Poetry’s Encounter with the Mysteries of the Sacred

This essay appears in Issue 24 of The Mockingbird, now available to order in our store.

As a poet, I have been drawn to the ways in which poetry brings out various mysteries of our human existence, especially in the individual’s encounter with the sacred. By the sacred, I mean an awe-inspiring majesty that emanates from a divine power, something utterly distinct from the human and the material universe. For centuries, people have seen manifestations of the sacred in our profane world, whether in ordinary objects like the mountains, or rocks, or trees, or in a supreme appearance like the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.

Subscribe to The Mockingbird!

Poetry, with its intense attention to the world, filtered through inventive clusters of words and turnings, has the potential to reflect or reveal the sacred. It can be a locus of a manifestation of something numinous and majestic. The poet, after the Creator, has the power to transform something in the external, or real, world into something new and rich, mediated through language. The creative process itself — how an encounter with the material world can be transposed into words that themselves create an imaginative realm, but one that is still attached, even loosely, to the thing that inspired them — is, to me, mysterious. When I read poems and write poems, I am alert to the intricacies of particular words to register this bird, or that experience; I am also aware that their words can point to other meanings, subtle and lurking in between the spaces.

When I first encountered T.S. Eliot’s poetry — I was sitting on a park bench in Brooklyn, an adolescent — I was frustrated with his elusiveness, and I didn’t care for his sordid, gritty images. His lines weren’t lovely to read! But they were provocative and memorable. “Do I dare disturb the universe?” “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” When I read Eliot, I knew that I didn’t understand him, but at the same time, strangely, I felt like his words, his lines, understood me.

In fact, reading Eliot’s poetry, from his early “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land to his later, religious poetry, like Four Quartets, when I was a student at Princeton and Oxford, was integral to my journey to become a Christian. Time and again, Eliot articulates the mysteries of the individual’s existential and anguished search for meaning in a spiritually barren world that is merely “A heap of broken images.” His anti-hero, Prufrock, speaks for us all as he — abruptly, unexpectedly — drowns in the shores of his desires for inclusion, intimacy, and sex. Even more astonishingly, Eliot pulls us into the waters with him:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me. […]

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Eliot’s use of blank spaces around “I do not think that they will sing to me” sets Prufrock far apart from the singing mermaids, and from the rest of humanity — so great is his isolation and social anxiety. Yet Eliot implicates all of us, changing to the plural “we” by the end of the poem, so that, ironically, we feel and sense that our longings for anything in this world — recognition, love, pleasure, achievement, sex, power, material possession — cannot be satisfied here on earth. Our spiritual need is more fundamental than that, and too dire. His internal rhymes and rhythms intoxicate us as we drown.

As he searched for religious meaning in both Eastern and Western religions, Eliot started experimenting even more radically with using words so as to make them mean what is beyond words. His language strives and fails, again and again, to reveal the divine Word, especially in his use of diction, imagery, line breaks and stanza breaks. Here is an example from The Waste Land’s “The Burial of the Dead,” a passage in which a man is remembering a powerful, romantic encounter with a girl:

‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’
— Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed. I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Eliot contrasts the fullness, the vitality of water, the flowers, and the words of the hyacinth girl with the emptiness of the man who does not communicate his thoughts and feelings to the girl. His faltering internal monologue is reported with lines ending with the negative words “not,” “neither,” “nothing,” and “silence.” Yet it is in this state of failed senses and apprehension that he gains some kind of spiritual revelation, “Looking into the heart of light.” We feel the silence and the sense of alienation, as well as the hope, futile though it may be, for something more.

This contradiction, itself a mystery — that you gain a vision of the numinous, however fleeting or transient or incomprehensible, when you suffer some kind of loss in your human faculties or experience — is a theme that Eliot will explore to greater length after he becomes a Christian in 1927. His more overtly religious poetry at times approaches the mystery of its other, silence, and in so doing, at times comes close to prayer. In “Ash-Wednesday” Eliot describes himself wanting to draw near to the divine God, asking for God to “Redeem the time.” However, he experiences doubt and difficulty even as he asks God for help, and he takes pleasure in the very things he knows he needs to turn away from in the moment of temptation. It is a very human poem in this sense, in that our approach to the sacred is contradictory and complex, full of fear and trembling, and also an aching sense of need. He writes, referring to Mary, “the silent sister”:

The token of the word unheard, unspoken
Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew
And after this our exile (“Ash-Wednesday,” IV)

Eliot relies on the silence and white space in between these stanzas and lines to evoke the mysterious activity of God who, though invisible and unheard, has been present all along. He has, in fact, been hidden in “the years that walk between … / … restoring” and “The new years” which “walk, restoring” (IV). We can live our lives neither seeing nor understanding clearly or accurately, but God has somehow been helping and saving us all along, even if we weren’t aware of Him. A new life, a new creation was walking alongside the old one, without our knowledge.

That Eliot ends the last line in this passage without punctuation leaves the words of the Anglo-Catholic prayer — “And after this our exile” — to linger in the air and in the space of the page. The words from the liturgy continue, “Show unto us the blessed Fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” but Eliot leaves them out. The sign of the baby, the divine Word, is implied, an invisible image, unreachable in this human condition of exile. In this and other ways, his poetry reaches the outer edge of what words can do, as they play with their counterpart, silence. And in the silence, Eliot creates a poetic space, an aesthetic space, for Jesus to dwell.

***

I had become a Christian in my early twenties after working through some difficult questions, including the one of how a good, loving God could allow for human suffering and evil. I was reading the poetry of Psalms and Isaiah in the Old Testament, drawn to their lyrical beauty and their inviting images of God redeeming His people, making them whole. The idea that Christ entered into our human predicament, to heal us, to comfort us, to forgive us our sins, and to give us eternal life, was compelling and, I thought, unique among other systems of belief. I’d stopped writing poetry, devoting my creative energy to praying for many months, even for several years. I didn’t know how to pay tribute to such a great God, or to register the complicated and contradictory experiences of being a Christian with my measly words, my dull words. It was hard to try … after reading and studying Dante, and William Wordsworth, and Eliot. Their poems were like monuments, sacred in themselves as works of art, and I didn’t know how to offer a new voice, in a new century. I was intimidated.

But I knew that I wanted to try. In graduate school at University of Sussex, England, I came across the works of Geoffrey Hill, an English poet. Reading his poems arrested me. He taught me that we can use words exactingly, but beautifully, as a way to measure out how God’s justice and mercy might co-exist in our world. Hill recognizes our recalcitrant human predicament, and he faces it head-on. He said, in an interview with The Paris Review, “We are difficult. Human beings are difficult … And we are mysteries to ourselves; we are mysteries to each other.” He has written poems that explore the ethical responsibilities that the living have for the dead, in historical circumstances as varied as the 17th Century Counter-Reformation, the Great War, the Holocaust, and Brexit. His imagination is often driven by contradiction, with two opposing images or ideas converging or colliding, partly to suggest the uneven, mysterious process of an individual or a society’s growth in moral righteousness.

In The Orchards of Syon (2002), for example, he meditates on the mystery of God’s surprising revelations of grace in our fallen, broken human world. The title is named after devotional writings of 15th century mystic Catherine of Siena, with Syon referring to the biblical Mount Zion, where God dwells. His interest in a mystical work is fitting for his project. The words “mystical” and “mystery” share the same Greek root word myein, meaning “to close” or “to shut”; and both words have traditionally referred to the hidden secrets of the divine. Hill sets his poem in his childhood home, Bromsgrove, in the Midlands, England, and he observes the orchards — a symbol for paradise, whether he is looking back at his childhood or looking forward to heaven — as they change through the seasons.

Throughout the poem are recurring motifs that bring out the sense of mystery and difficulty in our human existence: “Life as a dream,” poet Paul Celan’s Atemwende (his “turning of breath”), music as redemption, Dante’s dark woods, among others. The first is the idea of his creating a performance play that acts out La vida es sueño, or “life is a dream” — an allusion to a 17th-century play written by the Catholic Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca — immersed in the contrasting imagery of darkness and light. Hill is suggesting that we are often asleep to the realities of God in our life, that we are more forgetful than not, and that both our personal and collective memories are broken — and finally, that we often don’t see or interpret accurately. Our own existence seems a mystery to each one of us, his poetry asserts. He writes: “Dreams have charted / levels of sleep both complex and perplexing” (XI).

I love the way his descriptions of the trees as they change through the seasons are charged with meaning. Through them Hill is searching for a glorious spiritual vision in a natural landscape and skyscape that are ordinary, weather-beaten, and dirty. This is intimately connected to the fact that the hero in Hill’s poetry has always been the survivor or martyr who endures hardship and betrayal for the sake of others — Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian poet who was exiled and punished by Stalin’s regime; the composer Gerald Finzi, who wrote “In Terra Pax” after losing family members to the Great War; poet Paul Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, who wrote in German. These are three out of many heroes he alludes to in this poem. He is constantly alert to the strivings and failings of the most courageous and steadfast among humans, and wants to pay homage to them: “To love, determinedly and well, and to be / unfaithful: there should have arisen / particular broken forms to engage this” (XLVI).

One of the ways that Hill holds fast to fleeting moments of revelation is to disclose the glory and beauty latent in the ordinary, in the ugly, throughout the seasons. In the summer, “Roadside poppies, / hedged bindweed, still beautiful. The kempt fields / basking; intense the murmur of full summer.” In the winter, “Wintry swamp-thickets, brush-heaps of burnt light. / The sky cast-iron, livid with unshed snow. / I cannot say what it is that best survives these desolations. Something does, / unlovely” (XXVIII). He writes about the orchards in autumn:

Exhalation ah, not inspiration! the Orchards
of Syon exhaling green into gold,
gold to candescent red. Like ancient
rhetoric, both florid and threadbare,
showing the stemma. Light-endowed
among the natural shades and shadows; heavy-
browed barbed rugosa, rain-hackled, a streaming
instant unreconciled, magnificently
thrown off — the coda,
the invoked finality, the setting-out.

Hill’s diction here is musical, and the sound patterns come out in gorgeous ways. We hear echoes of some sounds in others, bringing the words together into an intricate whole. We see shades of colors transform from one to the other. For example, the “d” sound links together “gold, / gold to candescent red,” and “both florid and threadbare,” changing in a continuous stream. He relishes exploring the depths of the organic life of nature to reveal the contrasts between fullness and bareness, light and shadow, sunlight and rain, ending and the promise of a new beginning, the double mystery of the breathing-in of inspiration and the breathing-out of beautiful poetry.

***

Yet a third and very different way in which poetry can approach the sacred and delight in mystery can be seen in the works of contemporary Scottish poet John Burnside. His poems often describe the ghostly existence of a lost realm, perhaps a paradise or Eden. And he discerns this specter in the boundaries between humans and the nonhuman world of animals and nature. The supernatural, or sacred, presence is for Burnside usually provisional and almost, but not fully perceptible and grasped. Emblematic of his poetry is when he describes an encounter with something “familiar,” a half-recognition of something numinous he can’t quite identify:

or how I have tried, in passing, to describe
the quiet, when a last train pulls away
and leaves me on the platform, something bright
and watchful at the far end of the tracks,

a ghost, of sorts, though no one I would know (“Devotio Moderna”)

In this scene, Burnside evokes the sacred in various ways. It is quiet. Time is passing, and feels fluid, symbolized by the train pulling away. There is the painful distance between the poet and the vision, giving the poet a sense that he is left somewhere. And the poet describes the sacred object in provisional terms — it is “a ghost, of sorts.” These characteristics of this encounter with the sacred suggest that the numinous revelations come outside of our will or control or even desire, mysteriously, and that they occur in the most mundane of situations.

Moreover, in “Self-Portrait as Funhouse Mirror,” a reflection on seeing himself, his childhood, and his relationships in distorted ways as through a glass, Burnside writes about his confusion in identifying himself. This is surely an adaptation of Paul’s assertion that here on earth we can only have partial knowledge of ourselves, one another, and God: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor 13:12). Burnside writes:

That day, my mother wore her rose-print
sundress, antique-green

and crimson in the off-white
fabric, some new flora growing wild
in infinite reflection, while I turned
and turned, and couldn’t find myself until

she picked me out (“Self-Portrait as Funhouse Mirror”)

Burnside approaches the sacred in this poem by using broken bits of disparate images of the fabric of his mother’s dress. This mosaic of bits and pieces presents an unknowable whole picture of the wild environment. The boy can identify, and thus, half-create “new flora” “in infinite reflection,” but he gets lost, turning, in distorted space. The religious connotation of the boy turning away from his parental figure, getting lost in his orientation and in his perception of real life, and of the mother as a godlike figure calling him and finding him, lingers in the poem. The specific colors of “antique-green” and “crimson” recall the savage, ominous wild of the Garden made dangerous by the Fall. The flowing and frequent “f” sounds in “off-white,” “fabric,” “flora” create a disorienting replication of the garden or the wild in an “infinite reflection” in which the boy couldn’t “find [him]self.” Which version of himself and his mother was the real one, among many replicas? Burnside’s method is to place disparate bits of visual images in lines that “turn” one way and then another. The effect is that he recreates a confusing moment in his childhood. This confronts the reader with bewildering phenomena, which create a pathway for her to make new discoveries about herself, her life, and her relationship with the sacred. Thus the poem mysteriously enacts the complex process of self-understanding and finding meaning in life.

***

The parent-child relationship is a perennial theme, a source for imaginative flights, that at its heart reminds us of the mysterious love and unity between God the Father and Jesus the Son. In the past few years, I have felt a strange pull to spend more time with my own father. I’ve realized in a startling way that I have no abiding sense of his life story. So I’ve started asking my father questions about his life, and I’ve listened to him recount his memories. I’ve then transposed them onto paper, in the form of poems, fragments, and the fledgling of a fictionalized biography. Is this my belated response to a sacred call to (re)discover my Chinese heritage? Something to pass down to my three daughters, at the very least. My father was born and raised in Guangdong, China, and lived through difficult times in China’s modern history: the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War, Mao’s famines as a result of the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. Eventually he and my mother immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, with me and my three siblings, speaking no English, and embracing a humbling, hard immigrant life in a new country.

My father speaks very little English, and I speak very little Chinese. And yet he has helped me to write Chinese characters, stroke by little stroke; he has taught me Chinese chess and how to grow and cook bitter melons and fuzzy gourds; and I have witnessed his bowing down to his ancestors, in the Confucian traditions of filial piety, as he has seen me embrace the cross of Jesus.

Last year he helped me to translate into English one of my favorite Tang Dynasty poems, “Bound Home to Mount Sung,” by Wang Wei. The poem consists of eight lines, five syllables each. Each character in Chinese has one syllable only, and so the Chinese poet cannot play with rhythm and meter in the same way that a poet writing in English can. I’ve come to realize that in Chinese poetry the ambiguity of words — the presence of associations and alternative meanings of words and combinations of words — can be suggestive and evoke feelings in ways different from English poetry.

My father explained that some Chinese characters depict the image of the thing it is representing, and that traditional Chinese groups all characters according to 214 radicals, or basic components of the word-pictures. For example, the radical character for water, siu, consists of three strokes that show three small drops of water, and this radical can appear in many other Chinese characters having to do with water, like river, ferry, wave, nautical mile, transparent, and liquid, some of which appear in the poem.

For me, there are three versions of a Chinese poem — in Chinese, in literal translation to English, then in English with syntax filled in so that it makes sense. They each exist in parallel, but not overlapping, realms. It is a hard semantic leap for my mind to go from the Chinese to the English. I don’t know Chinese that well, so the characters look like enigmatic picture-puzzles. I grasp them visually. Even when I recite their sounds, their syllables, the meaning does not cohere, at least not immediately, if at all. My own loose, liberal translation of the poem is like jumping over the cliff, holding onto the triple-plaited ropes of sounds, images, and gaps (or pauses). The uneven, fine-lined geography of boulders that my feet touch as I scale down the cliff feels dangerous. My father would let out a chortle, a gentle scoffing sound if I were to share the translation with him. (I haven’t yet. I probably never will, since he wouldn’t understand the English that well.)

Here is my loose translation:

Going Home to Mount Sung (by Wang Wei)

A clear river flows, a long thin belt
A horse-cart rolls slowly, idle
The water flows, yearning for
The dusk birds to return—with another …
A desolate town faces the abandoned ferry
The sun sets, full, autumn hills
Far away, beside Sung Mountain
Come home, and close the door

I like these poems, the one in Chinese and my rough English equivalent, for their simplicity, for their conciseness, for the beauty of their natural phenomena, and for the deliberate propulsion of all things in the poem towards the culminating end — the return to Sung Mountain, where the narrator comes home to rest, shutting himself to this outer world. This is a picture of a daughter coming home, cross-culturally, to her father; this is also a picture of a soul returning to her God.

I like the idea of the individual Chinese characters forming larger wholes, with each character itself a whole consisting of radical components — image within image, or primitive picture within primitive picture, or strokes carefully positioned to create a visual depiction of the thing. And when I translate the Chinese to English, I delight in the freedom I have in forming the syntax — linking the words together in some cohesive way, choosing one way out of multiple possible ways, and thereby landing on one meaning among multiple possible meanings. The alternative meanings hover in the spaces around the English words, as they do around the Chinese characters. The ferry is “old,” for example, but it could also be rendered as “abandoned,” “decrepit,” “ancient,” “falling apart.” I chose “abandoned,” but the other meanings lurk and linger.

I will always remember the excited, animated tone in my father’s husky voice as he explained the symbolic positioning of the Chinese character man to mean “full” in the poem. The poem holds out the possibility that one character could encompass so much, one luminous detail stretching out beyond itself, so that the entire scene (the sunset, the orange-leaved trees on the hill) is affected.

The heart of the original Chinese poem, its DNA, its living matter, can be mysteriously and delicately preserved in a translation. Analogously, I imagine a father’s original DNA being replicated in some way in a daughter’s personality, and in her physical body, with its straight black hair and almond-shaped brown eyes and thin legs. Other duplications are particular gestures that I’m hardly conscious of: bad habits and lazy procrastination, shimmering intelligence, teasing humor, and animated curiosity. And perhaps most painful and truthful of all, a melancholy demeanor, interrupted by flashes of anger and self-loathing. A father’s own personal, luminous details, reaching out to new places, to rearrange themselves in a new pattern, but with the same living matter breathing through. This is some version of God’s majesty and glory being passed down from father to daughter, mysteriously, in the process of translating a Chinese poem into English.

Let me end by going back over two hundred years to what English Romantic poet John Keats famously described in one of his letters to his brothers as “Negative Capability” (1817), which occurs when a person “is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” His definition is itself tentative and provisional, but I take Keats to mean that a great poet needs to have a posture of being open to mystery, and that the experience and intuitive appreciation of beauty is at the core of producing a wondrous work of art. For me, it is the artistic and the beautiful that distinctively express or approach the mysteries of God’s glory and majesty. Writing a poem is creating with words alone an imaginative space, and the possibilities of their meanings, through which the sacred enters our human world.