Having much appreciated Jane Clark Scharl’s brilliant criticism on topics from Milton to Flannery O’Connor, I had very high expectations for her two recently published volumes of verse — Ponds (Cascade), a collection of poems, and Sonnez Les Matines (Wiseblood Books), a verse drama — that were not disappointed.
Better than any treatise or argument, poetry focuses one’s mind on the sacramentality of the world; that is, how created things point back to their creator. As C.S. Lewis put it, “‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.” Scharl’s poetic work has a blazing, bracing sacramentality from beginning to end.
Throughout Ponds, Scharl’s debut collection, familiar elements of daily family life — pets and other animals, trees, flowers and other plants, houses, children, the weather and the seasons — are interpenetrated with glimpses of the eternal mysteries.
The poems run the gamut of experience, from the sprightly comedy of “Hymn to an Open Box of Spaghetti as it Falls from the Pantry Shelf” and “Resurrection After a Headache,” to reckoning with deadly illness and bereavement in the family. Reading them, I kept thinking of art historian Leo Steinberg’s dictum that “the eye is a part of the mind”: the poet, like the artist, sees something, thinks deeply about it, and bids the audience to follow along an intensely focused interpretive path.
I was particularly gripped by several poems written in the voice of other characters, each of which shows the partiality of any merely human point of view and invites reflection on the part of the reader. These include “The Annunciation,” which takes Gabriel’s perspective; “The Widow of Cana,” who, grieving many years later, looks back on her wedding day with wonder; “Penelope,” who takes stock of both herself and her wandering husband; and the title poem, in which Theoderic the Ostrogoth gives an account of himself to Cassiodorus.
Theoderic’s slightly defensive self-justification of his morally dubious life and actions, which might nudge a reader toward a salutary, if uncomfortable, self-examination, recalls Auden’s Herod and Browning’s Duke of Ferrara, though Scharl’s Ostrogoth is more sympathetic than either of those two.
Scharl’s program is easiest to grasp when her gaze turns toward the simplest objects. Looking at the round, smooth “Stones on the Beach by the Puget Sound,” she sees geometrical abstractions “become almost, things themselves, near perfection.” In “The Art of Poetry,” the place where a cast stone breaks the surface of a pond creates a “clearing left by the smack of being against being” whose “edges hum with energy but whose core is a limitless lack of energy.” These are snapshots not of a Cartesian-Newtonian universe consisting only of matter extended in time and space, but of a universe charged with grandeur, where the Forms that give it order can be seen and felt through the mind and the senses, if only partially.
For those of us afflicted by what Scharl calls “the philosopher’s millstone” — the temptation to dwell too much within one’s own mind — poetry can call our attention back again and again to the things of this world. That millstone — ignoring or rejecting the reality of one’s embodied creation, or what Walker Percy called the Cartesian error of “angelism” — seriously troubles the character of John Calvin in Scharl’s philosophical one-act verse drama, Sonnez Les Matines.
Scharl’s Calvin can’t see any signs of goodness still flickering in the fallen creation, so he attends exclusively to his idea of the divine, which neatly contrasts him with the play’s other two characters: Rabelais, a materialist who is content to live according to the dictates of his body (falling into Percy’s opposite error of “bestialism”), and Ignatius Loyola, a disciplined soldier accustomed to shaping matter according to the dictates of reason. The three hearty and quick-witted young men are thrown together when they encounter a corpse lying in the street on Mardi Gras in 1520s Paris.
The play zips along as the three of them exchange lines of tart, pointed banter, moving scene by scene from a bustling street to smoky tavern to a deserted bridge. A succession of plot twists deepens and complicates the case, and readers are left to make their own determinations as it progresses. Although the Catholic author’s sympathies might be expected to lie with Loyola, each of the three characters is credible and compelling.
Each of the three takes roughly the position that would be expected from his historical namesake in the conversation about freedom, responsibility, sin and guilt that has shaped murder investigations from Crime and Punishment, to Chesterton’s Father Brown, to Camus’s The Stranger. A dead body has a way of concentrating the mind on original sin, well before the final homicide verdict is delivered.
I think that the nighttime setting of Sonnez Les Matines, as its action crosses the liminal border between Mardi Gras and Lent, is a significant interpretive clue. This passage in time, recapitulating the passage from Saturday night to Sunday morning, from death to resurrection, and from creation to new creation, is an example of how narrative can offer more space for redemption and transformation than a static, self-enclosed system can.
In this case, the play asks how one should understand the fleshy “muck” of the material world, both revolting and enchanting, that horrifies Calvin and delights Rabelais. In the light of a gospel narrative, a Christian reader will recall that muck isn’t just muck, but was created good and can be redeemed. Each of the three characters here, in his own way, points in this direction. As with Cain and Abel, the murder takes place early on, but does not dictate the end of the story.
