The Swiftly Tilting Worlds of Madeleine L'Engle by Luci Shaw

Author:Luci Shaw [Shaw, Luci]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-78180-2
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

What Milton suggests through Raphael, and what Bunyan points up in the rhymed preface, are concerns for those artists who are Christians to show through metaphor—and through an incarnational act—how Christian belief informs their art. Two poets, one from the seventeenth century and one from the nineteenth, may help readers understand more fully the glory of metaphor and the beauty and power of art as incarnation in poetry.

The poet-priest of Bemerton, England, George Herbert of the seventeenth century, writes a body of poems which poetically argue his indebtedness to the Bible. Almost every aspect of his poetry particularly demonstrates the influence of wisdom literature, the Psalms, the parables of Christ, and Pauline writings. To see these influences is not to deny that Herbert conceives of poetry in Richard Hughes’s terms as “a miniature version of the Incarnation.”5 While Herbert rarely uses the actual term incarnation, there is no question regarding his beliefs and feelings about the ramifications of this important Christian doctrine. Perhaps it is helpful or interesting to know, however, that although the Incarnation embraces the birth, the ministry, and the death of Christ, Herbert gives greatest emphasis to the passion and death of Christ. Obviously for Herbert, the passion and death is the central activity of the redemptive process.6

This poet does not ignore the nativity or the life and ministry of Christ; at the same time, his poetry suggests that the Incarnation never fails to provide him with subject or form and meaning. In a poem with a subject which he rarely uses, I should like to study Herbert’s poetry as incarnation. In his poem “Christmas” he writes of a strayed rider who arrives at an inn where the Host not only receives him, but waits for any traveler in need of help. The poet soon evokes the Nativity scene, which embodies one who “Wrapt’ in night’s mantle, stole into a manger.” What one perceives is one strayed rider who becomes a metaphor for all strayed riders. It is of special interest that when the strayed rider alludes to the Nativity, he does so across the “distance of the centuries,” with the cross and the tomb—indeed the whole Christian story—ingrained on his mind, and as ingrained as the manger in the inn.

To read even a few poems by Herbert is to recognize that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation cannot be limited to the small number of his poems whose explicit subject is the Incarnation itself; rather, his sense of the Incarnation, its embodiment of the entire Christian story, pervades his poetry, and each poem that he writes is a celebration of the Incarnation. It is equally clear that Herbert’s “heaven in ordinaire”—an important phrase from his poem “Prayer”—comes very close to a formulation of the poet’s view of metaphorical language and a fuller view of the way he envisions the implications of the Incarnation. This means language that never takes one out of everyday reality but drives a reader more deeply into reality. When he selects ordinary

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