The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Aubade

Studies Poetry
#1

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

#2

Is that Virginia Woolfe Johnny? Philip Larkin is often a very bleak poet - and you must still be feeling bleak to cite him. Thinking of you mate :slight_smile: Larkin did write two uncharacteristically affirming poems to my knowledge - Whitsun Weddings and even more so ’ At Arundel Tombs’. The latter poem ends quizzically and ambivalently but almost mystically - misanthropic curmudgeon though he was -with ’ The only thing that survives of us is love’ (or something very similar). You must know it - give it another read :slight_smile:

#3

Yes, Dick, I feel depressed and far from God right now. And poor old Larkin ain’t exactly the type to cheer me up, or bring me closer to God, I know :frowning: . But you guys do that, and I am very grateful for the love, kindness and tolerance of all the good folks here.

I do think as Christians we must face boldly up to Larkin’s despair. As Universalists we believe that he will be redeemed in the next life. And I thank God for that. But I feel great sympathy for a man who said that “deprivation for him was what daffodils were for Wordsworth”.

It seems that everywhere I turn right now I see gloom and doom, misery and suffering. I was watching TV last night and an archaeological documentary came on about a woman who has been excavating Treblinka in Poland. The Nazis razed it to the ground in an attempt to cover up the terrible crimes committed there. But the bones they left behind tell the story of the systematic extermination of over 900,000 men, women and children. We all know about the Holocaust, of course, but when you sit and ponder on it, as I did last night, it really is staggering that human beings could do such things to their fellows.

Earlier I was watching a documentary on Alfred Hitchcock, and he quoted Robert Burns’ poem Man Was Made to Mourn:

Then you turn on the news and hear about those people enjoying a drink and some music in a Glasgow pub on Friday night, who were killed by a falling helicopter, and you think Burns hit the nail on the head.

And then you hear about the selfless heroism of the people who risked their lives to pull the injured from the rubble. And there is hope. And hope is all we have. Hope, and faith, that God is on our side. And one day he will stop the next war.

Love

Johnny

#4

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd–
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainess of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends could see:
A sculptor’s sweet comissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.
They would not guess how early in

Their supine stationary voyage
Their air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they
Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths

Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,
Washing at their identity.

Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone finality
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

– Philip Larkin. This is the last poem in his 1964 book The Whitsun Weddings -

Another Blogger’s commentary (which will do)

#5

Hi Johnny

There is no reason why you/we shouldn’t feel sympathy with Larkin Johnny – no reason whatsoever. His poetry is haunted by a lugubrious fear of death and of facing the abyss. Some might say that it was/is symptomatic of godlessness and of a godless age – but I can think of examples of poets from all periods I have studied who were similarly haunted – and sometimes this haunting was connected not with a meaningless world but with contemplation of cruel and heartless god. The two sometimes go hand in hand indeed – and both deny what I look upon as the central Christian mystery and intuition – that of God with us.

Can I have hope for Larkin? – not just because of my eschatological beliefs but based on the evidence of his writings? Well he was a fine poet – even if his poems speak of ‘death hauntedness’ they are well made in terms of structure musicality and use of images. He has a sense of humour about his lugubriousness – that’s a good sign; it’s a creative attempt to live with and distance himself from his own pain – that is’ setting a good example to us because we all need to distance ourselves from our own pain or else we get swallowed by it and are no use to anyone. Also in poems like the Arundel Tombs – through the cynical irony – you can see a dim awareness/an intuition of something greater than fear of death (the lyrical affirmation a the close runs counter to the spirit of the rest of the poem). All of these things I take as evidence of the image of God in miserable old Philip – and I think God has plenty of stuff to work with in bringing about his eventual restoration.

Larkin was in some ways a mild exponent of what Alvarez (a friend of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath) called ‘The Savage God’ – the obsessive fear of death that in other poets and artists lead to a cult of nihilism and suicide. I think Larkin saved himself from the extremes by his humdrum self chosen life as librarian at Hull University and by adopting many of the prejudices of a slightly racist and misogynist little Englander (I think he would have voted for UKIP if he’s been alive today however avant garde his poetry once seemed). Of course Ted Hughes – the Savage Messiah – and Virgina Wolfe are another kettle of fish. Some of Hughes poetry like the volume ‘Crow’ and some of Plath’s writings after she was married to him drip despair and an unmitigated half celebration of the brutal animaility of life and the starkness of death in life as the only reality - a reality from which we comfort ourselves with diversions. The vision here becomes depraved sometimes – and of course Ted had two wives commit suicide . His poetic vision was not, I feel, unconnected to his treatment of those he loved and it was so sad when he translated Alcestis before he dies – the Greek tragedy in which the murdered faithful wife come back to life and there is some sort of redemption. (Mind you he did once write a lovely book for children on how to write poetry and observe wild animals as themes for poems)

We need to face up to despair in life as Christians – yes we do. Whether or not we have to face up to Larkin’s vision of despair or Hughes vision of despair or – thinking of paintings – Francis Bacon’s vision of despair is another matter. We certainly need to face our own despair – that way is the only way to hope. But there are many shades of despair. I wouldn’t recommend the poem you posted by Larkin to someone who was in a state of despair– and there are people on this site who sometimes do come here despairing I fear (for obvious and less obvious reasons). I would want to help them come to terms with their own despair by giving them reason to hope.

In reading Larkin’s poem I can come to terms with the fact that when he felt despair it was a bit like the stuff that he expresses in the poem. I think because you posted I can see that it speaks to you somehow at this moment – it articulates your own despair. All lives have much sadness in them – not everyone suffers from depression but many do. And even those who don’t suffer from depression are not immune to great sadness, or to empathy for that matter. You suffer from depression, I do too. Perhaps one of the difficulties you have is that of coming from the Evangelical tradition – this tradition is often too triumphalist and some within it see being happy too much as a sign of God’s good favour. I can well understand that. This is not true of the wider Christian tradition which has its place for contemplating the desert and for dry prayer and emptying lamentation, and for understating that when we feel far from God we may actually be very close to God. One thing I’d recommend is that you look more deeply into these other traditions – there are certainly lots of resources in the two traditions I know best – Anglicanism and Quakerism and I’m aware of them in other traditions too.

When we are depressed we are especially sensitive to suffering and tragedy – but to such an extent that it overwhelms us; so very little compassion can be done from a space of depression if you focus on vicarious suffering exclusively – this I know well. Also some types of depression will mask an anger that wants to lash out at an imperfect world – this I have known too. The headlines stories can just be stimulus to emotion. If you go on the BBC web page and look through all of the world news pages you can find stories every single day of the year that will break your heart.

Human beings can do appalling things to each other. We can do appalling things to each other – all of us could join a lynch mob given the right circumstances. But we have to create a more hopeful world in the teeth of tragedy and human beings inhumanity to each other with God’s help. Regarding the Holocaust – I have read so much about it and imaginatively entered into it more times than I perhaps should have done. Read some Etty Hillesum sometime – even in the extremity of the death camps she remained compassionate and kept Good alive (as she put it with hyperbole). It took a discipline of the heart to do so. She treasured every ray of sunlight in the compound, every little flower breaking through the tarmac. She trained herself in a certain detachment so that she could remain centred and useful in compassion and not overcome by hatred. And that’s the only creative response to a situation like the holocaust. She could have imagined an omnipotent interventionist God and filled herself with rage alternatively – but instead she took responsibility to keep God alive.

Robert Burns indeed wrote that verse; but it was just one sad melody in his wider poetic output. Most of his poems speak of a tender love of humanity and of a deep love of nature, of hope in universal salvation, and a picklish ability to puncture religious hypocrisy. Sometimes depression isolates one aspect of life and cannot see the whole. Burns was in no way like Larkin and even less like Ted Hughes. I see it as encouraging that even a man as life affirming as Burns could understand depression and mourning

There are plenty of terrible wars going on around the globe today –there always have been. God also wants us to play or bit in preventing violence when we can – we can’t do this from a position of depressive ‘no exit’. I think we should mourn and make space for mourning – we should also celebrate – there will always be plenty of opportunities for both in an ordinary life in fellowship with the ordinary people who are close. I think we should always be in touch with the sorrows of people around the world too – but also connect with stories of hope and ordinary happiness and of rebirth the other side of tragedy. And for us depressives – I think it should be a rule of thumb for us to realise that although depression has its deep lessons when we are deep in it our view of reality does become lopsided. Depression does not give us privileged access to the clear unvarnished truth – but only to one small aspect of this.

Love you Johnny – I wish you a safe journey. Good to see you back- but take it easy and be gentle with yourself

I must be getting old - I got Sylvia Plath and Virginia Wolfe muddled up

#6

Dick, thank you so much for such a kind, thoughtful, interesting and challenging comment. There’s so much to digest here, and I’m just not up to it intellectually or emotionally right now. But I will reply properly soon, I promise.

Thank you dear brother

J

#7

OK dear friend - look forward to hearing back; but take it easy, and don’t be hard on yourself. ‘Underneath are the everlasting arms’.