Poetry And Religion
Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words
and nothing’s true that figures in words only.
A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier’s one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.
Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?
You can’t pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can’t poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,
fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror
that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry
or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds – crested pigeon, rosella parrot –
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.
Leslie (Les) Allan Murray (1938 – 2019) from The Daylight Moon, Carcanet Press Ltd, 1988
One way to keep writing blogs is to write farewells to favorite poets who have died recently! Not a way I like to choose. But what a list recently: Crawford, Hoagland, Lane, Merwin and Oliver to name a few! And now the Australian poet Les Murray. A poet who dedicated his books literally To the Glory of God, Murray could move from the transcendent to the nitty gritty of this earthy life on a dime. He could talk big ideas and then write about cows.
Murray, who died on April 29th, 2019, was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal in poetry in 1999, one among many honours he received in his lifetime. To see the obituary in the Guardian please click here. And to see this great tribute to Murray by the poet David Mason in First Things please click here.
Now, I want to talk about this poem above – Poetry and Religion! Such an example of big ideas and then grounding (almost!) the poem at the end with a striking physical image. And in between the beginning and the end so much abstract ideas punctuated now and then with startling images or asides: the image of the soldiers marriage bed and then a quote by Huckleberry Finn (What the heck!). But most important for me is the celebration of poetry as rising from an inexhaustible source! And that it the only whole thinking! Huge and gutsy declaration but worth considering!
I first encountered this poem in an on line course on spirituality and poetry led by the author Peggy Rosenthal whom I met through the Glen Workshop (sponsored by Image Journal) in Santa Fe. I am grateful to Peggy for this poem and many other other poems and ideas she has shared with me over the years. You can find her great blog on the Image website.
What I so love (sing that to the roof tops!) about this poem is that it gets to the mystery behind poetry and religion. The big unknown. That is sings the importance of words but more important the bigness behind them. The truth that can ambush one often in a poem and also in a transcendent moment in a church or other holy setting. But a truth that so often we glance off in a poem but is ultimately the unsayable thing. The glorious failure. The success is in the trying!
Love these lines:
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror
that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
A lot of thinking in these lines. At times with Murray I have to hang on for dear life to try and grasp all he means! That happens a lot in this poiem for me. But is so worth it. How he tries to capture the impossible immensity of poetry, religion and God. A law against its closure?! I need to chew on that one a bit! This idea of God and poetry being open ended, caught but not imprisoned. Much bigger than that. That any poem contains, after all the words, an unsayable possibility. That God too, after all our religious attempts to confine the transcendent to this set of beliefs or another is a gargantuan unsayable possibility!
I will keep coming back to this poem to keep seeing if I can find new insights but I want to end by celebrating how he ends his poem!
There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry
or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds – crested pigeon, rosella parrot –
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.
Agree or disagree about his declaration, There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry, the use of his metaphor in the last two lines to describe a critical aspect of poetry and religion is exquisite. He is describing the wing action of passerines ( a huge sub-species of birds) and the way they fly in a way described as flap bounding. The way they flap and then, don’t glide on their wings but fold them back into their bodies and become for a moment like a small projectile!
Oh those moments when my poetry wings are shut and I fear I will drop into a non-writer’s abyss and then they open again and I and my poetry fly on! Thank you Les Murray. And fond farewell.
4 Comments
Thank you for bringing me to this.
Dear Catherine. So grateful to hear from my readers. That I get to share my passion for poems. Thank you.
Thanks for sharing your unique perspectives on these poets and their poems in your blog posts. You give me a taste of poetry in this fast world of social media to pause and try to understand the depth and meaning of words used in poetry to tell a story.
You are appreciated! Yvonne
Dear Yvonne So appreciate being appreciated for my posts. That there are readers out in the ether who share this passion for poetry. Thank you so much.