Ebenezer and Ozymandias

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen, and called its name Ebenezer, saying, "Thus far the Lord has helped up." (1 Samuel 7:12)

Samuel takes the above action in the presence of the army of Israel immediately after the Lord has acted for his people. The people are worshiping their covenant God when the Philistines come to attack and God thunders from the sky and confuses the Philistine army. At that moment Samuel decides it is appropriate to mark the place with a special stone. This stone, called Ebenezer, marks the place that the Lord helped. It is a constant reminder for all generations of the power of God to save to the uttermost. But, like the sacraments, it is not just a reminder of what has happened, it is a testament to what will be done as well. Thus far the Lord has helped us does not imply that he will help no longer. Driving from Greenville to Asheville one changes from I-85 to I-26. One might remark upon changing roads that thus far the interstate road system has helped us get to our destination. It would be foolish to suggest that the roads will fail to continue their helpfulness. It is not the nature of the roads. In like manner, Samuel makes a testament to how God's faithfulness will continue and the monument is meant to show that faithfulness in the past with a view toward the future.

One might compare this with Shelley's famous poem, Ozymandias. In Ozymandias a monument is also present, yet this monument is to the power of man and pride. The traveller tells of "two vast and trunkless legs of stone" standing in the desert with "a shattered visage" lying nearby. The pedestal proclaimed, in the fashion of Near Eastern kings of old, "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" The traveller then describes "nothing beside remains" and "The lone and level sands stretch far away."

How different are these two monuments and markers? One points to human power and human pride the other to the power and fidelity of the triune God. One is still standing, if not in fact, in the hearts of those who read and understand the Scriptures. One stands only as a shattered testament to the lack of human power and the worthlessness of human pride.

Set up Ebenezers in your life to remember that the Lord has protected till now and will protect henceforth.

The Vulture by Hilaire Belloc

The vulture eats between his meals
And that's the reason why
He very, very rarely feels
As well as you and I.
His eye is dull, his head is bald,
His neck is growing thinner.
Oh! what a lesson for us all
To only eat at dinner!

Guy Fawkes Day

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason, and Plot,
I can think of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

To the Autumnal Equinox

Monday, September 22, is the autumnal equinox. Scientifically it means that the sun is right over the equator. How sterile! Nonetheless, it is when the sun begins to shift toward the southern hemisphere, thus transitioning us away from summer and into fall (or autumn). Our days will get a little cooler (in the northern hemisphere anyway) and our nights will get even cooler as well (read tolerable). My air conditioning bill will go down!

Autumn and Winter are my two favorite seasons (not that I particularly despise any of them) because they are the ones where I am most likely to ge to sit by a fire, have a cup of hot apple cider, smoke my pipe and enjoy a book. One of the reasons I appreciate being a teacher is that I have a few weeks around Christmas to do just that.

In honor of the Autumnal Equinox, I offer up some poetry devoted to autumn (by better hands than mine).

Leaves, by Elsie Brady

How silently they tumble down
And come to rest upon the ground
To lay a carpet, rich and rare,
Beneath the trees without a care,
Content to sleep, their work well done,
Colors gleaming in the sun.

At other times, they wildly fly
Until they nearly reach the sky.
Twisting, turning through the air
Till all the trees stand stark and bare.
Exhausted, drop to earth below
To wait, like children, for the snow. 

Nothing Gold Can Stay, by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold,
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Metaphysical Poetry

“About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed metaphysical poets.”
Samuel Johnson first used the term “metaphysical poets” in a disparaging way in his Lives of the Poets in 1744. He faulted these writers for using their wit to construct false conceits, tying dissimilar ideas together in a violent fashion. He acknowledged that many of these poets were “men of learning” and that they occasionally hit on truth, saying “their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.”
By the end of the seventeenth century the poetry studied in this guide had fallen out of favor and was largely ignored for nearly two centuries. Poets like T.S. Eliot recovered the genius of the metaphysical poets and stated that the metaphysical poets were merely “engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling. And this means both that they are more mature, and that they wear better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability.” He noted that English poetry changed significantly after John Milton (1608-1674) and John Dryden (1631-1700) and that poets lost the technique of feeling the experiences that create poetry. In Eliot’s opinion, it is a lost art to convert heterogeneous experiences into poetry, and this is what the metaphysical poets did.
The poets that are generally labeled “metaphysical” are men like John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Crowley, Edward Herbert, Richard Crashaw and a host of other poets generally living during the seventeenth century (1600’s). From time-to-time sonnets of men like William Shakespeare will be slipped in. As Eliot noted, it was an organic transition from the dramatists of the sixteenth century that gave rise to the conceits of the seventeenth century poets. What makes a poem “metaphysical”? The poets we are concerned with wrote about a broad range of topics, both secular and sacred. However, their poetry is very much characterized by wit. Wit is different from humor, which is what we generally associate the word with today. Humor is more-or-less immediately funny. Wit requires a second glance or reconsideration before it is realized. Wit “suggests intellectual brilliance and ingenuity, verbal deftness, as in an epigram.”
An epigram is a short poem with a witty twist at the end. The form of the epigram comes from Rome, but has been well-developed by English-speaking authors as well. It may be the best way to illustrate the use of wit that is central to metaphysical poetry. Consider the epigrams reproduced below:
Little strokes
Fell great oaks.— Benjamin Franklin

Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she's at rest — and so am I.— John Dryden

Another major characteristic of metaphysical poetry is use of the conceit. A conceit is a “fairly elaborate figurative device of a fanciful kind which often incorporates metaphor, simile, hyperbole or oxymoron and which is intended to surprise and delight by its wit and ingenuity.To put it more simply, a conceit is a comparison of two things which are really nothing alike. Probably one of the best examples comes from John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: forbidding Mourning.” In this poem Donne compares the love he shares with his wife to a drafter’s compass:
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

Using this conceit, Donne explains that his going will do nothing more than expand the circumference of their unified love. It cannot diminish the love they share, for their souls are joined as the compass is joined. One leg of the compass provides a footing, an anchor; while the other moves away if needs be, but always they are connected at the center.

---

[1] Samuel Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” in Lives of the Poets, 1744.

[2] Ibid.

[3] T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets”

[4] J.A. Cuddon, “Wit,” in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, ed. J.A. Cuddon (New York: Penguin, 1999), 985-986.

[5] Ibid., 165.

On a Replica of the Parthenon

Why do they come? What do they seek
Who build but never read their Greek?
The classic stillness of a pool
Beleaguered in its certitude
By aimless motors that can make
Only incertainty more sure;
And where the willows crowd the pure
Expanse of clouds and blue that stood
Around the gables Athens wrought
Shop-girls embrace a plaster thought,
And eye Poseidon's loins ungirt,
And never heed the brandished spear
Or feel the bright-eyed maiden's rage
Whose gaze the sparrows violate;
But the sky drips its spectral dirt,
And gods, like men, to soot revert.
Gone is the mild, the serene air.
The golden years are come too late.
Pursue not wisdom or virtue here,
But what blind motion, what dim last
Regret of men who slew their past
Raised up this bribe against their fate.

Donald Davidson

Hopkins on Global Warming

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

I think we forget that we are in a covenantal world with a covenantal God. The same God who created the world has promised not to destroy it by Flood (cf. Gen. 8:21). Those who think we are on the verge of natural cataclysm by virtue of our industrial activities should read Hopkins' poem carefully. The first stanza begins by declaring the grandeur of God and then listing all the ways this appears not to be the case. Using words like seared and bleared, smudge and trod, Hopkins gives us every reason to doubt his opening assertion. If the poem stopped here it would be a lament of the highest order. But he then goes on to declare how what is unseen, but declared, protects the world from all the horrors mankind can unleash upon it.
This does not give us an excuse, mind you. We are given the command to take dominion over the world, not reduce it to filth and muck. It takes a clear understanding of the covenant and the gospel to understand how we can live in an industrial and commercial world, trust in the power of God to protect that world, and still be responsible for the way we treat the world God has given us.