4-22-24 

THE BEGINNING OF FAITH

 PHILIP LARKIN—AUBADE

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what's really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

--The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And so; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is not a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can't escape,

Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

THE INNER LIFE AS A WINDOW

The title of Larkin's poem is a bit misleading. Aubade in dictionary terms is: a piece sung or played outdoors at dawn usually as a compliment to someone. The tone of this poem is more like a dirge. Larkin awakens to “soundless dark” and there isn't any other musical reference in this poem. This is the third Larkin poem in a short sequence I am parsing and all three are windows into his inner life and his relationship with formal religion as well as how he is drawn to reckon with his mortality. Religion has a way of doing this for the appropriately sensitive individual. And, in some ways, religion begs questions about this tumultuous life we live every day and what happens when all of that life ends. What do we imagine? What about this life prepares us for what happens after it?

I am coupling this poem with a short book by Mark Doty, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon. It is a memoir, a look at a still life painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem in the 1650s. His reflections, as with Larkin's, are seen through a window into his inner life. In both cases, however, there is a visit to memories and an effort to find some meaning in the granularity of daily toil. Larkin struggles with the idea of death, especially when “we are caught without people or drink.” His poem does begin in the early hours of the day, what seems to be the only connection with what an aubade is said to be. I do not find in it anyone whom he might be complimenting. In fact, the whole poem is a darkened landscape of mortal fears. There are references to: “unresting death,” “arid interrogation,” “dread of dying,” “being dead,” for instance.

Larkin imagines a place of “emptiness for ever,” “extinction,” and of being lost in this place “always.” He disparages the efforts of religion to assuage these feelings of horror and dread by pretending that people don't actually die. At different places in the poem he bumps up against what he feels is the finality of his physical life with nowhere else to go. It is the end of a sense-filled life where there is “nothing to love or link with/ the anesthetic from which none come round.”

And how does he respond to this dreadful situation? He relegates the “blur” of it to the margins of his consciousness. It is a realisation for him that no amount of courage or bravery or whining will save him from the final end. In the first stanza he awakens to the darkness of the day and later as it begins to get light “I see what's always there.” In the last stanza he returns to the room in which he is awakening to see the objects he expects to see and feels he has to make the decision to accept this mundane life with all its familiar objects and the work that “has to be done,” the very granular existence that we experience from day to day. He makes this choice to sound like a begrudging one, perhaps the most convenient default so as not to slip into the nothingness he imagines the next life to be. He doesn't entertain the idea that perhaps one can be transformed from one life venue into another of a very different nature. He does not seek any comfort from his bleak existence. Is he suggesting to us that in rejecting the darkness of death we are choosing life? Or is he preparing us, the readers, for just such a possibility by letting us see into his inner life? We, too, have choices to make about what our inner lives will tolerate when it comes to the unimaginable, the infinite possibilities that poets of all stripes have explored when they have considered mortality and death.

It is all too easy enough for me to read through this poem once and then discard it, thinking that its dark message that sits on the top of the poem leaves me with little to work with as far as enlightenment is concerned. But why should I expect a poet or anyone else to provide me with enlightenment? I try to reconcile with what I know and believe about this life and anything after it with what Larkin puts before me. After all, the title is about a musical form and there are references in the poem to light and the reality of every day life. Every day life is where all of us must begin, no matter how the monk, mystic, CEO, or UPS driver manages the day after arising. It is where new beginnings can also find us—or where we find them. To this point, I think Larkin's poem is his beginning and he leaves it unfinished to allow us to imagine what follows. In some way it introduces us to the exploration of Mark Doty and what he discovers looking and reflecting on a still life. I would like to think that Larkin's discordance is a prelude to experiencing some of the illuminations that capture Doty. Larkin's (the poet) life is a very still life, a dark one, but one with the potential for transcendence, as I feel everyone's life can be, always beginning with wardrobes, telephones, and “the uncaring/intricate rented world.”

It is at this point that I bring in the short memoir of Mark Doty, also a poet. His work explores ideas about time and its passing; the fragility of life, mortality, and death; the sensual life at its fullest; the functions of memory; and the meaning of objects we collect and carry. I found this book in some ways to be a completion of Larkin's poem (and the preceding two: “Church Going” and “Faith Healing”), an extension of an exploration and also a celebration of what living this life can mean when reflecting on the finality of it. It is a different view on an inner life that seems more vivid and hopeful, if only to find meaning in what we encounter by our senses. Larkin's “unfocused blur” turns into Doty's still life with delicious objects and color and light.

Here are some short passages from Doty's book that help illustrate what his inner life is witnessing. I include many short references because Doty's poetic identity brings to light and attention what is life-giving in daily life and in art.

“That there can never be too much of reality; that the attempt to draw nearer to it—which will fail—will not fail entirely, as it will give us not the fact of lemons and oysters but this, which is its own fact, its own brave assay toward what is.

“That description is an inexact, loving art, and a reflexive one; when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.”

“And something else, of course; there's always more, deep in art's pockets, far down in the chiaroscuro on which these foodstuffs rest: everything here has been transformed into feeling, as if by looking very hard at an object it suddenly comes that much closer to some realm where it isn't a thing at all but something just on the edge of dissolving.”

This seems like a poetic way to describe how we reveal our inner lives and our personal substance, opening a window to the morning allowing more light to enter.

“To think through things, that is the still life painter's work—and the poet's. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon. A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations.”

“Therein lies a large portion of the painting's poetry; these things form not a single whole but a concert, a community of separate presences; we are intended to compare their degrees of roundness, solidity, transparency, and opacity. They are each a separate city, a separate child in a field of silent children. They speak back and forth—do they?--across the distance between them.”

“The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time.”

“At first still life seems so entirely of this world—a clarification and celebration of what is—that it can have little to do with mortality. But in truth, the secret subject of these paintings is what they resist.

… Everything in the field of our vision is passing. ...Here intimacy seems to confront its opposite, which is the immensity of time.”

“[And then there is]...the adult recognition that the things of the world go on without us, that the meaning with which we invest them may not persist, may be visible to no one else, that even that which seems to us most profoundly saturated in passion and feeling may be swept away.”

“The most beautiful still lifes are never pristine, and herein lies one of their secrets.”

“I am learning to accept the flux and revision time and experience in variably make, but I am also learning to love what I wish to keep the same, something that nothing in my life has taught me until now; learning, that is, not to let go but to hold on. I hold on to the mended, exactly right old platter, fixed in its place, cherished, singular, at rest.”

“What is it that such a clear-eyed vision of the particular wishes to convey? A way to live, perhaps; a point of view, a stance toward things.”

“A still life is more like a poem than it is like a portrait.”

“Maybe [Garcia] Lorca has it right—we want thing to wash us clean, we crave the plainness of the unmediated, the directness of apples. If we could live with their solidity, with the apple's clear distinction between inner and outer, how the firm shine and protective color of the peel wraps seamlessly around that fragrant, nourishing core, so that it remains unbruised by air, ready to feed...Fit to carry the dark central star of the seeds into the world. In this sense, still life is refuge, consolation, place of quiet. The world becomes bearable, apprehensible because so many elements have been subtracted from it.”

“But these paintings fill me with the pleasure of being bound to the material, implicated, part of a community of attention-giving. That is what we do with sight, give it out, give it and give it away, in order to be filled.”

“They [the paintings] cannot be generalized about without diminishing them, but I can report on their lesson, which is to remind us of the strangeness and singularity of things, and therefore of ourselves. Singularity, they wish us to know, resides in the physical, the particular, the seen; this knowledge can be looked at, can be held. Here you are, the painters say, a body in the city of bodies, in concert, in the astonishing republic of things, the world of light, which is the same gray world sliding past the boat, lapping and chilly, alive with detail as the boat pushes forward, slipping away.”

“Sometimes I think these paintings seem full of secrets, full of unvoiced presences. And surely one of their secrets—somewhere close to their essence—lies in a sense of space that is unique to them. These things exist up close, against a background of burnished darkness. No wide vistas open behind them, no far-flung landscapes, no airy vastness of heaven. This is the space of the body, the space of our arms' reach. There is nothing before us here we could not touch, were these things not made of paint. The essential quality of them is their nearness. “

“What is documented, at last, is not the thing itself but the way of seeing—the object infused with the subject. The eye moving over the world like a lover. And so the boundary between self and world is elided, a bit, softened.”

“It [still life] is an art that points to the human by leaving the human out; nowhere visible, we're everywhere. It is an art that points to meaning through wordlessness, that points to timelessness through things permanently caught in time. That points to immensity through intimacy. An art of modest claims that seems perennial, inexhaustible.”

“Someone and no one. That, I think, is the deepest secret of these paintings, finally, although it seems just barely in the realm of saying, this feeling that beneath the attachments and appurtenances, the furnishings of selfhood, what we are is attention, a quick physical presence in the world, a bright point of consciousness in a wide field from which we are not really separate. That, in a field of light, we are intensifications of that light.”

“Still life. The deep pun hidden in the term: life with death in it, life after the knowledge of death, is, after all, still life.”

“What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing....It's the same with painting.

Part of what that poetry is, I think, is the inner life of the dead, held in suspension. It is still visible to us; you can look at the paintings and you can feel it. This is evidence that a long act of seeing might translate into something permanent, both of ourselves and curiously impersonal, sturdy, useful.

Of what use, exactly? As advocates of intimacy, as embodiments of paradox, as witnesses to earth, here, this moment, now. Evidence thus, that tenderness and style are still the best gestures we can make in the face of death.”

This is a long way around the subject of Larkin's poem but the path is a way of illuminating what alternate meanings might be. There is no way for me to know if Larkin might have shared Doty's impressions of still lifes and poetry if he had extended his reflections about life and death—and maybe even faith. Certainly, his mood is dark and sad in its losses and the doleful acceptance of a life of daily toil without respite. He does not seem to share Doty's view of shared objects and what intimacy they might proffer. He doesn't see the dazzle of light in the same way. He does not perceive his own poetry as “the best gesture we can make in the face of death”--or does he? Is Larkin making the distinction, by subtle contrast, between the mundane practicalities of life and what beauty can be found in them if looked for, as Doty does in his wonderful little book?

At various points in my life I have become fretful of the details of the routines and habits of daily toil, thinking them needlessly tedious. I have thought: if only I could escape them, then I could experience the freedom I can only taste fleetingly when I am awake enough to sense their presence. But I see these points now as Larkin moments. I see now that they were an opening to Doty moments where being attentive to life and life-giving sustenance attested to the necessity of beginning with “what we know/ have always known, know that we can't escape/ yet can't quite accept” (Larkin). I have learned to begin with what I know of daily toil and its tedium in order to make a leap of faith to a place where “in a field of light/ we are intensifications of that light” (Doty).

Here we have two poets viewing still lifes in very different ways. Sitting side by side, each is a contrast to the other and each enriches the perceptions of the other. One is of melancholy and disappointment and the other is of illumination and transcendence. Human life holds all of this. When we look at our own lives what do we see?

Beginning with the Larkin and then visiting Doty's essay brings light into the darkness, as “slowly light strengthens” (Larkin). It seems to me that what Doty says about still life painting and poetry applies as well to faith, or maybe a prayerful life. It all begins with a recognition of what is present for us in just this moment and extends out into a wider world of impressions, perceptions, interior condensations, reflections, and countless opportunities to experience our world's objects and their intimate connections to memory and dreams. And this is the beginning of peering through or under the veil that shields our eyes from more light and new life, full of beauty as well as sorrows and joys. Philip Larkin has done us a favor, as has Mark Doty.

 A PARABLE OF GULLIBILITY

4-6-24

PHILIP LARKIN—FAITH HEALING

Slowly the women file to where he stands

Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,

Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly

Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,

Within whose warm spring rain of loving care

Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,

What's wrong, the deep American voice demands,

And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer

Directing God about this eye, that knee,

Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some

Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives

Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud

With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb

And idiot child within them still survives

To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice

At last calls them alone, that hands have come

To lift them and lighten; and such joy arrives

Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd

Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice--

What's wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:

By now, all's wrong. In everyone there sleeps

A sense of life lived according to love.

To some it means the difference they could make

By loving others, but across most it sweeps

As all they might have done had they been loved.

That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,

As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,

Spreads slowly through them—that, and the voice above

Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

This poem seemed so obvious to me at the outset but as I worked with it and its references and allusions it required more thought and even study. It didn't occur to me until much later that this poem is a parable for our times. I say this to remind myself what a poem can do and also my own sensitivities to how time changes perceptions and how time can sometimes stand still. This poem does both of those things: it comes to me as a piece of art from times past but its meaning also resonates in our own times. Let me explain by walking through what the poem seems to be saying and then reflect a bit on how I think it propels some important meanings for our own times. I think any good poem appeals to the reader for many reasons but also applies what is known about human behavior over the stretches of time.

“Faith Healing” is a tongue-in-cheek alert to what follows. If we know anything of Philip Larkin it is that he writes about religion and faith with a skeptic's eye and sensibility, never out of reach but never wholly into a zealous acceptance. In this case the sheepish candidates are women. I asked why Larkin would have made them the focus of this poem—and the healer a man. He is described as one slick authority with minions at his service. His voice is impatiently unctuous, giving each penitent just enough time to lay on hands and then dismiss them. The women move through as sheep in a herd with some straying to keen and gesticulate wildly with flailing arms, as we can imagine from the scene of healing.

By now we are into the second stanza of the poem and we now have some insight into the minds and expectations of the women. It seems their hope was to receive something from the healer that might restore them to a world of kindness and comfort, what Larkin refers to as the hopes of an “idiot child.” There is a moment when that seems possible, the remnants of their physical ecstasies clouding their minds or maybe just in a state of confusion. But here we hear the voice of the healer echoing from within them: What's wrong? Indeed, the earlier question seemed an invitation to release troubles as a preparation for the healing to come. The second time that question is posed it comes as an exclamation from the poet who observes something darker than an invitation for cure; a dissonance, an answer to the question the women might not have wanted to hear. The answer proposed is “all's wrong.”

I think there is always a mismatch between what we expect and what we can actually experience and that mismatch creates dissonance. This mismatch and the resulting dissonance often accompany loving and being loved. The poem says that loving others is only a source of dissonance for a minority. For the majority the expectation of being loved is the greater source of dissonance. Perhaps most of us feel we are not loved as much as we would expect. We imagine our lives as being different if only we were loved more. The poet feels this is the basis on which many of the women in the poem approach the healer. There is a search for more love and the comforts that will bring. They even imagine that their twenty second interactions with the healer, “within whose warm spring rain of loving care,” will bring them satisfaction. In some way, the healer's presence and presentiment are evidence of healing authority for the women. And they come to him as sheep might congregate as a scattered herd would to the calls of a shepherd.

The poet declares that there is nothing to cure the hollowed out loss of the love the women seek. In this final stanza “voice” returns but this time it isn't “the deep American voice” of the healer but one transcendent that only echoes the dear child of the healer but this time mocks the idea that the charlatan healer can provide what the women seek. Or, is this second voice, one from “above,” one that addresses the women with the mercy and understanding emanating from some spiritual whole, maybe from God? Perhaps the dear child of some pandering snake oil salesman becomes the Dear child (the capitalization here might be significant) of being held in a divinely focused gaze. The poet remains skeptical that even this might be the reality that lessens the dissonance the women experience. Who knows?

Many poems of past times are products of the world that surrounds them and from which they are produced. They also tend to mirror our own times and that makes them timeless. I think I am particularly sensitive to these extensions across time. I thought of the showman P. T. Barnum when I first read this and the declaration of his livelihood that “there is a sucker born every minute.” It is our tendency to become suckers in the face of our deficiencies to seek out charlatans, self-proclaimed saviors and healers, quacks, impostors, and frauds. It is not unusual for them to wrap themselves in the raiment and auras of religiosity, if only to maintain their hold on the vulnerable. And aren't we all sheep at one time or another? Our times now see the global sweep of authoritarianism and the rise of nationalism and mass paranoia and fear. We are living in times of turmoil and shifting social structures with economic and political pressures that are not unknown in human history. But our troubles are of the same kind but different in their own complex ways. The vague sense of entropic forces at work has created a vacuum, a gap created by the disparity between our certainties and assumptions and what reality has to show us. This is not unlike the dissonance the women of this poem experienced. It is “an immense slackening ache/ as when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps.” Our landscape is also thawing and weeping.

There are any number of charlatans in every age and era and ours is not exception. Politics seems to breed such animals. Our newest and most dangerous charlatan is Donald Trump. Most faith healers are benign to the extent that they don't cause harm to their sheep, save what damage is done to their wallets. But politics today is breeding charlatans with power to cause institutions and norms to fall into pieces and be swept away by the winds of time. Our charlatans are capable of these destructions because they consolidate power and untruthfully corrupt and falsify reality, thus promising to heal whatever it is that causes suffering among the faithful. It is astounding to think that so many people could fall for such chicanery but then it is not surprising given the density and tenaciousness of the dissonance that now afflicts the lives of those who do not feel they are being heard or understood. Trump the narcissist demands loyalty/love from his followers and promises to dole out the same to his supporters, but don't all faith healers promise such things?

Another difficult point to ponder is how it is that so many people gravitate to people like Trump when his most grievous character traits are so transparent. I think, once again, it is important to reflect on how many of us are discomfited when it comes to how much love we crave and how little we actually receive. This is a normal human trait that is permanently embedded in so many psyches. Reversing this dissonance is not easy by persuasion or logic. It is an intuitive need, instinctual almost, I think. It seems to reside in the lower levels of consciousness, isolated from any realizations available to the wakeful state.

What began for me as a satirical pastiche evolved into a parable about thwarted expectations for love or cure, about blind trust, about human gullibility. What was at first a caricature of human behavior turned into a very sad acknowledgment of how all of us suffer in different ways and attempt in almost any way possible to relieve that suffering. We are in some sense “idiot children” turned into sheep with profound wants and needs. If our love is unrequited by the likes of faith healers, is it possible to find requited love in true faith? How must we behave to be awake to this possibility?

The poet has opened for us readers this possibility and made us fully aware of our gullibility. We are only human, after all. I have parsed this poem from the perspective of the poet who was an observer of the action, adding in his descriptions and interpretations (and maybe his judgments, too). When I thought about my own reactions to the poem, it became clear to me that I, too, was a gullible one, dependent on my own need to be loved. If, in fact, “faith healing” can come in more than one form, then my gullibility is based on an innocence of what the source of my faith really is. The source is clearly not a person selling something to solve my problems or my needs. I am not vulnerable to cultish rhetoric. I am, however, innocent, trustful, and curious, willing to put my faith in a Creator Spirit that is immanent and transcendent at the same time. It permeates and is eternal and I am open to knowing about it in ways that are not consistent with the scientific method. I believe that there are ways in which humans are able to channel its manifestations in their behavior, especially as we are able to love in a divine way all those whose lives resemble my own. I have no longing to belong to a cult or even to a dogmatic religious tradition. I trust more and more my own experience in a way modeled by William James and as he described it in his prescient and insightful The Varieties of Religious Experience. He made no claim to be a “believer” but was open to the ways in which other people found meaning in transcendent belief. He was willing to listen, to be curious, and to be present for the beliefs and experiences of those he interviewed. I think my approach is the same in many respects. I am more open to how my own experiences reveal a realm beyond the temporal, beyond politics and beyond “faith healing” that sells something.

My gullibility is not unlike that of the women (and men if they were willing to admit to such vulnerability) in this poem and for the poet himself. I think the second stanza of this poem indicates to me that he knows what the women seek and he shares in their search. Finding the source of love affirmed, of love beyond the leveraged or coerced forms, is problematic for most of us. In this all of us share a want and a need, examined or repressed. The search is very human and a matter of what it is to search for meaning, a lifelong pursuit and exploration.

 THE CHURCH AT AUCTION

Philip Larkin—Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on

I step inside, letting the door thud shut.

Another church: matting, seats, stone,

And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut

For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.

From where I stand, the roof looks almost new--

Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know. I don't.

Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few

Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce

'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.

The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door

I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,

Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,

And always end much at a loss like this,

Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,

When churches will fall completely out of use

What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep

A few cathedrals chronically on show,

Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,

And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.

Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come

To make their children touch a particular stone;

Pick simples for a cancer; or on some

Advised night see walking a dead one?

Power of some sort will go on

In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;

But superstition, like belief, must die,

And what remains when disbelief has gone?

Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.

A shape less recognizable each week,

A purpose more obscure. I wonder who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was; one of the crew

That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?

Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,

Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff

Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?

Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt

Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground

Through suburb scrub because it held unsplit

So long and equably what since is found

Only in separation—marriage, and birth,

And death, and thoughts of these—for which was built

This special shell? For, though I've no idea

What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here.

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

The more times I read this poem the more profound it seems to me. It seems to speak to me in a number of ways. First of all it is a story, a narrative of the poet's experience inside a church. It is a narrative of an inner voice exploring what it is to be alone in the church and to be open to its “purposes.” And it is a soft narrative about where we find ourselves often in the presence of a power we can't define, wrapped as it is in what we see and what we don't see, but feel or sense. Perhaps the best way to tackle the challenge of responding to this poet's experience is to go stanza by stanza in the story but first noting the words that stand out for me, words that are repeated for the emphasis the poet wants to place on them in different parts of his story.

The words I notice are:

silence

reverence

stop

loss

found

dead ones

ghosts

power

purpose

shell, house, barn

serious

The title invites some interpretation, given the tone of the first stanza. In “Church Going,” I hear “going, going, gone,” as if this were an auction and the auctioneer is signaling the final bid. But is it?

In the first stanza the poet is outwardly apologetic and somewhat nonchalant maybe insouciant (and maybe a bit embarrassed) about stopping by on his bicycle, on his way to somewhere else. He acknowledges the reverence of the place by removing his cycle-clips as a gesture of respect. This seems like a pro forma gesture, as if this were expected of anyone entering such a place, a habit observed by anyone entering a sacred house.

The second stanza has the poet focused on those structures, almost absent mindedly, structures that are more like an assessment of its strength and reacting almost with affront to the verses he sees carved into the stone, a portion of one ('here endeth') that emphasizes his impression that this is a place out of place in his modern world of business and action and maybe a foretelling of a silent end. He leaves a token sixpence, signs the guest register, and tells himself this stop was not worth his time, after all.

But he is caught up short in the third stanza by the realization that this is not the first time he has stopped here with the same similar results of pondering what the attraction is for him. He wonders what will happen to this ancient structure when all its “purposes” are spent. Will they be museum pieces, tourist stops, or even shelter for sheep?

The fourth stanza begins his “serious” consideration of what deeper and more profound purposes there might be for people of his generation attempting to make some sense of the history of the church's power in times past, even reflecting on the possibility that there might be ghosts appearing in the night or other visitors coming to satisfy their superstitions about the healing from disease. This superstition he derides as “random” games. But he believes that superstitions will die with belief and then the church will revert to the forces of nature.

Stanza five: Now, with this natural deterioration, the purposes will fall farther and farther into the past and then obscurity. And what will be left for the people of the street, homeless and addicted, who will come because they have always come for the reasons he has derided. And will they be his surrogates in such obedience (does he think of himself now as damaged)?

Stanza six: These wretched few will be as uninformed as he is but still seeking what there has always been within the structure built on the pattern of the cross and standing sturdily for ages and representing a mockery of the separations that define human life, the separations and losses. Our poet is at once comfortable in the silence he experiences among the aging bones of the church.

Stanza seven: Here the poet comes down to being serious about his stop. He sees that what drives people, like him, to come to this church is for comfort in the face of what each believes is an individual destiny. “And that much never can be obsolete.” He speaks about his own “hunger” to be serious about his own purposes within what he experiences to be the purposes of this place. And he finishes his visit by reflecting on the wisdom that such a church can teach and finding the sources of wisdom in the dead, those who have found similar wisdom here over the centuries of the church's life.

Could all the dead, the ghosts, have been wrong about the purposes of this place? Could he in his uninformed state be one who will connect in some way with the wisdom of the dead? This brings to mind what meanings there are in the honoring of a lineage. Even though the poet comes alone and is met with the silence of the church (only emphasizing his solitary presence), he becomes aware of the ghosts of those who have worshiped here in times past, a community of spirit that extends across all time.

The implication in the title that this is a building on the auction block, a building that will be sold for new purposes and maybe even for demolition ('this accoutred frowsty barn', 'a shape less recognizable each week') and perhaps becoming only “serious ground” eventually lost to “grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.” Such musings beg the question about where people will go for the silence and serious purposes and wisdom where reverence can be expressed. The poet doesn't give an answer except to let us know from the beginning that he has come to this church often, always wondering what to look for, always seeking among the ruins and empty pews the one thing that will satisfy his serious search. Is this his way of being spiritual but not religious, as it is the custom to affirm in our times? Is this really an expression of what the heart wants and needs as it hungers for something more serious? Can the poet find this satisfaction in the ground that has been sanctified? Can he find it in the sacred moment, in Nature, in the community of saints now dead but alive in spirit?

This poem is more profound than what a once-through might reveal. I think that the poet was himself surprised at the end of the poem for the serious world he discovered after beginning his visit with such a casual and take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Yet, he had the feeling from the beginning that this might be a visit of revelation, calling from him upon entering an “awkward reverence.” The awkwardness doesn't dissipate entirely by the end of the poem but, in fact, defines the experience of how God's purposes through the formal structures of an ancient place emerge over time, in an enlarging lineage of those who have sought the ground with similar intentions. Here is a place that has held “so long and equably” even in (especially in) the face of death, as death separates us from the very structures that have gifted us comfort and wisdom. Where and how can we satisfy our hunger?

There seems to be a distinction made in the poem between what is heritage and what is lineage. In some ways objects, structures, icons, statutes, churches will eventually give in to the ravages of time and deterioration, as sacred as they may have been at some point in time. Lineage, on the other hand, is the vast community of the faithful (ghosts, maybe) who have found within the walls of churches, such as the one in this poem, a certain consolation and comfort focused on eternal and transcendent meanings. And it is in this eternal community that the poet finds what will last of the church's remains. Out of the ruins of time there will persist and even endure what is eternal, mysterious and yet available.