The Poetry of Contemplation

The greatest of English poets wrote two companion poems with Italian titles, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. The first celebrates the active life, while the second contemplates the pensive life of the reflective person. In the course of that second poem, the poet becomes particularly personal and reflects warmly upon his university years at Cambridge, coming, at that time, to a close:

                    let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloister’s pale,
And love the high embowed roof,
With antique pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.

This personal touch has led some readers to conclude that he is commending the reflective life over the active life, particularly as he was about to embark on six further years of postgraduate study, at home, with his generous father’s support.

This essay appeared in a recent Quadrant.
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It would seem that the young man was preferring retirement from the world to involvement with it. Rather, in the course of the two poems (neither of which should be read without the other, but which co-exist in a creative tension with one another), he magnificently displays the virtues of both lives. This leads his readers to appreciate that the life well-lived combines both action (including engagement with society), on the one hand, and, on the other, the concentrated consideration and evaluation of what we do and why, personally, professionally, and as members of the community. This takes place in purposeful retreat from activity, in study and contemplation (which, of course, are actions of their own kind). As Socrates taught centuries earlier, the unexamined life is not worth living.

In poetry, in English, the earlier seventeenth century was the golden age of poetry of meditation, an undertaking which is a more specialised and concentrated process than contemplation, which tends to be interpreted more generally. One of the explanations for the development of this rich treasury of verse was the turbulence of historical events, in those decades, leading up to the civil wars. In that theocentric world, these societal and political troubles were inevitably and inextricably bound up with religious conflict, which was the most pressing reason for the poets of meditation regularly (even daily) to retreat from such public controversy to the privacy of the contemplative discipline.

This is not to say, however, that, having so retreated, they necessarily found a peaceful domain in the process of self-examination, subsequently poetically expressed. Far from it, in fact. No one who has read John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” (otherwise known as “Divine Meditations”) would interpret them as expressions of a temperate mind and spirit, of contemplation as a necessarily serene activity. The poems’ arresting openings, in Helen Gardner’s phrase, speak of a very agitated man: “Batter my heart, three person’d God …” and so on. Donne envisaged and dramatised himself, in these poems, as an essentially, even irretrievably conflicted individual, of warring sensual appetites and spiritual aspirations: “Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one”, he exclaims in the opening of another sonnet in the sequence.

Yet for all the emotive and dramatic qualities of such poems, they are firmly derived, in their subject matter and structures, from well-established traditions of meditative practice, more generally, such as Catholic manuals—for example, the one provided for the Jesuits by their founder, St Ignatius Loyola, in the Spiritual Exercises (1522–24) and St Francis de Sales’s Introduction to the Devout Life (1609). Anglican poet-priests like Donne and George Herbert freely drew upon these and other models. And while Herbert, by temperament, and in his poetry, was less vigorous and violent than Donne, he could, nonetheless—in such as “The Collar” (punning on “choler”, the angry humour)—reveal an intemperate, rebellious, apparently un-contemplative spirit, too, but which, through meditation, resolves itself very tellingly:

But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
          At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child!
          And I replied My Lord.

Meditation is a process, as here, of seeking unity with the Godhead, and this particular genre of the poetics of contemplation has given us some of the greatest poems in the language.

Kevin Hart, the Anglo-Australian poet, scholar and theologian, described by Harold Bloom as “one of the major living poets of the English language”, and whose verse we are proud to regularly publish in Quadrant, reveals, in this splendid new study, his wide and deep learning in the matter of the long history of contemplatio in Western thought and, especially, as expressed in English poetry.  Lands of Likeness began life as the Gifford Lectures for 2020–23, an annual series established in 1887 by the will of Adam Gifford, Lord Gifford, Scottish advocate and judge, to “promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God”. Amongst the many distinguished thinkers who have preceded Professor Hart as Gifford lecturers are Lord Rowan Williams, one-time Archbishop of Canterbury, and Sir Roger Scruton, the conservative philosopher and social critic.

Hart is right in noting that those of us who have written much about the seventeenth-century meditative school—“which is already well identified and has been admirably examined”—have dealt pretty comprehensively with it over the last half-century. Accordingly, while acknowledging its genius (“much as I love it”), he decided to concentrate, in this work, on more recent poetry, giving as an initial example Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet “The Windhover” (1877) as “a clear instance of religious contemplation in a modern poem”. Given the dating of that poem, we see that “modern” is generously defined here. Hopkins serves as the leading example of “a poet writing in English who took religious contemplation with absolute seriousness in his verse as in his life”.

The book proposes a “hermeneutics of contemplation”, as expressed in poetry, which is not confined to the Church and the contemplative components of such as liturgical worship, but finds “traces of the divine in the world” (resonating with the idea of natural theology), “or in the poet’s mind”, while recognising, un-controversially, that “not all poetry is contemplative”, nor are all contemplative poems religious. While “The Windhover” reveals, as Hart contends, “a brief natural theology”, what he calls “aesthetic contemplation” can be a “replacement of sorts for religious contemplation”. Indeed, an entire chapter of brilliantly sustained reading, “Contemplation with Kestrel”, is given over to a tracing of the “motif of contemplation” in Hopkins’s poem, in an exemplary display of the techniques of close reading. 

In bringing W.B. Yeats’s idea of the role of rhythm in “prolonging the moment of contemplation”, here, Hart could also have referenced another modern master of rhythm in verse, T.S. Eliot, whose use of incantation (in such as the choruses from The Rock, but in many places in his poetry), produces what he described as “the perfect order of speech” in a quasi-liturgical language, “whispering lunar incantations”, as he writes in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”. These incantations

Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions.

Many a modern poem, Hart writes, “is itself a templum, a natural place in which we see traces of the divine or what was once taken to be divine”. Hart refers, in this way, to Geoffrey Hill’s idea that “landscape is like revelation”. Certainly, we can see this in W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone” (which gets a brief mention in a footnote) and, in a seascape, in Eliot’s “Marina”, for example, but which Hart does not refer to. Unsurprisingly, however, he mentions Eliot’s Four Quartets several times in the book, but as he has written extensively on them elsewhere, as poetry of revelation, he understandably does not repeat those analyses here, while acknowledging that the poems (completed during the Second World War) may be the “lone exception” in the poetry of recent times of a “strong contemplative” work that is “explicitly Christian”.

The reader’s coming to an understanding of such poetry is “a complex act, one that in practice always anticipates a further stage of reflection”. All poems, Hart writes, “have modes of hiddenness—thoughts or perspectives not fully disclosed even by the most fecund metaphors or the most disarming declarations—which is one reason why even some atheists are moved to talk of mystery in poetry”. Indeed, it is one of the characteristics of great poetry that on returning to it, you continue deriving ever-deeper insights from it. This has certainly been my experience with Four Quartets, Paradise Lost and other works of such stature in the English canon.

This is why the current disastrous and soul-destroying propensity, in what remains of the teaching of English literature in schools and universities, of (in Hart’s words) “using literature to diagnose social maladies”, is such a self-defeating and typically-ignorantly-applied strategy, particularly with regard to poetry which is, of its very nature, the most resistant of the literary arts to being stretched on the Procrustean bed of such ideological theorising. Poems accomplish much more for their readers than this drab, compliance-demanding agenda, as Hart notes:

They can comfort and gladden us, they can give us wider horizons or more pressing ones, and they can preserve fragile phenomena … They can lead us into unvisited corners of ourselves; they can prepare us for falling in love, indicate how love might perplex us … they can display facets of being human, in all its spheres of thought and action, some of which we might otherwise reduce, bypass or ignore …

and so much more. This catholic humanness of poetry is the very reason why it is now so little taught, as the result of the concentrated meltdown of what we used to understand by the term “the Humanities”, in educational institutions—even completely ignored, scandalously, throughout some pupils’ entire experience of high school or undergraduates’ supposed degrees in “English”. In “order for anything positive to happen from poetry”, Hart insists, “one must learn to read well”, and one of the best ways to learn to do so is to be well taught.

Poetry, as Hart points out, so far from enforcing some mandated “correct” opinion on this or that social issue, through its “various rhetorical procedures”, accomplishes the very opposite—producing varieties of readings between readers, and even within individual readers themselves. Poems are not closed books, but typically “frustrate any mental attempt to integrate all their parts into a satisfying whole”. We “go back and forth with them, always resisting a totality, if we read well”. And that intelligent and perceptive approach to reading includes the sheer enjoyment of “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”, as Alexander Pope put it.

Reading well, in poetry or any literature, requires an openness of mind to the breadth of humane experience. As Professor Gerald Wilkes argued, in Studying Literature, if we, with our inevitable presuppositions and prejudices, bring them to our reading of literature, seeking only to have them confirmed and endorsed (in other words, finding only ourselves there), then we are not taking from literary texts what they have to offer. Poetry provides windows to the world, not a mirror of ourselves. Going beyond the self-referential domain, “we step into the lands of likeness: we become for a short while what we behold”, a process of liberation through contemplation of the work of art, of “remission from desire and frustration” which has a “quasi-religious quality to it”. This is well captured by Eliot in the philosophical-contemplative sequence of the Quartets, in reference to the condition of that art which poetry, at its best, finally aspires to:

                    the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

The “self dissolves for a time into what it beholds”, and the reader becomes “not more than human, but perhaps a more reflective human”. This relates to the familiar idea of an epiphany, or what Hart calls “a poetics of the moment”.

The works of several philosophers are adduced in the course of a discussion of the “Hermeneutic of Contemplation”, including Edmund Husserl (“connoisseur of logically defined language”) to support the theory that “language mediates our relations with the world” and “the more highly constituted the language, the more that is offered to contemplation”. This leads to readings of Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” and Philip Larkin’s “Mr Bleaney”, as Hart notes that “highly constituted poems will keep manifesting meanings beyond any single reading”. Larkin is a striking inclusion here as he is generally construed as pursuing “the natural outlook” and as writing (in rejection of Modernist complexity) in the “plain style”. Yet Hart demonstrates the layers of reflection that “Mr Bleaney” reveals and the poem’s evaluations of the projections of the world of post-war England that it embodies.

In a later reading of Larkin’s “Aubade”, as the poet reveals his existential fascination with death, Hart distinguishes contemplation from fascination, describing this poem, indeed, as “a triumph of fascination over contemplation”. Such formulae and discriminations provide rich material for further discussion and debate, which is the function of literary criticism at its best, and the very opposite of the foreclosing of debate by this or that ideologically-enforced diktat.

The appreciation of poetry of any kind, contemplative or otherwise, itself requires contemplation and, for that in turn to occur, sustained silence and stillness are necessary. In a society of instant gratification, where many seem to have the attention-span of a gnat and for whom silence is not merely unknown and unappealing but positively terrifying, the opportunities and aptitudes for the appreciation of poetry, and of great literature in general, with its subtleties and profundities, appear to be in small supply, as Cardinal Robert Sarah argues in his recent book, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise.

Lands of Likeness, with its extraordinary erudition and density (in the best sense) of analysis, interpretation and appreciation will probably be most welcomed by specialists in poetry, philosophy and theology (of all of which Professor Hart is an acknowledged master), but also, more generally, by those with le goût à la vie spirituelle, who recognise the value of nurturing the experience of contemplation and meditation, thoughtful and intelligent interpretation of—and most importantly, openness to—the range of human experience, which poetry embodies, probes and celebrates:

Anyone who can read, can learn to enter those other lands of likeness, often far from divine simplicity, that we call poems, and, if we make good choices in what we read, we have the opportunity to grow in wisdom when dealing with others and ourselves.

Such a breadth of appreciation of literary culture as this has never been more urgently needed (in our age of “woke” censoriousness and the cancellation of “wrong”-thinking authors and texts) and is the mark of the truly civilised individual and society.

Barry Spurr, Literary Editor of Quadrant, was Australia’s first Professor of Poetry. His books include Studying Poetry (2nd edition), See the Virgin Blest: The Virgin Mary in English Poetry, and Anglo-Catholic in Religion: T.S. Eliot and Christianity