Gascoyne of God’s Realm
It’ll be Holy Thursday when the fish wrap containing this column hits the stoop and computer screens.
For those of us who humbly appreciate the smells and bells of a frequently misunderstood and too often disparaged faith, Holy Week is the several days of the liturgical year when we commemorate the end of Jesus’ earthly life until His resurrection on Easter Sunday.
It’s also a time of solemn reflection and gratitude. And prayer in abundance. Until Easter’s rejoicing. Back in my days in the literary reference book salt mines (lousy pay, educational diamonds aplenty), I worked on crafting author entries for the Contemporary Literary Criticism series.
By “contemporary,” it was meant authors who died after Dec. 31, 1959. As a result, I wasn’t allowed to research, excerpt criticism, or write on such personal favorites as Dylan Thomas.
However, I was able to discover poets and novelists who gained minimal traction in the U.S. through their own words and the informed criticism of their works written by others. Such authors include the British poets Kathleen Raine, whom I discussed in several columns last summer, Vernon Watkins, and David Gascoyne.
I frequently return to Gascoyne (1916-2001) this time of year because I find his mystical Christian poetry, particularly his Miserere sequence of poems dealing with the Passion of Christ, captivating.
Because he dealt with mental health issues, some critics speculated that his visionary poems might have been divinely inspired.
While I cannot speak to Gascoyne’s ultimate inspiration, I can attest that his religious poetry is reminiscent of the verse of two other of my favorite English poets, William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The images within the Miserere sequence toggle between the bleak human experiences of the 20th century and Christ’s agony in the Garden and Golgotha. Since the poems were written and published as the world was in the throes of World War II, they briefly positioned Gascoyne among a group of British writers called the Apocalypse poets. As an epigraph for Miserere, Gascoyne selected a quote from French poet Pierre Jean Jouve, which, translated, reads: “Despair has wings/love has Despair/for shimmering wings/societies can change.”
In the first poem of the sequence, “Tenebrae,” Gascoyne notes: “There is no more/regeneration in the stricken sun,/ The hope of faith no more …. /And may we know Thy perfect darkness./and may we into Hell descend with Thee.”
The epigraph and above excerpt bring to mind the “Leaden Echo” of Hopkins in which he chants: “despair, despair, despair, despair” — not to mention his “I Wake and Feel the Fell of Darkness, Not Day.” Life during wartime and all, one might be inclined to agree with all three writers.
The second poem is “Pieta” wherein “The Mother, whose dead Son’s dear head/weighs like a precious blood-encrusted stone/on her unfathomable breast:/ Holds Him God has forsaken, Word made flesh/ Made ransom, to the slow smoulder of her heart/till the catharsis of the race shall be complete.”
“Kyrie” — translated: “Lord, have mercy” — resonates today as it did in 1943: “Is man’s destructive lust insatiable?” and concludes: “O spirit hidden in the dark in us and deep,/and bring to light the dream out of our sleep,” but not before our tears become the stigmata of Christ and Gascoyne emerges from humanity’s dark night of the soul to recognize “Christ of Revolution and of Poetry,/ That man’s long journey through the night/may not have been in vain.”
Given my limited space and authorial gifts, it is impossible to convey to readers the beauty of Gascoyne’s sequence.
Although current events may portend another leg of “man’s long journey through the night,” and evil seems to ooze from the pores of our own body politic, we mourn humanity’s destructive lust while using our faith bolstered by the Easter season to move closer to the light. Societies can change.