[R. S. Gwynn]

Preface

Until quite recently a substantial amount of English-language poetry was Christian verse. This tradition stretched over a millennium from the earliest surviving Anglo-Saxon poems, such as The Dream of the Rood, to the works of modern masters such as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. The English-speaking world was conceived, even by non-believers, as part of Christendom, and a religious worldview was everywhere evident in its literature, even when the subjects were not overtly spiritual. As Donald Davie observed in the “Introduction” to his Oxford Book of Christian Verse, “most of those Christians did not suppose that their Christianity stopped when they came out through the church-door.” Religion provided the moral and symbolic framework for poetry on all subjects. Much of the writing, however, was specifically religious. It would be impossible to trace the history of poetry in English without recognizing the centrality of spiritually engaged Christians—a line that included Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, John Donne, Ben Jonson, John Milton, Henry Vaughan, John Dryden, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. This list does not represent a literary subculture; it constituted—until the late nineteenth century —the tradition itself.

Yet it is misleading to speak of a single tradition of Christian verse, because this vast literary and religious enterprise took many forms—the philosophical speculations of Wordsworth and Tennyson, the supernatural epics of Milton and Blake, the existential lyrics of Donne and Hopkins, and the great congregational hymns of Isaac Watts and William Cowper. At the center of these spiritual traditions, however, stood devotional verse—poetry written to serve as meditations for the spiritual exercises that constitute an important part of Christian religious life.

Devotional verse has always played a significant role in Christian practice, though congregations customarily think of the texts less as poetic than liturgical. Much of the Old Testament is written in verse, and this poetry is ubiquitous in Catholic liturgy, including both the Mass and Divine Office. Monastic worship centers on communal chanting of the Psalms. The many manuals of devotionals, therefore, almost inevitably include Biblical verse in their daily selections. Literary devotional poetry seeks to create new verse to aid the spiritual needs of contemporary believers. The greatest devotional poets in English, such as Herbert and Vaughan, were prolific, writing verse that engaged the reader in every possible spiritual and emotional posture—joy, thanksgiving, anxiety, fear, hope, and sorrow—as well as meditations suitable to the major Christian feasts.

Timothy Murphy’s Devotions revives this major but neglected poetic genre with variety and amplitude. In over two hundred short poems, Murphy explores the vicissitudes of modern spiritual life. Some of the poems are inspirational, celebrating the joyous mysteries of faith. Others confront the sorrows and failures of contemporary life—presenting unvarnished the painful dramas of sin, despair, repentance, and redemption. Murphy celebrates the saints, but he has not forgotten “the battered, the drunkards, the sinners,” among whom the poet numbers himself. In these poems the drama of redemption is not abstract but personal.

The great tradition of devotional verse in English has mostly been Protestant. Among the “Metaphysicals,” only Richard Crashaw was Catholic (though John Donne was raised in the Church of Rome). Consequently, the inwardness and individual focus of Calvinism shaped the forms of these devotions. While Murphy sometimes meditates on the solitary soul before God, he characteristically sees Christianity from a Catholic perspective. For him, Christianity is primarily a mystical community, composed of both the living and the dead united by Christ through the sacraments. His themes, though sacred, are remarkably diverse. The book contains meditations on the Psalms, sacraments, major feast days, priesthood, saints, and the daily sacrifice of the Mass. There are even some comic poems for those who forget how Jesus was not above instructing his apostles through humor. Devotions is a brave book that recaptures a legacy that has nourished both worship and literature. These are genuine poems rooted in a passionate encounter with the divine. I predict they will find many devoted readers.

Dana Gioia

[Gail White]

I'm not sure I agree with Dana about the Catholic/Protestant divide. There are bound to be differences, I suppose, but there is a lot about community in George Herbert and a lot of the solitary in John of the Cross. Minor point, though. I hope Tim sells a ton of books.

[Ian Hoffman]

I read Tim's "Hunter's Log" years back and was very impressed. I'm not sure I can spring for a book of religious poetry at the moment, but one day I do want to read this...

[Ian Hoffman]

Well, I did get the chance to read Devotions, so I thought I'd write up a little review. Has anyone else read it, and, if so, what do you think about it?

Devotions: Poetry, Life and Prayer

Timothy Murphy's Devotions is something of a "selected poems", except that the focus is on religious verse that Murphy has written between 2005 and 2013 (and this includes a lot of poems).

At his best, Murphy's religious poetry has a certain "rightness" to it (I might say this of all his best poetry, in fact). Take the opening poem of the book, "Disenchantment Bay": it is so obvious that every line has been labored over, made to fit just right, and yet, at the same time, they also, as Yeats would have it, "seem a moment's thought".

There's also a folksiness to this and most of Murphy's poetry which I quite enjoy, and which one might call indebted to Frost, who sought to bring the rhythms of natural speech into formal verse. To return to "Disenchantment Bay":

.....Touch and go. Our Cessna bumped the sand,
...............thumped its tundra tires,
...............lifted as if on wires,
.....banked over ice and rocked its wings to land.

Beginning with the colloquial "touch and go", Murphy brings in more elements of everyday speech: "Cessna" and "tundra tires". Even better, the form itself seems to imitate the rocking, intense landing of the Cessna, which swoops down to a moment of crises—here the two trimeter lines—before "landing" in the smoothness of pentameter.

Murphy's best poetry, I argue, has this sort of rightness, with language and form working in tandem to praise God, friends, dogs and the other subjects of Devotions.

I also don't want to neglect to point out how the best poems in Devotions are often great stories. Most obviously, I can point to "For Rich or for Poor", from the sequence "The Second Step". This poem contains a surprising turn, which elevates it, for me, from an interesting account of Murphy's meeting with a wealthy farmer years ago, to a frank admittal of his own need for help battling alcoholism. The poem works so well because we expect that Murphy will be asking for help in the form of money, not in the form of guidance and sobriety.

The poems in Devotions, as I've said, span many years, and even the poems in this book that I don't love as much as certain other ones—perhaps, at least in part, as I'm not religious—help paint a picture of Murphy's life, which is, to say the least, rather unique among the lives of contemporary poets. You will not find many university meetings here; Murphy's writing is academic, of course, in that it's influenced by the tradition, but it is not obsessed with academia. Rather, it is a meticulous chronicle of his life, his obsessions and his loves. For Murphy, poetry is a sort of prayer. For instance, in "Hunting on Thanksgiving", he writes:

.....Thanks for pulling me back from the despair
.....which might have lost me eighteen hundred days
.....I have devoted to my Maker's praise.

I think such lines can provide a conceptual framework in which to understand Murphy's "poetic act." That is, if each poem of his is read as a pseudo-prayer, we can see how they all (including the ones I don't love as much as certain others) go towards glorifying his God, and how that glorifying involves, in a strange way, the chronicling of his own life, as one might even do at a confession (but here, not being religious, I may be out of my depth). Thus we emerge with a portrait of a man, whose poetry is not only entertaining, wry and well-wrought, but also necessary:

.....yet here’s a Timothy and here’s a Kevin
.....and twin spires reaching achingly toward Heaven.

Murphy's own poetry is a sort of "aching" "toward Heaven", an act which brings him closer to God.

That said, I wouldn't want to lose sight of how, even within such a hefty conceptual framework, there's a lot of room for humor. I talked above about the folksiness of Murphy's verse, and this folksiness often goes a step further and becomes funny, so that Devotions is dotted with pieces that are wry and "light" (in the best sense of "light"). Murphy's religion is not dogmatic and blinkered, and in some of his deftest moments, he surprises with witty observations about his parish priests. Here's "The Runner" in full:

.....A frosty dawn: it isn't even seven.
.....I pass a hooded jogger on the walk.
.....Father? A sidelong grin, no time for talk.
.....My priest is on his daily race to heaven.

As in "For Rich or for Poor", Murphy's wittiest poems often turn on disorientation. A good example is "Partial Indulgence," in which Murphy shoots "a black goose out of season". We think he is confessing this sin to his "monsignor"; the joke is that he's actually just serving his priest dinner.

Time and time again, Devotions is an engaging look at the full life of a man and his loves (I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the many elegies for Alan Sullivan, Murphy's late partner, and for Murphy's various hunting dogs), full of humor and quite down-to-earth—perhaps surprisingly down-to-earth for a book in which poetry is next to prayer. That's because, for Murphy, even prayer is down-to-earth: to pray to God, he must take stock of his own life, which means chronicling, reflecting and reporting.

Devotions is not an overlong or difficult read despite the complexity and skilfulness of this poetry. I can wholeheartedly recommend it to nearly anyone, from longtime poetry readers to newcomers who've just read "Fire and Ice" in elementary school. As with most good poetry, Murphy's verse rewards explication, but doesn't need explication to be enjoyed.

[Aaron Poochigian]

I am shocked that Gioia doesn't mention Berryman's very Catholic "Eleven Addresses to the Lord" and the long series "Opus Dei"--they are major. The devotional tradition was not as Protestant and not as neglected as he says.

[Tim Murphy]

Aaron, the morning after Berryman jumped Alan and I walked out the Washington Ave bridge and looked down at the Mississippi. I liked Berryman when I was pretty young.