Flight of Faith

Flight of Faith

An article by Paul Oakley

Can we ever not think about God, about death? Can we not read and write poems about faith or spirituality given our final destination? Piety aside, isn’t faith something like magic? Isn’t poetry something like magic? Paul Oakley compares George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” and Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.”

Occasionally I cast through time, impressionistically examining poems in which the spiritual or the religious impulse expresses itself in some compelling way, exploring what makes them compelling, what makes them religious.

I begin, here, with myself and first contact. It was during my undergraduate days, more than a quarter of a century ago, that I became aware of religious poetry for the first time.

Reading my first flight poem

In the poetry unit of the mandatory literature class, one day Prof Murray assigned us to read George Herbert’s “Easter Wings,” a carmen figuratum, a type of poem where some or all of the words of the poem are arranged to produce a visual pattern on the page.

Herbert’s poem, when first published in 1633, was printed on opposing pages with the lines running down from the top of the page, making very obvious the form of wings though requiring the book be turned to read the poem. My college anthology printed it with lines running horizontally, but we turned our books ninety degrees, the better to see the wings.

George Herbert, “Easter Wings”

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
      Though foolishly he lost the same,
           Decaying more and more,
                Till he became
                 Most poore:
                 With thee
               Oh let me rise
            As larks, harmoniously,
       And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne:
  And still with sicknesses and shame
       Thou didst so punish sinne,
               That I became
                Most thinne.
                With thee
             Let me combine
         And feel thy victorie:
    For, if I imp my wing on thine
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

The rhyme scheme paired with the number of syllables per line was:
10a / 8b / 6a / 4b / 2a / 2c / 4d / 6c / 8d / 10c //
10e / 8b / 6e / 4b / 2e / 2c / 4f / 6c / 8f / 10c.

Prof Murray wanted us to see how the visual effect and strict structure worked together with the words to build the expression of Herbert’s faith that was his poem. I also remember she drew our attention to the fact that this resurrection poem was written in the last year of Herbert’s (1593-1633) short life, as he was suffering from tuberculosis.

The lark’s flight merged with the Resurrection which merged again with the hope of resurrection that was at the core of Herbert’s Anglican faith. Of course, Prof Murray knew how little interest college students tended then to have in things religious and, so, drew our attention to the sophistication of shape poetry grounded in the Renaissance.

And, of course, it helped that Herbert wrote aware of his own impending death, as did Chidiock Tichborne and François Villon before him. Doom hanging over the artist fills a psychological niche not unrelated to the risk of injury or even death that is in the backdrop of every stock car race.

Now that we are Postmoderns or something like and quite sophisticated and all, we may find less to appreciate in Herbert’s verse. But, as a young man, raised in a strict fundamentalist Protestantism that looked with suspicion on any post-biblical artistic use of language, I found Herbert’s wings were a ticket for me to ride, for the first time finding art a potential vehicle for expressing ultimate concerns.

Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”

Some 353 years after Herbert wrote “Easter Wings,” Mary Oliver published “Wild Geese,” a very different spiritual poem grounded in bird imagery. Where Herbert was a personally devout Anglican clergyman, Oliver is a lay person whose poetry explores the parameters of her existence in the world, her poetry not declaring a religious faith but a spiritual existence in relation to nature.

Though often claimed by Unitarian Universalists as one of them, Oliver was, for public purposes, religiously ambiguous until her late-life conversion to the Episcopal Church after the death of her life partner in 2005. In “Wild Geese” Oliver tells us that the ultimate belonging that Herbert finds in resurrection imagery is also available to us in images of the natural world unmediated by myth or the supernatural:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

– “Wild Geese”, Mary Oliver, Dream Work, 1986 (read the full poem here.)

“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine,” Oliver writes to Herbert’s statement that “My tender age in sorrow did beginne:/ And still with sicknesses and shame/ Thou didst so punish sinne…” Oliver’s reality is natural and is scientifically, as well as poetically, explorable while Herbert sees inscrutable moral agency at work in his illness.

The common idiom in Oliver and Herbert alike is bird imagery. From Edgar Allen Poe’s image of doom as a raven, to Jonathan Livingston Seagull’s airborne escape from this ordinary reality to the next level of being, to the craven scavengers who pick at the lives of the weak as if the flesh from the dead we term “vultures” – birds capture our imagination and our clichés precisely because they so easily elude us. But, elusive as the birds of their imagery are, both Oliver and Herbert ground us in sickness, weakness, despair or impending death, the too common heritage of humanity.

20th-century naturalism and 17th-century piety can only speak mutually incomprehensible prose, but when rendered in poetry, the bird soul of each is set free, soaring aloft, carrying Oliver’s despair and Herbert’s sinne alike, each speaking the language of their times.

Paul Kent Oakley has lived most of his life in small-town and rural southern and east-central Illinois. However, he has also had the opportunity to live in: West Germany before the Berlin Wall fell; Communist Romania in the last year of Nicolai Ceauşescu’s dictatorship; Japan before its economic crisis; Jordan, when you still needed a second passport to go there if your first one held an entrance visa from Israel; and the New Jersey suburbs of New York City. He has had the great good fortune to travel widely in Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. He has degrees in French, English, Japan Studies, and Accounting and pursued a doctoral program in Comparative Literature for three years before thinking better of it. Paul is religious but does not believe it is necessary for everyone to be so. He is a seminarian training for ministry in a liberal denomination but also loves seeing the way people in different traditions make or express meaning, celebrate life, and commune with the Ultimate, both as religious and non-religious people. Paul lives with his partner and two big dogs in southern Illinois in a town of 16,000 people with not much but agriculture around it.