For one reason or another, few modern poetry collections are published with an explanation of their arrangement or underlying theme. William Wordsworth included a prefatory advertisement explaining the principles behind Lyrical Ballads (1798), which he co-wrote with Samuel Taylor Coleridge; indeed, so intent was Wordsworth not to be misunderstood that he expanded his explanation with an additional preface in 1800 and an appendix in 1802. Perhaps Wordsworth overdid it because, ever since, such authorial explications of the poetic craft have been very much the exception rather than the rule. Today, however, at least one author is seeking to reclaim the right to provide some insight of his own. For on the rear cover of Versing the Mystery, recently published at the end of July, the English Catholic poet Christopher Villiers provides a description of his topic and approach in his new collection.
“This collection of poems verses the mystery of God and Creation,” writes Villiers on the back cover. Promising to deal with Classical history and myth, the glory of God and the depths of the human condition, Villiers goes on to observe that readers will be “confronted by their own needs and greeds reflected in the foundation of western civilisation.” This is not a narrow set of concerns, and quite an extensive undertaking would be necessary in order to fulfil all that is promised in the book’s back-cover advertisement. Villiers does his level best to deliver: the collection spans 192 pages of nearly as many poems, divided into three sections thematically titled “Sonnets from the Spirit,” “Petals of Vision,” and “Another Odyssey.” Many, perhaps even the majority, of the poems are sonnets, which are by no means confined to the first section (in which all of the poems are sonnets). The rest of the poems are nearly all of two sorts: a variety of forms of single-page poems longer than sonnets, and five-line tanka.
In a collection comprising such a large quantity of poetry, it is inevitable that there should be some variability not only in theme but in quality across the volume, just as there is variability across the larger collections even of indisputable masters of the poetic form. There are a number of typographical errors throughout the book, some of which lead to confusion about the content. In some sentences, the syntax gets away from Villiers, resulting in forced, awkward, or even ungrammatical constructions that exceed what can be poetically borne. And some poems don’t quite rise to the level of insightfulness that their tone seems to indicate they possess, as in the case of “Icarus,” a tanka which unfortunately reduces the tragedy of Icarus to the trite expression, “Would you not much rather fly / Too high than not at all?” But in other poems, Villiers shows himself to possess an admirable command of poetics, and some of his tanka are especially well done—no small feat given the demands of this particular Japanese form, which expects poignant insight deftly expressed in only five lines (containing 5-7-5-7-7 syllables). Consequently, the collection would have benefitted from a stronger editorial hand yielding a shorter volume, but a more polished and consistent one withal. Another option would have been to divide the work thematically into two separate volumes: one on Christian verse, the other focused on works of a more personal nature.
Because of these foregoing considerations, no selection of poems small enough to be suitable for a review will suffice as being representative of the whole. Therefore, this review will address a poem from each section—the sonnets “Jeremiah” and “Earth in Easter,” and the tanka “Great Pan Is Dead”—which together share thematic considerations and show the best qualities of the volume, thereby bracketing the aforementioned remarks about the occasional unevenness of the book as a whole. For the overall quality of the verses is commendable, and the very best may even be worth committing to memory—the highest praise which one can offer to any poem.
“Jeremiah”
The first section of the book, “Sonnets from the Spirit,” is a sonnet sequence charting key moments in the biblical story from Genesis to Revelation. The poem “Jeremiah,” as its name suggests, is a speech of the Old Testament prophet, in which he reflects upon the unwelcome reception that he has received in Judah. Formally, the Shakespearean sonnet form is in this poem presented with numerous metrical substitutions that disrupt the normally iambic line, but generally for good poetic effect. The volta is perfectly executed, shifting from a mournful refection upon Judah’s intransigence to God’s promise for the future. And the closing couplet is memorable and poetic, marrying the mournful and the optimistic sections of the poem.
The opening line, “You made me tell the hardest thing of all,” runs into a second line enjambment that concludes the sentence with, “The truth.” Here, this choice directs attention, and an effortlessly meaningful pause, to those closing words of the sentence. It is the truth, after all, which is the cause of Jeremiah’s woe: rejected for prophesying the destruction of Judah, which nation has given itself over to the worship of Baal, Jeremiah not only prophesies but experiences the fulfilment of his words. The problem is not that he is misunderstood, but that no one wants to listen to the killjoy: “Judah just will not want to hear / Anything but sweet lies” which confirm them in their sinful rejection of God. And there are alternative accounts aplenty: “False prophets call[,] / Being answered warmly though death draws near.” It is these false prophets, who prophesy peace, that the biblical Jeremiah repeatedly denounces, with the result that he is persecuted, attacked, and eventually imprisoned. Meanwhile, the false prophets, who insisted that the good times would roll on forever, instead went down to destruction: Villiers imagines Jeremiah “waiting / For your wave to crash over them” which duly came in the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.
But Jeremiah, though mournful, was comforted by the knowledge that God still had a plan for the Jewish people: “There is a future; you have told me that, / We must have faith”—here, Villiers captures the indomitable spirit of the prophet so often remembered as unwaveringly pessimistic. For Jeremiah so devotedly persisted in his efforts to bring his people back to their covenant with God that he accompanied King Johanan to exile in Egypt, even though the Babylonians were kind to him and gave him a good living in the city. “I have done my job,” says Villiers’ Jeremiah, underscoring the sense of his observance of a duty to the Lord, “and now sets my sun / Though night shall be dark[,] Lord, your will be done.”
It is likely that the historical prophet Jeremiah died in exile, in Egypt. But Villiers’ imagining of the figure gives us not resignation to Jewish defeat but devotion to God’s plan for Jewish victory—albeit within the context of a divine timeframe that exceeds the span of a human life. This seemingly fine distinction is actually essential: it is the difference between recognising that the trials of the present represent a step towards eventual victory, rather than that they serve as evidence of an error in faith. Thus his concluding couplet, with its humble subjection of the self (“your will be done”), is right in showing a faithful Jeremiah who accepts God’s will for the eventual, far-off triumph of the Jewish people.
“Earth in Easter”
“Jeremiah” shows Villiers contemplating the human realities of sin and punishment, and the relationships between God’s divine plan and his human prophets. But in “Earth in Easter,” Villiers shifts the focus away from human beings and towards the earth from which they were first made. In this way, his poem serves as “a parable of God’s story” as much as does the natural world which is the subject of his poem. There is also a shift in approach: “Jeremiah” uses the volta as a means to switch between the lamentable effects of unheard prophecy and the hope of future victory. But in “Earth in Easter,” the shift is not one of tone but of subject, allowing the poem’s focus to unite both the human and the natural in the analogy of the final lines. The final three lines of the poem, particularly “Creation smiling like a new-wed wife,” are suggestive of the book of Revelation, where the idea of creation is itself resurrected and made new.
In the first lines, the “Kind sunlight kissing leaves into fullness, / Proclaiming Easter gospel on the grass,” opening the poem on a note of optimism and rebirth that never fades, even with the volta after the eighth line. It is a change not in attitude but of focus because it retains its focus on life recovered, even as it shifts from the earth to the bones that repose within it and which are suddenly “stirred back to life.” Just as the sunlight is responsible for “Erasing old winter’s Lenten dullness,” the gospel message, “God’s story,” ensures that “The despair is broken.”
The arrival of the warmth of sunlight signals the end of the seasons of winter and Lent alike, dualistically analogical and natural. Thus, when “The tree of life blossoms into flower,” it is suggestive of mankind’s reconciliation with God in the new Eden, after “The frosts of death” have been finally and for all time “defeated by the spring,” which Villiers uses throughout the poem as an analogue for the divine power. He calls these “unburied hopes,” because they are not at all covert, but rather central to Christian theology and faith; and, they are a hopeful sustenance for mankind until such time as that heavenly return is at last at hand. That reunion is made possible only after Christ’s “Resurrection shines in the morning dew” (again drawing on the nature analogy), thereby prefiguring our own resurrection into the heavenly kingdom.
“Great Pan Is Dead”
The final poem under study in this review is a tanka from the final section of the volume. Because of the poem’s brevity, it is useful to give it in full:
Great Pan, is he dead?
Whose pipes play this new music?
From the East, tune blows
What is madness to the Greeks
With a cross its singing reed.
In Versing the Mystery, there are many poems on Classical subjects, both historical and mythological, but none so effectively straddle the volume’s paired interests—Christian and Classical—like “Great Pan Is Dead.” The poem offers a perspective on the turning point—not an historical moment, but an intellectual one—between the pagan world of antiquity and the Christian world that followed it. This “new music” displaces the old and seems at first to be “madness to the Greeks.”
There is also our own historical moment, when the prospect of the death of Great Pan seems less certain. In reading the poem, we become the speakers in our own historical moment, asking uncertainly whether the Pan of our own time is dead—whether he has, in fact, been displaced by a “new music.” Now, also, the Christian message can seem a kind of madness, with its rejection of the greed and pride which have become central to global culture. The “singing reed” in particular serves as a reminder of God’s divine plan for human salvation: natural rather than artificial, echoed in the hymns ringing out from countless church sanctuaries every day, and in vital opposition to the self-obsessed vanity of modern popular music.
With its fixation upon a single Grecian (or imminently post-Grecian) moment, it is appropriate that the poem should echo Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which similarly records a frozen moment—in that case, the one depicted on the titular Greek vase. Hence Villiers gives us “Whose pipes” and “What is madness,” echoing the final two lines of the first stanza of Keats’ ode: “What mad pursuit?” and “What pipes and timbrels?” Likewise, where the urn offers a vision of truth, Villiers’ “new music” hearkens a new truth in the form of the “cross” as a “singing reed.” Here is a clear reference not only to the crucifixion and its historical effects, but also to the gospel account and its transmission across ages and cultures.
For this reason, “Great Pan Is Dead” is a fitting poem with which to conclude a review of Versing the Mystery. The volume is, itself, a “singing reed,” which carries the gospel and its context from Eve in the Garden to the present day. On those merits alone, its spiritual poems are themselves sufficient to make the collection worthy of perusal, meditation, and even memorisation. Now that Great Pan is dead, reading Villiers will give us the words to become singing reeds ourselves.
