Between Human and Divine: The Catholic Vision in Contemporary Literature

12. Art with Its Largesse and Its Own Restraint”: The Sacramental Poetics of Elizabeth Jennings and Les Murray

207 For permission to quote from Elizabeth Jennings’s “Grapes” and “Towards a Religious Poem,” I am grateful to David Higham Associates Limited. For permission to quote from Les Murray’s “Poetry and Religion,” “Once in a Lifetime, Snow,” “Blood,” “The Abomination,” “The Broad Bean Sermon,” and The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, I am grateful to Mr. Les Murray. Part of my discussion of Elizabeth Jennings has appeared in a different version in the online Literary Encyclopedia (www.litencyc.com), to whose chief editor, Robert Clark, I am grateful for permission to reuse material essential to the cohesion of this essay. 1. John Keble, Lectures on Poetry: 1832–1841 (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003), 481. 2. Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism (Second Series) (London: Macmillan, 1903), 1. 3. Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 76. 4. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans. Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), 132. Chapter 12 Art with Its Largesse and Its Own Restraint” The Sacramental Poetics of Elizabeth Jennings and Les Murray Stephen McInerney In the peroration to his Lectures on Poetry, delivered in the first half of the nineteenth century, John Keble, the Anglican poet and priest, declared, “Poetry lends religion her wealth of symbols and similes; religion restores them again to poetry, clothed with so splendid a radiance that they appear to be no longer symbols, but to partake (I might almost say) of the nature of sacraments.”1 Almost fifty years later, Matthew Arnold argued that since the “fact” had failed it, the strongest part of religion was the “unconscious poetry” of its rites and rituals.2 A hundred years later still, the English novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch declared that art and poetry fill the void left by sacraments and prayer in an “unreligious age.”3 While Murdoch was paradoxically equating art and sacrament at the very same time as she was sounding the death knell of religion, the Catholic painter and poet David Jones was coming to the end of a career that had been devoted to reconnecting art with its ancient roots in sacramental practice. Persuaded by Jacques Maritain’s extraordinary claim that “the Eucharistic sacrifice [is] at the heart of poetry,”4 Jones related art to the sacramental life with a sophistication and “ 208 Stephen McInerney depth that exceeded any before him. For Jones, the sacraments themselves were a form of craftsmanship by which the work of human hands became an incarnation of the divine. As the body and blood of Christ are said to exist under the “species” of bread and wine respectively, so a painted object or scene really exists “under the species of paint,” and “as through and by the Son, all creation came into existence and is by that same agency redeemed, so we, who are co-heirs with the Son, extend, in a way, creative and redeeming influences upon the dead works of nature, when we fashion material to our heart’s desire.”5 Contemporary literary criticism has also borne witness to the increased awareness of the relationship between poetry and the sacraments, giving rise to something of a minor genre in critical discourse.6 This is particularly noticeable in Hopkins scholarship, where some extraordinary claims have been made about Hopkins’s intentions for his poetry. Maria Lichtmann, for example, has argued, “The poem, for Hopkins, is the Body of Christ. It is the Eucharist in the sense of bearing the motionless, lifeless Real Presence of Christ, of acting with sacramental, transforming instress on the reader as Hopkins has himself instressed nature.”7 Eleanor McNees is equally daring (and equally vague) in her claim that Hopkins “crafts a poem as a kind of Mass in which all words work to voice the one Word—Christ. The successful poem enacts the Eucharistic process . . . The moment of sacrifice is the culmination of real presence in the reader.”8 Margaret R. Ellsberg, meanwhile, has argued that, for Hopkins, poetry “is the sacrament of flesh, word and spirit charged by their interpenetration with each other.”9 More recently, connections between art and sacrament have been brought to a new point of fusion in the poetry of two modern Catholic poets, Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001) and Les Murray (1938– ). “Poetry,” Jennings writes, is 5. David Jones, The Dying Gaul and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 287. 6. See, for example, David Brown and Ann Loades, eds., Christ: The Sacramental Word—Incarnation...