CHICHESTER CATHEDRAL 4 MARCH 2013

‘Literature as Liturgy: Uncommon Prayer’

Several years ago, I was asked to contribute a chapter on ‘Literature as Liturgy’ to a

handbook of English Literature and Theology.1 This idea seemed almost incomprehensible,

and I concluded that the editors had made a mistake. Surely they had meant to request an

essay on ‘Liturgy as Literature’ – a much more logical idea? In the event, that was the agreed

title of the piece, but the order of the words has bothered me ever since. Was there after all

something that should have been said, a challenge that should have been met? The Dean’s

invitation has made it possible to make up for that rather cowardly act of avoidance and to

take up the challenge of talking about literature as liturgy. So I am grateful for this

opportunity and delighted to be in Chichester.

Various ways of addressing the subject spring to mind. We have all heard poetry and

sometimes memorable prose being recited in church or introduced into sermons and

intercessions. Anecdotal evidence of this might certainly be collected as one approach. A

different approach would be to gather and comment on examples of literary works being

quoted, or echoed, or adopted almost wholesale into the authorised texts used in liturgical

rites. George Herbert’s ‘Love bade me welcome’ and Charles Wesley’s ‘Christ, whose glory

fills the skies’ are two examples. Taking yet another angle, it would be possible to argue that

certain works of literature are prayers in their own right, and in that case we might turn to

John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, or the Terrible Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins, or some of

the bleakly truthful works of R.S. Thomas. But does that turn literature into liturgy? And is

that even the question that requires to be answered?

The problem lies in treating both literature and liturgy as well defined and easily identified

acts of language, belonging respectively to the realms of culture and religion. Since these

worlds are not completely separated, it is an easy step to proceed to ask whether they can be

interchangeable. That is to miss the point about both. Concentrating on what each is means

that we ignore what each does and is capable of doing.

1 Bridget Nichols ‘Liturgy as Literature’ in Andrew Hass, David Jasper & Elizabeth Jay (eds) The Oxford

Handbook of English Literature and Theology Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 669-690.

2

The ritual studies expert, Catherine Bell, reminds us that ritual language is not separable from

ritual action – a kind of decoration or add-on – it is part of the ritual act. She turns for

endorsement to another scholar, Stanley Tambiah, who ‘shares with many other ritual

theorists a concern to show how ritual communication is not just an alternative way of

expressing something but the expression of things that cannot be expressed in any other

way.’2

Looking at the subject through the eyes of those who talk first about ‘ritual’ and then about

how it is performed opens up a large and fertile territory which liturgy shares with literature.

It takes us outside of the Church, to forms of words which describe or accompany some of

the most ordinary activities, or which record the observation of apparently commonplace

events. These might include things so taken for granted that they are the largely unnoticed

background of our lives, like listening to the radio, or going for a walk in spring. They take

on a ritual identity when they are drawn to our attention, and made the property of shared

human experience which we may not realise we have had until we see it shaped and crafted.

I am talking here chiefly about poetry. Poetry does many of the things we encounter in the

structures of worship: it celebrates cycles of time and the cycle of human existence. It deals

in a wide range of human emotion: love, grief, anger, loss. It affirms ordinary good things

and illuminates the extraordinariness at their heart. Yet I am deliberately not looking for

examples in religious poetry – I don’t want to talk about prayers and meditations in verse.

Instead, I am interested in the imaginative organisation in literary form of what for

convenience I will call ordinary perception, feeling, and emotional response, though this is

both crude and inaccurate. This leads to new interpretations of the familiar, in ways that

probe human experience, celebrate its goodness and face its realities, often with staggering

honesty.

That honesty – sometimes shocking in its force – is possible because poetry is capable of

acting in ways which are forbidden to us in liturgical gatherings. It takes risks of self-

exposure and pushes at the boundaries of belief and orthodoxy in the course of examining

personal doubt and darkness. It does not always strive to proclaim a salvific outcome. It

2 Catherine Bell Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 111. Bell quotes from

Tambiah’s chapter in Roy Rappaport (ed.) Ecology, Meaning and Religion, 1979.

3

insists on a measure of realism in its treatment of birth, marriage and death. Perhaps that is

why increasingly there are requests for readings from secular sources at marriages, baptisms

and funerals – not because people are braver, but because the confident claims of the liturgy

of the Church leave little space for reserve or hesitation.

Why not fiction? Undoubtedly, some very fascinating ritual acts can be found. The

beautifully accurate study of manners in Jane Austen’s work could happily be mined. So

could the dark comedy of Beryl Bainbridge (The Bottle Factory Outing provides a splendid

example) and the less dark comedy of Dickens. Both show how disturbingly odd quite

humdrum events can be. But the portrayal of ritual in fiction is descriptive. It illustrates

modes of behaviour for particular purpose: satire, comedy, tragedy, narrative continuity. It is

about doing rather than doing itself.

The Ordinariness of Ritual Language

It is time to lodge some of this more securely. We start with a poem that looks at the

disposition to reverence in the midst of very mundane and unglamorous patterns of living.

The writer is the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, and you may recognise the words:

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer

utters itelf. So, a woman will lift

her head from the sieve of her hands and stare

at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth

enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;

then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth

in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales

console the lodger looking out across

a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls

a child’s name as though they named their loss.

4

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer –

Rockall. Malin, Dogger. Finisterre.3

This poem uses the classic form of a Shakespearean sonnet – three quatrains plus a final

couplet – to open the idea of prayer as a human activity fundamental to being human, rather

than in some way taught or conditioned by organised religion. Or is it an activity at all? Here,

it has become autonomous, capable of uttering itself, and of praying for us in two senses – on

our behalf when we are without words, and in an intercessory way when we reach out for

inspiration, consolation, and connection. It depends neither on belief nor on fidelity, as the

richly ambiguous adjective ‘faithless; suggests. It is experienced internally (‘that small

familiar pain’) but it is also voiced in external things: the singing of a tree, the rhythmic

sound of a train in the distance, a beginner practising the piano, the calling of a name, or the

litany of the shipping forecast. It is a modest, undemanding assurance of human

connectedness, whose elegantly modulated chanting cadences fall so naturally that they

disguise their own skill. They are much less dramatic and attention-grabbing than the spirit

groaning within with sighs too deep for words, so powerfully described to the first Roman

Christians by St Paul.4 Because of that, the poem captures scenes in which we can see

ourselves, even if we could not have found the words to describe the depth of the experience.

That is the chief criterion: that we can recognise ourselves, and recognise what we hold to be

enduringly important, even if we didn’t know it, in certain acts of language. The same

stripping down to fundamentals has its parallels in liturgical thinking. Gordon Lathrop, an

American Lutheran liturgist, has usefully defined the ordinary basics of our liturgical action

and identity – word, bath, table. Around these things we have developed an elaborate,

beautiful, evocative way of acting and speaking, finding our sacramental identity in baptism

and the eucharist, informed by scripture. Yet we are doing very commonplace things: reading

and studying together, admitting newcomers to the fellowship, sharing food. 5

3 Carol Ann Duffy ‘Prayer’ Mean Time London: Anvil Press, 1993. New edn 1998 repr. 1999. 52.

4 Romans 8.26.

5 Gordon Lathrop Holy People: a liturgical ecclesiology Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999. 11.

5

Ritual Cycles

These things happen again and again. They are the patterning of existence. There is another

kind of recurrence, built on a longer cycle, and learned through an observant relationship with

the natural world of which we are part and the world which has been consciously engineered

around us. Here is Philip Larkin’s poem, ‘The Trees’:

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too,

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.6

The ritual unfolding of each year’s new spring growth is noted, wondered at, probed, and

finally accepted for what it appears to mean now. The observer has seen the fresh leaves

many times before and has perhaps had the uncanny sense of being addressed, or at least of

hearing something not voiced but somehow suggested. While the ‘kind of grief’ that the buds

opening into green leaves express (or even enact) could be taken for a fall from innocence

into experience, I don’t think it is that simple. Whose grief is it, after all? The speaker’s or the

trees’?

6 Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 76-77.

6

The speaker tries out and rejects a first idea – that the trees are reborn but human life has a

relentless chronology from birth to death – but rejects this. This new life is all illusion. The

trees are growing older too, as their interior rings reveal. The theologian David Ford has

written about repetition particularly in relation to the eucharist. He uses the phrase ‘non-

identical repetition’ to describe what can be done again and again, without losing its novelty

and uniqueness on each occasion: ‘[Eucharistic] language [he says] (especially in print) can

also give an impression of exact repetition which is untrue to a temporal process in which

such repetition does not happen.’7

But back to the trees, and in that extraordinary image of an ‘annual trick’ lies the suggestion

of real mischief. One way of looking at it, is as a game played year after year between the

natural and human worlds in which both parties know how it works, know that trees do not

speak, know that death lies somewhere in the heart of all life, but play anyway. Another way

is to see it as a contract of understanding in which what is ‘almost being said’ at the outset

finally succeeds in being heard: ‘Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.’ There is an encouragement to

live, even if we can never really be sure whether it actually was said, and to seize at a new

chance of life, in an adult world that has learned from experience without losing its ability to

wonder.

Illusions of Permanence

I turn now from repetition to continuity, or if you like, durability. This too has its illusions.

Philip Larkin once again provides an account in ‘An Arundel Tomb’ – a poem now

inseparably associated with this Cathedral:

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,

7 David F. Ford Self and Salvation: Being Transformed Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 143.

Ford acknowledges his debt to Catherine Pickstock, who first coined this expression. See Pickstock After

Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

7

And that faint hint of the absurd –

The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness 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 a 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 would see:

A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace

Thrown off in helping to prolong

The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in

Their supine stationary voyage

The 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 glass. 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

8

Of smoke in slow suspended skeins

Above their scrap of history,

Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

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.8

Larkin was never entirely happy with this poem.9 He battled with the final stanza,

experimenting with ‘our nearest instinct nearly true’ and ‘all that survives of us is love’. He

felt frustrated in communicating what he wanted to express, writing to his long-term lover,

Monica Jones in 1956:

It starts nicely enough, but I think I’ve failed to put over my chief idea, of their

lasting so long, & in the end being remarkable only for something they hadn’t

perhaps meant very seriously.10

Yet, interviewed years later in 1981, he firmly denied feeling sceptical about the possibility

of such enduring fidelity:

No. I was very moved by it. Of course it was years ago. I think what survives

of us is love, whether in the simple biological sense or just in terms of

responding to life, making it happier, even if it’s only making a joke.11

8 Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 71-72.

9 Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 436-437. Burnett

meticulously lists the problems of the factual description of the tomb effigy identified by Larkin himself and by

correspondents following the poem’s publication. This in itself provides an instructive demonstration of the

differences between truth and fact. 10

Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 436. 11

Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 436. (From Anthony

Thwaite (ed.) Philip Larkin: Further Requirements 2nd

edn London: Faber and Faber, 2002. 58)

9

This is still a slightly qualified assurance. But the poem is a remarkable enactment of the

ritual coupling of two forms of representation and indeed interpretation – in this case,

language and the visual. The subject is the stone tomb effigy in the north aisle, which the poet

viewed on a visit to Chichester, and the poem is likely to be well known to you. Its genius is

to show how convention seems to be flouted in the portrayal of a noble husband and wife

holding hands through eternity. Further, it illustrates the subtle shift in emphasis from the

inscription round the base of the monument, recording a significant local name, to the effigy

itself.12

As time and visitors gradually wear away the letters, so the figures become their own

explanation. And people largely believe what they see, or at least invent explanations for it

(maybe these are nearly the same thing). In this case, what appears to be there is constant

human love, causing the ‘sharp tender shock’ of discovering the personal in the conventional.

The rest of the poem develops an extended denial, seeking other explanations and pieces of

counter-evidence for something obviously untrue to anyone who has read the standard claims

that pre-modern marriage did not involve love. Precisely because this testimony to eternal

affection cannot be true, there has to be some reason why it has become the popular

interpretation. As the third stanza points out, the couple themselves could never have meant

to immortalise a devotion they probably didn’t feel. So perhaps what we see is merely the

sculptor’s compliment, and a bought compliment at that, a ‘sweet commissioned grace’. Then

there are the successive waves of visitors, no longer the ‘tenantry’ who would have known

what they were looking at, but those who stop reading and instead only look. History has

worn away any explanatory inscription, to leave only an ‘attitude’.

Yet the last stanza appears unable to believe this rationalising argument. There is no accident

in the choice of ‘transfigure’ in its first line. Even if the transfiguration in question has

paradoxically delivered ‘untruth’, it remains a spiritually and theologically loaded word,

carrying on the one hand scepticism about all religious feeling; and on the other hand

admitting a change that is rationally assailable, yet wholly convincing to the viewer who

simply sees and believes. The couple will be defined for as long as the monument lasts by a

devotion they probably didn’t feel, though that proposition lures us into other generalisations

about what it meant to be human in times earlier than our own.

12

In fact, there never was an inscription. This was a detail Larkin thought he had remembered. He was later

pedantically put right by readers of the poem with an eye for accuracy.

10

Here, the poem slips from third person to first person. The sculpted feeling which the narrator

has tried so hard to resist proves finally irresistible, and not only that – it becomes a maxim

which the solid permanence of the monument appears to endorse: ‘what will survive of us is

love’. Discomfort is easy to detect here, but not cynicism. More powerful is the unavoidable

recognition that human beings will try to find what they would like to be true against

everything they may think they know. What we have here, is the working out of how a

conventional truth (that marriage partners love each other) has become a kind of prophetic

truth thanks to the sheer belief of generations who have looked at the effigy and accepted

what they saw. In this light, the comments Larkin received from those eager to correct a

number of inaccuracies in description of the sculpture, laboriously collected by his latest

editor, become both irrelevant and wildly comical.13

Like the autonomous prayer in Carol

Ann Duffy’s poem, and the confident call to new life from trees which are in fact quite old,

there is something compelling about the testimony to love which commentary and

contextualisation cannot confine. It would probably be accurate to say that this is conceded

rather than celebrated in the closing line. There are enough popular assumptions about

Larkin (professionally pessimistic, curmudgeonly and reclusive) to make his readers expect

that he would not let us have this ending too easily.

Denial : Literature as Anti-Liturgy

So far, we have looked at what could be loosely called ritual encounters with some of the

most resilient longings and emotions of human life. Death has a part in these, of course, but it

does not take a starring role. I draw a third time on Larkin, whose work often returns to the

slow, unglamorous winding down towards death, though perhaps not in the defining way that

some of his detractors suggest. His long poem about a hospital outpatients’ department is

called simply ‘The Building’. So even before it begins, it is playing out the reluctance to

speak of illness and death by their proper names. The poem uses a bald language of

avoidance that concentrates on facts largely unadorned by adjectives and metaphors. It begins

bravely enough, but two lines in, and the struggle to reimagine the place has been lost in the

face of its realities:

Higher than the handsomest hotel

13

Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 437.

11

The lucent comb stands up for miles, but see,

All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall

Like a great sigh out of the last century.

The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up

At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall

As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.

We move through the shabby waiting room, and the description of patients and staff, to what

defines the common purpose of so many unconnected people in the same place. They are all

‘Here to confess that something has gone wrong.’ The almost naïve comment that follows

becomes a grim secular analogy of the mawkish association of sickness and death as

punishment for sin:

It must be error of a serious sort,

For see how many floors it needs, how tall

It’s grown by now, and how much money goes

In trying to correct it.

A strange bond begins to form as, one by one, patients are called to appointments along

corridors on different floors. ‘[A]s they climb/ To their appointed levels . . . their eyes’

Go to each other, guessing; on the way

Someone’s wheeled past, in washed-to-rags ward clothes:

They see him too. They’re quiet. To realise

This new thing held in common makes them quiet,

For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those,

And more rooms yet, each one further off

And harder to return from; and who knows

Which he will see, and when?

The relentless factual detail has a documentary quality and there is a notable absence of

adjectives and figurative devices, apart from the searingly accurate ‘washed-to-rags ward-

clothes’. Verbal photo-realism is juxtaposed to the rapidly receding world outside. Not that it

12

is in any way an enticing or beautiful place, but it sustains ‘a touching dream’ of being vitally

alive which continues unchallenged until the summons to inner regions of the hospital

intrudes the truth of mortality:

. . . Some will be out by lunch or four;

Others, not knowing it, have come to join

The unseen congregations whose white rows

Lie set apart above – women, men;

Old, young; crude facets of the only coin

This place accepts. All know they are going to die.

Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,

And somewhere like this. This is what it means,

This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend

The thought of dying, for unless its powers

Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes

The coming dark, though crowds each evening try

With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers. 14

These final stanzas ruthlessly parody the picture of the Communion of Saints, whether it be in

the majestic style of the Letter to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation, or embodied in

coy phrases like ‘those who have passed over’. The upper regions are populated not by

glorious creatures but by the unrecognisably worn remnants of the divine image: for the place

demands to be paid in damaged life, dulled by illness, on the wager that it can achieve what

human knowledge cannot do and overcome death itself. That too is an illusion, colluded in

by visitors bringing ‘wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers’. The isolated final line does what it

says. It is physically surplus to the neat organisation of the rest of the poem, and though it is

part of its rhyme scheme, it can neither add to the existing bleakness nor alleviate it. They are

magnificently quotable and also completely unnecessary words.

14

Philip Larkin The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 84-86. The full text of

the poem appears at the end.

13

The poem is a triumph of one kind of realism over hope. It has no room for miracle or even, it

would seem, for healing, since even that has only temporary value in the face of the

knowledge that we all die in the end. This is to tell the truth in a way that leaves absolutely no

consolation, exposing all illusions and attempts to pretend, to find enough euphemisms to

cover fear and fatalism if only for a short time.

Wanting to know the truth – or what is reliably true – is not confined to death. That other

great mystery, love, has harnessed just as much – and more – creative energy. It is not often

treated in the teasing mode adopted by W.H. Auden.

Auden’s ‘Tell me the truth about love’ became a household poem after it was read as part of a

funeral scene in the enormously successful film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. It does not

immediately resonate of solemn ritual or even the customary seriousness attached to the

metaphysical question at its heart. Only when we look more closely does its clever mix of

relentless teasing frivolity and alternating stanzas of jazz rhythm and ballad (it is one of a

collection of twelve songs) begin to suggest an enquiry similar to Job’s dialogue with God

about the mystery of the created world, or the quests in some of the Psalms.15

It is too long to

read in full, so let me give you a flavour of it.

Some say love's a little boy,

And some say it's a bird,

Some say it makes the world go round,

Some say that's absurd,

And when I asked the man next-door,

Who looked as if he knew,

His wife got very cross indeed,

And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,

Or the ham in a temperance hotel?

Does its odour remind one of llamas,

Or has it a comforting smell?

15

Job 37.1 – 42.6. See also Psalm 139.

14

Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,

Or soft as eiderdown fluff?

Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?

O tell me the truth about love.

You could be forgiven for thinking this was highly intelligent nonsense in the mode of

Edward Lear, Ogden Nash or even A.A. Milne, and the mock solemnity of attempts at

definitions and references to love is surely designed to entertain:

Our history books refer to it

In cryptic little notes,

It’s quite a common topic on

The Transatlantic boats;

I’ve found the subject mentioned in

Accounts of suicides,

And even seen it scribbled on

The backs of railway guides.

Yet the subject escapes trivialisation. Love is at the same time familiar and like nothing we

know, and this is why attempts to personify it or tie it down to analogies find it always

escaping, always evading definition:

I looked inside the summer-house;

It wasn’t over there;

I tried the Thames at Maidenhead

And Brighton’s bracing air.

I don’t know what the blackbird sang,

Or what the tulip said;

But it wasn’t in the chicken-run,

Or underneath the bed.

The penultimate stanza tries to give it human characteristics:

Can it pull extraordinary faces?

15

Is it usually sick on a swing?

And it is here that the search for an answer stops – because, of course, the wrong question is

being asked. The truth about love lies not in what it is, but in what it does. If it is worth

having, it is life-changing. Hope and fear stand alongside each other in the final stanza:

When it comes, will it come without warning

Just as I’m picking my nose?

Will it knock on my door in the morning,

Or tread in the bus on my toes?

Will it come like a change in the weather?

Will its greeting be courteous or rough?

Will it alter my life altogether?

O tell me the truth about love.16

Why do we need a non-ecclesiastical ritual language?

Unlikely example though it is, this poem suggests to me something striking about the way

language is used to explore the things most significant in our understanding of what it is to be

human. It adds a certain weight to the conviction that we do not need a non-ecclesiastical

ritual language, capable of framing secular prayers. We already have a language that can be

ritually shaped, and which can participate in the conscious ritual shaping of what we do as

liturgical creatures and what we do and experience simply as human beings. It is the same

language. Presumably this is why David Frost, the composer of the well-loved post-

communion prayer, ‘Father of all, we give you thanks and praise . . .’, writes in this way

about the language of liturgy:

If liturgy is to justify its existence, its language must be such that minister and

people can return to it again and again and discover further meanings at each

repetition: it must have rhythm, imagery and verbal punch such as can only be

achieved by leaving yourself a wide variety of ways in which to say

something: in other words, it needs something of the quality of poetry. For this

16

W.H.Auden Collected Poems ed. Edward Mendelson London: Faber and Faber, 1994. 143-144. The full text

appears at the end.

16

reason the churches have commonly drawn material from Scripture, which has

this richness and density of meaning.17

Frost is describing liturgical language as a vehicle capable of carrying the weightiest subject

matter – human life and emotion in relation to God and the world. Behind it, as behind the

best literary creation, there will lie what T.S. Eliot called ‘the intolerable wrestle with words

and meanings’; and the struggle to use words at all, having realised that meaning and

expression are ‘more than an order of words’.18

I suggested at the outset that we should be more concerned with what literature and liturgy

did than with what they were. At this stage I want to suggest that what defines their common

territory is a search for ways of telling the truth, of representing accurately. Both strive for the

absolutely precise shaping of ordinary language to admit extraordinary insight and enable

extraordinary expression. It is a multi-faceted truth, beautifully described by the Irish poet,

Seamus Heaney, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1995. He gives an account of a

lifelong and maturing relationship with poetry:

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and

rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of

the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against. Even as a

schoolboy, I loved John Keats's ode "To Autumn" for being an ark of the

covenant between language and sensation; as an adolescent, I loved Gerard

Manley Hopkins for the intensity of his exclamations which were also

equations for a rapture and an ache I didn't fully know I knew until I read him;

I loved Robert Frost for his farmer's accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness;

and Chaucer too for much the same reasons. Later on I would find a different

kind of accuracy, a moral down-to-earthness to which I responded deeply and

always will, in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, a poetry where a New

Testament sensibility suffers and absorbs the shock of the new century's

barbarism. Then later again, in the pure consequence of Elizabeth Bishop's

style, in the sheer obduracy of Robert Lowell's and in the barefaced

17

David L. Frost The Language of Series 3 Bramcote, Notts: Grove Books, 1973. 9. 18

T.S. Eliot Four Quartets: ‘East Coker’ Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1974; 3rd

pre.

1980. 196-204. 198 & 202-203.

17

confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh's, I encountered further reasons for

believing in poetry's ability - and responsibility - to say what happens, to ‘pity

the planet,’ to be ‘not concerned with Poetry.’19

‘To be not concerned with poetry’: is that a paradox in creative art? It seems to me that he is

describing the kind of writing that can only tell the truth by risking all its certainties, and its

sense of secure identity in the process. To try to illustrate this better, I turn finally to another

poet, the American Wallace Stevens, who wrote a long poem called ‘The Man with the Blue

Guitar’, inspired by one of Picasso’s blue paintings. Here are just the first ten lines. We need

to imagine a scene in a small, rural town (somewhere in the western United States?) and a

guitarist who may or may not belong to the people who notice the unusual quality of his

guitar and his music:

The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar

Of things exactly as they are."20

The search for a language truthful enough to speak of ourselves, our experience, our

connection to the world and to each other, and truthful enough to tell us what we can be

19

"Seamus Heaney - Nobel Lecture: Crediting Poetry". Nobelprize.org. 17 Sep 2012 1995

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-lecture.html. Accessed 24 February

2013. 20

Wallace Stevens ‘The Man With the Blue Guitar’ in The Collected Poems, New York: Vintage, 1990. 165-

183. 165.

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rather than what we think we are must always be both beyond us and completely

recognisable. Most of us want to be transformed. Most of us probably want transformation

with guarantees of safety. There is a distinction implied in the dialogue between the

shearsman and his audience, between what is so true that it remains true even when translated

in a new creative process, and what is only ever self-referentially true (‘things exactly as they

are’). That first and constant truth involves what is durable, what enables us to endure, what

allows us to grow to our full potential. It involves tradition and memory. It gives shape and

meaning to experience. It dignifies the ordinary without losing the dignity of sheer

ordinariness.

These are literary and theological questions, tested again and again in forms that are crafted

to bear repetition and which reveal new meaning each time they tell familiar truths and voice

familiar needs and longings:

What will survive of us is love

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord

That is where literature and liturgy intersect.

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The Building Philip Larkin

Higher than the handsomest hotel

The lucent comb shows up for miles, but see,

All round it close-ribbed streets rise and fall

Like a great sigh out of the last century.

The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up

At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall

As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.

There are paperbacks, and tea at so much a cup,

Like an airport lounge, but those who tamely sit

On rows of steel chairs turning the ripped mags

Haven't come far. More like a local bus.

These outdoor clothes and half-filled shopping-bags

And faces restless and resigned, although

Every few minutes comes a kind of nurse

To fetch someone away: the rest refit

Cups back to saucers, cough, or glance below

Seats for dropped gloves or cards. Humans, caught

On ground curiously neutral, homes and names

Suddenly in abeyance; some are young,

Some old, but most at that vague age that claims

The end of choice, the last of hope; and all

Here to confess that something has gone wrong.

It must be error of a serious sort,

For see how many floors it needs, how tall

It's grown by now, and how much money goes

In trying to correct it. See the time,

Half-past eleven on a working day,

And these picked out of it; see, as they c1imb

To their appointed levels, how their eyes

Go to each other, guessing; on the way

Someone's wheeled past, in washed-to-rags ward clothes:

They see him, too. They're quiet. To realise

This new thing held in common makes them quiet,

For past these doors are rooms, and rooms past those,

And more rooms yet, each one further off

And harder to return from; and who knows

Which he will see, and when? For the moment, wait,

Look down at the yard. Outside seems old enough:

Red brick, lagged pipes, and someone walking by it

Out to the car park, free. Then, past the gate,

Traffic; a locked church; short terraced streets

Where kids chalk games, and girls with hair-dos fetch

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Their separates from the cleaners - O world,

Your loves, your chances, are beyond the stretch

Of any hand from here! And so, unreal

A touching dream to which we all are lulled

But wake from separately. In it, conceits

And self-protecting ignorance congeal

To carry life, collapsing only when

Called to these corridors (for now once more

The nurse beckons -). Each gets up and goes

At last. Some will be out by lunch, or four;

Others, not knowing it, have come to join

The unseen congregations whose white rows

Lie set apart above - women, men;

Old, young; crude facets of the only coin

This place accepts. All know they are going to die.

Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,

And somewhere like this. That is what it means,

This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend

The thought of dying, for unless its powers

Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes

The coming dark, though crowds each evening try

With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.

O Tell Me the Truth About Love W.H. Auden

Some say love's a little boy,

And some say it's a bird,

Some say it makes the world go around,

Some say that's absurd,

And when I asked the man next-door,

Who looked as if he knew,

His wife got very cross indeed,

And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,

Or the ham in a temperance hotel?

Does its odour remind one of llamas,

Or has it a comforting smell?

Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,

Or soft as eiderdown fluff?

Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?

O tell me the truth about love.

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Our history books refer to it

In cryptic little notes,

It's quite a common topic on

The Transatlantic boats;

I've found the subject mentioned in

Accounts of suicides,

And even seen it scribbled on

The backs of railway guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,

Or boom like a military band?

Could one give a first-rate imitation

On a saw or a Steinway Grand?

Is its singing at parties a riot?

Does it only like Classical stuff?

Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?

O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;

It wasn't over there;

I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,

And Brighton's bracing air.

I don't know what the blackbird sang,

Or what the tulip said;

But it wasn't in the chicken-run,

Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?

Is it usually sick on a swing?

Does it spend all its time at the races,

or fiddling with pieces of string?

Has it views of its own about money?

Does it think Patriotism enough?

Are its stories vulgar but funny?

O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning

Just as I'm picking my nose?

Will it knock on my door in the morning,

Or tread in the bus on my toes?

Will it come like a change in the weather?

Will its greeting be courteous or rough?

Will it alter my life altogether?

O tell me the truth about love.

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