"The Fire that Breaks from Thee": Incarnational Awareness in Metaphysical Poetry

by Dorothy Nielsen

In-Between Forms 

On the eve of Pentecost Sunday this year, four years after a reconversion to Christianity that followed decades of self-exile from the faith, I had a dream that ended with a woman dressed in white speaking authoritatively. 

Her tongue was a bright orange flame. 

Today, I recall how much I've always loved the image of tongues of fire hovering over the disciples' heads as a sign of the Holy Spirit and of their mission to light up the world with the Word. That blazing dream image also makes me think of the startling way that my own poetry recently caught fire. And about how it almost burned down in the process.

As a poet, professor, and literary critic, I have devoted many decades to the art of free verse. In my poetry, until three years ago I’d aimed for an understated, prosaic, casually conversational style that avoided didacticism, evident in poems such as “April,” which begins “Everything happens / over again except the light / comes from a slightly different angle. / The forsythia that didn’t flower / last spring when I needed it most / is trying again through your window.”

Then one day soon after my return to the Catholic faith, when I sat down to write, something very different appeared on the page: a poetic call to conversion complete with elaborate metaphors and old-fashioned capitalization of nouns, composed not in free verse but in set stanzas. After that first piece, things just got weirder in my religious poetry. I found myself weaving contemporary cadences and idioms together with baroquely intertwined syntax, superabundant repetitions, and intensely visceral imagery; or using intricate metres and stanza types; or concocting outlandishly layered metaphors; and occasionally incongruously punctuating all this exuberance with straightforward theological statements. My poem “Reversion” employs several of these florid techniques, as in this description of God’s invitation to return to the Christian faith as   

…a series of the short sharp shocks
the fish must feel when finally having taken in the shiny lure,
the line’s reeled in, let slack, reeled in and out and in and out again

by the patient angler who, sensing the reluctant longing
of the bride-to-be, declaims the true lover’s divinely-worded lines
patiently, patiently, knowing the patient wants more than anything
 
the cold, dark, emptying pain to abate, but just can’t quite
swallow the bait…

Unconsciously at first, I was borrowing these techniques from the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poet George Herbert and the nineteenth-century neo-Metaphysical poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Because it took me a while to realize this, I was surprised and embarrassed when a colleague dubbed my new poems as “postmodern Metaphysical.” I knew he meant it as a compliment, but I didn’t want my poetry to be hijacked by nostalgia and caught in some unpublishable limbo. So I considered just shredding it all and recommitting myself to understatement and free verse. 

Eventually, however, I understood that I had been forging a fusion poetics that could retain my twenty-first-century sensibilities yet also contain my newly inspirited imagination. Simply put, Christian observances were remodelling my inner world, making me increasingly aware of the interconnection between the physical and metaphysical planes, which I came to think of as an interface. 

Centuries-old practices open many well-known entry points to this in-between plane. The seven sacraments bestow intangible graces from God, but they equally require that our concrete, earthly selves are fully involved via the ritual’s “form” and “matter.” So at the Holy Eucharist, many denominations believe we consume God along with the physical bread and wine as the Real Presence of Christ’s Body and Blood; in confession, we hear the priest speak the prescribed words and see him make the gestures that signal divine forgiveness.

In a parallel kind of physical/metaphysical interface, it is customary to pray the rosary with a concrete meditation method that lets awareness flow back and forth from the divine to the earthly spheres as if through a spiritual conduit: while contemplating the fifteen mysteries of Christ’s and Mary’s lives, we focus intensely not only on the timeless spiritual teachings associated with each of the stories but also on particularized day-to-day details of each gospel personage, while also keeping in mind down-to-earth prayer intentions for ourselves or others. 

These in-between moments condition us to be present to the great mystery of the Incarnation, which is of course the most vital example of this interface between our world and God’s eternal kingdom. 

When I spontaneously borrowed from Hopkins and Herbert, I sought techniques that could do justice to the gravity of my new subject matter and embody my exuberant joy. Of course, I could never match the achievements of the two geniuses I was imitating, but in a more humble way my writing has been inspirited by the Incarnational poetics of these two great poet-priests. 

Hopkins’ Turbo Metaphysical Conceits and the “Scandalous” Paradox

Hopkins thought "The Windhover" was his best work, and world-renowned Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan believed it was the greatest short poem in English, maybe in any language. Considering Hopkins’ innovative methods for capturing its holy subject matter, that claim of distinction makes perfect sense for this remarkable sonnet:  

The Windhover
I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

A simple scenario introduces the sonnet’s profound meditations. One morning, the persona (or poetic speaker) watches a falcon (windhover) hover, then drop to strike its prey. The windhover’s “beauty” and “valour” “stir” the persona’s heart, and at the precise moment that the bird folds its wings to descend, he addresses it directly, bursting into hyperbolic praise for its “mastery.” In the very instant that the falcon “buckles” its wings and falls from the sky, the speaker exclaims: “AND the fire that breaks from thee then” is “a billion times told lovelier.” The word “then” is both a temporal and a logical term here, so this is a causal claim that introduces the paradoxical mystery at the heart of this poem: when and because the bird falls from the sky, its descent reveals its astonishingly high worth. 

The rest of the sonnet elaborates on this theme and gradually reveals its religious implications as the folding falcon becomes an intricate metaphor for the mysteries of the Passion, Crucifixion, and the Incarnation. But the reader must wait almost until the end of the poem for the Christological clue when in line 11 of 14 lines, the speaker ecstatically addresses the bird, “O my chevalier” (in other words, my knight, or my champion). When the persona compares the falcon to his own servant knight, he also alludes to Jesus’ paradoxical humility, to that strange and wonderful Incarnational mystery of God humbling Himself by coming down to earth to become the loyal champion Who even allowed His body be broken to save us. 

The poem layers on two other metaphors for Christ’s astonishingly generous brokenness. When a farmer’s plough breaks open dirt, it shines. And when dark embers fall onto the hearth, they break into flame again and "gash gold vermilion." The colour is a reference to His blood,  the gash is a reference to His wounds. And the fire to His Love. 

It turns out that this work’s subtitle “to Christ our Lord” wasn’t merely the dedication of a simple nature poem to Christ; instead, it prepared us to witness the persona speaking to Him with grateful adoration in a mystical moment when admiring creation creates an interface with God. 

These metaphors are 19th-century examples of the Metaphysical Conceits that 17th-century poets such as George Herbert are famous for, those often elaborate, jarringly incongruent comparisons between ideas from incompatible categories that they used to describe an abstract quality by means of a mismatched physical object. The most well-known is John Donne’s image in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” of the steel legs of a compass as a metaphor for two romantic lovers who have to part: “If they be two, they are two so/ As stiff twin compasses are two;/ Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show/ To move, but doth, if the other do.”

These Metaphysical Poets were left to moulder in obscurity until a hundred years ago because, to use the disparaging words of Samuel Johnson, “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together” in their work. Ironically, this famous insult names the very quality that earns these poets their place in history and that makes this neo-Metaphysical poem by Hopkins so great. After all, what poetic technique could be more apt for the paradoxical mysteries at the heart of Christianity? The ideas of the almighty God stooping to take on human form and then undergoing so much humiliation are themselves so violently incongruent that St. Paul called the Crucifixion a “scandal” to non-believers. 

In “The Windhover,” Hopkins perhaps went further than anything seen in the 17th Century, layering multiple images and doctrines to create a kind of turbo-charged Metaphysical Conceit that likely would have Johnson spinning in his grave. Marshall McLuhan famously spent an entire essay on the poem’s word “buckle,” with its complex layering of avian, knightly, and religious implications. 

And we would need a whole essay, too, to spell out all implications of the term “fall” in the final line, “blue-bleak embers fall, gall themselves.” This word is an indirect allusion to Adam and Eve’s sin and expulsion from Eden. The poem explicitly uses the falling embers as a metaphor for the falcon’s descent; the descent, as discussed above, connects theologically to Christ humbling Himself in the Incarnation by means of the chevalier imagery. Since the falling embers gash themselves vermilion, this image includes salvation history via the vermilion blood from gashes suffered during the Passion and Crucifixion. All these mysteries at the heart of Christianity are held in awareness by a 19th-century man observing a falcon one morning and are now being read about in the 21st Century. In brief, this high-powered Metaphysical Conceit enfolds all Christian history from Genesis up to the present-day and beyond. 

Incarnational Inscape 

Even if we ignore the less obvious Christological parallels and read “The Windhover” simply as a sonnet in which nature inspires religious awe, it deserves its reputation as a great poem and a prime example of Hopkins’ signature theory of inscape. This is the term he coined for the distinctively individual design of a scenario or a thing, which he sought to capture in his poetry. This nature poem teems with highly particularized imagery, creating remarkably precise details that let us see the falcon gliding and diving, as when the bird’s turns are compared to “a skate’s heel sweep[ing] smooth on a bow-bend.” Hopkins is famous for this kind of finely tuned naturalistic description. 

Inscape also serves deeper mystical meanings by opening an earthly/heavenly interface because the stunningly individualized imagery insists on physicality even when the poem shifts to the metaphysical plane and becomes an adoring expression of thanks to Christ for coming to earth to champion us. The sonnet never relaxes its attention to nitty-gritty images, of a plough breaking dirt or a piece of coal shattering on the hearth, for example, thereby demonstrating that by entering deeply into the particularity of objects, things themselves do more than inspire praise; attention to things might actually effect mystical union with their transcendent Creator. 

The Controlled Burn and Interfacing Allegories of Herbert’s Poetry 

Hopkins is famous for yet another innovation that helped light his poetry on fire: what he called sprung rhythm. Inspired by long-lined Old English alliterative verse, he adapted strict metrical forms by adding extra unstressed syllables, sometimes a surprisingly large number of them. “The Windhover” is a sonnet in terms of its rhyme scheme, number of lines, and its pattern of five strong stresses in each line. But instead of the expected ten syllables, its lines often run to lengths of fifteen or sixteen syllables, forcing them in many editions to arc over two lines, mimicking the sweeping arcs of the gliding falcon. 

All the superabundant repetition of sounds of Old English alliterative verse, which Hopkins amplifies with his sprung rhythm, creates a strange tension: the gravitas inherent in long lines and in the holy subject matter seems about to implode with the nearly uncontrollable burning of ecstasy suggested by the outlandish repetition. I sought to mimic this tension when I was writing a poem about the mysteries of the rosary, and so I used the long lines and abundant alliteration I learned from Hopkins in a joyfully reverent poem about Mary and Joseph presenting Jesus in the temple.  

Hopkins displays the same exuberance in his many poems that teem with imagery, such as the popular "Pied Beauty," with its list of dappled things (cows, trout, birds’ eggs); this plenitude is catalogued to praise the generosity of the Creator. 

George Herbert’s poetry is filled with the same tension between reverence and a superabundance that signals ecstasy, but in his case the enthusiasm seems to be tamped down somewhat by a desire for simplicity. When I modelled my work on Herbert’s, I reached first for his verbal repetition and signature catalogues. In elaborate poems like “Prayer (I),” he stacks image upon image to denote God’s abundant blessings as well as the persona’s pressing need to praise. In the brief, three-stanza long  "The Call," Herbert uses extensive repetition of key nouns and verbs. In each four-line stanza, he uses three key words in the first line, and then repeats each of them once in the same order over the next three lines. The poem begins: “Come my Way, my Truth, my Life” and those three nouns therefore dominate the short lines of the brief stanza.

So much repetition in so short a space gives the illusion that not much has been said because the form severely limits the number of nouns, and the result is a kind of childlike sing-song. Herbert’s simple form, syntax, and earnestness can be off-putting, but it has also been praised as “complexity disguised as simplicity.” Plain, earnest praise was one of his goals, as he stated in “Jordan (I),” where after complaining about his contemporaries’ overly obscure conceits, he counselled poets to be humbly straightforward and didactic, to “plainly say My God, My King.” But his theology was anything but simple. “The Call” is a catalogue packed with Christological paradoxes, as in line four: “such a Life as killeth death.” 

I wanted to learn Herbert’s trick of combining serious theology, straightforward statements of praise or doctrine, and the exuberance that always smoulders just below the simple surface with occasional flare-ups, all of which make up the controlled burn that draws attention to the interface between the physical and metaphysical planes. His "Redemption" is a case in point:

Redemption

Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
Not thriving, I resolvèd to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.

In heaven at his manor I him sought;
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possessiòn.

I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts;
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died.

Here the poet uses a strangely reticent method of allegory that emphasizes the narrative for so much of the poem that the symbolic higher meaning seems secondary. “Redemption” narrates at length the tale of a debtor imploring his feudal lord to forgive his debt. Only two words and an ampersand open up the spiritual plane to reveal that the story serves as an allegory for the Crucifixion. Religious allegories, such as Pilgrim’s Progress, are usually far less insistent on the human plane, foregrounding instead their religious meaning. 

In “Redemption,” as readers witness in realistic detail the debtor’s long search for his creditor, they are left wondering whether the poet will ever cash in on the theological possibility of the title as a reference to Salvation by Christ rather than merely use it as a mundane reference to a loan. “Heaven” peeks through in one word only in the fifth line. By being so aggressively and precisely a story of a transaction between men, this piece builds to the sudden and short shock at the very end: “Your suit is granted” the lender says, “& died.” In the final word, suddenly the joyous spiritual meaning flames out, engulfing the poem with an eternal level of meaning that fires up the sense of gratitude that the human story inspires.

Here the poet uses that same attention to an individualized earthly scenario that Hopkins would eventually name inscape. In other words, Herbert captures an inscape of allegory. In “The Windhover,” Hopkins’ laser-like focus on the particularity of a bird opens up a conduit to the Creator. Similarly, in “Redemption,” Herbert’s unusual level of attention to the realistic plane of his allegory causes us to dwell on the earthly story until the piece finally flashes to the spiritual plane, and the poem therefore emphasizes the union of the human and divine in Christ, this most vital example of the interface. 

Traditional Forms in Contemporary Christian Arts 

Poems like “The Call,” “Redemption” and “The Windhover” burn with ecstasy. We might be witnessing in them evidence of these two poet-priests’ mystical union with God, which is one of the chief goals of the Ignatian spiritual exercises. St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit order, devised a meditative method to place oneself in the Gospel scenes by calling to mind particularized details. Hopkins being a Jesuit priest, this unitive prayer method has been cited as one main inspiration for his theory of inscape, along with the philosophy of Duns Scotus. This prayer technique might have influenced Herbert’s poetry, too, as Louis Martz argues in his study of how Catholic meditation guides from the Continent were smuggled into Protestant England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then adapted secretly for Anglican priests and ministers, such as Herbert.

I certainly can’t claim Herbert’s religious or poetic depth, but I am struck by the parallels between my own experience and the basic process Martz describes: a spiritual renewal that focuses on an interface between the everyday earthly and the heavenly realms leads a poet to find and forge a new style. 

Once my attention was drawn to my own spiritual need to fuse my contemporary style with techniques borrowed from past masters, I noticed the same combination in several Christian arts at a lofty level. The music of Sir James MacMillan includes traditional passages; the celebrated poetry of Sally Read sometimes joins free verse with intensely particularized imagery and exuberant syntax that echo Hopkins’ style; church architecture is undergoing a renaissance of classical features. My worry that just such a fusion of contemporary and traditional styles would sideline me has turned out to be unfounded. A Christian journal, Ekstasis, published the religious poem “After Surrendering Night” that first hijacked my free verse. More surprisingly, a formalist and overtly religious poem about the physical/metaphysical interface has been published by a completely secular Canadian journal of ideas. 

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. We celebrate Pentecost yearly, I imagine, partly to remind ourselves that miracles still occur, including the miracle of speaking about God and being understood by those we assume don’t even share the same language. 

---

Dorothy Nielsen is a poet and literary scholar. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in many U.S. and Canadian journals and anthologies including The Literary Review of Canada, Ekstasis Magazine, Christianity and Literature, The Fiddlehead, The Dalhousie Review, Room Magazine, and Another London: poems from a city still searching for itself. She is the author of one collection of poetry. Her literary criticism has been featured in many American and Canadian journals such as Canadian Poetry, Contemporary Literature, Sagetrieb, and in several essay collections including New Definitions of Lyric: Theory, Technology and Culture and the forthcoming Transformative Reading: The Alchemy of Literature and Life. She lives in London, Ontario.

“Hollyhocks” by Daniel Fowler. 1869.