Faith, Hope and Poetry

Theology and the Poetic Imagination

Malcolm Guite

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351937214
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Letteratura
• Categoria: Poesia

Faith, Hope and Poetry explores the poetic imagination as a way of knowing; a way of seeing reality more clearly. Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, Malcolm Guite applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the contribution poetry can make to our religious knowing and the way we 'do theology'. This book is not solely concerned with overtly religious poetry, but attends to the paradoxical ways in which the poetry of doubt and despair also enriches theology. Developing an original analysis and application of the poetic vision of Coleridge, Larkin and Seamus Heaney in the final chapters, Guite builds towards a substantial theology of imagination and provides unique insights into truth that complement and enrich more strictly rational ways of knowing. Readers of this book will return to their reading of poetry equipped with new insights and enthusiasm and will be challenged to integrate imaginative ways of knowing into their other academic and intellectual pursuits.

Chapter 1

Seeing through Dreams: Image and Truth in The Dream of the Rood

Truth and Dreaming

One measure of the gulf between our own age and those that preceded it is the complete change in what we believe about dreams. The ‘cultural apartheid’ outlined in the Introduction, assuming the only ‘objective’ truths to be those to which strict science gives us access, has changed the way we think about dreams. Dreams, which so resist the weights and measures of modernism, are relegated to the realm of the merely subjective or else treated ‘scientifically’ as phenomena, to be studied in ‘sleep laboratories’, whose remembered symbols are to be examined only as yielding clues to the pathology of the dreamer. Jung might be regarded as an honourable exception to this approach, but he drew many of the ideas that led him to the conclusion that dreams might refer to a more than personal or individual truth from ancient, certainly from pre-Enlightenment, sources.

Now, this narrow focus on the interpretation of dreams as a way of understanding only what is happening in an individual mind has been fruitful in the field of psychotherapy, but it has also limited our expectation of what dreams might teach us. If we are to test the notion that imagination is truth-bearing by entering fully into the early and mediaeval genre of dream poetry, then we need to recover the framework of ancient teaching about dreams. The most subtle and influential teaching about the nature of dreams and dreaming came down to mediaeval poets in the form of a (probably) pagan commentary on a (certainly) pagan text. Yet Christian monks treasured this work for its wisdom, preserved, passed on and integrated into that harmonisation of biblical and classical that which formed the intellectual basis of Christendom. The text, the Somnium Scipionis,¹ is a fragment of Cicero’s philosophical work De Republica and thus comes from the high classical period. The commentary is by Macrobius,² who lived at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century. He was a Neoplatonist living at a time when Christian and pagan could freely mingle and he became the source for much of the later thinking and understanding about dreams. The Somnium tells the story of how Scipio Africanus Minor has a dream in which he meets his grandfather, Scipio Africanus Major, who takes him in a dream-journey to look down on Carthage ‘from an exalted place, bright and shining, filled with stars’.³

Here Scipio is told by his grandfather about his own future and given the moral encouragement and insight he needs to live well during the rest of his life.

Five Levels of the Somnium

Macrobius in his commentary takes occasion from this episode to make a careful distinction between the various types and levels of dreaming and the various kinds of truth or falsehood we might expect from them. He distinguishes five different levels of dreaming, from three of which we might learn or have revealed to us real truth and from two of which, at more shallow levels, we can expect ‘no divination’ (nihil divinationis). He gives his five levels of dreaming as follows:⁴

• Insomnium: This is simply the replaying in our mind of things with which we have been preoccupied. At first Scipio thought this was the kind of dream he was having because he had been talking about his grandfather that evening.

• Visum: This occurs when we are not yet fully asleep but we think ourselves awake. We see shapes rushing towards us or flitting hither and thither. Nightmares are included in this class.

Then come the higher levels of dreaming from which we can expect a revelation of truth:

• Somnium: This shows us truths carried through symbols or veiled under an allegorical form. Pharaoh’s dreams in Genesis are of this sort. There is a whole genre of allegorical dream poetry, all of which begins with descriptions of a feigned somnium. In his exposition of this text in The Discarded Image, from which this information is largely drawn, C.S. Lewis points out that ‘nearly all dreams are assumed to be somnia by modern psychologists’.⁵

• Visio: This is a direct unveiled pre-vision of the future, and is quite rare in poetry except as a means of heightening the tension in dramatic narrative.

• Oraculum: This is when we encounter someone in a dream – a parent, or ‘some other grave and venerable person’ – who openly declares the future or gives us advice and guidance.

Most dreams, of course, and certainly most of the dreams we encounter in early poetry, combine elements of the various levels and move from one level to another. It is important to be aware of this background teaching about dreams both to show that they were regarded as at least potentially serious revelations of truth and because many of the poets who include dreams in their narrative are deliberately alluding to the Somnium Scipionis and giving clues to what level of dream they intend to portray.

The Northern/Celtic Dream-world

Lying behind this tidy classical categorisation of the dream-world inherited from the Mediterranean culture that came with Latin, there were other layers of Celtic and Northern (that is to say Norse and Anglo-Saxon) understanding about dreams and the dream-world equally available to native English poets. Alongside the gravitas of Scipio’s dream, where the dreamer is addressed by a grave and venerable person and given a guided tour of the cosmos with moralising commentary, the English had access to another realm. This was the realm of the marvellous, the coloured lands, the islands of the blest; the realm where ‘stones have been known to move and trees to speak’,⁶ a realm of shape-shifters and sudden transformation, of doors and windows opening into other worlds; a realm where the stories of a pagan past have been woven together with Bible stories, where beneath the shimmer of French or Latin courtliness we feel the strength and sinew of heroes from a much more ancient past. This is the world that stretches from the pagan hero Beowulf fighting the monster Grendel to Arthur and the quest for the Grail. Part of the peculiar power and beauty of English poetry comes from the way it gathers together and makes a new unity of its very diverse roots – the strong sharp rhythm of Saxon epic, the lapidary Latin of the Church, the beautiful gothic interlacing of Anglo-Norman story – and all these shot through with the memories, sometimes preserved only in place and personal names, of the old Celtic past.⁷

The Range of Early Dream Poetry

Now the field of early and mediaeval dream poetry is vast and one could explore the theme of transfigured vision very fully without straying from this period. One could look at the dream poems in Chaucer – The House of Fame, The Book of the Duchesse, The Romance of the Rose.⁸ One could, of course, examine the most extraordinary extended Visio of all, the great allegorical dream of Dante,⁹ which guides us from the classical Oraculum in which Virgil speaks to the poet and takes him through all the realms of Hell and Purgatory, into a new Christian Oraculum with the restoration of the dreamed and unforgotten Earthly Paradise.Here the pagan poet steps back and the dream-journey continues into the real heavens guided by a Christian girl until Dante comes at last to the ineffable sight of God. Staying with purely English poetry (though Dante’s influence on all English poetry is huge¹⁰), one could contemplate Langland, the most underrated mediaeval poet, as he recounts, in the alliterative verse of his Piers Plowman,¹¹ the marvellous dream that befell him as he slept on a May morning in the Malvern hills. But perhaps the most telling of all, since we have not time to enter all these dreams, is to go back in time: back before Chaucer, before Langland, before Dante was born, before the battle of Hastings when French with its soft syllables and rhymes began to insinuate into the clashing consonants of Anglo-Saxon, back to the beginning of known English poetry to a dream poem that is both an early Christian achievement and the fulfilment of a still more ancient past.

As we prepare to travel back to the beginnings of English verse it is worth looking at a passage from ‘Bone Dreams’, a dream poem of Seamus Heaney’s in his collection North,¹² which is an exploration of the Saxon and Norse part of our linguistic inheritance. In these few lines Heaney takes us on a journey back through the different dictions and styles that make up English, back to the kind of language, the kind of poetry, that stands at the threshold of our language:

I push back

through dictions,

Elizabethan canopies.

Norman devices,

the erotic mayflowers

of Provence

and the ivied latins

of churchmen

to the scop’s

twang, the iron

flash of consonants

cleaving the line.¹³

Introducing The Dream of the Rood

We are going to look now at a masterpiece of dream poetry that stands at the very beginning of English literature. Nobody knows how old it is, but it must have been composed by the end of the seventh century, or the very beginning of the eighth, for a key passage from it is engraved in the old runic writing on a stone cross in Ruthwell in Scotland, which has been dated to that period. Another small portion of it is engraved on a silver reliquary said to contain a fragment of the ‘True Cross’ in Brussels, but the full poem is found in its entirety only in one manuscript now in Vercelli in north Italy, once a halting place for English pilgrims on their way to Rome.¹⁴ The poem may have found its way to an Italian monastery, but the really significant thing about it is that it is not a Latin poem. It is aware of the Latin tradition and seems to draw in places on the great Latin hymns that celebrated the cross of Christ and explored the paradox of his victory on the tree of defeat. But the language of this poem, and therefore its rhythm, its echoes, and the world it draws with it, is Old English, the northern barbarian tongue, the language of the Saxon warriors who had at first come in their long dragon-ships setting flame to the monasteries, celebrating their own heroes in their terse and powerful alliterative verse. At the time The Dream was composed the Gospel was still comparatively new to these shores. Not all the Saxons were converted and the poem arises from the first encounter of Christianity with the ancient pagan culture of the North.

To hear ‘the scop’s twang, the iron flash of consonants cleaving the line’ was to enter the world of those who sprang from Ask and Embla, ash and elm trees whom in the beginning the gods made human, not from the Semitic world of Adam and Eve, who came to trees as outsiders only to pluck their fruit. The poet certainly knows about Eden and the Tree of Life that grew beside the fatal tree; he knows, as Bede knew, the link embedded deep in the language of symbol, between Adam’s Tree and Christ’s Cross: ‘About the same hour in which the first man touched the tree of paradise, the second man ascended the tree of redemption.’¹⁵ But, as we shall see, he also knows about Yggdrasil, the world-tree, and how Odin the all-father himself hung there.

Paul had said in the letter to the Romans that even in the pagan places God ‘had not left himself without a witness’,¹⁶ and in the Acts of the Apostles his famous speech to the pagan Athenians set out the basis on which a fruitful missionary e...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements of Copyright
• Introduction: Poetry and Transfiguration: Reading for a New Vision
• 1 Seeing through Dreams: Image and Truth in The Dream of the Rood
• 2 Truth and Feigning: Story and Play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest
• 3 Understanding Light: Ways of Knowing in the Poems of Sir John Davies
• 4 A Second Glance: Transfigured Vision in the Poems of John Donne and George Herbert
• 5 Holy Light and Human Blindness: Visions of the Invisible in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan and Milton
• 6 A Secret Ministry: Journeying with Coleridge to the Source of the Imagination
• 7 Doubting Faith, Reticent Hope: Transfigured Vision in Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill
• 8 The Replenishing Fountain: Hope and Renewal in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index