Years ago I was on a personal retreat at St. Gregory’s Abbey in Three Rivers, Michigan. I remember having trouble falling asleep in the mysterious quiet that embraced the abbey for the nocturnal hours. A few lights led the way into the dimly lit library. I looked around, cherishing the knowledge that all those volumes represented.
Strangely, I reached for one book: Edwin Muir: Collected Poems. Not knowing anything about the book, I simply opened it, and there was a poem titled “The Good Man in Hell.” How incongruous it seemed. And then, slowly reading each line, I found the poet wondering if this good man would succumb to an everlasting Hell. But no, such a one would:
Kindle a little hope in hopeless Hell.
And sow among the damned doubts of damnation,
Since here someone could live and could live well.
And then there is a marvelous conclusion to this poem, demonstrating how far Muir had come:
One doubt of evil would bring down such a grace,
Open such a gate, all Eden would enter in,
Hell be a place like any other place.
And love and hate and life and death begin.
Who was that “someone”? I knew and am reminded of it every year at our Holy Saturday service. It is a one-page service with no hymns, no vestments, and simply some Scripture passages (BCP, p. 283). There is also a prayer we rarely hear at the graveside, in which we ask God to “deliver us not into the bitterness of enteral death” (p. 484).
The Holy Saturday service’s reading from 1 Peter answers, I believe, an immediate question related to the crucifixion of Jesus and the resurrection on that Easter morning: Where was Jesus on that Sabbath day? It’s just one verse, but it offers us an evocative picture of Jesus in Hell. He was preaching! “For this reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that, though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone’s judged, they might live in the spirit as God does” (1 Pet. 4:7). I have no doubt that Muir knew that verse.
That was the start of my journey with this beloved Scottish poet. He has been with me in many a pulpit where I preached during Holy Week. My hope is that one poem (“The Killing”) will find its way into a few Good Friday sermons. It ends with a most profound question.
Muir’s journey into Christianity was rocky and filled with deep questions and doubt. He was born in 1887 and died in 1959. The first 12 years of his life began on Orkney Island, where his father barely scratched out a living. He would be dead by the time Muir was 18. After his father’s death, Muir lost his mother and three of his brothers. They were all living in Glasgow at the time. Muir moved from one job to another, but not as an educated man. That he would become one happened with his wife, Willa Anderson, who would be known for her novels and her English translations of German authors—most notably bringing the work of Kafka to a much larger audience. By then Muir was a skilled translator. The two of them would lead a peripatetic life, wandering for long times in various European countries between the two world wars, and at times living back in Scotland.
Muir remembered his baptism, from when he was 3 years old. But his memory of that Calvinistic church was cold and barren—simply something from his past. As a young man he felt called to be a socialist, and then he soured on that. He wasn’t a man of faith, per se, but was drawn to deep questions about life with his wondering about the world of dreams and mystery.
His poetry reflects a man comfortable with paradoxes, even the kind that might never be resolved. He had a sense of journeys taken but never fulfilled. He could think back to his childhood as a place of Eden, and know how that dream had little connection to a war-torn world and the inhumanity exercised in totalitarianism, which he saw with his own eyes. If, on the one hand, Eden might enter again, he also saw in a poem titled “The Road” that
A million Edens fall
A million Adams drowned in darkness,
For small is great and great is small,
And a blind seen all.
Then, years later, he wrote another poem titled “The Road.” It described weary travelers who had followed “strange … demented windings and in out.” And then they hear that “There was another road you did not see.” I suspect Muir and Frost might have laughed at that image as both, continents apart, had wondered about what Frost called “the road less traveled.” Muir was at Harvard as a visiting professor of poetry in 1955, and there the two became friends.
What stands out is that this onetime atheist (albeit baptized) became fully engaged with the possibilities of God in this world, even in the midst of war and inhumanity, seemingly at every turn. He represented England in Prague in 1945 with the British Council Institute, which was promoting British culture around the world. There he saw refugees, decaying bodies, and wanton faces of those who had gone through dehumanizing times. He would witness the deceitful manipulations of the Russians turning Czechoslovakia into a Communist state. All this was prelude to his assignment in Rome.
Once he arrived in Italy he left behind, in his own words, a church he knew from his youth that “was severe and decent, with its touching bareness and austerity,” which “seemed to cut off religion from the rest of life and from all the week-day world.” Muir could not detect in the church of his youth “any outward sign that the Word had been made flesh.” But there it was in Italy. He wrote in his autobiography: “In Rome that image was to be seen everywhere, not only in churches, but on the walls of houses, at crossroads in the suburbs, in wayside shrines in the parks.”
One day he spent time gazing at an artist who depicted the encounter between the Angel Gabriel and Mary. He saw in it “a human love so intense that it could not reach farther,” for it “seemed the perfect earthly symbol of the love that passes understanding.” He writes of Gabriel in “The Annunciation”:
He’s come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time.
Then this mystical poet—for that is what shines through him—mentions “strangeness.” The two are looking at each other:
Of the strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on is wings.
Muir’s comfort with great paradoxes and his fascination with dreams and wonders shows him at his poetic best in this image of what was anything but a casual encounter.
In “The Incarnate One,” Muir tells us about his conversion to a Christianity that embraced color and art. It begins where Muir began on Orkney Island with his remembrance of Calvin’s kirk (church) standing tall on a wind-swept flatland that housed a single tree.
The windless northern surge, the sea-gull’s scream
And Calvin’s kirk crowning the barren brae
I think of Giotto and Tuscan’s shepherd’s dream
Christ, Man and creature in their inner day.
Then we see Calvin at this desk:
See there King Calvin with his iron pen,
And God three angry letters in a book,
And there the logical hook
On which the Mystery is impaled and bent
Into an ideological instrument.
Further reading |
I’ve known many a Presbyterian who would not see Calvin in such a light. Here, though, we must give Muir poetic license. In this remarkable poem, this man with this newfound sensibility regarding Christianity prophetically wrote: “the One has far to go. Past the mirages and the murdering snow.”
The echo of that passage finds its way into a more dramatic poem capturing the crucifixion: “The Killing.” You have a sense that this poem has taken him back to the day when Jesus died on the cross. The sounds of that day come with the “scourging, nailing, nailing against the wood.” Not just one being crucified, but three. And then there were those who watched, including the “hard-hearted young.”
“What use to them was a God or a Son of God?” Four women watch his heart “move on, by itself alone.” As he died, he was passing “far from their rage.” “All grew stale.” Even “spite, curiosity, envy, hate itself.” And this poet who saw with his own eyes tells us he was a stranger. He doesn’t know the end of the story, but—as is true of the greatest poets—asks us to consider the most profound questions of life:
Did a God
Indeed in dying cross my life that day
By chance, he on his road, and I on mine?
That’s such a good way to ask the most profound question possible on Good Friday. Ask this question, and those who hear it will receive a gift: the profound poetry of Edwin Muir.
The KillingThat was the day they killed the Son of God I was a stranger, could not read these people |
The Rev. George H. Martin is a retired priest of the Diocese of Minnesota.
