With his careful choice of words and his graphic word pictures Shelley has expressed in 14 lines of poetry what historians, philosophers and theologians might take chapters or even volumes to describe and discuss. His poem asks us to think carefully about the ideas that it expresses and to interact with them.

Words are also carefully chosen in biblical poetry. As an interesting contrast to “Ozymandias of Egypt”, take, for example Psalm 102:3,10. Here the psalmist writes:

For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers…
My days are like the evening shadow; I wither like grass.

The reader is being asked to think about these verbal pictures: smoke vanishing quickly in the breeze of the day; shadows lengthening as the sun goes down in the evening; glowing embers gradually flickering and dying down; grass withering in the hot sun – and then apply these pictures to the psalmist’s awareness of his life and the passage of time. These verbal pictures are much more evocative and beautiful than a simple description using prose, which might go something like this: “I am not happy. I am discouraged and depressed. There is nothing in the day to interest me. I feel old. I am sick. I feel sad, weak and small.”

Interestingly, even in the midst of his sadness and distressing circumstances, the psalmist can still express himself and his feelings in beautiful poetic language, which in itself is a positive and edifying thing. Ultimately, however, the psalmist’s comfort is in God and in his perfect plan for his people. For this reason, the psalm moves away from contemplation of self to focus instead on the Lord (vss. 12ff). This is the biblical answer to the problem posed by Shelley in his poem. Man’s comfort and consolation in the face of his transience and finitude lies not in self-glorification, but in the eternal Lord and in his sovereign purposes.

Poetry and Word Art

We have already seen how words are carefully chosen in poetry in order to express ideas and evoke (sometimes very beautiful) images in the mind. Further to this, poets often use words, and even carefully place words in a sentence, in order to express their ideas clearly and powerfully. I like to call this word art. For some examples let’s look first at these lines from S.T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around;
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

These lines are part of a long poem describing the experiences of a sailor after he shot an albatross at sea. Notice how the words have an accent and rhythm that carries the reader along: “The ICE was here, the ICE was there, the ICE was all AROUND… Notice also the way in which some of the words chosen sound like what is being described. “Cracked” and “growled”, “roared” and “howled” all sound, when spoken, like the sounds made by the ice as it shifts. This is a literary device called onomatopoeia. Finally, notice the rhyming scheme. In every stanza the last word of the second line, rhymes with the last line of the fourth. This explains in part why the word “swound” was chosen. It’s an archaic word for “swoon” or “faint”.

In Hebrew poems, although there are some examples of word play in which the word is chosen for its sound, much more prominent is the use of parallelisms to express ideas. That is: an idea will be stated in a line of poetry, and then restated in the next line in order to show either a similarity of idea or a contrast. Here are a couple of examples:

The cords of death entangled me;
The torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
The cords of the grave coiled around me;
The snares of death confronted me. (Ps. 18:4,5)

Notice how line 3 expresses a very similar idea to line 1 and the same is true for lines 2 and 4. This is an example of what is called synonymous parallelism.

The wicked borrow and do not repay,
But the righteous give generously. (Ps. 37:21)

Here the lines express a contrast. The wicked do one thing; the righteous, by contrast, do the opposite. This is an example of what is called antithetic parallelism. (Antithetic parallelisms are very common in the Proverbs that express a contrast between the behaviour of the wise person on the one hand and that of the fool on the other, or the righteous on the one hand and the wicked on the other.)

Derek Kidner makes the interesting point that this type of poetry is more readily “transposed” into other languages than other types that require an exact correspondence of rhythm and form in order to retain the poetic element.

It is the striking fact that this type of poetry loses less than perhaps any other in the process of translation. In many literatures the appeal of a poem lies chiefly in verbal felicities and associations, or in metrical subtleties, which tend to fail of their effect even in a related language. The programme notes of any Lieder recital are enough to prove the point! But the poetry of the Psalms has a broad simplicity of rhythm and imagery which survives transplanting into almost any soil. Above all, the fact that its parallelisms are those of sense rather than of sound allows it to reproduce its chief effects with very little loss of either force or beauty. It is well fitted by God’s providence to invite ‘all the earth’ to ‘sing the glory of his name’. (Kidner, Derek. The Psalms, Vol. 1, p. 4.)

Ultimately, we can understand and appreciate this word art because we are made in the image of God, who is the great Creator and “Artificer” of this world.

Poetry and Words of the Soul

More than any other form of literature, poetry often puts into words the thoughts and feelings that are experienced at the level of the heart or the soul. Take a look at this typical selective list of categories in this anthology called the Library of World Poetry (edited by William Cullen Bryant):

Poems of the Affections
Friendship
Compliment and Admiration
Love
Marriage
Home
Filial and Fraternal Love
Parting
Absence
Disappointment and Estrangement
Bereavement and Death
Poems of Sorrow and Adversity
Poems of Sentiment and Reflection
Poems of Fancy
Personal Poems
Humorous Poems

This anthology runs to nearly 800 pages!

The Hebrew poems in Scripture also depict and express a vast array of emotions including joy, sorrow, fear, longing, anger, reflection, praise, etc. These poems, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, clearly and powerfully express what the poet was thinking and feeling at the time:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, and am not silent… (Ps. 22:1,2)

How many of us, going through some difficult or challenging experience, have found great comfort by turning to the psalms? The psalms put into words exactly what we are thinking and feeling, in both a beautiful and compelling way. Moreover, the psalms take us through the challenging experience and help us to refocus our thoughts on the Lord and to find peace and comfort in him:

All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord,
and all the families of the nations will bow down before him,
for dominion belongs to the Lord
and he rules over the nations (Ps. 22:27,28)

Precisely for this reason, the psalms are a veritable goldmine for those seeking to offer pastoral comfort and encouragement to others.

Conclusion:

In good poetry, words are never wasted. The poet thinks long and hard about which word to choose, and even where to place it in the line or sentence in order to express his ideas and the beauty of his art. This is true of poetry in every language, including the Hebrew poems that are found in Scripture. Poetry is also the language of the soul, often expressing in a few words, and in a very telling way, feelings and experiences that others can readily understand and identify with. I hope this article has inspired you to read more poems, especially the poems in Scripture, with a new appreciation, and maybe even have a go at writing some poems for yourself.

>Read, read, read

>Read Until Your Brain Creaks

Lit Crit – Literary Notes
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, May 31, 2010

Some months ago, I listed seven brief and basic pointers for writers, and have since wanted to take time to expand on each one of those points with seven observations under each head. So here is the second point, upon which I would like to enlarge.

Read. Read constantly. Read the kind of stuff you wish you could write. Read until your brain creaks. Tolkien said that his ideas sprang up from the leaf mould of his mind. These are the trees where the leaves come from.

So then, what about it? How should writers read?

1. The first thing is that writers should in fact be voracious readers. We live in a narcissistic age, which means that many want to have the praise that comes from having written, without the antecedent labor of actually writing, or the antecedent labor before that of having read anything. Mark Twain once defined a classic as a book that nobody wanted to read, but which everyone wanted to have read. It is a similar situation here. Wanting to write without reading is like wanting to grind flour without gathering wheat, like wanting to make boards without logging, and like wanting to have a Mississippi Delta without any tributaries somewhere in Minnesota. Output requires intake, and literary output requires literary intake.

2. Read widely. Reading shapes your voice, and if you want a wide, experienced voice, you have to get out more. Reading in one genre only is a form of literary provincialism. The timbre of your voice will be affected in good ways by every place you have been, bookwise, and so you should make a point of reading novels, histories, collections of poetry, comedies, biographies, theology, and plays. And don’t be a afraid to have twenty books going at once.

3. Read like a reader, and not like someone cramming for a test. If you try to wring every book out like it was a washcloth full of information, all you will do is slow yourself down to a useless pace. Go for total tonnage, and read like someone who will forget most of it. You have my permission to forget most of it, which may or may not be reassuring, but you will forget most of it in either case. Most of what is shaping you in the course of your reading, you will not be able to remember. The most formative years of my life were the first five, and if those years were to be evaluated on the basis of my ability to pass a test on them, the conclusion would be that nothing important happened then, which would be false. The fact that you can’t remember things doesn’t mean that you haven’t been shaped by them.

At the same time, mark everything striking that you read — you won’t remember everything you read, and you won’t even remember everything you mark. Nevertheless, it is not a sin to remember some things, or to mark them in a way to be able to find them again.

4. Read like a lover of books, and not like someone who wants to be seen as knowledgeable, or well-read, or scholarly. Read because you want to, not because you need to. Actually, you need to as well, but you need to want to. You also need to want to need to, but I am rapidly getting out of my depth.

5. Pace yourself in your reading. A little bit every day really adds up. If you only read during sporadic reading jags, the fits and starts will not get you anywhere close to the amount of reading you will need to do. It is far better to walk a mile a day than to run five miles every other month. Plod. Make time for reading, and make a daily habit of it, even if it is a relatively small daily habit.

6. As a general pattern, read quality, and go slumming occasionally to remind yourself why quality matters, and what quality is.

7. Read boring books on writing mechanics. Read grammars, dictionaries, writers’ memoirs, books of proverbs, books of cliches, books on how to write dialogue, books on how not to write dialogue (“I dropped my toothpaste!” he said crestfallenly.) and books about finding good agents and how to blow away the readers of query letters. Writing is a vocation, and there is a body of professional literature out there — which is uneven in quality, just like every other kind of book. Read a lot of it anyway.