In Rowan Williams’s recent compendium he presents and examines 100 poems composed in the last century on the subject of faith. The poems range from canonical Christian meditations like TS Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” to lesser-known contemporary jewels like Sally Ito’s “At the Beginning of Lent: Ash Wednesday”.
As well as being a prolific poet in English and Welsh, Williams is a sensitive exegete, prying open sometimes-rarefied works like WH Auden’s “Friday’s Child”, a dense treatment of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology. In one of the most exhilarating critical discussions in the collection, Williams draws from Auden’s pithy quatrains a systematic sermon on human and divine freedom, concluding that “if we can indeed see God in the crucified” we have the “freedom to see more than our own embarrassing deceits and confusions, to see what the gift of life actually is”.
Williams’s perspicuous readings remind us that modern poetry does not have to be a solipsistic or mystifying art which gives rise to infinite possible interpretations. He clarifies word-order, identifies allusions and provides useful biographical details: Paul Celan’s “Count Up the Almonds” would make little sense to a reader unaware that the almond is a symbol of mortality in the Old Testament, or that Celan addresses his mother, who was murdered in an internment camp in the Transnistria Governorate during the Second World War. Nevertheless, Williams is careful not to limit himself to unifocal readings, and is always awake to the prismatic nature of poetic meaning which is not ambiguous but forensic in its plurality. He notes that Celan also addresses himself with the exhortation “Make me bitter, then / Count me in among the almonds”: “It is he who experiences the sleepless bitterness, he who has to find a truthful identity for himself that can be embraced by the dead – a kind of absolution for his survivor’s guilt”. On either reading, “the poet’s goal is to be among those who are ‘counted’ – counted off for slaughter, counted among the chosen”. Williams leaves us with a sobering reflection on the duality of “chosenness” for the Jewish people amidst persecution in Europe in the 20th century and the centuries before it: “the profoundest contradiction in the experience of a people defined by divine promise or covenant”.
Doubt is just as salient as faith in A Century of Poetry, as it so often is for the modern believer. Tadeusz Różewicz’s “Thorn” begins plainly “I don’t believe / I don’t believe from morning till night”, before nevertheless grieving Christ crucified: “I think of the tiny / god bleeding amid white / sheets of childhood”. Williams answers Różewicz’s expression of the way religious doubt is shot with mourning with reference to St Paul: “It is impossible, we are told, to believe in the old way: yet, as St Paul is kept humble by the thorn in his flesh, so our ambitions are chastened by our inabil- ity to forget the metaphor of God as the wounded child – even when we cannot see it as more than metaphor.” Williams takes the poetry’s angst seriously whilst answering it with hope in faith. Faith’s possibility is restored to probability; the reader is wounded by the poetry only to be salved by Williams’s reading. Of Louise Glück’s “Vespers”, Williams is again assuring: “the divine answer (to our sterile anxiety about whether or not our condition is serious enough to merit God’s response) is that the question is completely misconceived. God is always there at our feet.”
Williams sees God in the questions and qualms of poets as well as their proclamations of faith. If he can be faulted, it is for his benev- olence. He occasionally risks over-reading, as in the case of Gillian Allnutt’s imagistic “Verger, Winter Afternoon, Galilee Chapel”. Though set in a place of worship, its subject is the light which “inhabits water / or the heart’s interior”, a vague, spiritualistic image to which Will- iams attaches a serous theological significance: God’s grace. Perhaps he does so too readily.
Impressively, Williams resists didacticism in what is essentially a series of sermons. He fulfils a purpose which fuses aesthetics with counsel, showing that even poetry which deals with the ultra-private tumults of religious faith can be readable and restorative. The book is a treasure.
Jane Cooper is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.