Forma Issue #17

EDITORS’ LETTER by the Editors

Cultural Currency

KLARA AND THE SUN: HAGIOGRAPHY OF AN AI

by Tracey Leary

From the Classroom

WHAT I LEARNED TEACHING EIGHTHGRADE BOYS

by Kara Griffith

BOOK REVIEWS

THE WORK OF WRITING HISTORY

by John Wilson

PLATO ’S DIALOGUES AND THE MODERN TEACHER

by Matthew Bianco

A GOOD YEAR FOR DANTE

by Sean Johnson

READING THE ETERNITIES

by Sean Johnson

This magazine is published by the CiRCE Institute. Copyright CiRCE Institute 2022. For additional content, please go to formajournal.com.

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Cover Art: "Creation 2" by Jonathan Pageau

Issue 17

Winter 2022

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME: THE ODYSSEY IN TRANSLATION

by Monique Neal

BOOK EXCERPT: THE SCANDAL OF HOLINESS

by Jessica Hooten Wilson

THE GOLDEN ECHO

by Joshua Leland

AN ANCIENT DESCENT IN A MODERN

HELL: “THE UNDERWORLD ” UNDER THE INFLUENCE

by Joshura Hren

WHAT ARE STANZAS FOR?

by James Matthew Wilson

REDISCOVERING THE GOLDEN KEY A Conversation with Jonathan Pageau by Katerina Kern

The CiRCE Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization that exists to promote and support classical education in the school and in the home. We seek to identify the ancient principles of learning, to communicate them enthusiastically, and to apply them vigorously in today’s educational settings through curricula development, teacher training, events, an online academy, and a content-laden website. Learn more at circeinstitute.com

Editors' Letter

Dear Readers,

Welcome

to a new edition of FORMA, where we steadfastly believe the great works of the past speak universal truths that we cannot afford to ignore.

In this issue, we’ve asked our authors to explore the theme of mythos, and you now hold the outcome of that project. Because we intended this to be a free exploration, we did not define mythos in the call for papers. But we will offer you, the reader, some context for the term, and you can determine how well it plays out in the submissions.

Mythos can be understood narrowly as a collection of myths or stories told by a given people at a given time to interpret natural phenomena or explain the origins of life. These stories personify potent forces in human experience: weather, emotions, virtues and vices, time, etc. They are the stories humans have told to explain reality and teach children how to live according to it. But mythos can transcend the genre of “myth,” for stories always interpret reality and we are always telling stories. We live and breathe inside stories. Some might even say we are stories. So mythos can refer to the patterns and structures we use to speak of, and live within, reality.

This perspective unapologetically assumes that reality is patterned and ordered rather than chaotic and random; the hero dies and resurrects, not because we repeat the same story continually, but because the pattern of death and resurrection is true and embeds itself within our cosmos, and we embed it, in turn, within our stories. The patterns came first, and we echo those patterns.

We intentionally chose not to define mythos in our call for papers for this edition, wanting to allow the multivalence of the term to appear in the variety of the works that you find here. Some of the pieces directly relate to mythos, while others do so more implicitly. We leave it to you to consider how mythos informs each piece.

Cheers,

The Editors

The Editorial Team

Publisher: Andrew Kern, President of The CiRCE Institute

Editor-in-Chief: David Kern

Managing Editor: Katerina Kern

Art Director: Graeme Pitman

Poetry Editor: Christine Perrin

Contributing Editor: Noah Perrin

Copy Editor: Emily Callihan

“Mythological thinking cannot be superseded, because it forms the framework and context for all thinking.”

Northrop Frye

KLARA AND THE SUN: HAGIOGRAPHY OF AN AI

Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest book, Klara and the Sun, deepens his ongoing exploration of the themes of loyalty and service in a divided community. Remains of the Day, his 1989 Booker Prize–winning novel, followed a butler at the end of his years of usefulness during the decades leading up to World War II, a time in which the loyalties of the British people had fractured over their response to the rising Nazi regime in Germany. Klara and the Sun contemplates similar issues, but this time in a dystopian setting, appearing at first glance little different from modern life—apart from the active involvement of artificial intelligence in the lives of humans, which takes the form of “AFs” or “Artificial Friends.” The titular character is one such AF, and is for sale to any parent wealthy enough to purchase her companionship for their child. Early in the novel, Klara finds a home with a young teen named Josie, and it is in her new environment that the second glaring difference from our world becomes apparent, for Klara learns that Josie is a “lifted” child.

By Tracey Leary

Ishiguro never fully explains “lifting,” but it appears to be a type of voluntary genetic editing that takes place after a child is born. Lifted children are supposed to have superior intellectual capabilities to those who have not been lifted. They are eligible to attend most universities, many of which no longer accept unlifted students, and can expect greater economic prosperity after graduation. However, lifting comes with a price beyond the monetary— lifted children also have much greater potential for serious health issues directly related to this process. In the world of the book, both lifted and unlifted children are isolated and lonely, spending their days with virtual tutors and interacting little with other people their age except for sparsely scheduled gatherings to hone their social skills, sessions to which unlifted children are rarely invited. Klara enters Josie’s world to alleviate some of the loneliness that naturally coincides with being lifted. Yet by the end of the novel, she has transcended her role as an AF in ways that strongly suggest that we are meant to read Klara as a saint, ways that call to mind the me-

dieval motifs of traditional hagiography.

From the first pages of the novel, it is evident that Klara surpasses her programming as an AF in a very unusual way: she worships. Klara runs on solar power, and because of this, she believes that the sun is the source of life not only for AFs but for humans as well. While waiting to be purchased in the AF store, she watches a homeless man, whom she calls “Beggar Man,” appear to die on a cloudy day. He lies motionless on the sidewalk beside his dog, unnoticed by the many pedestrians that hurry past. When the sun comes out in all its brilliance the next day, Beggar Man and his dog have revived, and Klara believes that “a special kind of nourishment from the Sun had saved them.” When Klara comes to live in Josie’s home, Josie quickly realizes that Klara loves watching the sun set behind a nearby barn, so they make a ritual of this time, kneeling on Josie’s “Button Couch,” as a votary kneels at an altar, while the sun “goes to his resting place.”

When Josie’s health takes a turn for the worse, Klara determines to make a pilgrimage to this barn—a difficult journey for an AF unaccustomed to walking on uneven terrain. She is helped by Josie’s one friend and neighbor, Rick, who carries her to the barn where Klara pleads with the Sun to heal Josie as he did Beggar Man. Believing the Sun wants her to perform an act of devotion to prove her worthiness to make this request, she decides that she must battle in some way with a force of darkness, a force which is necessarily opposed to the sun. The darkest force that Klara can imagine is a machine that was set up outside the AF store during her time there that polluted the atmosphere with thick smoke, obscuring the sun when it ran. Klara believes that this machine offends the sun and that she must destroy it in order to prove her devotion to the Sun and to obtain her plea. Visiting the city, Klara has the opportunity to disable this machine, but must sacrifice part of herself to do so. She also learns that Josie’s family has an additional purpose for her, one which requires her to study Josie so intently that she can represent her in every conceivable way. This discovery leads to one of the central questions Ishiguro addresses in this novel: Can Klara truly know Josie’s soul? Klara believes that she can. She describes her study of Josie as walking through each room of Josie’s mind, studying each carefully until she knows them all implicitly. Josie’s

father is not sure that this is possible, and questions the belief of his world’s belief that there is nothing unique or unknowable about the human heart.

Unlike Josie’s father, Klara seems to be unaware of the presence and unpredictability of sin in a human soul. Created with only the programming that enables her to function as a child’s companion, Klara in many ways begins her existence with a true tabula rasa. We might call it an immaculate conception. Because Klara has never eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she cannot recognize evil when she sees it. Klara looks at her world with a purity of vision that enables her to recognize many subtle dynamics in the behavior and motives of those around her, but without a moral understanding of the danger of some of those motives, and the possibility that humans can intend harm to others. Scripture says that the pure in heart shall see God, and it is this purity of vision that fuels the uncanny perception that Klara possesses and which Ishiguro explores throughout the novel. However, Klara’s purity of motive also prevents her from truly understanding her own place in that corrupted world and her destiny at the end of her usefulness to Josie.

As most canonized saints are associated with miraculous activity, Klara does experience an apparent miracle which changes the course of the novel and of her family’s life. And like a true saint, Klara accepts all that comes to her after this miracle without complaining or casting blame, even as her own suffering increases. The novel closes with a definitive statement of Klara’s fidelity to the Sun and his kindness to her.

Interestingly, the canonized saint with the name closest to Klara is Saint Clare, who founded the order known as the Poor Clares, to work with St. Francis’, brotherhood of Franciscans. St. Clare, because of her miraculous ability to view the mass on the wall of her cell when she was physically unable to attend services, is now the patron saint of televisions and computers. The similarity between the names cannot be a coincidence. Ishiguro has given us his vision of a modern-day saint, and it is a convincing and thought-provoking one.

Tracey Leary teaches online courses in the integrated humanities with Kepler Education. She lives in Alabama with her husband, three boys, and a guinea pig.

THE WORK OF WRITING HISTORY

By John Wilson

Fiction, memoir, biography, history, essay-collections, reportage, science, philosophy, theology, writing that takes off from movies and music and art and more: which branch is most inadequately assessed in our public book-talk, in reviews and podcasts, on Twitter and elsewhere? I would say history, hands down. But what do you get when you read a typical review of a work of history? Mostly a summary of the subject at hand. Insofar as there is any account of the writing, it is likely to be limited to a few stock responses, pro or con (the historian is “biased,” leaning too obviously “left” or “right”; the historian is dumbing his subject down or writing only for fellow-mandarins, but—let there be trumpets and zithers—now and then she is wonderfully “readable,” etc., etc.). What we rarely get is any acknowledgment that writing history requires imagination every bit as much as it requires research. It is not an assemblage of “facts.”

This came to mind as I was reading an advance copy of Barry Strauss’ splendid new book The War

That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium, coming in March from Simon & Schuster. Strauss is one of my favorite historians, and this may be his best book in a distinguished career. Those who have a particular passion for the classical world (or simply a fascination with Antony and Cleopatra), not to mention connoisseurs of great naval battles, should already have this book on their wish list, but Strauss is writing for a broad audience.

Consider this brief passage from Strauss’ prologue, in which (at the very outset of his book) he describes the once-famous monument created by the victorious Octavian (soon to become Augustus Caesar) around 29 BC, two years after the Battle of Actium—a monument that until recently had long been obscured. “At Nicopolis,” Strauss observes, Octavian wrote the history of his triumph “in stone.” But then, Strauss adds, “he also wrote it in ink, in Memoirs that were famous in antiquity” but that vanished “long ago”; only fugitive fragments survived.

This is an incidental detail, and yet it will give the attentive reader a jolt. How did that happen? The Memoirs of the great Augustus Caesar were simply lost? In conjunction with the more developed account of the monument at Nicopolis, obscured for

centuries, this nudges us to step back from our own moment, to recognize that much we take for granted will also be erased in the vicissitudes of time.

Strauss’ book is loaded with moments like this, along with his persuasive argument for the historical consequences of Octavian’s victory (“If Antony and Cleopatra had won, the center of gravity of the Roman Empire would have shifted eastward”), the immersive details of battle between the contending forces (including a crucial contest some months before the massive sea-battle at Actium), intense personal passions, and intricate behind-the-scenes maneuvering on both sides, including a good deal of old-fashioned espionage.

To keep all these lines of the narrative in play, now foregrounding one, now highlighting another, holding the reader’s attention with no sense of disorientation, requires skills akin to but not identical with those of a gifted novelist. This crucial aspect of history-writing—whether it be superbly managed, as here, or shoddily handled, as is sometimes the case—routinely gets short shrift in reviews. Be sure to savor the art and the craft as you read.

The official pub date for The War That Made the Roman Empire is March 15. That same day is the pub date for Peter Handke’s Quiet Places (FSG), a collection of essays, two of which have not previously appeared in English. (Also on March 15, FSG will publish a translation of Handke’s novel The Fruit Thief, which appeared in German in 2017.) Even if you haven’t read Handke, you may remember the controversy (if that’s the right word) in October 2019 following the announcement that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Handke, critics charged, was an apologist for genocide perpetrated by Serbs against Bosnian Muslims. One writer, the former editor of the books section of a major U.S. newspaper, bragged that she had never read Handke and didn’t intend to start doing so now.

In response, I wrote a column for First Things

in Handke’s defense called “Why You Should Read Peter Handke.” At that point, I expected that most of the leading bookish magazines and journals would be assigning retrospective accounts of his long career in the wake of the prize and the ensuing invective. Stunningly, very few such pieces appeared. In March, with the publication of The Fruit Thief and Quiet Places, it will be hard to further evade that responsibility.

When I tell you that the long title essay of Quiet Places (written in 2011) begins with Handke’s memories of outhouses, boarding-school and railroad-station toilets, restrooms (especially in Japan), and so on, you may be inclined to pass. That’s fine. Despite the title assigned to my First Things column on Handke, I have no interest in pushing his books on you. But if you read the essay, in which the notion of Quiet Places is extended imaginatively well beyond its starting point, you will find that it is an extraordinary expression of one writer’s sensibility, of the distinctive way he experiences the world—“autobiographical” in the deepest sense, even as it eludes the customary strategies of “memoir.” If you dislike this essay, you are very unlikely to enjoy Handke’s fiction. If on the other hand you find it irresistible, you have a lot of good reading to look forward to.

John Wilson edited Books & Culture (1995–2016). He writes regularly for First Things and a range of other magazines. He is a contributing editor at the Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at Marginalia Review of Books

PLATO'S DIALOGUES AND THE MODERN TEACHER

By Matthew Bianco

Plato’s famous protagonist and history’s most famous philosopher, Socrates, has served as the ideal type of teacher for millennia, showing teachers how and why to engage their students in dialogue. Yet, in committing to Socratic teaching, the teacher attempts to imitate the inimitable—to be what only one has been before. Still, we strive, longing to one day ask questions so profound and necessary they propel our students into direct encounter with Truth. And for that, we will read books and gather wisdom and attend lectures. As we seek the tools of Truth perception and how to teach them, Jeffrey S. Lehman offers his insight and participation in this worthy quest.

Many in the tradition, philosophical and classical, see Socrates as a philosopher, the gadfly of Athens, and the mouthpiece of Plato. Those with this view believe that, if one wants to understand Plato’s beliefs, one must read what Socrates says; Socrates’ words are the words of Plato. This is not the belief of all in the tradition, perhaps not even

the majority. For some, Plato expressed his philosophy through Socrates, other characters, the form of the text, and the dramatic or literary elements of the dialogue. Those who read Plato in this light read his dialogues less as a philosophical treatise and more as an embodied philosophical mode. In other words, Plato’s dialogues seek to teach how he does philosophy more than what his philosophy is. The content of his philosophy is, of course, contained in the dialogues, but readers should attend more to the mode than the content.

In this sense, then, the dialogues beg the Socratic teacher to see Socrates not as the ideal philosopher but as the ideal teacher. If one were to read the dialogues dramatically, as if Plato had written plays, then we may meet Socrates anew, learning not the belief of Plato but a manner of inquiry.

This is precisely what Lehman’s new book, Socratic Conversation: Bringing the Dialogues of Plato and the Socratic Tradition into Today’s Classroom, has done. In it, he walks the reader through a few of Plato’s dialogues in order to demonstrate and derive principles that may guide classroom conversation. Then he does the same thing with subsequent dialogues within the Christian tradition, deriving additional principles of conversation. Finally, he applies these derived principles in the classroom. These principles include philosophical friendship, verbal psychagogy, the compatibility of mythos and

logos, an opposition to misology, the role of the “Inner Teacher,” the enchantment of Socratic conversation, and the political role of Socratic conversation.

Lehman uses the Meno to illustrate philosophical friendship. He notes that the teacher guides Socratic conversation by encouraging a spirit of friendship as the students engage in philosophical conversation. This friendship, he asserts, is key to a genuine pursuit of truth in dialogue.

With the Phaedrus, he illustrates “verbal psychagogy”: the “leading of the soul,” as Plato puts it. Verbal psychagogy is neither persuasion nor the assertion of a “right” answer, but the use of questions to invite the students into the philosophical life.

In the Phaedo, Lehman illustrates the compatibility of mythos and logos. He notes that people often think of mythos (storytelling) as a means of resuscitating a failed Socratic conversation; if the student fails to see truth, the guide falls back on mythos, leaving the student something to contemplate. Lehman argues mythos and logos are better understood as means of “appealing to different elements within the soul” (81). This understanding highlights the value of both modes of presentation, granting the Socratic guide permission to use both as needed.

Lehman then notes the principle of “opposing misology” in the Phaedo and the Republic. Misology is the hatred of argument and discussion and, ultimately, logic and reason—an argument he develops from Socrates’ comments in the Phaedo and from D.C. Schindler’s work Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth. When viewed together, these Platonic dialogues provide the principles for classical education and the Socratic conversation, enabling the cultivation of love for both reason and one’s fellow learners.

Lehman then turns to later Christian examples of the Socratic conversation: Augustine, Boethius, and Thomas More. In these he notes the importance of the “inner teacher”—or divine revelation—the enchantment of the dialogue with wisdom, and the political role of the Socratic conversation, respectively.

To get “practical,” as some might say, Lehman offers helpful advice for leading the discussion in the classical classroom. First, he encourages the guide to embody and encourage active, attentive listening. This may seem obvious, but you might be surprised

to find how quickly a Socratic conversation can devolve into parallel monologues.

His next rule is to ensure that the Socratic conversation stays on topic. Again, this seems obvious, but it is much more difficult to do if it is not intentionally protected. Many students easily get off topic by blurting out a newer, “better” question, or by telling personal stories (that they think are connected to the original topic but are not necessarily) that lead the conversation astray.

Next, avoid serial monologues. It is not just the parallel monologue that prevents real Socratic conversation, but even serial monologues, where no one is asking or thinking about a question or how others have contributed to it, but simply taking turns describing their own opinions without connecting them.

Always refer to the text or work. This rule can be the most effective at staying on topic and preventing monologues because the students have to make their case from the text itself. They cannot use extraneous sources (unless the teacher allows, but even then it should be directly and explicitly connected back to the text) or personal experiences, thus preventing or at least mitigating monologues and off-topic conversations.

Lastly, remember your manners. Don’t be rude. Assume that every person there has something valuable, something that can draw out a new idea about the subject for everyone.

Lehman’s book is a welcome and helpful contribution to the classical teacher’s toolkit. Classical school teachers often feel unprepared to lead Socratic conversations, especially new teachers. Yet, as Lehman argues, the Socratic conversation is one of the most classical and fitting modes of teaching. Thus, the contribution he makes in this book to help teachers do what seems difficult, and to translate what they encounter when reading a Platonic dialogue into a classroom experience, is invaluable at this stage in the classical renewal. This is a welcome book. It should be read by anyone who takes Socratic teaching seriously.

Dr. Matthew Bianco is the Chief Operating Officer of The CiRCE Institute and Head Mentor for CiRCE’s teacher training apprenticeship program, where he trains teachers in using the Socratic method.

A GOOD YEAR FOR DANTE

By Sean Johnson

The two thousand and twenty-first year of our Lord may have over-promised and under-delivered on a tragic number of fronts, but for lovers of Dante the seven hundredth anniversary of the poet’s death will go down as a good vintage. His works have received a swell of attention—critical as well as popular—through efforts like 100 Days of Dante, a national reading group and lecture series presented by Baylor Honors College and several other partner schools, and a slew of new books.

The year’s notable publications include two critical works and a new translation. Veteran scholar John Took’s study, Why Dante Matters, finds Dante’s enduring value in the dialectic (or give-and-take dialogue) he creates between philosophy and poetry. The fruit of that union, something both more and less than theology, is expressed in the plain language of the poet’s own people but still manages to find fresh and relevant expression in every age. Took looks at Dante’s poems partially from a psychological standpoint, and ascribes this success, in part, to Dante’s skill for dramatizing complex mental movements in clear poetic imagery.

The other critical study is Love’s Scribe, by poet

and gifted Dante translator Andrew Frisardi. Frisardi turns a close-reading eye on the richly layered symbolism of Dante’s poems. He finds in the poet’s intricate and subtle uses of biblical literature cause for renewed insistence that Dante’s Christian “orthodoxy is indispensable to his poetic [way of knowing],” but he also breaks new ground on the significance of the Orpheus myth in The Divine Comedy

The work of both scholars is married serendipitously in David M. Black’s new translation of Purgatorio for NYRB. Black is both poet and psychoanalyst by trade, and cites the influence of both Took and Frisardi in his introduction. He combines insight into the workings of the mind with a poet’s ear and eye for imagery, to render an English Purgatory remarkably true to Dante’s original vision. He favors a plain diction, and his unrhymed verse has an unscrupulous meter that frequently varies, but at no point does Dante’s verse feel underserved. After all, Dante himself made the unprecedented choice of writing his Comedy in an Italian vernacular so its language would be closer to the common experience of his audience. The grandeur of his verse is undeniable, but it came as much through his ordering of words and the images he constructed with them as from the words themselves.

A language is more than a collection of symbols and translation, at its best, is more than the decoding and encoding of ideas. A language is a mode of

thinking and a world unto itself. Word for word, one of the greatest achievements in English literature is the utterance “lippity-lippity.” Beatrix Potter capturing the absolute essence of bunnies in the simple repetition of a nonsense word demonstrates the very pinnacle of the vernacular, and the impossibility of translating “lippity-lippity” reveals the difficulty facing anyone attempting to lift poetic feelings and images from one language and plunk them down in another.

Most of Dante’s notable translators have approached the project as a balancing of poetry and meaning. Dante’s unique and intricate terza rima is almost impossible to render into English without prioritizing some elements over others, and not a few translations stand or fall on the elements they choose. Dorothy Sayers, unarguably a translational genius, nonetheless overplays her hand by committing slavishly to a rigid rhyme scheme that clunks as often as it sings.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, unimpeded by end-rhymes, crafted the most exquisite and transporting verse rendering of the Comedy that English has seen or may ever see, but even his language, when it soars, can obscure the finer points of Dante’s intricate descriptions. Consider this account of the way the senses direct the soul toward the objects of its loves:

Your apprehension from some real thing

An image draws, and in yourselves displays it So that it makes the soul turn into it.

And if, when turned, towards it she may incline, Love is that inclination; it is nature Which is by pleasure bound in you anew

Compare, then, Black’s version of the same passage:

Your apprehension from some actual thing Takes what’s called an “intention” and unpacks it within you so that the mind can turn toward it; and if the mind, once turned, incline toward it, that inclination is love: all this is nature, that’s bound in you by pleasure from the outset.

Certain features of Dante’s original lines are visible underneath both versions, but Black has arguably rendered the complexity more simply. His contracted “what’s” offends a little, but rhymes (if you will) nicely with the frank tone, and the intangible, inward process being described comes through with workmanlike clarity.

Black’s lines rarely soar, but they can draw deep waters out of the heart of man—“Less than a single dram / of blood remains in me that is not trembling! / I sense the presence of the ancient fire!” And in helping English readers draw nearer to the inward sense of Dante’s intimidating masterwork he has more than redeemed the year.

READING THE ETERNITIES

By Sean Johnson

The news” was already a problem when Leo Tolstoy began writing Anna Karenina in the 1870s. Although it would be another two decades before the term “yellow journalism” was coined, and almost three before William Randolph Hurst told a photojournalist, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” Tolstoy could read the writing on the wall. But he could also see past the threat of “fake news” to a deeper danger that would alter our very capacity to understand the world rightly.

He was so wary of printed “news” that he characterized the shallow and faithless Stepan Oblonsky, in part, through the description of his news consumption. On the heels of detailing Oblonsky’s lack of contrition over recent adultery, Tolstoy tells us about the paper he read every morning:

not an extreme Liberal paper but one that expressed the opinions of the majority. And although neither science, art, nor politics specially interested him, he firmly held the opinions of the majority and of his paper on those subjects, changing his views when the major-

ity changed theirs—or rather, not changing them—they changed imperceptibly of their own accord.

Oblonsky “was obliged to hold views,” and appreciated his paper because it saved him the trouble of forming them himself—“he loved his paper as he loved his after-dinner cigar, for the slight mistiness it produced in his brain.”

The sobering suggestion at the heart of Jeffrey Bilbro’s recent book, Reading the Times: A Literary and Theological Inquiry into the News, is that we are all becoming Stepan Oblonsky. Complaints about the news are nothing new, and in recent years it has become commonplace even for journalists to turn on one another and for prominent publications to tack bathetic slogans onto their mastheads advertising themselves as the purveyors of “true” news. Though Bilbro creates a few pesky ambiguities by never offering a strict definition of “news,” there is no mistaking his subject, and his meaning remains aspic-clear. He contends that hand-wringing over the reliability of news outlets is something of a red herring, and that a better remedy for our trouble with “the news” is careful reevaluation of the role we grant it in our lives. True, “fake,” or otherwise, the issue is not what’s in our news, but what our news is doing to us.

Bilbro comments, in turn, on a series of sages who help him name the deleterious effects of mod-

ern news and provide models for living beyond them. The first and chief is writer-activist Henry David Thoreau, who pointed to the modern industrialization of the news as both its defining feature and the cause of greatest harm to its readers. The ability to produce and distribute a new abundance of news content was soon followed by the need to produce a new abundance of news content. Steam-powered improvements to printing technology and transportation turned news into The News, a commodity whose value was reckoned in tonnage. Bilbro relates Thoreau’s observation that “the increased abundance and speed of the news threaten to fragment our attention and damage our ability to see what is really happening and to think rightly about these events.”

Thoreau made vivid the fragmenting of our attention through the metaphor of macadamization, a method of paving roads with millions of small, broken stones. To remain profitable, the news must come rapidly and concern itself with people and events far outside of our natural sphere of experience, so that a mind that dines routinely on news becomes macadamized—divided between a thousand matters in a thousand places without the context to weigh the value of one against the others. Thoreau warns with dumbfounding prescience of the mind’s ability to be “permanently profaned by the habit of attending to profane things . . . its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over.” In our day, as in Thoreau’s, the problem is not a shortage of reliable voices but the sheer number and volume of voices—the more attention we give them, the less we are capable of attending deeply to anything at all.

Thoreau’s solution, built on one of the most serious puns in history, is to “Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but by flashes of light from heaven.” Bilbro assures readers this is far from a mystical escapism, but the strategy of many of the modern era’s greatest activists. Here he borrows the ancient Greek distinction of chronos time and kairos time. A constant flow of news confines our existence within the mundane, wasting, minute-to-minute, factory-whistle world of chronos time, and increasingly bars our entry into the larger, transcendent cycles of kairos time—a heavenly time or timelessness.

Beside Thoreau, Bilbro introduces a series of oth-

er exemplars—Thomas Merton, Simone Weil, Blaise Pascal, and others—who managed to decentralize their own experience with the news. Each in their own way cut out the vague and disconnected middle distance where mass-produced “news” originates, instead focusing on both the transcendent realities beyond this life and the immediate concerns of their neighbors. Their detachment from the “daily scrum” of current affairs actually augmented their momentous contributions to the political and social causes of their own times and places. He shows how each highlighted figure gives the lie to that crass old charge of being “so heavenly-minded they are no earthly good.” Their lives rather prove C.S. Lewis’ observation: “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.” Bilbro shows us how each found a way to speak out of the firm kairos harmonies of existence into the harried, chronos-bound troubles of their fellow man.

German philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel mocked such a posture when he endorsed reading the morning paper as “the realist’s morning prayer.” He contended that one may orient one’s “attitude toward the world either by God or by what the world is” and that both options are equally valid. He misses the hidden insight in Lewis’ comment above that only God and the things of God can make us much use to our neighbor. Hegel’s materialists may often elect to be selfless or magnanimous, but there is nothing stronger than their own preference keeping them so.

Oblonsky is one. Even as his wife is shut in her room, weeping over his infidelities, he can placidly take his breakfast and read his paper, content that he is still attending to matters of importance—important because they, no less than his domestic concerns, are real and reflect “what the world is.” When his mind turns momentarily to church, he wonders “why one should use all that dreadfully high-flown language about another world while one can live so merrily in this one.”

Though Tolstoy does not garner a mention in Reading the Times, both he and his characters certainly merit a place among Bilbro’s luminaries. Alongside pitiable, macadamized souls like Oblonsky, Tolstoy imagined their healthier counterparts in figures like Konstantin Levin—Anna Karenina’s true hero. A

mirror for Tolstoy’s own convictions, Levin keeps away from the intrigue of metropolitan life, preferring to raise a family and work beside peasants in the country. But these commitments only amplify his ability to see and speak decisively into his world’s weightier affairs when they arise. He lacks that mistiness of the brain that determines his views for him.

“Don’t get your news from the TV,” Bilbro concludes. “When you watch or listen to or read the news, you are catching a community’s ways of thinking—and feeling—about the events of the day.” If that “community” is a corporation with primarily financial motivations, you won’t be catching anything good. At this point I might’ve liked him to make a plea for the revival of inn- and pub-culture, and the slow gathering of news by word of mouth over frosty, frothy, steaming, or otherwise overflowing mugs of whatever you please. Alack, he is silent on that front, but for many of the spread-out communities of modern cities his suggestions represent the best alternatives.

“Seek out organizations that operate on a longer wavelength—not the moment-by-moment chatter of Twitter but the slower forms of thinking found in monthly or quarterly periodicals or books.” Look, he says, for small journals put out by people in your area, or found one of your own, where the overhead is low and the goal is to inform people of the ideas and good work going on around them, so that they can join in. He admits that a journal, like one of Lewis’ Christians or one of Tolstoy’s rustics, seems an unlikely hero. “A journal is an exceedingly modest affair, after all, born of the hope that human beings, trailing one another from page to page, might just be listening, and listening keenly, to one another.” Upon that possibility he grounds his hopes for many healed souls and many new lifegiving enterprises. May the very fact you are reading these words be some small proof that his hopes are well founded.

Sean Johnson teaches medieval literature at Veritas School in Richmond, Virginia.

The following is an excerpt from chapter one of Jessica Hooten Wilson’s forthcoming book, The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints. Walking through classic works of literature such as Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop; cult favorites like Kristin Lavransdatter; popular Protestant novels such as C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength; canonically Catholic novels like The Diary of a Country Priest; lesser appreciated works such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain; and others, Hooten Wilson draws from our multivalent Christian tradition to see holiness in the diverse array of saints. The characters in these novels replace the false heroes and idols handed to us by our culture and become the holy company we need to answer faithfully the Lord’s call to reform us into saints ourselves.

Inhis account of his time in the concentration camps in World War II, Elie Wiesel witnesses his father’s death. For a week, his father grows weaker and more delusional, unable even to climb out of his bed to relieve himself. The others in the camp beat him and steal his ration of bread. The elder of the block of cells advises the fifteen-year-old Wiesel, “In this place, it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others. . . . In this place there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. . . . Let me give you some good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore. . . . In fact, you should be getting his rations.” The young boy listens as one who has experienced the worst kind of suffering—abuse, sickness, starvation, hopelessness. For a split second, he considers hoarding his father’s ration for himself. Even mulling over the possibility leaves him feeling guilty.

Why? Why does Wiesel’s hesitancy in this moment cause him guilt? To take his father’s ration is reasonable: the old man will soon die; he’ll be oblivious to his son’s theft; he may even encourage his son, in his right mind, to take the ration for himself. Not to mention, Wiesel needs the food: his body is starving. This brief moment in Wiesel’s memoir reveals that human beings are more than mere minds or appetites. There is something in us that cannot be con-

tained within the body-mind dichotomy, something else where filial piety, generosity, magnanimity, and guilt are manifest.

Humans with Chests

Only a year before Wiesel’s deportation to Auschwitz, C. S. Lewis—seemingly a world away in England—gave a series of talks about this middle sphere of the human person, which he calls “the chest—the seat of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments.” This part of the person is what makes us human beings. It is our heart, the place where morality is felt and willed. According to Lewis, “It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man.” Whereas the world allows us only two options—we are either beasts ruled by our guts or we are brains who rule by the power of our intellect—Lewis prioritizes this third part as the true indicator of humanity. He published these talks in 1943 as The Abolition of Man

The book centers on education and culture, seeking to answer the question, How do we cultivate human beings with chests? Not every person in the concentration camps responded to suffer-

ing with the character—or chest—of Elie Wiesel. In Night, the young Elie watches one son abandon his father and prays to not be like him. While it may seem like a strange undertaking for Lewis to have written a book about education and culture in the midst of war and the Holocaust, Lewis knew the necessity of such a work. Nazis did not rise up from hell to impose their viciousness on Europe. They were formed by the schools that were controlled by the government, the cowardly withdrawal of many churches, and the misuse of language that encouraged masses of people to swallow evil as though it was a palliative. Lewis explains that the formation of Nazis may begin with something as seemingly benign as a textbook that unwittingly dismantles objective beauty and discards our emotional responses as irrelevant.

As a storyteller, however, Lewis knew that the most compelling work was not a collection of essays on education but a novel (though I highly recommend everyone read The Abolition of Man regularly if you care about a flourishing human culture). Lewis had already published Out of the Silent Planet, the first in his space adventure trilogy. He and J. R. R. Tolkien had agreed to write the kind of stories they themselves enjoyed, what Lewis calls in the dedication of the book a “space-and-time-story.” At the end of that story—a rather crazy romp on planet Mars— the main character, Dr. Ransom, a philologist (who seems to be based on Tolkien), decides to publish his experience as fiction. For one, his story seems unbelievable and would not be heard as fact. Second, fiction has “the incidental advantage of reaching a wider public.” In this decision, we glean from Lewis his desire to proselytize, to ensure that a large audience change after reading his book. By the time Lewis writes the third novel in the series, That Hideous Strength, he informs his reader in the preface that the book is a storied version of The Abolition of Man: “a ‘tall story’ about devilry though it has behind it a serious ‘point.’”

What is that serious point Lewis hopes readers draw from That Hideous Strength?

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis argues that good education must not merely tear down jungles but

also irrigate deserts. He means by this metaphor that, more than dismantling false conceptions of the world, we must teach people what they are to love. In the novel, Lewis disillusions readers of their mistaken assumptions about evil while showing us a beautiful picture of the good. Good and evil do not exist as entities “out there” but rather are planted and grow within a community through small and gradual actions that assent to or dissent from warring powers. In other words, the small decisions matter. For instance, if we lie to the DMV about whether we drove our car after the registration was expired (not that I’m speaking from experience), we have increased the strength of evil. And if we offer a room in our home to a student for a semester while she figures out finances for college, we have participated in increasing the strength of God’s kingdom. It’s like the Netflix show Stranger Things: the darkness grew stronger or weaker based on people’s actions.

Even better than a show or film that portrays reality with truthfulness, That Hideous Strength teaches readers the necessity of being formed by good culture. Those with all the head knowledge in the world still don’t stand a chance against evil if they have not cultivated a strong chest. Without chests, even those who fashion themselves as “heads” will devolve into beasts. In That Hideous Strength we witness both a community that nurtures a culture of holiness and its opposite, an infernal world that drags down the most dedicated of humanists. Lewis offers an illustrative warning based on Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians: “Bad company corrupts good character” (1 Cor. 15:33). But he also shows us what the church, in its highest ideal, could look like.

Content taken from The Scandal of Holiness by Jessica Hooten Wilson, ©2022. Used by permission of Baker Publishing www. bakerpublishinggroup.com.

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. She is the author of Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and The Brothers Karamazov, which received a 2018 Christianity Today Book of the Year Award in the Culture & the Arts; as well as two books on Walker Percy. Most recently she co-edited Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).

The great narrative of the Odyssey is not entirely told by Homer. The arch-poet Homer turns the story over to his hero, Odysseus, and it is Odysseus himself who tells of his voyages. In doing so, Odysseus reveals to his audience that he, like Homer, is a poet. But the meta-layers don’t end there. Those who read the work in translation encounter another poet: the translator. Desiring to understand and experience the original to the greatest extent possible, we ask of our translation: Is it faithful? In so doing, we ask the same question of our translators that has been asked for generations of Odysseus: Is the poet faithful to the truth?—a question especially fitting to the tradition of the Odyssey.

While the poet deals in truth, he does not necessarily utilize literal facts. This is likewise true of translations. Like Odysseus, the translator has a preeminent goal: to bring a work home. In bringing poetry into our native language, each translator will choose how tightly to tether to the original. Even when a translator desires a precise and literal rendering, fidelity to the complexity of Homeric poetry can be elusive.

Homer’s poetic craft is masterful to the point of mystery. Homeric Greek can do much with few words, allowing for poetry of depth and dimension dressed in simplicity and economy. His careful control of the elements of poetry—word, meter, and content—leave the translator a great challenge: how to render these three elements in a way that conveys the greatest poetic knowledge of the original. In general, a translator will prioritize certain elements above others, for English cannot fully capture the depth of Homeric Greek, and the translator must make concessions wisely.

A walk through a selection of the Odyssey, comparing translations to the original Greek, may help us see how choices of translation illuminate different aspects of the original poetry and may ultimately help us select translations suited to our particular purposes.

At the heart of Homer’s Odyssey lies the iconic descendus ad inferos, the journey to the kingdom of the dead. Instructed by Circe, Odysseus has learned that he cannot go directly home but must first journey to the underworld to consult the prophet Tiresias, who alone can tell him the way home. This action takes place in darkness. Odysseus travels to where the ancients believed the very boundary of the earth existed, a place where the sun cannot shine. Structured chiastically, the opening lines of book XI begin and end with images of darkness: as the dark ship sets sail, the journeying ways are darkened, and Odysseus and his companions arrive at the place of νὺξ ὀλοὴ—deadly, perpetual night. Eventually Homer starkly contrasts the darkness with the bright spiritual themes we will come to see in this book. But first, Odysseus walks in darkness.

Disembarking, Odysseus digs a pit and pours a libation to the dead. Invoking the dead, he sees the dread shades approaching. Odysseus’ narration translated by Richard Lattimore is,

the souls of the perished dead gathered to the place, up out of Erebos. (11.37)

And a few lines later:

These came swarming around my pit from every direction / with inhuman clamor, and green fear took hold of me. (11.42–43)

The Greek, which Lattimore translates accurately as “of the perished dead,” is,

νεκύων κατατεθνηώτων. (11.37)

Spoken aloud, these two words form a formidable phrase of nine syllables, many of which are long vowels that the ancient rhapsodes would have sung with double length. One cannot rush this phrase in Greek. The three long omegas sound like one long groan. In the original, the audience hears the unsettling groans of the dead before being told five lines later of their inhuman clamor.

Robert Fagles, whose translation flows beautifully when read aloud, phrases this as,

up out of Erebos they came, flocking toward me now, the ghosts of the dead and gone . . . (11.41–42)

Peter Green takes a similar approach:

There came up out from Erebos the shades of corpses dead and buried. (11.36–37)

Though idiomatic, Fagles’ phrase “dead and gone” slows down the pace, and partially replicates the lengthened, lower register sound of the original.

The first soul that speaks to Odysseus is his companion Elpenor, whom Odysseus and the others left unburied on Circe’s island after an accident took his life. Elpenor implores Odysseus to bury his body lest, unburied, it provoke the wrath of the gods. His instructions to Odysseus, translated with clarity by Peter Green, are,

Heap me a burial mound by the shore of the grey sea, / for those yet unborn to learn of an unfortunate man. / Do this for me, and set on my tomb the

oar / with which I rowed, when alive, among my comrades (11.75–78)

In the original, “Do this for me, and set on my tomb the oar” is,

ταῦτά τέ μοι τελέσαι πῆξαί τ΄ επι τύμβω ἐρετμόν. (11.77)

Fagles chooses the command “plant” rather than “set,”

Perform my rites, and plant on my tomb that oar / I swung with mates when I rowed among the liv ing (11.85–86)

as does Lattimore,

Do this for me, and on top of the grave mound plant the oar / With which I rowed when I was alive and among my companions. (11.77)

Though πῆξαί does mean to set or plant, it can also imply a more repeated action than either setting or planting, more like making something fast by hammering a few times. The phrase πῆξαί τ΄ ἐπὶ τύμβω ερετμόν, spoken aloud, sounds like a steady metrical drumbeat. In the original, this phrase heard with the next line, “with which I rowed, when alive,” recalls the action of a boatswain keeping time, hammer in each hand, striking the beat as the oars of the rowers rhythmically strike the water. Lattimore’s translation follows Homer’s hexameter. While it approximates the pace of the original and lends a foreign ethos to his translation, it is a meter not naturally rhythmic in English. Here, Green and Fagles imitate in English the rhythmic nature of Elpenor’s instructions in the original Greek. We can picture Odysseus pitching Elpenor’s oar upright in an action reminiscent of the time-keeper. Elpenor, whose name incidentally closely resembles ἐλπίς, hope, exhorts Odysseus to remember; to remember him while we remember the passage of time itself.

Next, Tiresias speaks to Odysseus, this conver-

sation being the raison d’être of this journey to the underworld. However, before Tiresias speaks, Odysseus sees the soul of his dead mother, Antikleia, and, unaware until this moment of her death, breaks into tears. Tiresias speaks for thirty-eight lines in the original, telling Odysseus of his homecoming, including a warning to not harm the pasturing cattle of Helios and that trouble awaits him in his household. After this long speech, Odysseus, the poet, a man whose epithets are prefixed with many- and much-, surprisingly replies with a one-line statement in the Greek, with no subsequent questions about his homecoming. Both Lattimore’s and Green’s line-by-line translations replicate the surprising brevity of the original. Green’s translation:

Teiresias, it may be that the gods have spun this thread. (11.139)

While Odysseus’ response in Green’s translation could be understood as thoughtful or wondering, Lattimore’s translation relates this as conclusive and practically dismissive, closer to the mood of the original Greek:

All this, Tiresias, surely must be as the gods spun it. (11.139)

Odysseus then asks about his mother, specifically why she sits in silence. Tiresias responds, in Green’s translation,

Whosoever of those that are dead and gone you permit / to come up to the blood will converse with you truthfully; / but any that you refuse will go back to where they came from. (11.147–49)

In this, Homer begins to reveal a crucial truth: the most important knowledge is found among the dead, among what is dead and gone, but only Odysseus can give it voice. Antikleia sits in silence until Odysseus gives life to her voice in the form of blood.1 Odysseus has traveled to the underworld to learn of his future, but he remembers that it is the past and the present

1. Antikleia’s name means the opposite of kleos. While kleos is typically translated as fame, its root is to hear. Kleos means that which is heard, and so, that which is famous. In the instance of Antikleia’s name, it is more likely that the significance hearkens back to the root meaning, she who is not heard

he does not know. In a triumph of what is past and familial, Odysseus dismisses the seer and magnifies his mother. After partaking of the blood, she speaks first, addressing him simply as τέκνον ἐμόν, my child. Green’s translation,

My child, how did you penetrate this murky darknes while alive? (11.155–56)

Antikleia is unhappy to see Odysseus here in this place of darkness. In the original, Odysseus responds in uncharacteristically simple language, which enhances the pathos of this encounter. Μῆτερ ἐμή, my mother, he says. Fagles, Fitzgerald, and Lattimore translate this more formally as mother, but Green captures the simplicity of Odysseus’ language and the intimacy of the moment with,

My mother, need brought me down here to Hades’ realm: / I had to consult the shade of Theban Teiresias. (11.164–65)

Having no questions for Tiresias about the future, he questions his mother first about how she died, next about his father and son, then about his wife and her fidelity to him. In the original, Antikleia’s response immediately brings Odysseus hope. She leads with the news of Penelope’s endurance, answering his last question first; and after her first few words, we understand that Penelope is waiting for him, Καὶ λίην κείνη γε μένει τετληότι θυμῶ. Green’s and Lattimore’s translations accurately reflect her motherly instinct to quickly comfort him,

Truly indeed she holds on with steadfast spirit. (11.181)

And Lattimore’s,

All too much with enduring heart she does wait for you. (11.181)

Fitzgerald’s translation is beautiful, though it does not make perfectly clear the good news until the second line:

Still with her child indeed she is, poor heart Still in your palace hall. (11.204–5)

In her final words to Odysseus, Antikleia tells him to hurry towards the sunlight and to remember all that he has seen so that he may tell his wife. Green’s translation:

But quick, hurry back to the light now, with all these things / stored in your mind, to tell your wife hereafter. (11.223–24)

The word that both Green and Lattimore translate as “hereafter” is translated by Fagles as “one day,” and Fitzgerald as “in after days”; all fitting translations for the original μετόπισθε. Yet there is a certain timelessness about the word hereafter that hints of retellings and calls to mind the work of Odysseus, not only the husband but the poet.

At some point, Odysseus pauses, and we remember that he is relating this story to the Phaiakians in the hall of King Alkinous. Here also, darkness has fallen. It is night, and the halls are dark and shadowy, and everyone sits in silence, paralleling the land of the dead. Queen Arete2 speaks first, breaking the silence. Green translates the Queen’s words,

Phaiakians, how does this man’s character strike

2. Queen Arete’s name may mistakenly be understood to mean excellence or virtue, but her name in Greek is spelled Αρήτη, which is a different word meaning the object of one’s prayers, the one prayed for.

Though some translations are more interpretative than others, all translations are acts of interpretation, offering to us truth as prioritized by the translator.

you? / His looks, his stature, his equable inner mind? (11.336–37)

The phrase that Green translates as “equable inner mind” is translated as “inward poise” by Fitzgerald, and “the balanced mind inside him” by Fagles. Lattimore chooses “the mind well balanced within him”:

Phaiakians, what do you think now of this man before you / For beauty and stature, and for the mind well balanced within him? (11.336–37)

While Green, Fitzgerald, and Fagles offer elegant translations of this phrase, Lattimore’s translation is the most thought-provoking. The original Greek is φρένας ένδον ἐίσας. The word ἐίσας is the same epithet that Homer uses in both the Iliad and the Odyssey to describe ships. Homeric ships are well-balanced, swinging evenly on the keel, maneuvering forward and backward. Shields are also well-balanced. Where this word ἐίσας appears, Lattimore does not vary the translation; he is comfortable replicating Homer’s repetition. While an English translation may not be able to bear the full repetition found in the original, Lattimore’s tendency to reflect this repetition helps us to perceive indirect comparisons; Queen Arete is likening Odysseus’ mind to a ship, the only means of returning home for the Greeks who fought in Troy, and a symbol of salvation. Despite his mother’s final advice to hasten back to the light, it is Odysseus’ nature to want to know more. After speaking to the wives and daughters of heroes and Agamemnon, he sees Achilles, the greatest of the Achaians, who reveals that he would rather be a hired hand for a landless man than lord over all the perished dead. Then Achilles asks about his son: Was he a champion in the war? After hearing Odysseus praise his son as a champion in both war and council, Achilles walks away. Odysseus describes the manner in which Achilles leaves, translated by Fitzgerald,

But I said no more, / for he had gone off striding in the field of asphodel, / the ghost of our great runner, Akhilleus Aiakides, / glorying in what I told him of his son. (11.639–42)

Lattimore translates these latter lines as:

So I spoke, and the soul of the swift-footed scion of Aiakos / Stalked away in long strides across the meadow of asphodel, / Happy for what I had said of his son, and how he was famous. (11.538–40)

Lattimore’s translation here is faithful to the words in Greek. However, Fitzgerald weaves in what tradition believes to be true about Homer. Long strikes, μακρά Βιβᾶσα, symbolize victory and glory. In the Iliad, Hektor took μακρα βιβας when fighting against the Achaians by their ships, after being assured of victory by Apollo (Iliad, 15.305). Fitzgerald here deviates from the Greek, opting for the word glorying, which is not in the original, rather than Lattimore’s happy, to associate these steps with battle victory; it is a thoughtful interpretative choice and well-grounded in context.

Though some translations are more interpretative than others, all translations are acts of interpretation, offering to us truth as prioritized by the translator. For those who would appreciate more of the interpretative work done for them, Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey is both poetic and insightful. Lattimore, on the other hand, will not disappoint the student or scholar who does not know Homeric Greek but wants to be able to quote Homer accurately. Fagles and Green are somewhere in between, with Green being closer to Lattimore in his precision, while still being delightfully musical. For a well-balanced poetic experience of the Odyssey, bring one translation home this year, then commit to a different one hereafter.

Monique Neal lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her husband and homeschools their four children. She is a CiRCE Certified Master Teacher and is a student and teacher of ancient Greek as a living language.

Jonathan Pageau is an icon carver, creating images based on the medieval canon of images for churches and people all over the world. This has led him to study the way symbols embody meaning, a field of study that he explores on his YouTube channel and blog. In particular, he often contemplates how the symbolic structures of our ancestors can inform our world today. Recently, he sat down with FORMA’s editor Katerina Kern to discuss the recurring themes of his life’s work.

Why do you speak so frequently on symbolism?

In the past two hundred years, since the Enlightenment, or maybe the Renaissance, we’ve moved towards a materialist way of understanding the world. We’ve gained a lot of power, material power, you could call it, through analysis and science—through quantifying things, calculating them, measuring them, predicting them. It’s quite impressive. But what seems to have happened as a side effect is we’ve lost some sense of purpose and ultimate meaning, some sense of the reason why we are bound together as communities, as families, as cities. All of which seem to be fragmenting around us today. People don’t know what is real, what is true anymore. And I believe that this is due to looking only at things that you can analyze and quantify, rather than looking at their purpose. So this symbolic way of seeing the world is a way to recapture these meanings, to recapture the mystery behind communion, families, and cities.

Symbolic thinking can help us understand how facts can be strung together in patterns, which we call stories, and in images, which take a bunch of stuff, bring them together in a frame, and help us see that they are one within that frame. All of this can help us move towards meaning again.

In your work, you frequently use terms like “truth” or “reality.” What do you mean by these?

Well, there’s a way in which we reduce truth to something like factuality, which is that if something exists, and we can touch it, we can count it, we can predict it, then that’s true. But there’s a deeper truth, which is hiding behind that, which is something

like: Why do we care about that in the first place? Why do we care enough about something to name it, to give it an identity and to engage with it? And so once we start thinking that way, we come closer to truth. We could call that value. You can understand it as something like an arrow that is aimed truthfully, that hits its mark. The arrow is true in that sense as well as a factual sense. This is the higher form of truth.

I think we’ve come to a point where it’s inevitable that we look at that higher form of truth again. This will then lead us to something like virtue and love. For we understand that the world exists in a certain manner through love, which is the capacity for us to engage with someone or something and bring it close to us without destroying them or annihilating their individuality, but rather to bring them into this relationship of unity and multiplicity simultaneously.

If symbols name things and Genesis tells us that naming things takes dominion over them, how do symbols express things without taking dominion over them?

In the notion of dominion we can understand the idea of hierarchy. Every identity has an aspect of it which is central and visible. When lighted you can see it, but that aspect of reality then could go in different ways. It moves in one direction towards the margin where it starts to break down, to manifest exceptions and strangeness.

Think of a chair. You know what a chair is. But once in a while you’ll encounter a chair that’s not necessarily a chair, it’s like a chair and unlike a chair. Perhaps it’s a bench. It’s in-between. And that’s totally okay. There’s room for that in-between in identity making, if you understand hierarchy.

Then there’s also a manner in which the identity points to something which is hidden, which is something like the mystery of the chair, which can’t be contained in its particulars. This is harder to talk about, but it has to do also with the purpose of the chair. So you can say that the purpose of the chair is not in the chair, the purpose of the chair is in our use of the chair. But there’s an even higher purpose of a chair, which would be to be something like a throne, let’s say, for the highest thing, the seat of the

highest thing. So the seat of a judge is getting closer to what a chair is in its mystery. But you can’t totally name it, you keep going higher and higher. And then you come, ultimately, to the notion of the throne of God, which is the heavens themselves. So there is a cosmic throne, a cosmic purpose for the chair that we use to eat our dinner. But it’s somewhat hidden, even in the chair which is physically present. Understand this in the chair, and you can understand the manner in which the heavens are the throne of God.

Do you think about this in Platonic terms?

I don’t necessarily use Plato. I use mostly the church fathers. One of the differences between Plato and the way the church fathers described it, especially St. Maximus the Confessor, is the church fathers understood man as the crux of this. One of the problems with Plato is that he has these forms up there. And then he has these shadows of the forms on earth. But where are the forms? Maximus says that the laboratory of the forms is man. So the human is the place where the forms are gathered in. And so the purposes of things come through human purposes. And this is really important, because it comes down to the manner in which you perceive things.

Right now, in terms of cognitive science, we realize that we cannot abstract ourselves from the intelligent beings that we are when we look at the world. We look at the world through this lens of being human, and having human desires and human goals, and this, for the church fathers, is not at all a problem. Because man is the image of God, so the human gathers these logoi (as they would call them), the different purposes of things, in himself. And then he offers them up. So it’s through man that they’re offered up. The reality of the human chair can help you understand the higher aspect of the throne of God, you could say, but it’s really through man. It’s through a form that we

are using and embodying and engaged with. So all the images we use for God are human images. That doesn’t diminish God, it means that all of these images that we gather into ourselves are projected up. And that’s totally fine because we are the image of God. This eliminates the problem of Platonism so we don’t have to think of a world of forms separated from the intelligence in man; it’s gathered into us.

This sounds like phenomenology. Do you think of this that way?

Yes, it is similar to phenomenology. I believe that Heidegger opened a door but didn’t have a full intuition of what he was opening. But I do think that one of the things phenomenology does is help us at least to re-enter this space of being. For example, Heidegger’s notion of dasein (care) is very useful, because it’s the idea that we see that which presents itself to us as that which we care about; it is the capacity for attention.

The difference between phenomenology and this understanding of meaning I’m describing is in the way we talk about it. We (the church fathers and I) are bringing it back into a type of metaphysics that includes the idea that humans exist in the image of the Divine pattern. It’s not just this arbitrary thing, it is actually the pattern of reality, and therefore it gives us access. If we accept that phenomenology and look up, then all of a sudden we can understand mysteries about the way in which the world lays itself out. So it’s not just about analyzing phenomena through the lens of experience, but it has a transformative aspect, which I don’t think Heidegger would have necessarily talked about.

Ultimately, it’s an offering that we give. We offer ourselves and all that we gather into ourselves to God so that the offered reach their full potential. And so then the dominion that we have over the world is not this cold dominion that we see in modern science and

modern technology, but rather a caring dominion. It gathers things and participates in them and makes them beautiful, so that they do become something like the body of God.

That’s beautiful. I’m wondering, then, if someone perceives what they choose to perceive, or what their priorities and their vision allow them to see, and then they tell a story, is it possible to have a false story? Is fiction possible? What makes stories true or false?

Again, hierarchy is the best way to understand this. The human person has different faculties, and those faculties are organized in a hierarchy. At the top, you have something like a spiritual intuition—spirit, perhaps. The spiritual capacity is to encounter higher things: God or higher aspects of reality. Then you have something like reason, which weighs the good and the bad. Then lower still you have something like your desires and your more irascible nature: your capacity to get angry, your capacity to be hungry for different things. Consequently, you have to purify your attention. Because your attention, especially in this world, tends to move down towards those lower aspects. So, in that sense, you can say that there are false stories that we engage in all the time. We have idols, which are usually these images of our lower aspects, but they can be derived from our reason as well. Those would be the stories which would be more false as you come down the hierarchy. But there’s nothing wrong with the desires if they’re properly organized, it’s only when you attend to them completely that they become something like idols. You can see that in terms of story. Most will be something like going down and up. Almost every story is about that: losing control, losing some higher aspect, facing a problem, facing a question, facing a challenge, then fighting it out and regaining that higher place.

So the hero’s journey is essentially every story?

Pretty much, but the hero’s journey makes it overly complex. You can just understand it as—situation, problem, resolution or non-resolution. That’s the big cosmic story, right? In the Bible, from the formation

of the world and the fall to the New Jerusalem, it’s down and up the hierarchy. There are stories of going up and down, but those are to return up again. Like Moses goes up the mountain, gets the law, and brings it down to the people [so that all can return up again].

If it’s just left at the bottom, I imagine that would be a tragedy?

Tragedy would be when things unwind. The image of Pentheus in The Bacchae is one of the best examples. His attention is not on the right place, so he ends up being a little too curious about the wild women in the wilderness and he’s literally ripped apart by them. That’s at the bottom of the hierarchy. It’s hell. Hell is being ripped apart—falling into chaos. The problem with these passions at the bottom is that we become slaves to them, and usually to several of them, and they fight amongst each other and we feel as though we’re ripped apart.

So you talked about these patterns. Which patterns do you think are most important for our culture now to understand?

This is going to surprise some people, but I think that right now the most important one to understand is the pattern of monsters. Our world is pretty much obsessed with that symbolism. If you just look around you, you’ll see it everywhere. If we’re not able to understand them, we won’t be able to see both their danger and their opportunity.

It comes back to the problem of identity and exceptions. So you have chairs, and then above them you have the throne of the judge or the throne of God, and at the bottom you have monster chairs. And those exist like broken chairs. They aren’t fully chairs—they’re chairs that are in between “chair” and something else.

These exceptions are part of the system, but they always appear at the margin of an identity. Imagine a tribe, let’s say. A tribe has its own cohesion, its own unity. And then once in a while someone will marry outside the tribe, or someone will come in from outside that is not part of the system. That person will be on the margin, which is totally fine. But one of the problems we have right now is that we’re obsessed

The pattern of Genesis is really a map of reality that can help you understand the manner in which the world works. Here we see this powerful creation of two extremes, Heaven and Earth. They slowly move towards a middle, wherein lies man as the union of breath and dirt and dust—the union of the chaos below and the spirit above.

with the exception, and so all our social discourse is about glorifying the exception in every way. But this accelerates fragmentation, because you can’t have an identity full of exceptions. They’ll end up ripping each other apart.

I think understanding that can help us find a more balanced relationship. The exception, or the fringe, is very important in the story. In the Bible, for example, it’s pointed out often that you always have to leave a fringe on any identity. You have to leave the corners of the field untilled so the stranger can come and gather it, and you have to leave a fringe on your vestment; you can’t tie everything up. You have to leave a little bit of chaos on the edge. Because tying everything up is part of dying; it’s actually a form of asphyxiation, you could say. So you can’t have a closed system; you can’t have completely closed identities.

That makes sense on a large scale—the image of the margin and the need for that in society as a whole. But what about the individuals within the margin? Should we not try to enfold them into the whole because society needs the margin?

There are a few ways to understand this. One is that people are not one thing. A homeless person is not just a homeless person. He’s also a man and Joe and the son of someone and the brother of someone. We all have some aspect of ourselves that’s of the margin.

Now being on the margin has advantages and disadvantages. We tend to think that the margins only have disadvantages, but that is absolutely not true. Being on the margin has advantages if you can perceive it properly. And so to the extent that as a person you have some marginal aspect to you, you have to try to make the most of that.

You speak of “the upside down world” a good bit in your work. When you talk about people trying to make the margin a part of the center, is this what you mean by “the upside down world”?

One of the problems of the modern world has been this idea of equality. It’s a very messy concept. There are so many vectors in a human person that this borders on absurdity. What do you mean by equality? Equal intelligence, equal in height, equal in attractiveness, equal in money, equal in skills? There’s no way in which all humans can be equal in all vectors. And because humans are not equal, and can’t be equal, in the desire to make things equal, they always have to overcompensate. A good example is the trope of women being as physically strong as men. That’s just not true. It’s true in the exception, but it’s not true in the pattern. Because it’s untrue, in order to bring the point about, you actually have to overemphasize your point. So the idea is not to show that women are equal to men, you have to show that they’re stronger than men. All you’ve done in your search for equality is turned the world upside down and repeated the same pattern in its inverse. This is problematic because it’s so unnatural that it brings people close to something like psychosis. Why force people into roles that are so unnatural to them that they have to embody their own opposite? If you just let things be, there would always be women that would be more masculine, and there would always be men that would be more feminine, but you don’t have to make it a goal to invert the patterns across all society.

Thinking more about the masculine and the feminine, how do we know what the proper patterns and forms are?

The relationship between masculine and feminine is not exactly the same in all cultures and in all times. It varies, but it necessarily has a certain pattern. All the ways in which we’ve tried to supplement gender with technology are the ways in which it goes a little bit awry. So in a world without birth control, for example, most of what we’re going through just wouldn’t exist; it just wouldn’t be possible. And now, they’re trying to compensate for that with more technology. For example, in Canada, we have these massive systems of maternity leave, because we’re realizing that there’s a problem when you turn the world upside down: the world ceases to exist. People just stop having kids, which is what happened.

You can see what it takes to preserve a system like that, and that if anything massive happened, like a war or a famine, all of it would go away. In the blink of an eye.

Could Christ as the masculine and Mary as the feminine be a way for us to reorient? Or are they simply an excellent man and an excellent woman? Might they be manifestations of a more universal pattern that we could participate in in some sort of a redeeming way?

Oh, definitely. Christianity is the only rampart. It’s the only thing that can hold the whole system. Those that are going to make it are those that are true. Truth wins. It looks like it’s losing, but truth wins. But a lot of things have to disappear before truth rises victorious. Think of it like an apple falling to the ground. It’s gonna rot, but the part of the apple that has the pattern, the seed, is going to rise again. That’s just how it works.

So you mentioned that these symbols and stories can seem really esoteric, or maybe just abstract, but are actually really practical and concrete. What are some ways that we can experience these universal truths in a more bodily or physical manner?

Being attentive to the way in which you participate in reality is probably the best way to experience it. If you’re a more secular person, you can start to expe-

rience it at a low level—something like realizing how patterned and ritualized the family dinner is, and how embodying certain patterns in that family dinner will make it succeed or not. That’s a coherent way to engage with the patterns of reality.

And those patterns scale up into higher forms. So, for instance, if you participate in a sports team, the team has a common goal. It has a common identity. So the people on the team, if they want to succeed, have to keep their eye on that goal. But looking up towards that goal implies also something like love for your neighbor. That is, you have to look out for your other team members and make sure that they’re okay. Winning, then, includes sacrifice. That’s also how a city works. That’s how our country works. That’s how a church works. And the church is the highest form because the purpose or the goal is the highest goal. And so, in theory, the love that we have for each other should be the deepest love as well.

How did you learn to interpret symbols in this way? What was your process?

It’s something my brother and I developed in our twenties, when we started having intuitions about meaning and Scripture. We could see that there was a deep connectivity in the Bible, that the stories looked similar. People seemed threatened by this because they didn’t think the world exists in patterns. They seemed to think that by showing the patterns in the story we were saying they weren’t true. That they were just “myths” or “stories” because they were patterned. We were confused because we could see how deep these patterns were in Scripture. So we started investigating patterns on our own in different ways. My brother ended up reading a lot of rabbinical commentary and I started reading the church fathers. Then we could see this form of thinking in the ancient mind as we saw that, because the world is patterned, there’s absolutely nothing weird about stories being patterns. They have to be patterns, or else you wouldn’t recognize them as stories. And so we started to see that not only are the stories patterns, especially in Scripture, but diving into that pattern, understanding it, and embodying it

or living it can give you something like a key to reality.

For instance, the pattern of Genesis, especially the first two chapters, is really a map of reality that can help you understand the manner in which the world works. Here we see this powerful creation of two extremes, Heaven and Earth. They slowly move towards a middle, wherein lies man as the union of breath and dirt and dust—the union of the chaos below and the spirit above.

And then when you see that, you realize so many stories are about how we can join this thing above with this thing below. Moses goes up the hill and gets the law and brings it back down, but it doesn’t work, so he smashes the tablets and has to go back up and get them again because there’s no connection. Now you’ll see many places where the connection gets broken, and then it gets reestablished.

That’s how we started to see it. We realized that all these stories are doing this same thing, showing us how to participate in this pattern, which once you once embody it, live it, really understand it, you can turn towards anything. You can understand politics, movies, fiction—anything that is within the human experience, you can now understand through the lens of the patterns Scripture gives us. One of the beautiful things that Scripture gives us is a teaching, a way of life. But it’s also giving us just as importantly an internal understanding of the patterns.

We can live by these patterns even without having a rational understanding of the teachings in Scripture. That’s why the simple faith is, in a way, superior to the intellectual. There’s a manner in which you don’t necessarily have to understand these patterns to live by them. If you reduce Scripture to the idea of virtue, rather than a more generalized notion of a mode of being by which the world lays itself out, then there’s so many things in Scripture that you’ll never understand. They’ll just be a mystery to you forever.

How do you teach your own children to understand the patterns and engage with them?

Religious practice is a good way to do that. But in terms of more educational strategies, the way that I did it with my kids was to help them see patterns. When they were very, very young, we would play a rhyming game in which one person proposes something and the other rhymes with it. We would just go

back and forth. We did this for years. But also, it’s very important to read stories, especially fairy tales, old stories, and Bible stories. But don’t try to explain symbolism to them. Instead, ask them to notice repetition. For example, when you read Snow White and get to the part where she eats the apple and dies, ask, “Have you ever seen this before in another story?” Usually they’ll notice it’s like Adam and Eve in the garden. You could then ask whether they think there’s a relationship between the two. You can leave it at that. Because stories rhyme in their structures. And helping kids see how this story is like that story helps them later on when they’re capable of understanding the patterns in a more intelligible way.

What is the responsibility of Christian artists and storytellers? What should we do as creators?

One of the problems that Christians have had in the past few centuries is that, because they’ve often failed to see the deep story patterns in Scripture, they’ve not been able to use those patterns to tell their stories. This has made our storytelling boring and moralistic and superficial. Diving into Scripture as a pattern for storytelling and looking at the other Christian stories like hagiographies and the legends that happened during the Christian period, like the Arthurian Romances, can help us recapture a more powerful spirit of storytelling. Christians have the responsibility to do this. We have the best story. The story of Christ informs all storytelling. From the time of its inception it has completely taken over storytelling. However, sometimes secular people tell Christian stories better than Christians because they unconsciously imbibed the Christian pattern of self sacrifice: death and resurrection—the pattern of using your strength to help the weaker. These are all Christian stories. They didn’t exist before. At least not in their fullness. Today, we’ve lost the golden key to storytelling because we’ve been so preoccupied with proving that our faith is historically valid or scientifically accurate, which is secondary to the way in which we actually exist in the world.

Katerina Kern currently serves as FORMA's managing editor and is an Adjunct Professor at Belmont Abbey Honors College and a Consultant and Researcher for the Circe Institute.

Poetry Mary Romero

Mary Romero lives in Tennessee, where she works as a deacon for the Mission Chattanooga as well as a writer, teacher, and mother of two lovely hooligans; her work has appeared in many journals and won the Luci Shaw Prize. The following poems will appear in her forthcoming collection, Loom, out in May from Finishing Line Press.

PENELOPE CONSIDERS HER SON AMONG WOMEN

With the men shipped off with their spears, my son works with the women

at their tending. He knows the leaven rising in the rye, and how

to beat it back, and let it rise again. He knows the scent of lye, how fingers blister and wrinkle, plunged in steaming tubs, how linen fibers go firm when wet and silk proves delicate. He knows the river of women’s chatter coursing alongside every task

and how to shorten such a task by singing, or noticing a trio of notes

tumbled from a nearby tree, to mimic and call the feathered shyness back.

He sings the names of flowers, knows their power lies not in flight, sinew, or bite, but in the quiet confidence that they will return.

THE WEAVING OF ARACHNE

The spindle-fingered spinster called Arachne adored her loom and wove with delicacy; precision equal to anything a god could make: a dahlia, a goldenrod. Her tapestries could breathe, redolent like perfumed hair, a crush of moss, a scent escaping from the threads. To see her tide in lapis-layered yarn was to reside within it, feel it fringed with foam and hear its susurration and its song. A deer could leap out of her rippled field. She’d weave a spell that only mortals, driven by need, have learned to cast. The never-discontent divinities still lack this element in art: the urgency to breathe another air, to make, with wrinkling hands, a world elsewhere that might outlive its source. We’ve all to gain, to glean a bitter beauty from our pain.

Enraged, Athena protested, and in a contest bested her—of course, an unfair test— how could it ever have been fair? Exiled, dark-eyed Arachne felt the snare entrap her. She plaited strings into a noose around her neck. They hung like roots beneath a tree, and when she fell, they laced themselves into a web around her, encased her purpled body as it split into a spider’s legs and spinnerets, the tissue of her skin now hard and haired, her abdomen, once thin, now heavy with silk to spin— and spin she must to live, as live she must to spin.

Listen. Our work cannot be rushed. It’s earned our time as more than future dust— it lives. And might entangle—or deliver us.

THE SONG OF THE SIRENS

In honeyed song, we do not mean to hurt you. Cursed to bear the emerald mirror of the world, we voice to passing souls our sole and shimmering view: the reverse of the tapestry, through-line of each thread’s purpose.

It’s beauty—not ourselves—that beckons, stabbing through your armor. The haze of days in which you’re drifting— dispelled—because you ache to know your life’s true value, its weight. The entire thread, unwound to its beginning.

Revere the mystery of living; it’s an antidote to us. You err in jumping ship just so you’ll know your glory, the point of all your gutting pain. Take note of the broken bones, the skulls and sun-flayed skin below,

the overlooked and unvoiced message we are sending: to hear your story, it must already have an ending.

wen Barfield once said that the obvious is the most difficult thing to point out to someone who has genuinely lost sight of it, and much of what I have to say of beauty is decidedly obvious. Maybe that is why it is hard to talk about beauty: because it is so common, ubiquitous, and obvious, we have a tough time saying anything concrete about it. Like meaning, beauty is so common that you might be tempted to not see it. Some pieces of literature and poetry, however, make the picture more clear and help us to see what is right before our nose.

One such piece comes from The Wind in the Willows, in the chapter “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.” In it, the two riverbank animals, Ratty and Mole, have learned that their good friend Otter has been anxiously searching for his young son, Portly, who has been missing for several days. Although it is time for bed, Ratty and Mole are both too restless and pained by their friend's distress to sleep, so they decide to paddle down the river to help look for Portly. It seems a hopeless errand, but they cannot simply do nothing.

As they travel down the river, the water rat hears something, suddenly sits up, and listens with a “ passionate intentness,” while the mole looks at him with curiosity, not hearing anything himself.

“It's gone,” sighed the Rat, sinking back into his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worthwhile but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spell-bound. “Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O, Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call

in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.”

Mole continues to row, although he himself is unable to hear anything of this music the rat speaks of, until eventually “the liquid run of that glad piping [finally] broke on him like a wave, caught him up and possessed him utterly.” The water rat sees “the tears on his comrade’s cheeks” and bows his head with understanding. The world around them seems to vibrate with sights, sounds, and smells of unspeakable intensity, and the song draws them in towards itself inexorably.

When they finally land at the source of the mysterious music, an island girt in flowers, they approach a “little lawn of a marvelous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees—crab-apple, wild cherry, and sloe. ‘This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,’ whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. ‘Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!’ ”

Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy—but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend, and saw him at his side, cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

It seems indecent to try and put the next scene into words, but they encounter Pan, the nature-god, and find little Portly curled up in peace and contentment

between His hooves. Standing before Him, breathless and shaken, Mole finds the breath to whisper to his friend,

“Rat! Are you afraid?”

“Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

As the sun bursts over the horizon, their vision is dazzled, and when they are able to see again, the glorious presence is gone; they immediately begin to forget the magnificence of the scene they had just beheld, “for this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod [Pan] is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the afterlives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before.”

Rat is quicker to forget that beatific vision and its accompanying song, “but the Mole stood still a moment, held in thought. As one awakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty! Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties.” Soon, the revelation of divine beauty dims, recedes, and disappears from the animals’ memories.

As they row back up the stream with the sleeping Portly, Rat catches fleeting glimpses of some strange song floating through the reeds and can just catch the words at intervals:

Lest the awe should dwell

And turn your frolic to fret

You shall look on my power at the helping hour

But then you shall forget!

Lest limbs be reddened and rent

I spring the trap that is set

As I loose the snare you may glimpse me there

For surely you shall forget!

Helper and healer, I cheer

Small waifs in the woodland wet Strays I find in it, Wounds I bind in it

Bidding them all forget!

Have you ever heard the song that Mole and Rat heard as they paddled down the river? Has your heart ever been caught up in that heady, wild, intoxicating rush and felt the stabbing ache ripple throughout the boundaries of your being? Have you ever been undone, in the best way possible, by an encounter with divine beauty? How can one even put words to such a thing? To speak of beauty is like trying to catch the wind with bare hands.

For all of our big talk, we are afraid of beauty. Beauty is dangerous—and most of us like our safety far too much to open ourselves up to an encounter with real beauty. As Bilbo Baggins warned Frodo, “you step into the road, and if you don’t keep your feet there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Open yourself to beauty, and there’s no knowing who you might change into. Beauty always transforms, though the seeds may take time to bloom. And it is not all pleasant—far from it.

C.S. Lewis argues that the hurt we experience when we encounter great beauty in nature results from the fact that our experience of that divine glimpse is permeated by a simultaneous perception of distance and separation. We ache because we see the chasm that exists between the beauty and ourselves, and it is not just that we want to have the beauty, but that we ourselves long to be beauty; we long to be united with it such that our being is caught up, lost, and re-found within it—to be married to it. In the absence of this, a glimpse of beauty can leave its wound on our souls, a bittersweet reminder that we live in a cursed and fallen world, like fractured bone. For one desperate moment, we remember what we have forgotten. We remember our Home.

Beauty, though it leaves a kind of (good) wound, paradoxically is the only true healing for those who have been victims of ugliness—an unfortunately inescapable experience in this cursed and fallen world. Those who have endured the trauma of tragedy and evil are also wounded, but these wounds tend not towards healing and life but towards death and despair. An encounter with true beauty may be the only effec-

tive antidote to these kinds of traumatic experiences, and those whose souls are scarred by ugliness will find beauty to be the only remedy that brings relief and healing to those wounds.

I once heard it said that good art should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. At its best, art incarnates invisible realities and clothes them in color, sound, and form so that we can glimpse them more clearly. The beauty that we see in nature is powerful, but seeing the beauty that a person can create through the use of their imagination and a physical medium is also a powerful experience, for through art we can leave behind ourselves and experience reality (for even a short time) through the lens of someone else. In history and literature, I am all men, for nothing human is truly foreign to me. Those artists who have experienced the healing of beauty may struggle their whole lives to attempt, over and over again, to bring into being on a canvas, or in a song, a glimpse and echo of that heavenly vision that they once saw. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true—those artists who have been traumatized by ugliness often incarnate more ugliness into the world, and they attempt to traumatize others with the ugliness that they have experienced. Misery loves company, and those who have been traumatized by ugliness often believe that they have received some special revelation in that experience which discloses the real, ugly truth of the world—like the cynical, treacherous dwarves trapped in the donkey’s stable at the end of The Last Battle, who will not be “taken in” by beauty because they are so convinced that their vision of ugliness is the most Real thing. The trauma of ugliness imprisons, not sets

free, even when the possibility of paradise itself lies before you.

Short of ugliness, however, beauty can also be dangerous in how it is manipulated by others to paint a picture of the Good Life. The Wind in the Willows vividly shows how the power of beauty can be used (or abused) by others to enchant, bewitch, or even brainwash. In a later chapter, “Wayfarers All,” the same water rat has an encounter with a treacherous beauty that nearly destroys his life. He meets a traveling rat on the road near his house, and innocently enough invites him back for lunch and a rest before continuing on. As the two of them eat and talk, the adventuring rat begins to talk of his wayfaring wanderer’s life, and with his words he begins to weave a spell of images, sounds, stories, and pictures that fill the water rat’s imagination to the brim and take control of him:

Spellbound and quivering with excitement, the Water Rat followed the Adventurer [in his imagination] league by league, over stormy bays, through crowded roadsteads, across harbour bars on a racing tide, up winding rivers that hid their busy little towns round a sudden turn, and left him with a regretful sigh planted at his dull inland farm, about which he desired to hear nothing.

The adventuring rat uses potent pictures and memories to weave a spell of enchantment that takes hold of the water rat’s imagination, and the fascinating beauty of these images makes the water rat’s nor-

Theophanies lie all around us, if we have but eyes to see them. And what is more, we ourselves hold the power of creating (as makers) theophanies with our words and actions; we hold the ability to create flashes of divine, self-sacrificial light that illuminate the darkness of this fallen world.

mal life seem dull, dry, lifeless, and utterly undesirable by comparison. The seafaring rat seems to know what he is doing, and his enchantment of the water rat seems undeniably deliberate. The water rat is intoxicated, snared, bewitched.

By the time their meal was over, and the Seafarer, refreshed and strengthened, his voice more vibrant, his eye lit with a brightness that seemed caught from some far-away sea-beacon, filled his glass with the red and glowing vintage of the South, and, leaning towards the Water Rat, compelled his gaze and held him, body and soul, while he talked. Those eyes were of the changing foam-streaked grey-green of leaping Northern seas; in the glass shone a hot ruby that seemed the very heart of the south, beating for him who had courage to respond to its pulsation. The twin lights, the shifting grey and the steadfast red, mastered the Water Rat and held him bound, fascinated, powerless.

The adventuring rat continues to weave his spell over Ratty, and when the river rat finally comes to his senses, his guest has already left. Ratty stands up, “mechanically,” and begins packing his bags to leave behind his beloved home in favor of the sexy, glamorous, alluring life shown to him by the seafaring rat. When his friend Mole shows up and finds him packing up to leave, Mole has to physically wrestle him to the floor and restrain him, as he is clearly not in his right mind.

The Rat struggled desperately for a few moments, and then his strength seemed suddenly to leave him, and he lay still and exhausted, with closed eyes, trembling. Presently the Mole assisted him to rise and place him in a chair, where he sat collapsed and shrunken into himself, his body shaken by a violent shivering, passing in time into an hysterical fit of dry sobbing. Mole made the door fast, threw the satchel into a drawer and locked it, and sat down quietly on the table by his friend, waiting for the strange seizure to pass. Gradually the Rat sank into a troubled doze, broken by starts and confused murmurings of things

strange and wild and foreign to the unenlightened Mole; and from that he passed into a deep slumber.

Rat is already enduring the painful withdrawal symptoms from his brief overdose of specious beauty.

It takes the mole some time to learn what has affected his friend so deeply (the rat himself hardly knows how to put it all into words), and the main result is the enchanted rat seems to have lost all interest in the things he used to care about; a listlessness hangs over him. As a good friend, Mole slowly draws Ratty back into reality by talking to him of “the harvest that was being gathered in, the towering wagons and their straining teams, the growing ricks, and the large moon rising over the bare acres dotted with sheaves. He talked of the reddening apples around, of the browning nuts, of jams and preserves and the distilling of cordials; till by easy stages such as these he reached midwinter, its hearty joys and its snug home life, and he became simply lyrical.”

Mole heals Ratty with the images of simple, everyday, common beauties lying hidden in the water rat’s soul. His healing is not complete, however, until the wise Mole suggests that Ratty try to write some poetry. “The Rat was absorbed [in his poetry] and deaf to the world; alternately scribbling and sucking the top of his pencil. It is true that he sucked a good deal more than he scribbled; but it was joy to the Mole to know that the cure had at least begun.” This negative enchantment is primarily enacted through pictures and images that take root in the imagination, and the healing, therefore, must take a similar form.

This last point, though subtle, is momentous. For those that have been seduced by false visions of beauty, sometimes the only path to healing lies through the attempted creation of beauty oneself. This is of particular importance for classical educators, for we know that our students and children are constantly being bombarded with false, seductive beauties that parody the Good Life—particularly when we send them off to college. For the most part, we try to protect our students by stuffing them full of goodness and truth; we cram them with syllogisms and arguments, and admonitions to virtue, thinking

that this will protect their souls when they go off to the vicious battlefield that is higher education. But I once heard someone rightly say that our college students are far more likely to be drawn away from the faith by false visions of beauty than they are by false arguments—and my own experience holds this to be true. Only true beauty can fend off false beauty, and in general we have done a woefully poor job of teaching our students to recognize and love and create beauty. We often deem the creative arts extraneous and unnecessary to the formation of goodness and virtue, and we foolishly segregate students into false categories of “artistic” and “nonartistic”—as if the appreciation and creation of beauty were only something useful for a small, select set of people and not something vital to each and every human being.

We are all of us artists in that we are all “makers.” Usually we think of artistry as creating a piece of art through some particular physical medium, like painting or sculpting, but the idea of artistry actually extends much further than that. Lewis once famously said that you do not have a soul, but you are a soul. I would go one step further and say you are in the process of crafting a soul. Every single day, with every thought, word, and deed, you mark the canvas of your soul, changing it from its previous state to a more complex, up-to-date version; your soul is the art project which you are working at day in and day out. Like the picture of Dorian Gray, our choices change our souls to become reflections of those actions. What the artwork of your soul will look like in the end you cannot yet know. Just as in the creation of a physical work of art, the picture typically does not emerge in clarity or completeness until the end of the process, and it often looks very little like the beginning or middle stages. Whether the art of our soul will be a thing of beauty remains to be seen— after the time for work is finished. Only then will we see the results of our handiwork and whether we have crafted our soul to become a thing of beauty or everlasting horror.

The beauty of our souls is primarily determined by what we pay attention to. We will become that which we spend time beholding, admiring, and being enchanted by. The church fathers teach that certain types of vices, addictions, and slaveries cannot be overcome without some form of physical artistry that a person can work at, some art that they can

bend their attention to in order to heal their traumatized souls—and no one escapes being wounded in this fallen world. In rightly desiring to protect our students and children from unnecessary ugliness, we have falsely assumed that arguments, logic, and reason will be the best defenses for them. And while these things are important, they are not the primary movers of the human soul. Rationality is fine, says Dostoyevsky through the Underground Man, but it only accounts for a small fraction of human existence—what then of everything else not covered by rationality? We have fallen into the modern, materialistic, scientistic trap of elevating rationality above all else and at the expense of all else. We have ceded the definition of man from homo adorans (“worshiping man”) to homo sapiens (“thinking man”), as if rationality were our defining characteristic. It is not. Our ability to worship is our defining trait, and we inevitably worship the beautiful—or our best estimation of it. Why then do we not dedicate more time, energy, and money to developing that artistic and aesthetic impulse in our children and students so that they will not be pulled asunder by false enchantments of beauty? Do we honestly think that rationality stands a chance when faced with the seduction of false beauty? Be honest with yourself, and examine your own life: Do you sin more often because you do not know that your behavior is sinful, out of ignorance? Or do you generally sin because you find something in that sin beautiful and seemingly worth wanting (at the time)?

Saint Porphyrios once said, “No one ever became holy by fighting evil; instead, fall in love with Christ.” It is not facts, or syllogisms, or logic that will protect our children’s souls from ugliness and evil, but rather giving them practical training in how to recognize, love, and re-create beauty in their own lives. Bank tellers are trained to recognize counterfeit money not by studying counterfeit money, but by studying and becoming familiar with real, authentic money— so that they can thereby more easily identify deviations from that true form. One cannot understand or identify fallacies until one has learned the appropriate use of the three modes of persuasion. Likewise, a clear and lucid picture of the truly beautiful best wards off ugliness and false beauty. If we desire our children, our students, or ourselves to become more virtuous, more good, and true, then we must let the

beauty of Christ invade our souls and ignite a fire of eros for God that will burn off all lesser, impure loves. The Greeks thought of beauty as the radiance of the Good; if we hope to become good, it must be the light and warmth of beauty that leads us home.

“But how do we determine what is truly beautiful?” you will surely ask. Beauty seems so subjective to moderns, and we spend endless hours debating aesthetic standards—can we really even judge what is beautiful? In The Ethics of Beauty, Timothy Patitsas puts forward a standard all Christians should use: quite simply, our standard for beauty is the cross, and Christ crucified. In that paradoxical picture, we see a revelation of ultimate beauty that can and should guide our basic aesthetic judgments.

The symbol of Christ crucified on the cross is a theophany: a revelation of God and his nature. In the cross, we see the revealing of the great mystery of self-sacrificial love that transforms the horror and ugliness of crucifixion into life and victory. This is why all who would follow Christ and be his disciples must daily take up their crosses and be crucified. In this single, symbolic act, we see most clearly the heart of God: to pour himself out as an offering for those who do not deserve it. So we ourselves must, like Christ, be willing to be a living sacrifice, offering up our lives for the life of the world, humbling ourselves even unto death, that through death we might find eternal life. Our vision of beauty must always involve some element of self-death or self-sacrifice, where we glimpse the logos of the Christ’s cross shining through. With training, the cross can be seen in the beauty of art and nature, but it can perhaps be seen most clearly in the realm of human actions and behavior. We can make our very lives a thing of beauty.

Theophanies lie all around us, if we have but eyes to see them. And what is more, we ourselves hold the power of creating (as makers) theophanies with our words and actions; we hold the ability to create flashes of divine, self-sacrificial light that illuminate the darkness of this fallen world. We can, by our pursuit of the logos of Christ, become beauty incarnate. In the end, every man is the artist of his own soul, and his thoughts, words, and deeds are the brushes by which he paints the logos of his own being. We are all in the process of creating something—there is no possibility of not creating! The only question is,

are we making something that reflects divine beauty, or something that reflects a diabolical ugliness of selfishness and consuming others? Do you live a life of self-sacrificial beauty? Are you willing to be vulnerable? Are you willing to open yourself up to be wounded by beauty?

I said earlier that we are afraid of beauty. But why is that? In our best moments, we would say that it is because we are afraid of being seduced by false beauties. But there is perhaps another reason. What if we are wary of beauty because we are afraid of the conversation that would follow should we encounter true beauty—because we are afraid that then our previous seductions by false beauties would become apparent? An encounter with genuine beauty always renders us vulnerable and reveals our interdependence on others and our ultimate dependence on God. Adam and Eve, once they were seduced by the false beauty of the apple, hid from God and feared his presence because they did not want their ugly, selfish, non-sacrificial actions to be known and brought to light. So too do we fear that, by encountering beauty, our own weakness and failures will be brought to light. Our wounds will be revealed, festering, stinking, and crawling with maggots—too ugly and painful a thought to bear, for most. And yet the path of healing requires we open the wound to the air, that we let the healing medicine of beauty penetrate deep into the source of the old hurt. It is painful, and it feels like wounding, yet as Lewis says in the poem “As the Ruin Falls,” “. . . the pains / You give me are more precious than all other gains.”

May God have mercy on us sinners, seduced by false beauties, and may he never stop sending that sweet, distant tune to our starving, aching ears.

Related Poems for reading:

• “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

• “A Tree Telling of Orpheus,” by Denise Levertov

• “Lilith,” by C.S. Lewis

Joshua Leland is a husband, father, and teacher in Concord, North Carolina.

When we praise a poet,” says T.S. Eliot, we too often isolate those aspects of his verse which resemble least anyone else’s—which depart most surely from his predecessors. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot challenges the critic’s inclination to “pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man,” and fixate upon this singularity “with satisfaction” (36). Truth be told, no artist “has his complete meaning alone,” for his significance is indissolubly tied to “his relation to the dead poets and artists” (37). To gain fulsome appreciation of his achievement, you “must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead” (37). When we rid ourselves of the penchant for originality and invention in favor of situating the new in the stream of tradition, we may just find that “not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (37).

Dana Gioia’s long poem “The Underworld,” the first installment of a book-length project which appeared in The Hudson Review in 2018, may become his magnum opus. Gioia conceives of this ambitious tour of the afterlife as his swan song—one of the last and lasting things he will say in poetic form (may he live to bring many more verses into being). The poem is clearly written under the influence of book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, Seneca’s The Madness of Her-

cules (which Gioia has translated), Ovid’s myth of Orpheus, and Dante’s Inferno—all works that imagine the nature and character of the hereafter. Nonetheless, it possesses an utterly contemporary idiom and pictures an underworld defined by a peculiar blend of bureaucracy and mystery; the narrator, an allegedly trustworthy travel-agent tour guide, assures us that the unknown can be mastered by rules. The numinous, he insists, can be mapped. Gioia’s odd coupling of curated, touristic travel and afterlife terrors may not be as gruesome as the museums of monsters made by his predecessor poets, but its very familiarity makes it more hellish.

The form of the poem is atypical—seventeen stanzas comprised of seven lines each. The spiritual connotations are obvious, but they introduce a tension rather than a resolution. Yes, seven is a sacred and mystical number, and yes there are seven Sacraments, but there are also seven deadly sins. Unrhymed, written in blank verse, the stanzas are innately asymmetrical, presenting challenges for the poet himself and giving the work a strange and surprising feel.

“The Underworld” tracks the travels of a person addressed only as “you.” Guided by a nameless instructor, this character tries to properly prepare for a harrowing visit to Hell. Prior heroes who have passed through its caravan of horrors haunt “your” memory as “you” undertakes a mysterious errand in honor of “your uneasy dead.” Steeped in grotesque mythological visions of what this place of punishment will

be like, “you” is met by a litany of nothingness that reconfigures our understanding of the underworld.

The poem’s epigraph, posted like a sign alerting travelers to rough terrain, is taken from the Aeneid of Virgil: “Facilis descensus Averno” (descending into Hell is easy). In the first line of his poem, Gioia transposes the classical Latin into a contemporary, colloquial key, as if the reader were following a do-ityourself tourist brochure that caters to the tediously straightforward, the streamlined step-by-step:

It isn’t difficult to visit Hell,

As long as you can follow the instructions

Get on the Underground, the Western Line. Go to the final car. Sit by yourself

In the last row. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t exit when you reach the outmost station. Don’t move—not even when the lights go off.

You may remember Virgil’s original, either from when your Victorian schoolteacher drilled the lines into your mind or when your soul soared aloft with Plato’s Forms before you were born, soaking in the classics in preparation for your passage through this life. “The Underworld” offers a negative rendering of Virgil’s original: not the positive enunciation of ease found in facilis descensus (the descent is easy), but “It isn’t difficult.” The switch seems to sap some of the shock that comes with an easy-access underworld, a mythical place of eerie Otherness which is, in Gioia’s case, bridged by the familiar means of the subway “Underground.” Still more, the accent on removed obstacles and effortlessness tells only part of the truth. What is omitted is ominous: Yes, the way downward is easy, and yes (in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation) “Black Dis’ door stands open night and day, / But to retrace your steps to heaven’s air, / There is trouble, there is the toil.” Given this difficulty, the Sibyl calls Aeneas’ desire to piously descend and find his father a “mad effort.” But in Gioia the peril is muted by the assurances of a nameless tour guide.

The first stanza’s directives themselves consist of six terse imperatives (the number just short of perfection): three oughts, countered by three don’ts. But even the oughts lead the poem’s protagonists to further isolation and alienation. What initially seems like 3 - 3 = 0 amounts to a sort of -3, the negation of the sacred number. This depiction of Hell via ne-

gation, first found in Dante, is in Gioia’s poem exercised with forceful flourish in the final stanza of the first published part.

We also experience such negation in the “Descent to the Underworld,” an excerpt of Seneca’s The Madness of Hercules, which Gioia translated in his collection Interrogations at Noon. The play tracks Hercules’ horrible fate as, made insane by the Furies, he kills his wife and children. For Seneca, as for Virgil, the underworld’s entrance is “wide enough / For all mankind,” and here too the “journey now seems easy”—even though when it “begins to draw you down” the gravity and inescapability fast become eerie. Seneca soon peppers the reader with a litany of negativity:

There are no grassy meadows bright with flowers, No fields of tasseled corn swaying in the wind, No soft green vistas for the eye, or groves Where branches bend with slowly sweetening fruit, No breezes spiced with odors of the plum.

Although Seneca’s landscape is far from cheery— stripped of all vitality and fertility—Gioia’s nullification is still more unnerving, because the imperative solitariness and the series of don’ts do not negate the natural landscape: they restrict “you”—the everyman, addressed through apostrophe, who tours the world below.

This device, the “you,” differentiates us from Dante with far-reaching consequences. On the anagogical level all readers can identify with Dante, as we all have sinned and many of us with prodigal degrees of lostness. However, there is always the possibility of seeing Dante as a peculiarly awful sinner, as if he, more than we, needs the tour of hell to right his wayward passions and mind. In Gioia the possibility that “you”—that is anyone and everyone—could arrive here in hell is front and center: “you” never goes away.

When the conductor comes to hand out tickets, There’s a small charge. No money changes hands, But you must offer something of your own— Your book, your fountain pen, a lock of hair, Your smile, perhaps the memory of your mother. He’ll always notice something that he needs. Each trade is final. There are no returns.

Whether “you” will remain on tour or mired in this foul foreign land remains an open question, for when the conductor comes to dispense tickets and retrieve “the fare,” we find—only after the trade is made—that “each trade is final. There are no returns.”

The pun on “no return” is, needless to say, not funny, given the destination. The second stanza is replete with such reversals and defied expectations. At first you might find assurance that “no money changes hands,” in fulfillment of this “small charge” levied by the train conductor. On the other hand, the very smallness of the fee suggests that the mechanism of letting you know you must pay is more important than the fee itself. You can give him “something of your own” such as a fountain pen, a book, or a lock of hair. But the stakes elevate starkly, the prospective barters grow increasingly taxing and exacting: along with a list of dispensable items, the instructions indicate that you may have to surrender “Your smile, perhaps the memory of your mother.”

Also unsettling is the fact that the “trades” are forced; there is no free exchange. Worse than this, “he’ll always notice something that he needs.” That is to say, what is taken is driven by the will of the conductor, who presents as a need the whims of his wants. This aspect of relative randomness is found, in Inferno, in the circle of the suicide’s soul which Minos tosses into the forest, where it is “blown about / where fortune flings it. After its descent / it roots at random.”

In a hell defined by what Erich Auerbach calls “the almost pedantically precise concreteness of Dante’s genius,” wherein wailing and awfulness are never arbitrary, for “he never sacrifices the strictest clarity,” the arbitrariness of the suicides’ tossed state is especially harsh because it departs from the rational categories and ordering we’ve come to expect (Dante, Poet of the Secular World, 109–10). In contrast, Gioia suggests that whimsicality is at the core of the underworld, for even before you arrive you are subjected to it.

Sin is separation—from God and from others. Hell is not other people (as Sarte suggested) so much as it is solitary confinement with only our own selves as visitors. For this reason, the punishments in Dante’s Inferno can include the perpetual pairing of two souls who were mortal enemies while on earth—as when we meet the Ghibelline Farinata and the Guelph Cavalcante stuffed into the same grave, still cultivating an eternal enmity. Whereas Virgil encourages Dante

to speak with any number of the damned—from the magnanimous Farinata to the sodomite father-figure Bruno Latini—the nameless instructor of Gioia’s underworld warns the passenger, “Don’t talk to them,” the other riders, for “they know much less than you.” The others on the train are, we learn, “the damned” about whom there is “nothing notable.” Apparently “you” is an outsider, a visitor-tourist rather than an impending resident. Here again we remember all of the damned whose definite features drew Dante’s curiosity, as when he finds Pope Nicholas upside down in a faux baptismal font and asks Virgil, “Master, I would like to know his name / who is twitching more than any other one” (70)—and here, as elsewhere, his master consents to his just request. Curiosity is not always forbidden, so long as its motive is right.

In Gioia’s underworld, the soon-to-be tenants have “nothing notable” about them, except their very commonplace appearance and status. In place of Dante’s loud and dramatic exemplary figura we have a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” disposition reminiscent of a Soviet conductor taking foreign diplomats on a “nothing to see here” trip through the Gulags. In Dante the damned are placed together in a sociality that reflects man’s political nature, an innate link to the common good which many ignored in favor of individualist gain. Hell itself has a capitol, Dis, and thus the condemned are citizens of a common place. But they repeatedly come off as indifferent to their fellow sufferers, and so when Gioia’s guide says, “Frankly, they aren’t interested in you,” it rings true.

The damned, however, likely disagree.

Perdition is a matter of perspective.

What makes them notable may not be visible.

Damnation is an essence not an outfit.

“Why this is hell nor am I out of it,”

The instruments of pain become internal— Barbed memory, the lash of consciousness.

The damned are dead-set on advancing subjective interpretations of their own situations. For them, “perdition is a matter of perspective.” Hell, in other words, is a hotbed for what Nietzsche called “Perspectivism.” In Will to Power he insists that “it is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against.” Out of each individual’s “lust to rule” he wishes to “compel all the others” to accept his per-

spective “as a norm.” There exists no objective reality, metaphysical or more modest. In spite of this subjectivist assertion, “damnation is an essence and not an outfit,” and here hell is essentially a state wherein “the instruments of pain become internal—/ Barbed memory, the lash of consciousness.”

Auerbach notes that some critics of Dante see him as guilty of “haphazard products of an irresponsible fantasy seeking to pile up horrors,” and in spite of his monsters, in Inferno the worst aspect of damnation is also internal (112). Pope Nicholas is already writhing when Dante finds him upside down in a pseudo-baptismal font, but it is the way Dante’s invective pierces his intellect that pains the former pope most: “You dared use guile to win / the lovely lady that you lacerated,” says the pilgrim poet, furious over the highest cleric’s abuse of the church. After a fusillade along these lines, Pope Nicholas’ “two feet kicked like mad” (72). Perhaps it was “his rage that made him twitch,” but Dante doesn’t rule out “his conscience” as the primary cause. This pain is worse than any torments the whip-bearing demons could devise.

In City of God, St. Augustine addresses the reality of hell when contemplating Mark 9:42–47, where Jesus warns of souls being “cast into hell fire, where their worm dies not, and the fire is not quenched.” Some, he says, think that “both the ‘fire’ and the ‘worm’ here mentioned are meant as pains of the soul rather than of the body,” for the damned “burn with anguish of the soul” (498). Augustine argues that both interpretations are possible.

In Brothers Karamazov, Father Zossima also takes up the question: “But I think if there were fire in material sense, they would be glad of it,” he suggests, assuming an unexpected angle: “for I imagine that in material agony, their still greater spiritual agony would be forgotten for a moment. Moreover, that spiritual agony cannot be taken from them, for that suffering is not external but within them.” This truth tremors through Gioia’s underworld.

Regardless of the supremacy of spiritual agony, “you” can’t resist “surveying” the hell-bound. What strikes him more than the condemned’s golf attire or the fact that a bishop is among them (Dante surely has inured “you” to this possibility) is the mysteriousness of Gioia’s world below. If, ala Dante, they possess both prophetic powers and a blindness to the present moment, you’ll never know, for “they sit like oracles

bereft of utterance. / Theirs are the secrets Hell exists to hide.” Gehenna, as Gioia envisions it, lacks the transparency and rational surety so characteristic of Dante.

The damned also lack the definiteness of Dante’s characters, whose thickness and telling details are notorious, so much so that “sometimes the individual character becomes so intense as to outweigh” the circle or Malebolge (“evil ditch”) that they inhabit, thereby “determining Dante’s—and our own—sympathies” (Auerbach, 106). Crucially, Auerbach argues, “the Inferno is rich in significant figures whose extraordinary virtues are not annulled by the vice for which they have been damned” (106). God’s justice demands that their natural virtues and their idiosyncratic traits be manifest even amidst the flatterers’ latrine existence. In spite of the fact that his “head was so besmeared with shit,” Dante recognizes Alessio Interminei, just as he makes out the noble Florentine sodomites although their features are seared beyond recognition, just as elsewhere he recognizes persons by their voices alone (68).

This is not to say that Gioia waxes abstract in the way of Seneca; no “desperate Famine” or “drowsy Sleep,” no “thin Anxiety” or “Tottering” Old Age inhabit this place (23). But Gioia’s Hell hides all of these things, and its horrific character is stoked by this scary secrecy. This secrecy is apparently absolute. We know more about the passengers’ luggage (“hand-tooled leather fragrant with adventure”) than we do about the spiritual burdens carried by these voyaging souls, for “their heaviest burdens are invisible.”

Again the question of how long this tour will last waxes worrisome, for although the instructor advises the poem’s protagonist to “dress comfortably” because “you don’t plan to stay, / Or bring back anything except yourself,” he also reminds “you” that he should pack “no more than you can carry / Eternally.”

The travelers who ventured here before, The living ones, who crossed into the shadows

To violate this place, could not resist

From questioning the dead. They hoped to learn Forbidden things and yet remain untouched. There are some truths that only darkness knows. Such knowledge never comes without a price.

What would the underworld be without the “leg-

endary heroes” who risked the descent? “Such knowledge never comes without a price.” Consider Ovid’s Orpheus, whose “new-wed bride” dies young from a serpent’s poisoned venom. He “dared descend through Taenarus’ dark gate / To Hades to make trial of the shades” (225). Striking sublimely sad chords from his lyre, he pleads with Persephone and company, asking the Fates to “reweave” his wife else “my resolve is clear / Not to return: may two deaths give you cheer” (226). He swears that his purpose is straightforward; no dubious curiosity drives his descent: “I have come down / Not with intent to see the glooms of Hell, / Nor to enchain the triple snake-haired necks / Of Cerberus, but for my dear wife’s sake” (225).

Although “the Underworld could not deny the prayer” of Orpheus, and the musical lover meets Eurydice again, as they depart from this “murky gloom,” just at “the edge of the bright world” he looks back in fear, violating the compact, and she slips from his fingers with a “faint farewell,” turning back from whence she was just lately resurrected, leaving Orpheus’ wits stolen (226).

The darkness drives Orpheus to madness. Such is to be expected, says Gioia’s instructor, for others “who crossed into the shadows / To violate this place, could not resist / From questioning the dead.” Others besides Orpheus are more blameworthy, for they “hoped to learn / Forbidden things and yet remain untouched.” “The Underworld” condemns those who dare dread descents and assume they will emerge untouched, for “such knowledge never comes without a price.”

In The Madness of Hercules, Seneca enunciates this stubborn fact that there are only a few heroes who have descended into Hades and returned. This one-way ticket accords with the ancient taboo telling that the descent profanes the hero, since he violates the sanctity of the afterlife and the kingdom of darkness. Nietzsche corroborates this concern in Beyond Good and Evil: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

In Gioia’s rendering, “The deeper they explored, the more entangled,” because “the truths that darkness taught infected them,” “goading their descent.” Gioia’s verse resounds with Seneca’s characterization of “the path” which “begins to draw you down” and “the

dark” that “turns ravenous,” letting “no one return.” In “The Underworld,” most of “the legendary heroes” are “not searching now but lost,” indistinguishable from “the shadows they had questioned.” This state of perpetual searching embodies the lifelong seeking Pope Benedict finds in Friedrich Nietzsche, who, dreading the abyss, nonetheless favors bold lostness over easy happiness:

The young Nietzsche encouraged his sister Elisabeth to take risks, to tread “new paths… with all the uncertainty of one who must find his own way”, adding that “this is where humanity’s paths part: if you want peace of soul and happiness, then believe, but if you want to be a follower of truth, then seek”. Belief would be incompatible with seeking. From this starting point Nietzsche was to develop his critique of Christianity for diminishing the full meaning of human existence and stripping life of novelty and adventure. Faith would thus be the illusion of light, an illusion which blocks the path of a liberated humanity to its future.

In “The Underworld” all renderings of the perpetual searchers are stripped of romantic glorification: a shade is a shade by any other name. This meandering heart is given moving expression in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, but St. Thomas Aquinas spells it out as a vice: curiositas. The viciously curious man might strive to “know the truth above the capacity of his own intelligence,” or—he cites Augustine—“by their sinful curiosity” they sought “knowledge from demons.” Alternatively, they might “imagine they are doing something great,” he says in the Summa, “if with surpassing curiosity and keenness they explore the whole mass of this body which we call the world.”

Remember Dante’s Infernal Ulysses, who departs from Circe not to head home but questing after the thrill of adventure, “the longing / I had to gain experience of the world / and of the vices and the worth of men.” Thus driven, he stirs his men on a mad flight to uninhabited vistas beyond the Pillars of Hercules (and thus beyond the known world), captaining their unending damnation.

Those “Legendary Heroes” . . . will not include you. You abjure heroics.

No epic journey, just a private trip

Without ambition for reward or glory.

You cross the border between worlds to bring Belated gifts to your uneasy dead. No winged divinity spoke in your dreams. Nothing copels you but your riven heart.

“You,” however, “abjure heroics.” Unlike “yours,” Dante’s journey, in the Inferno, is hardly undertaken “willingly,” at least initially. Intoxicated by Virgil’s verses and the slightest hint of Beatrice’s eyes, he submits to the slog with stars in his eyes—and not the kind moved by love. But your journey is not “epic,” it’s “just a private trip.” Initially this categorization seems satirical— another sendup of a modern antihero, a mediocre man whose self-styled modesty is actually pathetic slack. But Gioia undermines an ironic sense, giving us someone stripped of “ambition for reward or glory,” a soul set on bringing “belated gifts to your uneasy dead,” compelled by “your driven heart.”

Here we have a recurrence of the Orpheus / Beatrice motif, but modulated to something much more modest. Gioia’s wanderer is not motivated by an impas sioned erotic and marital bond to risk all for his lover. Nor is he the saintly solicitor Beatrice, intercessor for the lost soul Dante. Rather, “you” yearns to make rep aration of a kind. The word “gift” is key. Here we have not the failure of dues owed in strict justice, but de

ferred gifts—“superfluous” solidifications of friendship or agape—something like “the debt of love” bespoken in the Epistle to the Romans 13:8.

Dante too came to give things to the dead. Regularly he promises to return to earth and right wronged reputations—even of those in hell. Take Piere delle Vigne, faithful counselor and aid to Emperor Frederick II. Falsely accused of treachery, he was thrown in prison and killed himself by smashing his brains against the wall. Although on account of his suicide he inhabits the Inferno, Virgil assures him that Dante will one day “refresh your fame” (48). Dante also articulates depths of gratitude to a variety of friends and father figures, many of whom died unexpectedly; as their lives were cut short, it is likely that Dante never adequately voiced his thanks. Passing through the circle of the sodomites, he walks beside Brunetto Latini “like one in reverence / with my head bowed low” (56). As Aristotle argues in Nicomachean Ethics, it is impossible to give back to one’s teacher what one has received from him, and Latini taught Dante Aristotle and Aquinas, “what a man must do / to become eternal.” Dante’s dredge through the kingdom of darkness is not undertaken solely for his salvation; he too must satisfy justice.

Gioia’s character is so modest that we know very little about the particulars of the errand; all we can tell is that “your” dead are “uneasy” and “you” are bringing them “belated gifts,” unbidden by any “winged di-

vinity.” There is something more arresting about this understated motive, this apparent humility: “you” will never receive the glory of an impassioned Orpheus or the reverence given to a beloved Beatrice. “You” are not balancing a rigorous scale or seeking to snatch your lover from doom, but are making reparation for an unspoken offense that seems to be between “you” and God.

“You” are, however, still a tourist, and though a tourist can get woefully lost—never to be seen again—for now you are taking in the view as the train and subway platforms begin their final descent. Gioia gives us a sort of “Avernus by mass transit,” making familiar and modern the bucolic and sublime found in Seneca’s similar downturn.

In The Madness of Hercules, the underworld is accessible via a “famous cliff on Sparta’s coast”:

It’s here the mouth of Hades opens up. The high cliffs split apart, and a huge cave, A gaping chasm, stretches its great jaws And makes an entrance wide enough for all man kind.

Gioia preserves the sense that the underworld and ours are linked by a portal, but in his “tunnels” and “subway platforms” and “dim and dirty stations” which take you there were once part of a flourishing civilization, even if now they are unused by anyone “except the dead.” Speeding “nowhere,”

The train emerges to lowland plain Bordered by mountains on either side. Behind each range another range arises,

A space at once enormous and confined,

The verses are clearly cousins of Seneca’s, but Gioia’s side of the family is more expressionistic; the way is still woefully wide, but it is also—simultaneously—“confined.” In “your” consciousness, Hell’s “landscape without sky” induces immediate claustrophobia, however expansive it is. The land and the psyche are linked.

Dantean grotesqueries are reduced to a minimum, if not muted entirely. True, when “you” turn to the woman next to you “with such urbane composure,” you cannot help noting that she “has turned to stone.” The situation is doubly strange. First, “no sudden Gorgon-gaze arrested her,” for “she drew this slow perfection from within.” Second, “she now seems more / Beautiful in her alabaster skin.”

In Inferno, when Virgil and Dante approach the city of Dis, the devil pulls out his B-level horror movie tactics, sending “three hellish Furies, who in shape and mien / resembled women, but they were blood-smeared / and girdled with hydras of the deepest green” (33). With hair made out of vipers, these “handmaids of the queen / of eternal lamentation” were “clawing at their breasts with all their might, / beating themselves and shrieking” (33). There is something especially fearful about their self-destruction, for if they sought to harm only others they wouldn’t so lividly communicate nihilism. These Furies threaten Dante with Medusa, ensuring Virgil that “He’ll be stone cold / when she gets done!” (34).

At this point in their passage through hell’s unholy expanse, both Virgil and Dante are palpably un-

Gioia’s “The Underworld” interrupts our imaginations, refusing us handrails when we need to exit the train, poeticizing nothingness with rhythmic potency.

nerved. Virgil has met the limits of his natural means at the gate of Dis, and Dante, seeing his mentor’s bare adequacy in the face of frenzied Furies, comes close to despair: he confides that “I thought I would never come back here [to earth] again” (31). At the very point that their impasse is most awful, an angel arrives, operating with the detached grace of “one who was preoccupied / much more with other matters than he was with our affairs,” and he salvages the two halted men (35).

Gioia’s poem is stripped of these B-level horror tactics of Hell. No demons compete to trick the visitors that their powers surpass God’s; no horned devils knock on the walls or shock with their visceral puffed-up wherewithal. Is his character in less peril than Dante, then—here in some ultramodern underworld? Perhaps the devil’s wiles are far more insidious. Remember that “you” met this transformation into stone with a studied “composure.” This calmness comes off as a ruse of respectability, anxiety over “making a scene” in public at a moment when wailing and gnashing of teeth are in order.

But there is no evident order in Hell. Dante gives us blueprinted Ethics (a map modified by Aquinas’ commentaries). Virgil provides a hierarchical ranking, from wailing infants to “souls falsely accused” to those “sad souls” who “contrived / Their own destruction” and so on (174–75). As if to affirm the Roman Empire’s commitment to law and order, the underworld is also wonderfully put together. Mind, in fact, rules the cosmos. “Mind / Infused through all the members of the world / Makes one great living body of the mass” (185).

In Gioia’s underworld “you” eagerly await this same order as the train arrives at its destination. Familiar ticks surround him—things he found whenever the airplane hit the tarmac back home or a train slowed into its station: “Even the damned are anxious to arrive,” and they “fumble with their baggage nervously.” Likewise, Virgil’s new arrivals on the shores of Styx “stood begging to be first across / And reached out longing hands to the far shore” (170). Here, as in Dante, the souls pine for their destiny, however bleak or Elysian it be. Gioia’s travelers seem bent on something different, convincing themselves that “surely some revelation is at hand,” channeling Yeats’ Celtic spirit. “This world can’t be as indecipherable / As the last,” they continue. “Hell at least

must offer order.”

The poem seems to track the fellow passengers more than “your” consciousness. It channels the existentialist insistence that creation cannot be traced back to a Creator. Infinite regress would seem to these folks de jure and not fallacious. Why would souls seek an outline of sanity amidst the underworld? Maybe so they can assert that hell is superior to earth, and, if this is the case, their own rebellion was wisdom and subservience would have been silly. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus counsels, owning the absurdity of a hellish circularity and asserting self-creation against the world’s wearying necessities.

Disappointment comes for the existentialist:

No fire, no furies, no ferryman, No bleeding thorns, no waters of oblivion, No triple-headed dog to guard the gate, No gate at all as far as you can tell, No burning wheel, no stones to push uphill, No Titans bound in chains, no serpent kind, No sun, no moon, no stars, no sky, no end.

Here negation is barely contained by the slant rhyme of “oblivion” and “ferryman,” “tell” and “uphill,” before it ricochets from wall to wall of whatever measure the lines can maintain, collapsing the walls of the claustrophobic underworld and uttering a litany of nothing. Because the poem names what is not, we cannot help envisioning these very absent beings and objects and elements. But the final note of nothingness revolves around something: “no end.” Hell is eternal, “everlasting” like Dante’s, like God’s own creation which He called good. Gioia leaves us with a yearning for that notoriously hard sign that his predecessor poet saw over Hell’s entrance: “ALL YOU WHO ENTER, LET NO HOPE SURVIVE” (11). That, at least, would be something—and the rest of the sign assured us still further, proclaiming that “JUSTICE MOVED MY GREAT MAKER IN MY DESIGN / I WAS CREATED BY THE PRIMAL LOVE / WISDOM SUPREME AND POTENCY DIVINE” (10).

Gioia’s “The Underworld” interrupts our imaginations, refusing us handrails when we need to exit the train, poeticizing nothingness with rhythmic potency. “Sin is nothing,” Aquinas writes in De Malo,

citing a gloss On the Gospel of John, “since sin is nothing, and human beings become nothing when they sin” (57). At the gates of Dis, Dante felt the Furies, their melodramatic pyrotechnics of evil. Effective as this was for the sake of our senses, Gioia’s depiction of evil could be more accurate. Aquinas argues that “every real thing has a conformity with some good, and evil as such is not in harmony with good but contrary to it. Therefore, evil is not an entity.”

Assuming you still reckon to return, Observe these rules. Don’t eat. Don’t fall asleep. Taste anything in Hell—a piece of bread, A sip of wine, a single pumpkin seed— And you invite the darkness into you.

Sleep, and the memories of life will fade. You wake a dry husk turning in the wind.

But pure negation is not the final word. We learned, earlier, that a hell will harbor this nothingness somehow. And, once there, “assuming you still reckon to return / Observe these rules.” Do not eat. Don’t sleep. If you sleep, you will wake “a dry husk turning in the wind.” That is, you will not even be akin to dried corn, but merely the crisp surface detached from its purpose, scrubbed of memory.

Of course the Lethe of yore would also rid you of memories, but the aftermath of that experiment was not reckoned as reliable. In Seneca, for instance, the “quiet and smooth” river curves across the plain, and though “one drink will wash away the memory, / Of all life’s sorrow,” the souls who slurp from it are submerged and carried along as the stream “bends back on itself / So many times that travelers scarcely know / Whether it seeks the seacoast or its source.”

Gioia takes the dubiousness of memory loss even further: if you sleep in the underworld you aren’t stripped of anxious images, remembrances of pain and wrongdoing. Any and all memory can be taken—again, apparently arbitrarily. If you eat or “taste anything in Hell—a piece of bread, / a sip of wine,” you “invite the darkness into you.” The two laws of nature necessary for human survival—eating and sleeping—here only increase darkness and emptiness. For all its horrors, Hell in Gioia’s hands is in some ways awfully familiar to the world above—our world, in our time.

T.S. Eliot contends that “the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” The bones of Gioia’s generation are dry, and in a valley, awaiting the Spirit’s resurrecting breath, for in our time there is an infernal establishment of rules that are meant to procure mere obedience without orienting us toward a human good. Gioia’s poem consistently captures this rule-bent condition through the imperative managerial voice of the instructor who tells “you” what to do. But the verses also voice it through the basic rules that, stated so simply and with straightforward surety, would frustrate even an infernal flea from flourishing.

As Alasdair MacIntyre observes in After Virtue, our modern world rests on the idea that “questions about the good life for the ends of human life are to be regarded from the public standpoint as systematically unsettleable” (119). This interminable perspectivism is as perilous for politics as it is for our persons—bodies and souls both. In place of laws oriented toward common goodness, we witness the way in which mankind rules itself, unhinged from a more fundamental conception of the good for man, a tacit promulgation that no such definitive end actually exists. Virtue, then, blanched of its ancient flourish, is recast as “just those dispositions to produce obedience to the rules of morality.” In Gioia’s underworld this logic is carried to its furthest extremity: the rules are fundamentally contrary to virtue, against nature—and yet their arbitrary punishments promote obedience.

These rules, so central to Hell, are reminiscent of the Satan at the center of Dante’s Inferno. Each of Lucifer’s three mouths contains a traitor, and he chews eternally upon their duplicitous bodies in a conscious, rebellious, cannibalistic inversion of the unbloody Eucharistic feast. In Gioia’s poem the inversion is less gross—no “bloody slobber, dripped down his three chins” (130). But the fact that Hell’s unnatural rules strive to counter not only nature but Christ’s Blood and Body (inviting “the darkness” into you in place of sacramental grace) may just be the unexpected and twisted witness of “The Under-

world,” amidst the nothingness, to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Virgil, wrote Eliot, is “peculiarly sympathetic to the Christian mind” (135). The creator of the Aeneid “looks both ways; he makes a liaison between the old world and the new”—the classical and the Christian (138). Gioia also stands at this intersection. He has been fascinated by literary hells since he first studied them in the Harvard classroom of classicist and translator of Virgil Robert Fitzgerald. Like Virgil, Gioia looks both ways. But whereas Virgil was a pagan Roman with messianic yearning for “heroes mingled with gods” (to cite the fourth Eclogue), Gioia stares mesmerized by these powerful myths of the past but finds them fulfilled and corrected by Christ, who even hellions can (faintly) descry as the center of the cosmos (136).

Joshua Hren is cofounder of the master of fine Arts in creative writing program at the University of St. Thomas and is the founder and publisher of Wiseblood Books.

James Matthew Wilson is the author of ten books, including, most recently, The Strangeness of the Good (Angelico, 2020), which won the Catholic Media Award in poetry. He is Cullen Foundation Chair of English Literature at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston, where he directs the MFA program in creative writing. Wilson also serves as poet-in-residence of the Benedict XVI Institute and as poetry editor for Modern Age magazine.

Poetry James Matthew Wilson

THE BONES OF MEN AND WOMEN

I

The bones of women bend toward motherhood, Their arms already cradling the unborn. The bones of women balance in repose, To pierce the fleeting moment with the timeless. The bones of women give themselves away, Little by little, as a shore erodes. The bones of women drink up suffering And tell it when all thought of flesh has faded.

II

The bones of men will creak to rise and walk, Yet bear a crossbeam steady on their shoulder. The bones of men grow straightened like an arrow That flies, impatient, to its single end. The bones of men are scattered like desire And like desire are shattered by its weight. The bones of men shift, restless in the parlor, But sleep within the beaten dark of clay.

BEFORE THE GATES

When I first opened Homer, there was no Comparison of Greek and English, no Discovery of some wild diction freed Of pert chiasmus and antithesis. No, there was awe. Like everyone, I saw The rattling grandeur of Achilles, thews Straining beneath the plating of his armor. He shook his spear and pounded on his shield, Its hollowed underside reverberating A deep and plangent summoning of doom.

And so it’s always been. I was not one Who, having seen a conversation through, Would smirk and with a knowing eye conclude Upon some pithy phrase from Cicero. If I had ever met with one who could, I would have asked him to repeat the line, As if I had misheard a word or two, Before I realized what I’d just confessed.

Nor was I one of those who, having made Acquaintance with the greats just well enough To take a first and get oneself a place, Retained a sense of individual pride By reading some gay minor novelist Whose every purple passage is a romp Of flashy irony and knowingness, As if one’s bookshelf could beget a scandal.

Oh, no, I didn’t even know it all Existed; would have smiled a nervous smile, Confused to learn about these carryings on.

What’s more, the ease some had with it would shame: That half-remembered lines, arcane and old, Could summon up a whole pericope

Once studied, yes, but now to be assumed And treated as a password at the gate.

Reception’s not the same as gratitude. And gratitude it was, when I first read The barbarism in those staggering lines, The poets calling out some cosmic order

When all seemed but a hodge-podge strip of road. Whole lives are makeshift, huts of tin and shingle. Whole worlds are dustbowls or unplanted wastes. Who knew that time was measured out in verse, Or that, amid our daily squalor, glory Could rise to blazing immortality?

When one has even a taste of something grand, It’s like the faithful poet who would follow His master down into the bowels of hell; It’s like the man who went and bought a field; It’s like the one who had himself remade

By speech and gesture and by tailored suits: He may pretend possession, but not feel it.

And that, in fact, is how it ought to be.

He’ll watch, admiring, as the laureled shade Discourses on the arrow flight of love.

He’ll see the army swarming like blank ants Upon the shore, the pyre already smoking.

He’ll sit, his lips zipped tight, to hear the questions That bring forth certitude from mouths of slaves. And guard, and guard most jealously, each thing He’s somehow run across, all that was hidden, And rearrange his days as acts of praise.

Just reading by the lamplight, he will start To fit what he has learned, and see himself Be fitted to it, made its borrowed image. And such brute love, such tension strained between Raw admiration and shamed ignorance Is almost certainly the only way A decent soul and city come to be.

THE NEW WORLD

Our thrones and altars, in the best of times, corrupt, Moth-eaten and self-serving, we set out In search of empty lands, of places rich With iron buried in the earth, old trees Sheltering the hills and welcoming the clearing. We think, it was a purity of heart, A certain independence that was missing In those who came before us, cowering Beneath the shadows of the gallant horses And such hard masters as their saddles bore.

We think of self-taught boys, in bygone days. The cabin still, the horse beside its oak Nosing an idle mirror of creek water, As some young scholar, squatting on his stump, Attempts to memorize a speech from Shakespeare. His mind, we think, though slow to come to order And destined at its best for common sense, Will see the fence posts dug, the fields well planted, Will map and parcel out the wilderness. And somehow he will build us something better.

We do not, in such fantasies of hope, See wild and graying uncut hair or nails Brittle and claw-like, gnawed by crooked teeth. We do not see the man outside the store Who sucks upon discarded catsup packets While waiting for your exit and your change. We do not mark how much our nature yearns For shaping and will be shaped soon enough By those who do, until we watch strange columns Come marching in their uniforms and boots.

And then, we look into the jeweled light Descending on the priest at consecration; We see all beauties meet within the face Of some beheaded majesty; and wonder How they, inbred and cunning, they, so vain

And reckless, nonetheless raised stone on stone And set the great hall echoing with music. We stare, bemused and sullen, that the root Of every good should be already tangled In time and blighted in its growing flesh.

From Lines to Stanzas

With the rise of free verse in the early twentieth century, the question of what distinguishes poetry from prose swiftly became a vexed one. While some free verse seems a sparse collage of words, lacking so much in grammar and syntax that one might be inclined to follow the poet Marianne Moore’s humble judgment that one can call it poetry only “because there is no other category in which to put it,” most free verse observes the basic features of prose composition. In this at least it conforms to the spirit of Ezra Pound’s admonition, in the first age of free verse, that “poetry must be as well written as prose.” Over time, the commonplace has come to be that prose is written in paragraphs and poetry is written in lines.

In one sense this is an adequate distinction. In metrical poetry the internal properties of the line will define or determine the line as a whole. That is, a poem composed in iambic pentameter will consist of lines that are measured and conformed to the pattern of five iambs. In free verse, there can be no similar internal principle that determines the lines; the lines will be formed arbitrarily, that is, by the will of the poet, sometimes according to a discernible principle, sometimes not.

Sets of lines in metrical poetry are sometimes organized into groups called stanzas. This is also the case with free verse. Edmund Spenser’s hymns, for instance, are all written in the organized group that came to be called “rhyme royal” after James I, King of Scotland, composed a long poem in it. The “Hymn to Heavenly Beauty” opens:

Rapt with the rage of mine own ravish’d thought, Through contemplation of those goodly sights, And glorious images in heaven wrought, Whose wondrous beauty, breathing sweet delights Do kindle love in high-conceited sprights; I fain to tell the things that I behold, But feel my wits to fail, and tongue to fold.

Each line is in iambic pentameter. The stanza has the rhyme scheme of ababbcc. The stanza itself repeats forty-three times and constitutes the form of the poem.

Just as free verse lines operate according to a radically different principle than do lines in meter (or

rather, an absence of universal principle) and yet we still call both verses, so also both metrical and free verse are generally said to have stanzas, even though these too operate on radically different principles. One early achievement of free verse are the poems of William Carlos Williams’ book Spring and All. Poem XIX in that volume begins thus:

This is the time of year when boys fifteen and seventeen wear two horned lilac blossoms in their caps — or over one ear

What is it that does this ?

It is a certain sort — drivers for grocers or taxidrivers white and colored —

fellows that let their hair grow long in a curve over one eye —

Horned purple

For purposes of description, almost everyone would refer to the major visible divisions of the lines into groups as stanzas. The first stanza has four lines; the second just one; the third, three; the fourth, two, and the fifth one. The lines vary continuously in length such that, while one can hear three strong rhetorical stresses in each of the first four lines, that loose pattern is soon lost.

In Williams, the breaking of the lines into stanzas is as unintelligible as breaking the sentences into lines. At first, it may seem he is listening for three beats; then, with the single line constituting a single question, it may seem he begins to break the stanzas into grammatical units. Finally, with “Horned purple,” one might guess he wanted to set the garish pair of words in relief by surrounding them with white space.

My purpose is not to chase after chimeras of meaning in Williams’ prosody, however, but rather to observe that, in calling these groups “stanzas,” we are as likely to lose sight of what stanzas are for as we are, with free verse, to lose sight of any principle capable of explaining the phenomenon of the verse line. If we sampled a wide variety of free verse, the answer

to that question would become ever more elusive. If, however, we restrict ourselves to metrical poetry, an answer is forthcoming. Or, rather, five answers are forthcoming and those answers, overlapping and variously applicable to poems in meter will also, by analogy and less certainly, also be helpful in the understanding of free verse. If, that is, we keep poetry in meter as foundational to our understanding of what poetry in general is, such poetry will also help us better, if incompletely, to understand poems that are not in meter.

With these prefatory comments in mind, I would like to consider two questions: What makes a stanza a stanza, and what are stanzas for?

Dark house, by which once more I stand

Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand,

The rhythm of the stanza that immediately follows and which completes the sentence is somewhat different, but the number of lines, iambic tetrameter, and envelope rhyme scheme of abba all continue:

A hand that can be clasp’d no more — Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep

At earliest morning to the door.

What is a stanza? At the widest possible range, the term refers simply to groups of lines visibly separated off from others in a poem. In metrical poetry we can answer the question more precisely. In his superb guide to versification, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing (1999), the contemporary American poet Timothy Steele defines a stanza as “a group of lines arranged in a pattern that specifies the number of lines in the group, their meter, and the sequence of their rhymes.”

As Steele soon observes, this definition requires some qualifications. First, not all metrical poetry rhymes and indeed not all metrical stanzas include rhymes, but the unrhymed stanza in English is a relatively recent and rare innovation first practiced, I believe, by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Second, the stanza will have a set number of lines and each line will have a set meter—meaning, in almost every case, a certain number of iambs—but not every line need have the same meter. The three features—line number, line meters, and rhyme scheme—are the three chief variables internal to and constitutive of the individual stanza. And, third, a stanza in metrical poetry normally has one feature that cannot be part of free verse but which almost always occurs in metrical poetry, that of what Steele calls “responsion.” The pattern established in the first stanza will repeat in, or be “answered by,” every subsequent stanza. In Tennyson’s In Memoriam, for instance, the four-line stanza that runs as follows repeats in every stanza before and after it:

The art of poetry in stanzas thus illustrates at a greater scale the art proper to the individual metrical line: continuous variation (what Steele calls “modulation”) built upon a consistent and invariable foundational pattern.

Some stanzaic poems will include a regular pattern of different stanza types. W.H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” provides one particularly ingenious example. It alternates a stanza in shorter lines that has some features that can be repeated and one with many. Four stanzas of eight lines in a loose half meter (trimeter with cross rhyme), wherein the even lines rhyme (usually), surround five stanzas of the same rhyme royal found in Spenser’s poem. The half meter stanzas are similar to Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening,” his best known poem in the meter, save that Auden combines quatrains into groups of eight. The trimeter lines are sufficiently irregular and ask us to stress the first syllables often enough that they almost sound dactylic and resemble some of Auden’s longer-lined experiments in imitating classical meters (the poet Lesley Neal Clinton brought this to my attention).

As to the longer stanzas here: Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron” is composed of one hundred eighty-six stanzas of rhyme royal, but “Achilles” has just five. They are mingled with the trimeter: first a trimeter stanza, then two in rhyme royal (a seven-line iambic pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc), another trimeter, another two in rhyme royal, then one in trimeter, before a final rhyme royal stanza, and the poem’s close with a last trimeter stanza. Responsion obtains insofar as once we encounter the trimeter stanza or

The Stanza in Itself

the rhyme royal stanza, we know it will provide the pattern for all subsequent instances of the two respective stanzas. And yet the poem alternates them irregularly.

In the poetic tradition, we can find other stanzaic poems that make the responsion even more irregular or eliminate it altogether, as in the pseudo-Pindaric, or irregular, odes often written in the late seventeenth century. For the most part, however, stanzaic poems feature responsion from stanza to stanza and, when the stanzas vary, they vary with the regularity we are accustomed to in popular music with its verses and refrains. Indeed, this analogy is often an identity. The individual stanza, its repetition, and its regular alternation within a poem are all features that make poetry, not only akin to music with its regular melody and rhythm, but which make it specifically suitable for musical setting.

The poet John Hollander once complained that the composers of songs and madrigals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would base their score upon the first stanza of a poem, and then simply repeat the music for the subsequent ones, indifferent to their suitability for the individual stanza. One might respond of course that however inappropriate this seemingly arbitrary yoking of stanza and melody may sometimes prove, it was based on a practical necessity. Stanzaic form made it possible to set poetry to a relatively complex melody without forcing the composer to vary the composition continuously from beginning to end. Once a score had been completed for one stanza it would do for the second and so on.

In Thomas Campion’s ayre, “Come, chearfull day,” the stanza consists of four cross-rhyming iambic pentameter lines, which are completed by a couplet that serves, in the musical setting, as a kind of refrain. The sixth line in fact is repeated in both the first and the other, second stanza. This particular stanza is called the sixain or sesta rima:

Come, chearfull day, part of my life, to me: For, while thou view’st me with thy fading light, Part of my life doth still depart with thee, And I still onward haste to my last night.

Times fatall wings do ever forward flye, So ev’ry day we live, a day wee dye.

Campion wrote his poems specifically for their

musical setting. The English poet James Reeves once judged Campion’s poems as cold and insincere, which they may be, but if so, it is probably because the words clearly serve the music more than the reverse. They are tamed for performance; that they are stanzaic helps them more easily to be performed.

Lord Byron, to my knowledge, did not write for music, and yet, in the first stanza of this poem we hear a music intrinsic to the poem itself:

She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

The alliteration in the second line, the parallel structure discernable in each of the first four lines and the chiasmus in the final two, where the order of verb (mellowed) and noun (light) is reversed in the final, with noun (heaven) preceding verb (denies)— all these features give this first stanza a quality of pure auditory beauty just as its subject was clearly a visible beauty in a black gown. We have not even mentioned the six lines of alternating rhyme on “night” and “skies,” but these are clearly the most patently musical aspects of the phrasing. The first stanza’s musical beauty is continued in the subsequent two stanzas, and these are practically the only notable qualities of the poem, because Byron fails to develop the initial, entrancing image in the stanzas that follow. That would not recommend most poems to our attention, but in the present case I believe it suggests how content Byron was to develop his stanzas for the sake of their musical properties.

In both these cases, the regularity of meter and rhyme subjected across stanzas to responsion is essential to the musicality of the poems. Only with responsion does music become musical pattern. This musicality is a desirable feature of poetry that poets would be loath to lose.

Pound writes of his promotion of free verse, in the Pisan Cantos, when he observes parenthetically, “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave,” and so he clearly intended to eliminate rhythmic regularity in verse. He stridently insisted, however, that free verse poems must be musical. Indeed, his

third principle for the imagistes was “to compose to the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” How could a musical phrase stand athwart the rhythm provided by a metronome?

Pound answers, as was his fashion, by conceiving a tendentious, secret musical history. In several places, most memorably in his review of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Pound explains his theory that composers do not make music in terms of the measures (“bar divisions”) or the metronome, but in terms of the “shape” of the melody. Music has qualities that transcend the regularity of the measures, and these are the principles of the composition, he contends. This is in one sense plainly true. No two distinct lines of iambic pentameter have exactly the same rhythm. Meter is not all of rhythm but rather serves as its foundation; every distinct line will give to the stressed and unstressed syllables of the metrical feet varying degrees of stress and pacing.

Pound’s assertion is that music will therefore perform its melody apart from or indifferent to the regularity meter gives to rhythm. For poetry to do the same, it must not be written with the regularity of meter. It sounds as though Pound were calling for the kinds of improvisation and departures we find in the jazz solo and that he is projecting that phenomenon back into music history. While musical scores often call for a change in rhythm, they still have rhythm. In just the same way, it is not necessary to eliminate meter from poetry for there to be immense variation in the total rhythm and melody of a line. The features of the stanza are such, therefore, that they make possible the regularity required for music while also making possible the variability that Pound desired: a variabil-

ity that will be discovered the moment one actually recites the metrical line rather than merely scans its meter on the page. For Pound, however, this seemed impossible. He saw meter as constraining the continuous variation of melody, of the “musical phrase,” as if the recitation of a poem entailed a slavish ta-da, ta-da, ta-da, a pronunciation reduced to—not merely informed by—the metrical pattern. Paradoxically, and in vain, Pound was trying to contain the nuance of performance to the text itself. Regular meter and various rhythm seemed incompatible on the page, and so meter had to go and the “musical phrase” became a thing untethered from the larger patterns we normally associate with music.

The Five Functions of Stanzas and Musical Patterning

In describing the stanza in terms of music, my language shifted from defining what stanzas are to what stanzas do, what purpose they serve. That must mean we are ready to answer our larger question. Stanzas can serve at least five functions within a poem, none of which are mutually exclusive but some of which can stand in a certain tension with one another.

First, as we just considered and as Steele notes, stanzas create a musical pattern. Rhyme and meter can serve to make words fit for musical accompaniment, but they also constitute a kind of music proper to themselves. The pleasure of poetry is an intellectual one, where sound is connected to sense. Such pleasure includes, however, the pleasure of “music,” that is, the pleasure of perceiving the orderly relations of sounds among themselves. Meter regularizes and be-

For the most part . . . stanzaic poems feature responsion from stanza to stanza and, when the stanzas vary, they vary with the regularity we are accustomed to in popular music with its verses and refrains. Indeed, this analogy is often an identity.

gets rhythm; rhyme-sounds answer one another as do the notes of a melody. This is the most obvious function of a stanza. The other four may be a bit less obvious and are the purposes that may stand in tension with one another.

A second function emerges from the musical pattern in one way, that is the rhetorical. A third function emerges in still another way from the musical pattern, the architectonic. At a distance from, perhaps enclosing these three functions, we find two more. A fourth function of the stanza is what John Hollander has revived as the modal function, or the “metrical frame.” A fifth and final function stands in some sense in opposition to the modal, and that is the expressive. Let us consider these four functions individually.

The Rhetorical Function

By the rhetorical function of stanzas I intend the way they help the poet to order and unify thought and expression. A stanza becomes the unit for expressing a particular thought or set of thoughts, and the leap from one stanza to the next allows for a shift in thought akin to the function of a paragraph break in prose but more regular. Once more, Steele’s account proves helpful here: “Just as rooms can divide an apartment or building into subunits that enable people to organize different facets of domestic or professional life, so stanzas can partition a poem in such a way as to help poet and reader alike find their way through its components.”

Consider, for example, the first stanza of John Donne’s “The Flea”:

Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be; Thou know’st that this cannot be said A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead, Yet this enjoys before it woo, And pampered swells with one blood made of two, And this, alas, is more than we would do.

The stanza alternates between tetrameter and pentameter for the first eight lines and then concludes with a ninth pentameter line. It rhymes aabbccddd.

Each set of rhymes constitutes a grammatical unit, so that we have four rhymes and four distinct statements in the stanza. The departure from a rhyme pair to a triplet of rhymes at the end of the stanza also marks a turn (volta), a “Yet,” that deepens, troubles, or ironizes the meaning of what has proceeded.

This rhetorical pattern repeats in each of the three stanzas of the poem. The partition between each stanza really does serve as a threshold to a new rhetorical “room,” as Donne begins a new facet of his discourse with each new stanza. Indeed, between the second and the third stanzas, Donne indicates by a rhetorical question that his beloved has crushed the flea with her fingernail, such that we may say even the blank space of the stanza-break plays a role in the poem’s rhetorical structure.

Thomas Hardy’s “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave” is equally rigorous in its use of the stanza to organize the poem’s rhetoric. The poem’s scenario involves a deceased woman lying in her grave, dead and at peace, until she hears a scratching noise above. The poem constitutes a dialogue between the deceased and the digger until we learn at last the latter’s identity. The poem begins:

“Ah, are you digging on my grave, My loved one? — planting rue?”

— “No: yesterday he went to wed

One of the brightest wealth has bred.

‘It cannot hurt her now,’ he said, ‘That I should not be true.’”

Each stanza begins with an unrhymed tetrameter ending with the word “grave.” A trimeter, three tetrameters, and a final trimeter, rhyming abbba follow. In the first four stanzas, the late mistress’s question fills the first two lines, while the mysterious visitor’s voice takes up the remaining four. The final short line of the second speaker always has a certain bite to it, made possible by the sooner appearance of the rhyme. In the fifth stanza, the mistress speaks for the entire stanza. In the sixth, the visitor makes a final answer also filling the entire stanza. Hardy thus creates an intricate structure of responsion of call and answer that culminates in one long call and one long, final answer. If one thinks Hardy’s conceit of a deceased speaker improbable, one should know that the mysterious interlocutor is the doggy of the late mistress, come not

to dig at her grave, but to bury a bone.

The Architectonic Function

If stanzas can help organize the content of a poem, in their rhetorical function, they also serve an organizing purpose in poems where they expressly do not give shape to the grammatical units of the rhetoric. A poem filled with caesuras (pauses within the line) and enjambments (the running over of a phrase from one line to another) will render more subtle for the ear the units of lines, the regular placement of rhymes, and even the length of the stanzas themselves. In such a fluid structure, the stanza can serve an architectonic function, giving shape to the poem at the level of poetic form, even though that shape does not correspond to the form of the grammar and syntax. Stanza form and rhetoric are thus set at variance. Consider these opening four stanzas from Richard Wilbur’s “A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra” as an example of this practice:

Under the bronze crown

Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet

A serpent has begun to eat, Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down

Past spattered mosses, breaks

On the tipped edge of a second shell, and fills

The massive third below. It spills

In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes

A scrim or summery tent

For a faun-ménage and their familiar goose. Happy in all that ragged, loose Collapse of water, its effortless descent

And flatteries of spray,

The stocky god upholds the shell with ease, Watching, about his shaggy knees, The goatish innocence of his babes at play;

Like the water overflowing the wall fountain’s several stone shells, the sentences overflow the individual lines and even the stanzas. The complete pause of period or semicolon only appears once at the end of a

stanza. Twice more it appears somewhere in the middle. The stanza’s architectonic function gives shape to the poem through the meter and the rhymes but does not shape the rhetorical structure insofar as the syntax is often, though not always, at variance with the lines.

One can see how this quality stands in opposition to the tight identity of meter, rhyme, and syntax in Donne, and yet it is still a function performed by the stanza. Most poems do not flow across line endings and stanzas as extensively as does Wilbur’s, and even here we see phrases conforming to the lines quite frequently. In Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings,” we see the first stanzas use a minimum of enjambment, but in the poem’s later stanzas, Larkin enjambs heavily within stanzas, from line to line, and even across the limits of the stanzas.

In the city of Paris, one can see two architectural wonders that were built in the same period and in purposeful opposition to one another. Near the center of the city, the Eiffel Tower stands with its exposed wrought-iron girders, bare and geometrical, rising to a needle’s point. To the northwest, perched atop the great hill of Montmartre, the basilica of Sacré-Coeur overlooks all. One claims to speak for a France of rational, technological order; the other speaks for France as the oldest daughter of the church, devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The basilica must of course have a supporting skeleton just as has the tower, but its structure has been entirely concealed by the smooth, variegated surfaces of travertine. The rhetorical function of stanzas is in some ways comparable to the clear lines of the Eiffel Tower. The architectonic function is akin to the basilica. In one, stanza and grammar approach identity, in the other, one supports that which conceals it. The monuments beg the people of France to choose between them, but the rhetorical and architectonic functions make no such demand upon the poet. Both are ever available and will be more or less appropriate depending on the poem to be made.

Can a poem’s meaning make one form or another more or less appropriate? The answer is yes, and that suggests the last two functions of the stanza. The rhetorical and architectonic functions of stanzas concern the relation of poetic form to grammatical form. The final pair of functions concerns the relation of the poem’s form to its meaning.

The Modal Function

Modality refers to the ancient belief that specific meters were suitable for specific subject matter and, further, that specific meters could cause specific emotional effects on their auditors. John Hollander, who did much to revive the use of the term in his 1975 book Vision and Resonance, also deprecated the ideas behind it as a kind of naïve realism. We need not decide whether the basis of such a doctrine is metaphysical, psychological, or merely conventional. The fact is, we can and do associate conventional stanza forms with conventional contents, and this is part of the working vocabulary of poetry.

The sonnet, a fixed form, is first to be thought of in relation to love poetry even though not all sonnets are love poems. It is probably significant, for instance, that Milton’s sonnets are not love poems. Byron’s work gave to the ottava rima an association with the comic, while, as Frank Kermode once argued, W.B. Yeats, following a renaissance predecessor, used the ottava rima to signal he was making either elegiac or especially momentous meditative claims.

We quoted Tennyson’s In Memoriam above. While one can use that quatrain stanza for many subjects, readers can see with ease that it serves Tennyson’s voice and occasion especially well. One can also see that this association of the stanza with the grief of elegy remains for future poets as a property of the stanza to be embraced or ironically undermined—either way, it becomes part of the poem’s meaning and a way to shape the reader’s expectations and response to it. Something similar can be said of the heroic cou-

plet and wit, the elegiac quatrain and meditations on mortality, the terza rima and spiritual reckoning, or the rime royal and moral or philosophical “hymns.” The ballad quatrain has ineradicable roots in the folk song and the simple narrative that is balladry (as in “Sir Patrick Spens”); when Emily Dickinson uses the ballad, short, and half quatrains for her profound lyrics, an eerie, incongruous effect occurs precisely in virtue of this prior association with the folk.

The stanza’s modality may even suggest specific kinds of rhetoric as suitable within the poem. Charles Causley, for instance, who early in his career embraced the ballad as his paradigmatic form, seems often to follow its convention of beginning with a line that situates the speaker or protagonist in some specific place, as in, for example, “I walked where in their talking graves . . .” or “Mary stood in the kitchen . . .” Overall, instances of modality remind us that the choice of a stanza is not arbitrary. The poet will often choose one because it seems suitable to the subject of the poem, and, once chosen, the stanza will guide the poet’s other choices not merely by way of meter and rhyme but in reference to what kind of language seems fitting. What is “fitting” has its own law, often inexact and mysterious, but rooted in our capacity to perceive beauty, that is to say, the formal relations that subsist among things.

The Expressive Function

The final function of stanzas will also have something inexact and mysterious to it. If stanzas can become embedded in systems of meaning that make their

This final pair of functions indicates that a stanza can root a poem in a tradition far older and broader than itself, but it can also individuate a poem, and although these are in some ways opposed tendencies, a stanza can sometimes do both at the same time.

forms fitting for, and associated in memory with, certain kinds of content, the form of stanzas can also become uniquely expressive. The poet’s invention passes beyond “choosing” a stanza to the invention of a new stanza individually suited for the particular poem. Donne’s stanza in “The Flea,” for instance, serves a rhetorical function, but it is also an unusual form that seems particularly fitting for that one particular poem. We may say the same about Wilbur’s “Wall Fountain.” The stanza was conceived to express some dimension (as a stony architecture impermeable to the water it supports and guides downward) of this particular poem and which may never be repeated. Donne and Wilbur alike invented many stanzas for individual poems.

So also did Donne’s younger contemporary, George Herbert. Herbert is well known for his “Easter Wings” poems, which are printed in the form of a pair of angel wings, and for “The Altar,” which appears shaped like the chalice used for the consecration. These are idiosyncratic examples because the union of stanza form and meaning are so garish. Such exercises provoked the accusation of “false wit” in the century after Herbert’s death. More compelling because more subtle are the myriad other stanzas Herbert deploys in his poems. “Good Friday” is formed of a quatrain that rhymes in couplets but which runs dimeter, tetrameter, tetrameter, dimeter. “Easter” uses its unusual stanza to such effect that it sounds akin to choral polyphony:

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise Without delayes, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With him mayst rise: That, as his death calcined thee to dust, His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.

“Repentance,” “Affliction,” “The Flower,” and many other Herbert poems mix five or more shorter and longer lines and in doing so produce uncanny effects, some like an echo of praise, others with a sigh of grief. “Church-monuments,” although printed in one long block of enjambed lines with irregular caesura, actually is composed in a pentameter stanza rhyming abcabc. Here, the architectonic stanza serves to convey a voice of grave, withdrawn meditation far from song. Auden also made an expressive use of stanzas.

“The Shield of Achilles,” which we considered earlier, is exemplary in that regard.

This final pair of functions indicates that a stanza can root a poem in a tradition far older and broader than itself, but it can also individuate a poem, and although these are in some ways opposed tendencies, a stanza can sometimes do both at the same time.

Echoes of Many Fine Things

Stanzas most obviously serve a musical function in the poem, but the rhetorical, architectonic, modal, and expressive functions also appear in various combinations within the poetic tradition. They feature most richly in poems in meter and rhyme, but unrhymed metrical stanzas with responsion also can serve some of these functions. We even find faint hints of these functions in free verse stanzas. A poem in free verse may be written in a squat, long-lined clump that reminds the eye if not the ear of a sonnet. I once heard of a student having shared with a poetry class a poem in free verse tercets, to which a distinguished poet and professor immediately replied, “Well, we are obviously meant to be thinking of Dante.” Probably.

Free verse poetry in short-lined ticker-tape will remind most of us of Williams; those who print their poems in complex fragmented shapes on the page, with individual words sometimes enveloped in white space, will call to mind the Cantos of Ezra Pound or the Maximus poems of Olson (which themselves conjure memories of Pound). Such associations are often superficial, but they are rooted in a history deeper and more significant, one that answers the question “What are Stanzas for?” with the reply “Many fine things.”

James Matthew Wilson is the author of ten books, including, most recently, The Strangeness of the Good (Angelico, 2020), which won the Catholic Media Award in poetry. He is Cullen Foundation Chair of English Literature at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston, where he directs the MFA program in creative writing. Wilson also serves as poet-in-residence of the Benedict XVI Institute and as poetry editor for Modern Age magazine.

What I Learned Teaching Eighth-Grade Boys

IN A YEAR OF GLOBAL TURMOIL, fear, and anxiety, a classroom of masked eighth-grade boys became my traveling companions. Alongside the uncertainties of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was also teaching at a new school and teaching middle school boys for the first time. I teach at a classical Christian school, and the middle school boys and girls are divided by gender for the humanities classes in order to give them the opportunity to enter into the great works of literature without the need to impress the opposite gender.

When I reveal that I teach eighth-grade boys, most everyone chuckles, makes an exasperated face, or declares “God bless you.” And it is true that eighth-grade boys can be loud, argumentative, and lack impulse control. But throughout this year, I came to see that these boys were actually a lot like

By Kara Griffith

most of us, but without a filter to hide the immature or unsightly parts of themselves. I came to see that my small classroom of masked thirteen-year-old boys deeply reflected the needs and desires of us all.

But I can not pretend that this is a story of disciplined young men in pressed uniforms with respectful manners. They were not. They talked out of turn. They loved to passionately discuss the current political environment with all of the complexity and nuance of a middle schooler. At least three times throughout the year someone passed audible gas. I tried my hardest to reign in everyone’s giggles (and in those moments, I was thankful for the mask that hid my own grin). They tried to sneak food but

without the stealth of their female counterparts, and their choices were the smelliest things they could find: boiled eggs, sushi, salt and vinegar potato

chips. And so, lest you think I am about to tell you a story of a movie version of private school boys, do not be so disillusioned.

At the beginning of the year, I was so overwhelmed with their energy and physicality that I began to think about how to best direct the deluge of energy into a flowing river rather than a tidal wave. As I thought about the needs of these masked boys who were overwhelmed not only with a visibly uncertain world, but with their rapidly changing bodies, minds, and emotions, I realized that they needed what we all need. They needed not to bear the weight of being (or appearing to be) in control; they needed to know that they could rest and that they were loved. And so, I decided to begin my classes with three minutes of silence.

On the first day of this new routine, I told them that we were going to be quiet for a few minutes and asked them to put their heads down. I told them that in these three minutes, they were more than students, they were people, and there was nothing expected from them in these moments. They were sons of God, and they were loved by him. They didn’t have to do anything in the silence, just sit there. At first, they were embarrassed because we almost never sit in silence with other people. This was weird, and three minutes of silence seems like an eternity. In the first weeks, they used their minutes to peep around and see what the others were doing. They tried to be funny by tapping and pushing water bottles off desks. Some of them truly could not sit still and dragged their heads across their desks or fell out of their seats. It’s hard for most of us to sit still.

But eventually the wiggling stopped. The silliness subsided. For those three minutes. Before long, when the bell rang, many put down their heads without being asked. We would take a breath and for a few minutes remember that we were loved, that God was there. In that space, we were more than students and teacher. We were God’s children. We were brothers and sisters.

These three minutes began to shape us as a class. The act of sitting before God and being loved by the one who created us forged moments of clarity and vulnerability within each of us. Our souls were being met with the greatest need we all have, to be loved and to remember that we do not have to be

in control. These young men live in a world where much is demanded of them. They must be strong. They must be leaders, innovators, athletes, creatives, and they must learn all they can to get into college and to get a job.

And yet, those things are not what we were created for.

So I reminded them that they were not in fact the masters of the universe, and that my class was not about a particular grade on a test. I reminded them that we were all frail, weak, and in the process of learning, including myself. Our great God invites us into this world, and we can humbly enter it with joy and curiosity.

At the start of the year, they were brazen young men who seemed to genuinely think they had something to teach me. They often pushed back and argued. This is a common trait with middle schoolers. But over the course of the year, this aggressiveness and defensiveness began to fade away into questions and curiosity and, dare I say it, delight.

This class did not turn into a perfectly behaved group of mature boys. There were still detentions and calls home. They still wrestled as they came through the door and slapped each other as one walked to the trash can. Occasionally, I would ask them if anyone would like to share anything about their time of silence. The first time I did this, to my surprise, most of their hands went up. “I am so thankful for my friends,” one student said. Another said, “This is the time in my day where I feel most loved.” Another said, “My world is so loud, and this is the most I feel at peace.”

In November, we had the national election. Leading up to the election, my classes were in turmoil and anxiety over what would happen. I had a policy that we would only speak with respect and dignity about either of the candidates, and ultimately, I had to ban conversation on the topic because it was just too caustic. The day of the election, they came in shouting and making predictions about the state of our nation. I had them put down their heads, and then I extended the silence for about six minutes. At the end of it, one of the boys looked up and said, “I wish our whole nation could put their heads down and rest.” He understood that we cannot save a broken world, but we can sit with the one who can

restore us all.

Over the course of a year riddled with challenge, newness, and national anxiety, these eighth-grade boys taught me that they needed what we all need: to have space to rest, to listen, and to be loved. These spaces of silence where God met them reminded me of my own need to relinquish control. It is not on my shoulders to make my students into my image. They are God’s. It is my responsibility to pour into them what God has given me. To be patient. To walk alongside them. To step out of the way and allow God to restore us all.

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Kara Griffith, MA, is a humanities teacher at Trinity Academy of Raleigh.

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