A Meditation on ‘The House at Rest’, a poem by Jessica Powers PHILIP HARVEY

“The house must first of all accept the night,” writes Jessica Powers in her poem ‘The House at Rest’. Like other Carmelite mystics, like other people generally, she is working from the experience of night – unknown, challenging, prayerful, creative – and in her case enunciated in the writings of St John of the Cross. The epigraph sets the scene. It is the place and time when the lover will go out to meet the beloved, just as we read in the Song of Songs. John knows the biblical poem; Jessica knows both the Song of Songs and John’s poems of the night. She asks the question, “How does one hush one’s house?”, i.e. how can one go out to meet the lover if one’s house is not at rest? Her description of the house can be at once her own restless thoughts and the collective memory of the house where she lives. Jessica was prioress of her enclosed community, with all of its attendant social difficulties, and at that level the poem talks of her life. But it can be about our house, how the memories we have for good and ill exist in our residence. Our thoughts can easily connect with household problems listed in the opening verse. So, while the house is anthropomorphised it is at the same time described as an individual’s admission of shared tensions and conflicts. It is an extended metaphor of trials and tribulations. Here is the poem:

The House at Rest

On a dark might

  Kindled in love with yearnings –

  Oh, happy chance!

  I went forth unobserved,

  My house being now at rest.

-         St. John of the Cross

How does one hush one’s house,

each proud possessive wall, each sighing rafter,

the rooms made restless with remembered laughter

or wounding echoes, the permissive doors,

the stairs that vacillate from up to down,

windows that bring in colour and event

from countryside or town,

oppressive ceilings and complaining floors?

The house must first of all accept the night.

Let it erase the walls and their display,

impoverish the rooms till they are filled

with humble silences; let clocks be stilled

and all the selfish urgencies of day.

Midnight is not the time to greet a guest.

Caution the doors against both foes and friends,

and try to make the windows understand

their unimportance when the daylight ends.

Persuade the stairs to patience, and deny

the passages their aimless to and fro.

Virtue it is that puts a house at rest.

How well repaid that tenant is, how blest

who, when the call is heard,

is free to take his kindled heart and go.

Jessica Powers

It is night that, once accepted, will “erase the walls and their display,

impoverish the rooms till they are filled with humble silences,” and that will “let clocks be stilled.” Because the night, as Patti Smith would say. However, Jessica then states “Midnight is not the time to greet a guest,” reminder of that which is customary and proper, but equally good reason to keep vigilant. Are we ready to go forth “unobserved”? Acceptance and humility have earlier been forwarded as steps toward overcoming life’s prior demands, whether priority or not, but now she cautions the house itself to understand and be patient. Virtue, in the sense of courage and acceptance, and as spelt out quietly and firmly throughout the poem, puts that which she (and we) live with, at rest. All of these words, a storyline of growing self-awareness, can be read in different ways, each of them valid. The night is where she meets God and goes, when ready, to meet him. It is then too the perfected love that can go to meet the beloved, whoever that may be, in the world beyond the tempests and trials of the temporary house. The tenant has come to terms with the demands of the temporal house itself and can now go to meet life, or death, equally on terms of love. Mind and body, still filled with yearning at the moment of death, have through the trial of night come to an acceptance. Today we ourselves are sequestered in our house, if we are lucky enough to have a house, by order of the state. We have about as much choice as the prioress of a convent. This unusual historical moment causes us to look at our house afresh, just as Jessica does in her poem. Our own bodies must become calm, our own minds must learn prayerfulness, sometimes without much practice.