Poetry and Religion

Some people have been asking about the Les Murray Poem I quoted from in a Guardian CIF piece last week. I’ve had one fascinating conversation about why standard snarky atheists who show up always and everywhere with vituperative little digs about sky fairies stayed away for most of the week’s Question about poetry and religion on desert islands. I wouldn’t know why, but am reminded of a line by U. A. Fanthorpe, in another context, about the disciples. Perhaps it applies to all militant evangelists, even atheists:

My sheep and goats,
Virgins, pigs, figtrees, loaves and lepers
Confuse them. Fishing, whether for fish or men,
Has unfitted them for analogy.

Anyway, here, as food for thought, is Les Murray in all his glory on Poetry and Religion

Religion are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

dit-dit-dit-daah for Les Murray!

Challenged to tell the world what religious poet I would take to a desert island, I didn’t know where to begin. I could not have failed to mention Milton. His Paradise Lost is, after all, the greatest poem in the English language. Faced with interminable hours to explore on the beach, however, I thought I’d try something diferent. I want to join the Les Murray Liberation Front. Quite apart from anything else, Mr Murray was numbered in 1997 by the National Trust of Australia among its hundred Australian Living Treasures. How could a mere Secretary for Foreign Tongues compare with an official Living Treasure?

I’ve quoted extensively from Murray’s “Religion and Poetry” on the Guardian CIF site: But here is one of the first poems of Murray’s I read, ten years ago or so. It caught my eye straight away. What a legend! Murray calls poetry “the only whole thinking,” and this unassuming but amazing poem takes ordinary words and weaves magic. Theme, language, metre and rhythm fit together gloriously unpretentiously into one of the world’s great works of art. The best poetry is fabulous music that makes like you were there!

Morse

Tuckett. Bill Tuckett. Telegraph Operator, Hall’s Creek,
which is way out back of the Outback, but he stuck it,
Quite likely liked it, despite heat, glare, dust and the lack
of diversion or doctors. Come disaster you trusted to luck,
ingenuity and pluck. This was back when nice people said pluck,
The sleevelink and green eyeshade epoch.
Faced, though, like Bill Tuckett
with a man needing surgery right on the spot, a lot
would have done their dashes. It looked hopeless (dot dot dot)
Lift him up on the table, said Tuckett, running the key hot
till Head Office turned up a doctor who coolly instructed
up a thousand miles of wire, as Tuckett advanced slit by slit
with a safety razor blade, pioneering on into the wet,
copper-wiring the rivers off, in the first operation conducted
along dotted lines, with rum-drinkers gripping the patient:
d-d-dash it, take care, Tuck!
And the vital spark stayed unshorted
Yallah! breathed the camelmen. Tuckett, you did it, you did it!
cried the spattered la-de-dah jodhpur-wearing Inspector of Stock.
We imagine, some weeks later, a properly laconic
convalescent averring Without you, I’d have kicked the bucket...

From Chunking to Burrenjuck, morse keys have mostly gone silent
and only old men meet now to chitchat in their electric
bygone dialect. The last letter many will forget
is dit-dit-dit-dah, V for Victory. The coders’ hero had speed,
resource and a touch. So ditditdit daah for Bill Tuckett.

Good Friday: Redemption Song

Good Friday — Here is a poem by Les Murray, which explores why Jesus died and how all his persecutors, friend and foe, could actually be redeemed:

Easter 1984

When we saw human dignity
Healing humans in the middle of the day

We moved in on him slowly
Under the incalculable gravity

of old freedom, of our old freedom
under atmospheres of consequence, of justice

under which no one needs to thank anyone
If this was God, we would get even.

And in the end we nailed him,
lashed, spittled, stretched him limb from limb.

We would settle with dignity
for the anguish it had caused us,

we’d send it to be abstract again,
we would set it free.

*
But we had raised up evolution
It would not stop being human.

Ever afterwards, the accumulation
of freedom would end in this man

whipped, bloodied, getting the treatment.
It would look like man himself was getting it.

He was freeing us, painfully, from freedom,
justice, dignity — he was discharging them

of their deadly ambiguous deposit,
remaking out of them the primal day

in which he was free not to have borne it
and we were free not to have done it,

free never to torture man again,
free to believe him risen.

Good Friday is a day to address St Paul’s teasing question to the Galatians, “who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Christ was publicly portrayed as cricified?” to ourselves, and dedicated followers of some contemporary fashions:

1. Sincere attraction to Pharisaism (as in Galatia)
   
   
2. Excluding Jesus from the public square (even though he started out there)
   
   
3. The auld liberal Protestant habit of severing a lovable mop-haired Jesus (of History) from the Pauline Christ (of faith)
   
   
4. The notion that human dignity, rights and equality are somehow, in themselves, a threat to the real Jesus Christ
   
   
5. The folly that Christianity is a religion, rather than a process of personal and social renewal.
   

Poetry and Religion

On a day some sit down for turkey dinners, and some celebrate Saint Cecilia, patron of musicians, two pictures of arrayed religion I took a couple of years ago in Växjö Cathedral (Sweden) where they do incredible things with glass, and a poem from the incomparable Les Murray, Catholic Poet, who writes poems to the glory of God:

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.
A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.
Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?
You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,
fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror
that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry
or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.