An Icon of Jesus and the Woman at the Well.
Poetry can open our hearts and minds and provide a source of living water for our lives, says author Sarah Bachelard. Dr Bachelard*, who is the founder of the Benedictus Contemplative Church in Canberra, Australia, reflects on how poetry can illuminate our understanding and nourish our lives and faith. This reflection is based on a talk on 8 September at The Well, a monthly online meditation and talk on a mystic or poet*.
From my earliest days at school, words have been my ‘thing’. I know for some people it’s numbers and shapes; for others it’s music or colour, fabric or wood; for others it’s movement, dance or the hidden mystery of the physical world. But for me – it’s always been words.
I remember being introduced to how words could be put together into sentences in kindergarten. It was the early 1970s, and our teacher produced a kind of kit that had individual words printed on bits of cardboard or laminated paper and folders that, when you opened them up, had word holders running across and down the page. You could choose words and put them into the holders, and create phrases and sentences; you could represent what you wanted to say.
I loved these kits. I loved their smell, their colour, the days they were produced from the cupboard. And for me the felt sense that went with this activity was of a kind of wonder and mystery. That this was possible! Words to me had a kind of density or pregnancy, an inner life.
I don’t remember being introduced to poetry at primary school apart from learning nursery rhymes, limericks and the like. But my mother tells a story of me coming home from early high school one day, bursting with excitement. We’d been reading a poem. Bizarrely, I can’t remember what that poem was – but I do remember sensing I’d discovered a new depth to the world, a new way of apprehending reality and its meaning. And from the beginning, in the same way that some people, even when untrained, have an instinctive feel for music or visual art – recognising when something’s true and when it’s derivative or banal – so it was for me with poetry. Even if I didn’t understand it I just knew when a poem was good, when it was alive, and from the beginning I trusted my poetic judgement.
So how exactly has poetry been a source of living water in my life? I’ve touched on some of the elements already. For me poetry speaks to the depth dimension of things, expanding the horizon of the possible. It offers clarity and truth – like breaking through to a kind of essence. And a good poem is beautiful. The use of language, the rhythm of breath and meter provoke delight and wonder. But it’s hard to talk about all this in the abstract. So I thought I’d try going a little deeper by reflecting briefly on three poems that struck me profoundly early on. It’s not that I think these are the best poems I’ve ever read or even that they’re my favourites. But each of these nourished my love of poetry at school and I’m interested in what it was about them that did that.
The first is Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’, which I read aged 16 I think, as part of an English class on war poetry.
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! An angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
This is a harrowing text. Wilfred Owen was an English poet who died aged 25 in the trenches of France in the First World War. He had served one brief deployment in France in 1916 and survived, though he suffered severe shell shock. He had been in continuous action for twelve days, during which he was blown into the air by a shell and had to spend some days sheltering in a hole near the dismembered remains of a fellow-officer. Sent back to England to recover, he had an extended convalescence on light duties, during which time he began to find his way as poet. But in June 1918, he was declared fit for general service and, though he could have used his contacts to avoid being redeployed, he felt bound to those who were still in France and bound to bear witness as a war poet to what was happening. According to one commentary I read, ‘Owen’s letters of this time are filled with a deep sadness based on the certainty of death’.[1] By the end of August, he had returned to France for the last time. He was killed less than two months later, seven days before the war ended in October 1918.
Reading this poem as a teenager brought alive for me the tragic non-necessity of Owen’s death and of that whole terrible war. It took me into the felt sense of what it’s like to be caught in some futile, fatal mechanism not of your own making, and evokes the helpless rage and grief of being able to see this mechanism for what it is and yet still be crushed by it.
So what’s nourishing about this? How is this poem life-giving? Well, it’s true – and truth is always enlivening even when it’s painful. I loved how the poem connects the Genesis story with contemporary events – showing how each is made more meaningful in the light of the other, generating a new space for reflection and response. As I think about this now – I’m struck by the fact that I’ve always responded to this conversation between Scripture and poetry. I loved Owen’s juxtaposition of the language of the biblical text with the paraphernalia of warfare:
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there.
And I was blown away by the final couplet – Abram refusing to heed the angel’s call to sacrifice the Ram of Pride instead.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
It’s like a gut punch, the profoundest possible indictment of the obduracy and intransigence of righteous old men who ‘have lost the means to forgo [their] pride’[2]. It’s a reproach from the grave, a haunting. Astonishing.
A second poem that struck me as a teenager is one I’ve discussed elsewhere – it’s Australian poet Judith Wright’s ‘Eli, Eli’.
Eli, Eli
To see them go by drowning in the river –
soldiers and elders drowning in the river,
the pitiful women drowning in the river,
the children’s faces staring from the river –
that was his cross, and not the cross they gave him.
To hold the invisible wand, and not to save them –
to know them turned to death, and yet not save them;
only to cry to them and not to save them,
knowing that no one but themselves could save them –
this was the wound, more than the wound they dealt him.
To hold out love and know they would not take it,
to hold out faith and know they dared not take it –
the invisible wand, and none would see or take it,
all he could give, and there was none to take it –
thus they betrayed him, not with the tongue’s betrayal.
He watched, and they were drowning in the river;
faces like sodden flowers in the river –
faces of children moving in the river;
and all the while, he knew there was no river.
Again there’s a connection with Scripture – and I guess, at this time in my life, I was seeking to make meaning of the tradition I was growing up in. I was excited to discover it could be an imaginative resource for the whole of life, its imagery and sensibility expanding awareness and making sense of experience far removed from the world of the Bible itself. And some of the resonances are the same as in Owen’s poem. There’s that notion of the tragic non-necessity of so much of our suffering – ‘all the while, he knew there was no river’ (maybe my teenage self was trying to tell me something!).
Wright depicts the suffering of Christ, his cry of dereliction from the cross – ‘Eli, Eli’ – as issuing not (as in the gospels of Mark and Matthew) because of the Father’s abandonment of him, but because of humanity’s refusal to receive what he comes to share: ‘all he could give and there was none to take it’. The heart of Jesus’ anguish, Wright suggests, is not God’s distance but ours; it’s our refusal to come close, to be helped, to receive what he offers, that desolates and betrays him.
I wasn’t sure I understood this poem, but it felt profoundly important. And I think that’s another way poetry has been for me a source of living water. Like Scripture you don’t have to wholly ‘get’ it for it to feed you. It cultivates a tolerance for unknowing, for waiting, for receptivity. Unlike what Walter Brueggemann calls the ‘flattened world’ of certain kinds of prose, a good poem opens the heart as well as the mind and so works within you.
And lastly – if you’re not already convinced that I was a total swot at school, this’ll do it! The third poem I remember being blown away by is Book 1 of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Again – I understood almost none of it – most of the biblical allusions and all the mythical ones were completely beyond me … but I vividly remember my English teacher reading aloud the lines where Milton depicts the fall of Satan, the ‘infernal serpent’, and his rebel angels from heaven, and shuddering with delight – shivers going up my spine. Here’s a snippet:
Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?
Th’ infernal serpent; he it was, whose guile,
Stirr’d up with envy and revenge, deceived
The mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from heav’n, with all his host
Of rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equall’d the Most High,
If he opposed; and with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of God
Raised impious war in hea’vn, and battle proud,
With vain attempt. Him the almighty Power
Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.
The theology, of course, is terrible – and I never believed it. But the language, the rhythm, the furious energy contained by form – amazing!
‘To bottomless perdition, there to dwell/In adamantine chains and penal fire,/Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms’!!! The sheer sound of it delighted me!
So – I’ve shared three poems that spoke to me early in my life. Looking back, I see they set me on a way of reading and responding to both poetry and Scripture that continues to this day.
How have they been living water? In the end, I think I’m saying no more than the great Australian poet Les Murray expressed in his wonderful poem, called ‘Poetry and Religion’. According to Murray, poetry is the only ‘whole’ or integrated thinking. It brings together or harmonises – ‘concerts’ is his word – ‘our daylight and dreaming mind, our emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture’. After encountering a good poem, I feel this effect – more integrated, more connected to the real and alive to the whole. I feel grateful for the poem’s existence – grateful that, through the combination of words on a page, a poet has wrought the miracle of meaning, has made connections that give new access to the world and a new way of apprehending, sensing, and inhabiting it. Words really are astonishing – and poems are words at full stretch.
As we share more poetry in the coming sessions as well as the wisdom of the mystics, our hope is that we will all find living water here.
*Dr Sarah Bachelard is the founder of the Benedictus Contemplative Church in Canberra (see: www.benedictus.com.au) and author of several books, including Poetica Divina: Poems to Redeem a Prose World; A Contemplative Christianity for our Time; and Resurrection and Moral Imagination.
*This article is based on a talk Dr Bachelard gave at the Well on Sunday 8 September 2024. A recording of the talk is available HERE. (Note copy and paste passcode: Q8eNA%38). The Well provides an online opportunity to drink deeply from the Well of Living Water offered by the mystics and poets. These monthly Sunday night sessions consist of a reading, a 20 minute silent meditation, and a talk in which the speaker reflects on how a mystic or poet has been life-giving, a source of Living Water, in their lives.
The next talk in the series will be on Sunday 13 October at 7.30pm. Award-winning Australian poet John Foulcher, who is also Editor of Eremos magazine, will be speaking about the English poet Philip Larkin.
The event is free, but donations are gratefully received. You can join the event by clicking on this Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84040088292?pwd=enE3Q0riwnLAO4h9OgyIk5Dwg8gWTc.1
There is no charge, but a donation towards an honorarium for our speakers would be greatly appreciated.
See: https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/checkout/donate?donatePageId=5f20c979af12d14916e8f57a
The Well is a joint initiative of Benedictus Contemplative Church (https://benedictus.com.au/)
The Victorian branch of The World Community for Christian Meditation in Australia
(https://wccmaustralia.org.au/),
and the blog Living Water (https://www.thelivingwater.com.au)
Footnotes:
[1]Dominic Hibberd (ed), William Owen: War Poems and Others (Sydney: Australasian Publishing Company, 1986), p.49.
[2] Rowan Williams, ‘The Judgement of the World’ in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) p31.