Thomas Merton Poetry 4. Poet-Theologian. Poem: ‘St. Thomas Aquinas’

 On the 17^th of March Philip Harvey conducted a Spiritual Reading Group on Thomas Merton. Pursuing a biographical line, poems were read and discussed that identified nine different aspects of Merton’s life, self, and work. Each aspect was illustrated by one of his photographs. Here is the text, with comments from the group about the poetry. 

 

In 1951, ten years after entering the monastery, Father Louis became the novice master. Although he produced many books during his life, his writings on the monastic life given to the novices are still only being published now. Much of what he writes in poetic form is a distillation, a playing with and dramatizing of the theology he is spelling out during other parts of his day.

Christian poetry is poetry in Christ. Merton makes this breakthrough realisation early in his time at the abbey. If Christ is for you the centre of creation, then Christ is the centre of the creative act. Everything is ultimately coming from that source. I have to say that this is not always what we think when we encounter so-called Christian poetry, which covers a multitude of forms and subjects. We are used to the panoply of social and historical reference that is connected however directly or tenuously with Christianity. But for Merton, the poetry happens because of attention to Christ, Christ is the centre, even in poetry where Christ is not named by name. 

Reading his essays on poetry is to find someone who questions his own motives all the time, and the purpose of writing. He is fiercely critical of art as production, as a product, as an end for capitalist gain, as the vehicle for cults of the artistic ego and fulfilment of false illusions of the self. He mistrusts words for their own sake; he rejects what he calls “word-magic” as “an impurity of language.”

Merton says “Poetry is the flowering of ordinary possibilities. It is the fruit of ordinary and natural choice. This is its innocence and dignity.” (Hart 373) We find the same tendency towards purification and simplicity of language in many of his great works of contemplation and the spiritual life.

When we think of  Merton teaching the novices, it is easy to imagine the in-depth coverage he gave to Thomas Aquinas. At first we may see the following poem as a complicated set of Thomist terms requiring a lexicon. However, I see the poem as treating these terms, e.g. Person, Presence, Pure Act, and so forth is a playful fashion to illustrate how Thomas explained the world. The poem is a kind of humorous sketch, serving as an introduction to these high-sounding concepts. The line “His intellect His Bethlehem” explains in four words the start of the theologian’s quest for understanding and the abiding peace that he speaks through his writngs. Saint Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican. He died at the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova south-east of Rome, on his way to the Second Council of Lyon, in March 1274. In verse 4 we find mention of Fossanova, realising that we are present (at least in the poem) at the funeral of the great saint. The poem is, we suddenly become aware, a eulogy.  

St. Thomas Aquinas

 

The stars put out their pale opinions, one by one,

While the black-friar breaks the Truth, his Host,

Among his friends the simple Substances:

For thus he fathered minds to reason’s peace,

And fed the children of the Kingdom

With the Person in the intellectual Bread.

 

His mind had never smarted with the bitter reek

Of the world’s night; the flesh’s smoke:

His eyes were always cradles for the Word of God:

His intellect His Bethlehem.

 

Better than Jacob’s dream,

He saw how all created essences go up and down

Upon their Jacob’s ladder.

Finding their own degree of likeness

To the Pure Act and Perfect Essence.

 

When matter lay as light as snow

On the strong Apennine of form,

And morning rose upon the church of Fossanova,

All creation lay transparent, as serene as water,

Full of the Child Who consecrates the universe,

Informing all with power and meaning, like a Sacrament.

 

But oh, the day that sings upon the ridge

Steals from the stars the brittle fire of their analogies:

They vanish in the single intuition

Of the rising sun:

And the grey monks’ Cistercian “Subvenite”

Follows Aquinas in his ransomed flight,

And loses him amid the cheering cherubim.

 

Sources

Thomas Merton. The collected poems of  Thomas Merton. New Directions, 1977

Thomas Merton. The literary essays of  Thomas Merton. Edited by Patrick Hart. New Directions, 1981

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas Merton Poetry 3. Monk. Poem: ‘Two States of Prayer’

On the 17^th of March Philip Harvey conducted a Spiritual Reading Group on Thomas Merton. Pursuing a biographical line, poems were read and discussed that identified nine different aspects of Merton’s life, self, and work. Each aspect was illustrated by one of his photographs. Here is the text, with comments from the group about the poetry. 

Thomas Merton was an artist, photographer, and poet. When he entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, around the time of Pearl Harbour, he was leaving the secular world of his upbringing. He was addressing the outbreak of war by committing himself to a lifetime’s dedication to peacemaking. 

One thing he was not leaving behind was his own creative drives. “If God wants me to write, I can write anywhere,” (Rice 64) he wrote with relief at the time, as if this was something he feared would be refused him in the monastery. Creativity as a means to the spiritual life was vital to Merton. In his early spiritual autobiography, the book that made him famous overnight, Thomas Merton says that he wants “to write all about God in a new witty and pertinent way.” (Rice 61) His first poem as a monk was published in The New Yorker within a year. 

That is not the poem we are going to read now. ‘Two States of Prayer’ could only have been written by someone who has become immersed in the prayer life of a community like the one he had joined. It must have been written about five years after his entry to Gethsemani. As the title says, it describes two states of prayer by analogy with the natural world that Merton had come to know. The first is autumn in Kentucky, the second is winter, so the words are tracking the change of the seasons. The poem encourages us to think of prayer life as happening always in the world where we find ourselves now. It cannot be defined in abstract terms without the risk of missing something essential. Always when we pray we are in our own found physical and geographic place.    

The autumnal first half uses the analogous imagery of a sports stadium to describe the changing appearance of the trees. This is Merton remembering life on the outside, where large crowds congregate to witness competition and afterwards everyone goes home again. His world now is on the inside of the monastery, brought out later in the snowy winter landscape being “like a white Cistercian.” The poem is a work of eco-spirituality, we would say, where the inner life of the individual at prayer goes through the changes of the seasons. Is, indeed, at peace with these natural phenomena. Contrasts of sound and silence, exultation and withdrawal, affirm the experience of different states of being and of present prayer. The excellences of each season are put into perspective through comparison, where winter may even outshine “all the songs of June with radiant silences.” Merton may be thinking of the singing of the hours in the abbey, but he is also noticing the sounds of nature in and around the place where he lives. The natural year and the liturgical year weave together as everything heads into Christmas. The poem invites reflection on these rhythms wherever we may live, as we pray in our own places and by our own seasonal experiences.     

Two States of Prayer

 

In wild October when the low hills lie

With open eye

And own the land like lions,

 

Our prayer is like the thousands in the far, forgotten stadiums,

Building its exultation like a tower of fire,

Until the marvellous woods spring to their feet

And raid the skies with their red-headed shout:

 

This is the way our hearts take flame

And burn us down, on pyres of prayer, with too much glory.

 

But when the trees have all torn up their programs,

Scattering the pathos of immense migrations on the open-handed winds,

Clouding and saddening the dusky valley,

Sorrow begins to bully the bare bars

Of those forsaken cages

As thought lies slaughtered in the broken doors.

 

But by the light of our December mornings,

Though words stand frozen in the voice’s well

And all the country pumps are dumb,

Look where the landscape, like a white Cistercian,

Puts on the ample winter like a cowl

And so conceals, beneath the drifts as deep as quietude,

The ragged fences and the ravaged field.

 

The hills lie still, the woods their Sabbath keep,

The farms, half buried in their winter coats

Are warm as sheep.

When was there ever greater than this penitential peace

Outshining all the songs of June with radiant silences?

 

November analyzed our bankruptcies, but now

His observations lie knee-deep beneath our Christmas mercies,

While folded in the buried seed

The virtual summer lives and sleeps;

And every acre keeps its treasure like a kingly secret.

 

Sources

Edward Rice. The man in the sycamore tree : the good times and hard life of Thomas Merton. Image Books, 1972

Thomas Merton. The collected poems of Thomas Merton . New Directions, 1977

 

Thomas Merton Poetry 2. Student. Poems from ‘Cables to the Ace’

On the 17^th of March Philip Harvey conducted a Spiritual Reading Group on Thomas Merton. Pursuing a biographical line, poems were read and discussed that identified nine different aspects of Merton’s life, self, and work. Each aspect was illustrated by one of his photographs. Here is the text, with comments from the group about the poetry. 

“Every minute life begins all over again.” (Moses 88) We are only ever beginners. There is no point in thinking you have won; you have already lost. These and similar recurrent sentiments tell of Merton’s Christian understanding of human limitation. They also retell his awareness of being always a student, someone open to learning new things, and getting others to get studying. 

Merton studied in the forties at Oxford and Columbia. He lived a fairly typical wild existence in those places, combined with an intense study of things that interested him. He and his friends engaged in competitions. For example, they challenged each other to write a novel in a week. He edited the university magazine. These games of meeting crazy deadlines and entertaining others are training for what Merton did the rest of his life in a very different setting from a university. 

The ultimate result of the crazy language games he played with his friend Robert Lax and others are the book-length poems written towards the end of his life, ‘The Geography of Lograire’ and ‘Cables to the Ace.’ The cables of that title are 88 poems about the relationship we have with God, who is the ace. It is a work of theopoetics. Here are four of those 88 poems. 

8 shows its age with the verb ‘to dig’, a sign Merton was listening to the Beats, while questioning the world of artificial intelligence and the computer at large, a world we now live with in ways Merton could only have imagined. The poem hints at the ever-present danger of turning manmade things into idols. It is saying that prayer is human and will have a human voice; our relationship with God can never be other than personal. 53 seems to be saying that poetry, like prayer, is always available. Yet he repeats the need that it must be available. He uses a favourite image of the cellar, a word we will meet again today, as the source of all this activity. We don’t always think of a dark night of the soul happening in a cellar. The influence of Saint John of the Cross is evident throughout these poems and we hear this in 80. Although Christ is present in the whole sequence, this is the first time we meet him by name, close to the end. The places where we meet him are reminiscent of those gardens of the Spanish mystic, though we may meet him in any place. We smile at “the lost disciple … too literate to believe words,” with its implication of language being a trap that can separate us from God, as well as knowledge that can hinder rather than enhance growth. Learning how and when to use silence and language is an issue that tests everyone, whether or not they are poets. 84 opens with a German word for serenity. The words set up Taoist conundrums. That which we name God cannot be the true God. The words to-and-fro in an attempt to reduce preconceptions, our ‘baggage’, to the place where only God may be.     

8

Write a prayer to a computer? But first of all you have to find out how It thinks. Does It dig prayer? More important still, does It dig me, and father, mother, etc., etc.? How does one begin: “O Thou great unalarmed and humorless electric sense…”? Start out wrong and you give instant offense. You may find yourself shipped off to the camps in a freight car. Prayer is a virtue. But don’t begin with the wrong number. 

53

I think poetry must

I think it must

Stay open all night

In beautiful cellars

 

80

Slowly slowly

Comes Christ through the garden

Speaking to the sacred trees

Their branches bear his light

Without harm

 

Slowly slowly

Comes Christ through the ruins

Seeking the lost disciple

A timid one

Too literate

To believe words

So he hides

 

Slowly slowly

Christ rises on the cornfields

It is only the harvest moon

The disciple

Turns over in his sleep

And murmurs:
“My regret!”

 

The disciple will awaken

When he knows history

But slowly slowly

The Lord of History

Weeps into the fire.

 

84

Gelassenheit:

Desert and void. The Uncreated is waste and emptiness to the creature. Not even sand. Not even stone. Not even darkness and night. A burning wilderness would at least be “something.” It burns and is wild. But the Uncreated is no something. Waste. Emptiness. Total poverty of the Creator: yet from this poverty springs everything. The waste is inexhaustible. Infinite Zero. Everything comes from this desert Nothing. Everything wants to return to it and cannot. For who can return “nowhere”? But for each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of movement; a point of nothingness in the midst of being; the incomparable point, not to be discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find it. If you stop seeking, it is there. But you must not turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you are lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost, for you are, at last, nowhere. 

Sources

Edward Rice. The man in the sycamore tree : the good times and hard life of Thomas Merton. Image Books, 1972

Thomas Merton. The collected poems of Thomas Merton . New Directions, 1977

Thomas Merton & John Moses (editor). The art of Thomas Merton : a divine passion in word and vision. Franciscan Media, 2017