Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination

Jeffrey, David Lyle

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781493416899
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Littérature et arts dans le christianisme

The God of the Bible often speaks in poetry. Beginning with an illuminating exploration of eloquence in the divine voice, a highly acclaimed professor of literature opens up the treasury of biblical tradition among English poets both past and present, showing them to be well attuned not only to Scripture's meaning but also to its music. In exploring the work of various poets, David Lyle Jeffrey demonstrates how the poetry of the Bible affords a register of understanding in which the beauty of Holy Scripture deepens meditation on its truth and is indeed a vital part of that truth.

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Poetry and the Voice of God

Trying to find ways to think plausibly about the nature of the immortal, invisible God has been a major preoccupation from the burning bush through both Testaments and on down through the annals of Christian tradition. For Gerard Manley Hopkins, in “Nondum” (a poem which has as its epigraph Isaiah 45:15, “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself”),

We guess; we clothe Thee, unseen King,

With attributes we deem are meet;

Each in his own imagining

Sets up a shadow in Thy seat;

Yet know not how our gifts to bring,

Where seek Thee with unsandalled feet.

Hopkins is conscious that only a few pages away in the Bible are explicit divine warnings against idolatrous comparisons (e.g., Isa. 40:25; 46:5), yet also that analogies abound (God is a Rock, a Fortress, a Consuming Fire). All analogies communicate, even though such insight as they gather must be at best, by definition, partial. When such biblical metaphors are tumbled in the imagination of theologians and commentators, typically the invisible, omnipotent God is still envisioned figurally. For example, in Christian tradition imaginative representations of God as architect of the universe draw not only upon the first chapters of Genesis, as we would expect, but on related phrasing in the New Testament. In Hebrews, Abraham, still in the wilderness and not knowing where he was going, is said to have “looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect [Greek technitēs; Latin artifex] and builder [Greek demiourgos; Latin conditor] is God” (Heb. 11:10). This New Testament metaphor interprets Genesis but also looks forward to the end of salvation history, in which all human flesh will see that God is alpha and omega, the first and the last (Rev. 1:11; 22:13). Yet this is far from the only kind of assistance within the Scriptures to imagining what God is like. A second kind of biblical metaphor for God speaks not just to his omnipotence and omnipresence but, more intimately, to his personal nature; in other texts he may present himself as a lover, a bridegroom, a father. Of this latter kind of self-disclosure, one figura in particular seems to provide a special register of meaning for our understanding of God in Scripture: God is a poet—as John Donne will say, he is “a very figurative and metaphorical God.” How he speaks, not just what he says, becomes an important measure of who he is.

The Divine Poet

When people less familiar with the Bible think of the “voice of God,” they often think of it in terms of “thou shalt nots” and similar moral imperatives. To the degree that we take the existence of God to be real, this is an entirely reasonable thing to do; indeed, it would be foolish in the extreme to do otherwise. When we look more closely at the full canon of Scripture, however, we soon encounter the voice of a God who speaks fulsomely and frequently in poetry, and that not in any such way as to mask the truth he utters. In the writings of the prophets, these divine poetic irruptions are so evident when the text is read aloud that modern editors can readily insert quotation marks around the speeches of God, even when these utterances are not clearly indicated by a prose transition, such as, for example, “Thus saith the LORD” (Isa. 50:1). If one is reading in an English translation, this qualitative distinction in expression is most clearly apparent in the King James or “Authorized” Version (which I quote here, though set visually so that its nature as poetry becomes more apparent). For example, words ascribed to Isaiah himself are sometimes followed by an antiphon, or response of the Lord, often both an answer to the prophet and an amplification. Here is a luminous instance: after he has praised the Lord as “exalted,” the prophet notes despairingly the contrary, desolate condition of his people because of their sin:

The highways lie waste,

the wayfaring man ceaseth. (Isa. 33:8)

The answering voice of God then (beginning at 34:16 are several divine interjections) takes up the prophet’s lament and turns it into an extended poem about divine restoration.

And an highway shall be there, and a way,

and it shall be called the way of holiness;

the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those:

the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.

No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon,

it shall not be found there;

but the redeemed shall walk there:

And the ransomed of the LORD shall return,

and come to Zion with songs

and everlasting joy upon their heads:

they shall obtain joy and gladness,

and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. (Isa. 35:8–10)

A rather despairing utterance of Isaiah is in this fashion transformed into a promise of reversal, radiant with assurance of future hope. That poem then becomes a theme, returning again a few chapters later as a pilgrim song:

Therefore the redeemed of the LORD shall return,

and come with singing unto Zion;

and everlasting joy shall be upon their head:

they shall obtain gladness and joy;

and sorrow and mourning shall flee away. (Isa. 51:11)

Sometimes the pitch and tenor of the divine Voice produces an effect when read aloud (even in English—try it in the KJV or NKJV) that occasions a thrill of the sort described by the ancient Roman writer Longinus as an effect of the “rhetorical sublime” (for which his compelling example is the fiat lux of Gen. 1:3). Rhetorical sublimity is, in fact, characteristic of the divine Poet’s utterances in many places:

Ho, every one that thirsteth,

come ye to the waters,

and he that hath no money;

come ye, buy, and eat;

yea, come, buy wine and milk

without money and without price. (Isa. 55:1)

Following this particular divine exhortative outburst and its sustaining metaphor, the prophet himself is inspired to versify, now in classic Hebrew parallelism, entreating his people to return from the poverty of their sinfulness to the abundance of the Lord’s Way:

Seek ye the LORD while he may be found,

call ye upon him while he is near:

Let the wicked forsake his way,

and the unrighteous man his thoughts:

and let him return unto the LORD,

and he will have mercy upon him;

and to our God,

for he will abundantly pardon. (Isa. 55:6–7)

Strikingly, God himself may speak in poetry even when he is angry, as we see regularly in Jeremiah (e.g., Jer. 23:1–8), Hosea, and Amos, among other prophets; in such contexts the adah voice (of bitter condemnation) rather than the teudah voice (of consolation) predominates. Another powerful example of the elegance of God’s poetic displeasure comes in the famous “whirlwind speech” in which he first rebukes Job, then his theological friends:

Who hath divided a watercourse

for the overflowing of waters,

or a way for the lightning of thunder;

To cause it to rain

on the earth, where no man is;

on the wilderness, wherein there is no man;

To satisfy the desolate and waste ground;

and to cause the bud of the tender herb to spring forth?

Hath the rain a father?

or who hath begotten the drops of dew?

Out of whose womb came the ice?

and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?

The waters are hid as with a stone,

and the face of the deep is frozen. (Job 38:25–30)

The elegant poetry of God is here and everywhere expressive of his divine majesty and attendant authority. Human poets sometimes seek to echo it, howsoever imperfectly. Christina Rossetti, for example, in her lovely poem (and hymn) “In the Bleak Mid-winter,”1 delights in the beauty of the simile of “water like a stone,” and Anthony Hecht quotes verse 28 as an epigraph to “Adam,” as he probes the mysterious transcendence of divine fatherhood compared to its human analogue.2 Both poets are clearly inspired by the beauty of the KJV’s language, but also by more than just the words. Read aloud, their poems reveal that these authors are responding to the tug of something higher up and further in, something of the divine nature itself that is projected by the divine Voice. Their own thought, accordingly, is elevated, aspiring, yet remains circumspectly aware of the gap between divine and human poetry that remains. This reality is addressed many times in Scripture itself, nowhere, perhaps, more memorably than in the poem from Isaiah we have already briefly considered:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways,

saith the LORD.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

so are my ways higher than your ways,

and my thoughts than your thoughts.

For as the rain cometh down,

and the snow from heaven,

and returneth not thither,

but watereth the earth,

and maketh it bring forth and bud,

that it may give seed to the sower,

and bread to the eater:

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth:

it shall not return unto me void,

but it shall accomplish that which I please,

and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

For ye shall go out with joy,

and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills

shall break forth before you into singing,

and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree,

and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree:

and it shall be to the LORD for a name,

for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. (Isa. 55:8–13)

This is magnificent poetry. Any translation that captures some measure of it (e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Poetry and the Voice of God
• Part 1: Medieval Poetry and the Bible
• Part 2: Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination after the Reformation
• Epilogue
• Index
• Back Cover