The Catholic Studies Reader

15. Seeing Catholicly: Poetry and the Catholic Imagination

15 Seeing Catholicly Poetry and the Catholic Imagination angela alaimo o’donnell In her poem ‘‘The Robin’s My Criterion for Tune,’’ Emily Dickinson attempts to describe the peculiar vision that powers her imagination and informs her poetry. With typical deftness, she states simply, ‘‘I see—New Englandly.’’ Anyone who has read even a few of Dickinson’s poems—each sparse and spare, yet offering up food for the soul even the angels might savor—recognizes exactly what she means by this. Dickinson’s geographic home, an accident of her birth, has located her in the universe, given her a vantage point from which to see the world and a language to engage it. The rhythm of New England seasons lends to her poems their sense of temporality, the slant sun a light to her landscapes. Also embedded in Dickinson’s remark is the looming presence of the dark, Puritan God, who is a permanent part of her consciousness . Although she rebelled against her family’s Calvinist faith, which took the form of Orthodox Congregationalism, Dickinson could never quite shake the gloom of her religion, and it casts its long shadow even in her sunniest poems. Apparently with no surprise To any happy Flower The Frost beheads it at its play— In accidental power— The blind Assassin passes on— The Sun remains unmoved To measure off another Day For an Approving God.1 God’s indifference to the world and the suffering of its creatures portrayed in this poem is typical of the Puritan vision, famously expounded by Jonathan Edwards in his sermons as well as in the writings of his Puritan predecessors. Dickinson inherited this New England 332 angela alaimo o’donnell theology along with the local air and accent, all of which contributed to the evolution of her vision and her poetic practice. To ‘‘see—New Englandly’’ is to see the world in a necessarily circumscribed way, but it is also to see it clearly. Dickinson lays claim to her identity as an artist with this simple description, yet rather than flattening out her body of work and rendering it typical or generic, the defining phrase sharpens our sense of its uniqueness, throws into high relief the special qualities that give it heft and texture, a presence in the physical world. I want to borrow Dickinson’s poetic formulation, making a slight adjustment, to identify another very particular way of seeing the world, one less informed by physical geography than by a spiritual one. Writers whose minds, hearts, and spirits have been shaped to some extent by the Catholic Church might be said to ‘‘see Catholicly.’’ Anyone who has been brought up in a Catholic household, undergone the process of formation in preparation to receive the sacraments, or been educated in Catholic schools has been initiated into the unique configuration of reality afforded by Christian theology as communicated through scripture and church tradition. The world according to the Catholic writer is distinctive, different from the one seen by Dickinson, for example, and the God who oversees it is different as well. This distinctiveness, evident in the work of any number of Catholic writers, is nowhere more present than in the poems of Dickinson’s contemporary, the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. As with Dickinson’s, many of Hopkins’s poems focus on the landscape native to him, the shimmering green world of the British Isles. He, too, has a keen eye for telling detail and feels a kinship with the things and creatures of earth. Taking his cue from his spiritual mentor, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Hopkins recognizes and celebrates the presence of ‘‘God in All Things.’’ For Hopkins, every aspect of creation bears the imprint of its Creator—expresses God’s singularity, energy, and sheer delight in the fact of existence. The most seemingly ordinary creatures and objects are suffused by the transforming medium of light enabling him to see the ‘‘inscape’’ of each thing, its haecceitas (a term Hopkins borrows from another spiritual mentor, Duns Scotus) or thisness . Every thing is important and worthy of such attention for its own sake, but it takes on even greater significance when seen as a means through which God communicates boundless goodness to us. In his poetry and the catholic imagination 333 sonnet ‘‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire,’’ Hopkins articulates this principle of uniqueness in the highly condensed language and fractured syntax characteristic...