A few years ago, I had the opportunity to review James Matthew Wilson’s The Strangeness of the Good (2020). I thought both that the work was a very fine one and that it showed the immense promise of a singular talent already being realised on the page. Now, with the release of Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, there is no room left for lingering doubts or abashed apologies to the rest of the great and the good: James Matthew Wilson is the finest poet-philosopher of the modern age, and both his name and his verses should be familiar upon the lips of every literate reader of poetry.
It takes quite a bit to earn such effusive praise, and the number of Wilson-authored books on my shelf attests to the time and effort he has undertaken in order to earn the justly deserved plaudits of readers and critics alike. Moreover, his undertakings are serious and pursued across the fields of teaching, writing, and theorising (although Wilson and I will never quite see eye-to-eye on Kant’s aesthetics, I think). In his work, there is no denying the poetic craft on display and the thought that lies behind it. For Wilson is very much a poetic philosopher in the vein of T.S. Eliot; his poetry seeks to do something not only to the world of poetry but to the world more generally. It is poetry with a purpose, although not necessarily an explicitly didactic one. That purpose has been advanced in works like The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (2015) and The Vision of the Soul (2017) as well as in lectures and essays in venues such as The European Conservative. It is a purpose which recognises both that order is preferable to chaos and that true order runs parallel to a genuine pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty.
Wilson’s understanding of order is everywhere in his poetic works, but never has it been as fully on display as in Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, in which the idea of order runs like a thread through all four parts of the collection. The words ‘order’ and ‘ordered’ appear in numerous poems, as do examples of order and disorder alike—but these are nuanced representations which depict the world as it is rather than in terms of simplistic abstractions or analogies. For example, in “An Encounter,” the momentary visual chaos of children scrambling for dropped balloons is not an example of disorder; instead, it is an occasion to consider the true order of their unified attentions, redoubtable family structure, and emotional investment in their shared experiences which have been the subject of the poem up to that point and which direct them, in unison, to the fallen balloons. The real disorder is in the purposeless malice whisperingly conveyed from adult to child and in “the smile of contempt,” which together are the middle action of the poem. It is around that disruptive event that the good family’s fundamental order endures, even amidst and despite the circumstances which test and strengthen it.
Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds is comprised of 60 poems across four parts. Two poems exist in relative isolation: there is an initial poem which stands as a prologue (“To an Unborn Child”), and the ultimate part contains a single poem (“Farewell to Berwyn”). These two poems neatly bookend the collection, with the first opening the text by highlighting the wonder-inducing nature of human conception and birth, and the last serving as a farewell to a former home and to the collection itself. Inside the main body of the collection, the three other parts read roughly of equal length and gravity. For the purposes of review, I have selected two poems as generally representative of the quality— if not the highly varied content—of the whole: “The Garden,” which is the second poem in Part I; and “Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds,” which opens Part II.
“The Garden”
The title of Wilson’s “The Garden” immediately suggests potential connexions to Marvell’s famous poem of the same name, although there is little superficial poetic resemblance between the two. Nevertheless, there are some tantalising echoes of Marvell in Wilson’s poem, such as the presence of melons tripping up the speaker in Marvell’s poem and spilling “their seedy guts” in Wilson’s. Both poems, too, are occasioned by a kind of solitude: Marvell’s rhyming lines extol the virtues of solitude, particularly that of Adam in the Garden before the arrival of Eve; Wilson’s blank verse is occupied with the work of a solitary speaker who toils and thinks alone—his difficult task and blundering efforts reprove Marvell’s sunny vision of a garden paradise.
It is the difficult imposition of order upon nature that occupies the content of the poem. The speaker is no seasoned green thumb. His efforts are the first forays into bending nature to the ordered will of mankind: “But in the ordered bed of cedar ties / I built, then planted with an amateur’s / Stupidity a dozen kinds of seeds,” leading inexorably to sprawling confusion—the opposite of Marvell’s floral clock and docile trees dropping their ripe fruit into his outstretched hands. Wilson’s nature may be unromanticised, but that is not to suggest that it is without joy—there is beauty in his garden too stunning to behold, beneath the “mess of orange flower and fat leaf,” which would “throttle everything.” Good order means cutting away the sprawl that would choke the whole, and his speaker duly moves to “clip them back, uncovering carrot fronds” and those melons aforementioned.
Marvell’s idle repose under idealised fronds can never accomplish anything; it is an imaginary state of existence in an unreal place. Wilson recognises that if one truly seeks to participate in beauty, then the work must be the point. It is the work that orients the worker towards beauty, even as the worker changes the world to make it more beautiful. But here, too, Wilson is not unsophisticated in his understanding that Man’s order is only a reflection of the divine order, and it is susceptible to pride, decay, misguided ambition, and a host of other afflictions—as fragile as nature itself:
Oh, yes, we lower our eyes from brilliant things,
When they stand glowering in their airy strangeness,
And think that little order we have made
Will shelter us—will do for all we need.
But what’s sown from our hand grows well beyond
Such well-trimmed plotting and, in this, it tells
That every order—though the roots be slow,
And though leaves curl and wither in the noon—
Is rooted in a broader spread profusion
Than any easy measure we may make;
And which we don’t defy or much improve
But stand, uncomprehending parts, within.
At the outset of the poem, “the sky’s blank blue / Retreats before the fiery eye that rules it,” and as the sun sets, “My brother’s lands are burning in the West.” There is a brilliance in the heavens that occasions the downcast eye, to be sure, but there are beauties in the carrot fronds and melons which force the eye lower still, to the dust and that which is made from it: to man and to his desires. Before these things, a little order, hard-wrought in a chaotic world, seems like a mighty aegis. But the sprawling garden and its need for tending have shown that—as another keen poetical observer of the natural world has noted—“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley.” In the end, the gardener is caught up in his own tangle, deep as the roots which bind the yielding earth.
“Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds”
In the Summa Theolgiae, Prima Secundae at Question 102, Article 6 (“Whether There Was Any Reasonable Cause for the Ceremonial Observances”), St. Thomas Aquinas gives, in his lengthy reply to objection 1, an explanation for the Mosaic law against consuming the flesh of various animals (cf. Deut. 14), including birds. He notes that some of the listed birds were the subject of idolatry and that the Israelites were to be encouraged to consume more readily obtained food than some of the birds could provide. A little later, however, he remarks that the birds embody certain sinful attitudes and that to consume them is to become inured to those failings: the eagle is proud, the kite is fraudulent, the ostrich is worldly. Wilson’s titular poem in this collection, “Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds,” takes as its topic the saint’s dictation of this part of the Summa.
The poem opens in the early hours, as “morning sparrows made / Their song as if the whole world’s goodness paid / Its plenty out for them and them alone.” The “as if ” here barely conceals the identification of a self-obsession: these birds have a narcissistic moral failing. We learn that they are disruptive withal: “The old saint heard their joy and squelched a moan” at the pains in his sleep-sore legs before trying to recollect his thoughts, interrupted by the birds—“Where had he left off before?” The flighty, unconcerned, self-interested chirping of the birds is in stark contrast to the slow, ordered, ponderous thoughts of the saint once nicknamed “The Dumb Ox,” whose careful sentences are expressed to the “three amanuenses,” whose duty it was to record his weighty words.
To be like the birds—to live in the moment, driven by impulse and passing fancy, subject to the vicissitudes occasioned by whim and caprice—is forbidden, and to ponder the nature of this proscription, the saint must retreat from his own worldly cares until, “mind withdrawn / From his mouth’s taste of buttered loaves, the dawn / Without, the wish for more wood in the fire,” he is able to clearly speak aloud his reasoning in words that will echo down the generations and earn for him the title Doctor Angelicus. There is something almost proverbial in his explanation, eminently suitable to Wilson’s couplets:
He spoke: the long-beaked ibis feeds on snakes
To represent the man whom nothing slakes.
Feasting upon dead bodies’ opened gore,
The vulture stands for all who thrive through war.
There is a certain joy here, and amidst Wilson’s delightful rhymes, one can almost imagine the hint of a twinkle in the great saint’s eyes as he delivers himself of this considered reasoning, at once wholly serious and yet somehow playful in design. But when Thomas reaches the despair of the hoopoe, he pauses, and Wilson draws us back to the gravity and the order of the scene, to the saint’s devoted purpose in directing mankind to higher things: participation in the divine order. It is “the thought of earthly sorrows” that moves Thomas, mentally and physically, to consider the fullness and complexity of mortal life until he “bore down on his broken knees to pray / For such a world that had so much to say.” In this moment, Thomas’ devoted work—with all its instructive and elucidatory purpose—must give way to allow for an appeal to the greatest of all authors, whilst his wordless amanuenses bear alongside him his dutifully-recorded explanations, as if in offering.
Ideas of order
Order, deep and fulfilling order, is present not only in these reviewed poems but throughout the work (to say nothing of the formal poetical structure of the poems themselves). Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds is a great hymn to order—not misread as constraint or imposition, but rather as the very means by which meaning is conveyed. Without ideas of order, without pursuit of order, without an underlying governance of order, there is only the meaninglessness that comes from an inability to understand the deep connectedness of people, things, and events: the chaos of a world without history, without hope. In the opening lines of “Farewell to Florida,” the first poem in Ideas of Order (1938), Wallace Stevens writes that, “The moon / Is at the mast- head and the past is dead. / Her mind will never speak to me again.” Wilson replies, in “Farewell to Berwyn,” the last poem in Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, that “The stars grow old far slower than we do. / They’ll still be shining down / After I latch this door a final time”—cosmic history, literal and metaphorical, is here to stay and will endure to offer perspective on mankind’s place in creation tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. This is Wilson’s own rejection of the end of history, albeit expressed not quite as categorically as Faulkner declaring in Requiem for a Nun (1951), “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Although Wilson’s stars are not quite eternal, they can and will speak to us of our place in the circles of order—divine and man-made, eternal and mortal—in which we move.
This essay appears in the Summer 2024 edition of The European Conservative, Number 31:106-109.
