NORTHWEST NAZARENE UNIVERSITY Faculty Award Lecture, April 22, 2003

Gaymon L. Bennett, Sr.

When my friend Gil Gillette received the invitation to The Faculty Award Lecture, he e-mailed me back with this question:

You've invited me to hear you give a lecture involving a Papist turncoat

who died over a hundred years ago, and a Kentucky farmer who considers

loon poop preferable to chemical nitrogen fertilizer?

It doesn't account for everything in tonight's lecture, but it provides a succinct introduction.

Nineteenth-century priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (the “Papist turncoat”), a herald of twentieth-century poetic developments, expressed in a handful of his poems an environmental sensibility unusual for a religious poet of his time.  Contemporary farmer-poet Wendell Berry (the “loon poop” advocate) has expressed views similar to Hopkins' in scores of poems-as well as in novels, stories, and essays-over the past forty years.  Hopkins' environmentalism-a term I use, though anachronistic, because it seems appropriate to Hopkins' treatment of nature and the human place in the non-human environment-was grounded in and, at many points, coincidental with his theology, and seems remarkably forward looking and consonant with present-day ecological concerns.  Though he does not provide a detailed agenda for the restoration of our imperiled planet-few poets would-he makes clear that the environment is a divine concern for which humans are ultimately responsible.  Berry is one of those poets who does provide-in his poems and elsewhere-a detailed agenda for rescuing and renewing the earth's environment.  His vision, like Hopkins', is distinctly Christian-a vision of a new earth made possible by divine-human cooperation.

Hopkins was born in 1844 into a well-to-do Victorian Anglican family who were, according to Hopkins scholar Catherine Phillips, exceptional for their interest and participation in the arts.  His father Manley, though a businessman, sketched, composed songs, wrote a novel, and published many poems; one sister was a musician; and two brothers were illustrators and artists.

 Young Gerard himself was a musical, artistic, and literary prodigy who, as a teenager, aspired to be a painter-poet in the mold of William Blake or Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

In 1863 Hopkins entered Balliol College Oxford with a college exhibition.  There he read classics and came under the influence of the Oxford Movement.  In 1866 he was received into the Catholic Church by John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman, against the wishes of his moderate High Church Anglican family, and in 1868 he began training for the Jesuit priesthood.

 When he entered his novitiate, he abandoned art, destroyed much of his early verse, and for at least seven years did not write poetry.

During this early phase of his career he seems to have segregated the life of piety and scholarship from the production of the arts, resolving “to write no more, as not belonging to my profession . . . .”

 Even after his poetic silence was broken when the drowning deaths of five nuns inspired him to write “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins wrote to his life-long friend, Robert Bridges, that he did not write for the public.

 He confessed to an another friend, R.W. Dixon a recurring fear that in writing poetry he might “undergo a severe judgment of God” for the “waste of time” and “preoccupation of the mind which belonged to more sacred or more binding duties.”

Ultimately he seems to have concluded that his poetry might not be in conflict with his vocation and, indeed, that it might be an aspect of his calling.  “When a man has given himself to God's service [he receives] from God a special guidance, a more particular providence,” he wrote to Dixon.  “This guidance is conveyed partly by the actions of other men, as his appointed superiors . . . .” which was the case in his encouragement to write “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”  Hopkins concluded that this guidance is also imparted “partly by direct lights and inspiration.”

 Finally then, Hopkins considered his poetry as inspired by and written in the service of God.  And his poems addressing natural and ecological issues derive as clearly from his priestly vocation and Christian commitment as those on more conventional religious topics.  The poems themselves provide the final evidence of  Hopkins' ultimately undivided response to the whole of life.

Just as Hopkins' developing holistic attitude toward the place of poetry in his vocation assists our understanding of his theological and environmental views, so an acquaintance with the novelty (or oddness) of his poetic structure and style provides a similar heuristic benefit.  Perceiving the holism of his thought regarding poetry and vocation, we are not surprised to see it reflected in the relation of novelty and theology in his poems.  Hopkins' poems were almost unknown during his lifetime, but after his death, his friend  Bridges (later England's Poet Laureate), began introducing his poems into anthologies, hoping to make the reading public accustomed to what Bridges considered Hopkins' oddness.  And in 1918-nearly 30 years after his friend's death-Bridges published the first collection of Hopkins' poems.

Hopkins did not deny the alleged “oddness,” writing to Bridges in 1879, “No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness.”  He explained further that he intended the music, design, and “inscape” (a term he coined) of his poems to be distinctive, concluding that “it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer.”  But those elements, he insisted, are “queer only if looked at from the wrong point of view.”

 Hopkins poetic distinctiveness consists primarily of three characteristics which were experimental in the nineteenth century, but which became staple, if not commonplace, elements of much twentieth-century poetry in English: (1) sprung rhythm, (2) sprung syntax, (3) and what I call syntactical “magic.”  These were not tricks as the term “magic” might suggest, but elements consonant with his concept of inspiration, his vision of the world, and his rhetoric of poetry.

Sprung rhythm is the result of a syncopated “spring” in a line created by the abrupt juxtaposition of stressed syllables.  In “God's Grandeur,” (which we will read presently), Hopkins sets the reader or listener up for sprung rhythm in later lines with a first line of regular iambic and anapestic meter: “The wrld is chrged with the gl-ry of Gd.”  Then he surprises in line 2 with: “It wll flme ot . . . ” (four consecutive stressed syllables.)  The two clearest results of the “spring” are the immediate emphasis on the four syllables, and the organic union of sound and sense (or image).  The sound enables us in our minds (or nerve endings or wherever) to “see” the flames “flame out.”

Bridges regarded Hopkins' sprung syntax or “syntactic license” (which included inverted word order, delayed parentheses, and insertion of words into unexpected places) as his major “fault,” and he worried that the poems would confuse readers.  Whether they would have then, one cannot be sure, but twentieth-century readers are accustomed to the syntactical irregularities of such poets as e. e. cummings (who was, incidentally an admirer of Hopkins).

So, for current readers, Hopkins' poem titled “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection” might require more than one reading but presents few serious syntactical challenges.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest's creases; in pool and rutpeel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed   dough, crust, dust; staunches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it.

There is syntactical “magic” in these lines too, as well as in others of the following poems.  There are (1) compounds and coinages such as “yestertempest” and “footfretted.” (2) Transformed parts of speech in “Hurrahing in Harvest” to described clouds at harvest time: “has wilder, wilful-wavier/ Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?”  (3) Alliteration in “Ribblesdale” in the lines “. . . sweet landscape, with leaves throng/ And louched low grass.”   And (4) surprising internal rhyme in “Binsey Poplars”: “not one/ That dandled a sandalled/ Shadow” and “O if we but knew what we do/ When we delve or hew-/ Hack and rack the growing green!”  These devices result in-among other effects-vivid, organic imagery and musical qualities not achievable otherwise, and dramatization of the important themes that his poems address.

Not only were Hopkins' poetical techniques ahead of their time, but his environmental sensibilities were also distinctive and forward-looking. Not that he was the prototypical environmentalist, but he added to romantic feelings for nature and use of natural analogs for religious purposes in his poems, an amateur's enthusiastic understanding of natural science,

a recognition of the impacts of industrialization and environmental irresponsibility, and more: a perception of what was necessary to restore the planet.

Hopkins' sonnet, “Hurrahing in Harvest,” is a celebration of nature in which the beauty of harvest time is not only a sign of the sacred, but valuable in itself and ravishing in its own detail-filled, colorful imagery.  The poet sees and feels the “barbarous . . . beauty” of the shocks of grain in the field and-overhead-the “lovely behaviour/ Of silk-sack clouds!”  These sights allow him to “glean” or harvest (that is-to discover-) his Savior.  The “azurous hung hills are his [my emphasis] world-wielding shoulder/ Majestic-as a stallion stalwart, very-violet sweet!”  

And to the poet's eyes and heart, the replies of nature are, he writes, “realer and rounder” than “rapturous love's greeting.”

In the final four lines of “Hurrahing in Harvest,” Hopkins imagines a world without a human beholder, and then what it must have been like for the first beholder to witness what he himself has just seen.  The result is this beholder's being knocked for a loop. “The heart rears wings bold and bolder,” he exults, “and hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off from under his feet.”  It is not the soteriological revelation, however, which provides the ecstasy he experiences, but the sheer beauty of the earth.

“Pied Beauty” is a somewhat more ambiguous, or at least complex, presentation of the beauty of nature, and it too contains theological implications.  The poem begins by celebrating pied or dappled beauty: “couple-coloured” skies, stippled patterns on swimming trout, and finches' wings, for example.  The poem also implies three other characteristics of nature.  (1) It is transient: all these examples of pied beauty are moving, fleeting images.  (2) It is frequently contrary: in lines five through eleven, Hopkins celebrates not only the swift but the slow, not only the sweet but the sour, and not only the bright but the dim.  And, thirdly, (3) it includes human productions-farmscapes and the tools of trades.  Clearly, the creator of beauty (of the positive, if that judgment can be made) is also the creator of its contrary (of the negative).

The poem concludes with the affirmation that the creator of all this variegated nature is worthy of our praise.  Indeed, the last line is a command to praise him.  The implications of the poem seem to be, first, that not only is the “beauty” of the creator “past change,” but past human understanding; secondly, that humanity occupies a place in the non-human environment; and, finally, that whether it seems beautiful or not to us, nature compels our praise.  (It is interesting to note a parallel-and perhaps influence-in “Pied Beauty,” with Augustine's City of God.  For Augustine the fundamental telos of nature is beauty, and that beauty includes such creations as ferocious beasts, pests, and poisonous plants.

)

To the valuing and celebrating of nature in the previous poems, Hopkins adds-in the next three-explicit environmental awareness.  Incomplete in any single poem, his insights are contingent upon the relationship of the poems analyzed, especially the following three, beginning with “Binsey Poplars.”  He wrote the poem in response to the felling of several trees in Oxford in March of 1879.  The tone of the poem, which is elegiac, softens but does not conceal the outrage he feels.

       Binsey Poplars

  felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled;

Of a fresh and following folded rank

 Not spared, not one

 That dandled a sandalled

     Shadow that swam or sank

On meadow and river and wind-wandering

Weed-winding bank.

O if we but knew what we do

     When we delve or hew-

Hack and rack the growing green!

     Since country is so tender

To touch, her being so slender,

That, like this sleek and seeing ball

But a prick will make no eye at all,

     Where we, even where we mean

  To mend her we end her,

 When we hew or delve:

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.

Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve

     Strokes of havoc unselve

 The sweet especial scene,

     Rural scene, a rural scene,

     Sweet especial rural scene.

Perhaps the first impression is the intrinsic and individual worth of the poplars: their beautiful shadowy green sweetness.  The blows of the ax “unselved” them-destroyed their valuable and valued selfhood in a few swift blows.  A second impression is the fragility of nature.  Even without the scientific data available now, Hopkins understood-as early 1879-how unintended consequences can occur when the environment is altered, and how permanent such alterations can be.  He suggests in lines 15 and 16, that the alteration-the felling of the trees in this case-will affect the environment as quickly and certainly as piercing the eyeball causes blindness.

Two other characteristics of the poem are worth mentioning.  The first is the role of humankind in environmental damage.  Though he claims in his later poem “Ribblesdale” that only man can undo the damage, here he posits that “even where we mean/ To mend her [nature] we end her.”  The second is the use of poetic devices to dramatize the loss of the Binsey poplars: the repeated ax-blows of “All felled, felled, all felled”; the harsh sound of “Hack and rack”; the image of blinding; and the choice of “havoc” in “Strokes of havoc unselve.”

“God's Grandeur” (perhaps Hopkins most anthologized poem) also pictures the human effects on nature which imperil the planet, as well as God's intention to restore it.

    God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed.  Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now,  nor can foot feel, being shod.

And, for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Lines 5 through 8 create a grim picture of human-inflicted environmental damage which follows the line “Why do men then now not reck his rod?”  This question suggests that the way in which the planet has been despoiled-representative of nineteenth-century industrialization and disregard for the environment-is contrary to the intentions of God.  Hopkins' use of “his rod” in line 4 refers to the rod of pastoral or shepherding care, as in Psalm 23:4.  The shepherd used the rod to guide or urge sheep over dangerous rocks or across difficult streambeds and to keep the flock in line, but also to protect the sheep from predators-it was essentially a club.

Hopkins' implication seems clear: not only does God oppose environmental irresponsibility, but Christians in the nineteenth century should know that.  (In other words, he asks, why do people refuse to follow God's guidance in this matter, and instead do what they know God opposes?)  If the rod implies protection, a correlative implication is that God opposes environmental irresponsibility for human protection and survival-our salvation broadly and rationally understood.

The second stanza of the sonnet begins with a more hopeful statement: “And, for all this, nature is never spent,” which may seem unscientific.  We understand now that nature can be spent or exhausted or that humans can cause irreversible damage to the planet.  However, examples of remarkable natural recovery do exist.  Similarly, the final couplet of the poem-“Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/  World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings”-may seem like bad theology, like the too typical, simplistic popular Christian response to complex problems: “It's God's will” or “God is in control.”

I think, however, that when viewed in relation to Hopkins' poem “Ribblesdale,” it can be understood as God's concern with sin and suffering, not only in the human experience, but also in the natural environment.  As such, it is half of the solution to environmental peril.

      Ribblesdale

EARTH, sweet Earth, sweet landscape, with leaves throng

And louched low grass, heaven that dost appeal

To, with no tongue to plead, no heart to feel;

That canst but only be, but dost that long-

Thou canst but be, but that thou well dost; strong

Thy plea with him who dealt, nay does now deal,

Thy lovely dale down thus and thus bids reel

Thy river, and o'er gives all to rack or wrong.

And what is Earth's eye, tongue, or heart else, where

Else, but in dear and dogged man?-Ah, the heir

To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn,

To thriftless reave both our rich round world bare

And none reck of world after, this bids wear

Earth brows of such care, care and dear concern.

The tone of this poem about the plight of the earth is desperate.  “Earth, sweet Earth, sweet landscape,” is not joyful or celebrative-certainly not in the context of the whole poem.  It suggests, instead, sorrow at loss and desperation at the absence of hope for recovery.

The first stanza presents the earth's personified predicament: wanting to appeal to the creator but having no tongue.  The second stanza provides an insight into Hopkins' concept of creation as continuous and continuing: “he,” to whom the earth wants to make its strong appeal (God), not only “dealt” or created dales and rivers (past tense); he “does now deal” (continuously).  But the second stanza ends with an unexpected turn in the statement: “thou”-the creator-has given creation over to “rack or wrong.”  The blame for that wrong, however, is not the Creator's as the final stanza clarifies.

Meanwhile in the third stanza, the poet asks rhetorically where Earth can find its eye or tongue or heart-some means by which to plead its case-and concludes: nowhere else “but in dear and dogged man.”  Only humankind can advocate for-take responsibility for-the plight of the planet.  How ironic, since Earth's predicament is a human-caused problem.

The potential advocate, then, for Earth is humankind, described as “heir/ To his own selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn,/ To thriftless reave both our rich round world bare/ And none reck of world hereafter.”  The word “reave” means to plunder; it can also mean to rip apart violently.  And I understand Hopkins' lines 10 through 13 to say that those who must take responsibility for the future of the planet are the heirs of the very gang that has plundered and polluted it without reckoning the consequences.  What's more, they can be expected to exploit it, spoil it, and leave it barren in their turn.  But as dim as that prospect for restoration seems, it is the only possibility.  The final line and a half-“this bids wear/ Earth brows of such care, care and dear concern”-suggests that it's no wonder the earth's brow is so furrowed with care and despair!

So what are we to take home from this reading of Hopkins' poems?

First, that beyond rhapsodizing or spiritualizing nature, he presents it as intrinsically, rather than instrumentally, valuable.  Yet, while he imagines the Earth as existing prior to a human “beholder,” he places humans in the natural environment.  In doing so, he depicts humans in that environment as responsible, not only for despoiling and destroying it, but for participation in saving it.  They bear responsibility for both the sin and the salvation.  In these poems God is characterized as interested in the salvation of the world, not just because of his arbitrary love of humanity, but in spite of (or because of) the environmental sins of humans.  And though perhaps

not explicit, certainly clearly implied in these poems, is Hopkins' message that to save humankind, God must save the environment which they share with all of life.

This depiction of nature and salvation history is distinctive in at least three ways.  Most of Hopkins' contemporaries were more interested in religious controversies than in nature.  And those who wrote about nature tended to rhapsodize romantically about it or co-opt it for religious use, but Hopkins' adds to such tendencies, a strong emphasis which today we might call eco-theological.  In these poems he departs from the usual anthropocentrism of salvation history, which has generally led to disregard for the state of nature, to write unusual poems calling for salvation of the physical world.  The poems are forward-looking also in regard to the placement and role he assigns to humans in what is often considered the non-human environment, and, in this regard, he seems to have anticipated present-day Christian ecology.

Wendell Berry, who-I suspect-would accept the label “Christian ecologist,” was born in 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky, pursued a fairly typical literary education, and taught briefly at Georgetown College, Stanford, and New York University.  In 1964 he joined the English faculty at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, and the next year bought Lanes Landing Farm near Port Royal in his native Henry County.  There, with his wife, Tanya, he has farmed for nearly forty years, raised his family

, and written forty-some books of poetry, fiction, and essays.

Berry apparently never experienced the disjunction between faith and art or piety and public utterance which the young Hopkins did.  “In everything he writes,” states Michael Hamburger, British poet and university professor, “[Berry] draws on the totality of his experience, the totality of his vision.  It is his distinction to be all of a piece . . . .”

 This holistic vision extends to Berry's production and criticism of literature.  “In judging a literary work,” he writes, it is legitimate . . . to ask what its effect might be, or has been, on community life or on nature.”

 And issues of community and the conservation of the natural world are at the center of his work-poetry and fiction, as well as scores of essays-on the often ungracious disregard of God's amazing gift of our planet.

Berry doubts that the institutional Christian church has much potential to solve environmental problems; however, he believes the Bible and much of Christian theology mandate it.  The peril of the planet is for Berry not just a human problem, but a Christian problem.  To those who suggest turning to other religious traditions, such as Buddhism, for environmental instruction, he insists that Christians should accept and survive Christianity's failures and be part of renewal, so that Christianity can be instructive.

 Many of Berry's poems, especially those in The Timbered Choir, a collection of what he terms “Sabbath Poems,” provide instruction for addressing the plight of the planet.

While Gerard Manley Hopkins' poetic style surprises and delights us into the truth, Wendell Berry's style is conspicuously unsurprising and formally traditional-reflecting his distaste for novelty and his commitment to tradition.  He describes both agriculture and poetry as “essential disciplines,” implying both the importance of a certain kind of poetry and the skill required to write by the rules and demands of that kind of poetry, concluding that “we do not have a wide appreciation of good land use or good literature.”

Of Berry's poems that we will consider this evening, nearly half are written in carefully metered blank verse or in rhymed verse forms, though he plays variations on this cantus firmus, or prescriptive, underlying melody.  He is a master of natural and near (or slant) rhymes and metrical variations.  But absent from these poems are unexpected coinages and compounds or surprising syntax and sprung rhythms that enliven Hopkins' work.  Perhaps the most surprising aspect of berry's style is that it is palatable to twenty-first-century readers even though it harks back to a time before most twentieth-century poetic innovations.  What is remarkable about Berry's poetry is his prophetic intent and what Michael Hamburger calls his “plain 'community speech,' which can convey “straight narrative . . . but also an almost mythical undercurrent that allows him to make connections between the concentric circles of . . . life.”

These characteristics are exemplified in “Sabbath Poem VII (1982).”

VII

The clearing rests in song and shade.

It is a creature made

By old light held in soil and leaf,

By human joy and grief,

By human work,

Fidelity of sight and stroke,

By rain, by water on

The parent stone.

We join our work to Heaven's gift,

Our hope to what is left,

That field and woods at last agree

In an economy

Of widest worth.

High Heaven's Kingdom come on earth.

Imagine Paradise.

O Dust, arise!

It is written primarily in common meter (a favorite of eighteenth-century hymn writer Isaac Watts

) alternating lines of four and three accents or stresses (iambic tetrameter followed by iambic trimeter).  “The Cléaring résts in sóng and sháde./ It ís a créature máde . . . .”  The second quatrain of each measure varies the meter: lines 5 and 8 (as well as 13 and 16) contain only two stressed syllables each.  The narrative of the first stanza describes, quite straightforwardly, the scene of the poem-a clearing which is a place of birdsong and some shade and which may have been hewn out by human work but could not have been possible without the Creator's.  But this scene is just a glance, an introduction.  Three thematic circles come into focus in the second stanza.

The first is Berry's belief that whatever havoc, whatever catastrophic change has occurred, humanity cannot go back; instead we must “join our work to Heaven's gift,” which is “joining our hope to what is left.”  Berry confided to forest ranger Jordan Fisher-Smith: We must “stop somewhere!  Because you can't recover what's lost.  There's no going back to it . . . . [T]he necessary work of the world [is] to take what we've got and make it better.”

Second is Berry's belief that just as all living things inhabit one and only one planet, so all participate in the same ways in nature.  Therefore, the environments of human creatures and domestic animals should be conserved as well as those of wild things.  Hence the lines: “The field and woods [both human habitations and wild lands] at last agree/ In an economy/ Of widest worth.”  He adds-not incidentally-that this cooperation and co-habitation on the planet is the divine ideal.  It is “High Heaven's Kingdom come on earth./ Imagine Paradise.”

Third is Berry's belief that the Divine is in the “dust” as well as the “breath” of life.  In the final line of the poem he suggests that we of the flesh and the field take our place in God's great scheme of nature-not as dominators nor even as stewards-but as an integral part of the whole.  Two quite amazing truths are embedded in the short phrase, “O Dust arise!”  The first is that in God's plan, not just the spirit, but the body-the dust-shall arise; the second, that the value of the “Dust” is coeval-not secondary-in Christian theology, despite some notions to the contrary.

Elsewhere Berry writes that “the breath of God is only one of the divine gifts that make human souls; the other is dust.”

 And the idea of dust arising or ascending turns on its head a tradition of “spiritual motif” theology which understands the physical world as an evil place from which the soul must escape to heaven.  To that view, Berry replies: “When we think of ourselves as lofty souls in lowly bodies in . . . [an] unlovable world that we despise for Heaven's sake . . . . we become . . . the destroyers of a world we did not make and that we are bidden to think of as a divine gift.”

Despite their differences in style (as well as evident differences in vocation, scientific knowledge, and environmental agenda), Hopkins and Berry share common views, and their poems demonstrate remarkable consonance.  As Hopkins envisioned in “Hurrahing in Harvest” a world in which “these [beauties] were here . . . but the beholder/ [was] Wanting,” Berry, in “The Dream,”

writes:

I dream an inescapable dream

in which I take away from the country

the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,

ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,

our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.

I restore then the wide-branching trees.

I see growing over the land and shading it

the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.

I am aware of the rattling of their branches,

the lichened channels of their bark, the saps.

of the ground flowing upward to their darkness.

Without “ourselves” the earth would be a verdant and inspiring spectacle, but Berry cannot end on a note of ecstasy, as Hopkins ends “Hurrahing in Harvest, for, with the “pain of foreknowledge,” he “must end, always, by replacing/ our beginning there, ourselves and our blades,/ the flowing in of history.”  Still he views the world, not only in its beginnings, but in its present state, as a source of ecstasy and inspiration in many other poems.  “Sabbath Poem III (1985)”-also a dream poem-contains this hymn to the forest:

Leaf shadows tremble on light leaves,

A lighter foliage of song

Among them, the wind's thousand tongues,

And songs of birds.  Beams reaching down

Into the shadow swirl and swarm

With gleaming traffic of the air,

Bright grains of generative dust

And winged intelligences.  Among

High maple leaves a spider's wheel

Shines, work of finest making made

Touchingly in the dark.

It is right and good that the Christian poet praise the creation, for as Berry points out, the Bible, our model and mandate, is “full of poetry, awe, and reverence for non-human nature.”

Hopkins, in “Pied Beauty,” described the world not only as beautiful but also as transient, contrary, and inclusive of human productions, and so does Berry.  In one of his best known poems, “The Slip,” he suggests that all of nature is transient, when he writes that “The earth, even, is like a flower, so soon/ passeth it away.”  And, in “The Gift of Gravity,” he avers that “all that has come to us/ has come as the river comes,/ given in passing away.”

Regarding the contraries in nature, Berry points out in “The Slip” that what disappears or disappoints or darkens our souls may be the beginning of new possibilities.  It may be, he writes, “Where the imperfect has departed, the perfect/ begins its struggle to return.”  More explicitly, in “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” he reinforces Hopkins' “Augustinian” claim for the beauty of the slow, the sour, and the dim:

God made not only the parts of Creation that we humans understand and approve but all of it . . . . stinging insects, poisonous serpents, . . . poisonous weeds, micro-organisms.  That we may disapprove of these things does not mean that God is in error . . . it means we are deficient in understanding.

Thirdly, regarding the human presence and human productions in the natural world, Berry, in “Sabbath Poem III (1985)” concludes:

So what was still and dark wakes up,

Becomes intelligent, moves, names

Itself by hunger and by kind,

Walks, swims, flies, cries, calls, speaks, or sings.

We all are praising, praying to

The light we are, but cannot know.

Note the inclusion of the human “we” in the penultimate line: “We all are praising, praying.”  We are praising and praying along with the creatures that swim and fly as well as walk.  This is the dream-the ideal.

The themes of the intrinsic, rather than instrumental, worth of nature, along with its fragility, so poignantly expressed in Hopkins' poem “Binsey Poplars,” are echoed in several of Barry's works.  In “Sabbath Poem III (1987)” he writes of the deaths of trees, trees “that had unearthly power to please/ The earthly eye, and gave unearthly solace . . . .”  He specifies their sentience (and, indeed, their connectedness to the God of the cosmos) in the lines following:

To see them standing was to know a prayer

Prayed to the Holy Spirit in the air

By that same Spirit dwelling in the ground.

This seems to me to be a helpful and potentially fruitful description of a right relationship among God, humans, and nature.  In the line following, Berry imagines God replying to the prayer in the sound of the wind, and that “rayed/ Imperial light sang in the leaves it made.”  I'm struck by the synesthesia of sound and light and picture the “rayed/ Imperial light” like the halos in sacred paintings.

Berry makes an interesting observation about the grief he experiences at the death of the trees, contrasting it to grief for human loss.  “[H]uman loss,” he claims, is “In human time made well”; however, “to mourn an ancient woodland, known/ Always, loved with an old love handed down,/ That is grief that will outlast the griever . . . .”  Implicit in this greater grief is how long-lasting (even permanent) these changes are.  In “Sabbath Poem VIII (1979)” he portrays the ecological catastrophe of the loss of top soil resulting from, among other causes, the destruction of trees.  “The growth of fifty thousand years undone,” he writes, “In a few careless seasons, stripped to rock/ And clay-a 'new land,' truly, that no race/ Was ever native to . . . .”

But Berry allows the trees an ironic revenge in “Window Poems” writing:

When fools of the capitals

have devoured each other

in righteousness,

and the machines have eaten

the rest of us, then

there well be a second coming

of the trees.

When pressed by interviewer Mindy Weinreb, Berry admitted that the “poem seems a little wishful now.  Our fate and that of the trees may not be so easily distinguishable.  It is likely that in killing off ourselves we will kill off the trees, or vice versa.

The specter of human, especially industrial, destruction of the natural world that Hopkins introduced in “God's Grandeur,” is reiterated in Berry's “Sabbath Poem III (1983)”

Now though the season warms

The woods inherits harms

Of human enterprise.

Our making shakes the skies

And taints the atmosphere.

We have ourselves to fear.

We burn the world to live;

Our living blights the leaf.

Note the parallels between Hopkins' “All is seared with trade . . ./ And wears man's smudge” and Berry's “The woods inherits harms/ Of human enterprise” and “Our making shakes the skies/ And taints the atmosphere.”

In another poem Berry projects backward from industrial degradation of the environment to its causes and forward to its ultimate physical and spiritual consequences.

II (1988)

It is the destruction of the world

in our own lives that drives us

half insane, and more than half.

To destroy that which we were given

in trust: how will we bear it?

It is our own bodies that we give

to be broken, our bodies

existing before and after us

in clod and cloud, worm and tree,

that we, driving or driven, despise

in our greed to live, our haste

to die.  To have lost, wantonly,

the ancient forests, the vast grasslands

is our madness, the presence

in our very bodies of our grief.

The causes are implied in lines 10 through 12: “whether driving or driven”-it hardly matters whether active or passive-we have despised our bodies.  The phrase “our bodies,” here implies much more than the single self and seems to encompass all of nature (“clod and cloud”).  We have despised or spited our body-earth in “our greed to live” and, ironically, in “our haste/ to die.”  When this destruction is palliated by Christians who hate and abuse “the body”-the earth-because, to paraphrase the old song, this earth is not their home; they're just a-passin' through; their treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue, Berry exclaims, “What do we expect?  That out of this life that we presumed to despise, we would somehow salvage a soul capable of eternal bliss?”

The first lines of  “Sabbath Poem II (1988),” “[T]he destruction of the world/ in our own lives,” might be interpreted as “destruction of the world in our own lifetimes.”  And, while such environmental catastrophe seems possible, the sense of the passage is more likely “destruction of the world in our own beings.”  Lines 6 through 9 in their sadly ironic sacramental tone make it quite clear that our lives (or our bodies) are inseparable from the rest of life-the body of the earth.  These are “bodies/ existing before and after us/ in clod and cloud, worm and tree,” which hardly seems like what we see in the mirror in the morning.  In this context then, the lines-“To destroy that which we were given/ in trust: how can we bear it?”-describes not only ungraciousness, but sin and self-destruction.  More explicitly, in “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” Berry states:

[O]ur destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy.  It is flinging God's gifts in his face, as if they were of no more worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.

The ultimate consequence of destroying what was given in trust is forfeiture of our salvation, quite clearly implied in the conclusion of “Sabbath Poem II.”  We are grieving not just the extinction of forests and grasslands, but the destruction of all, including our very lives.

But neither Hopkins nor Berry ends with the human dilemma.  Despite-or perhaps because of-the despoiling and destruction, the Divine is still involved in creation.  And as Hopkins characterizes the Holy Spirit healing and renewing nature as bird like, brooding over the world with warm breast and bright wings, Berry in “Sabbath Poem III (1983)” hears the herald of hope from a water thrush.

The water thrush began

The song that is a prayer,

A form made in the air,

That all who live here pray,

The Sabbath of our day.

The prayer that the thrush sings is a prayer for a renewed earth in which human singers share the world without destroying it, the air without polluting it, with the birds, their fellow singer.

May our kind live to breathe

Air worthy of the breath

Of all singers that sing

In joy of their making . . . .

And finally, Berry characterizes the restorative work of God through nature's processes in “Sabbath Poem VI (1979).”  What “time” (or human history) has “stolen,” he writes, will return.  “Though creatures groan in misery,/ Their flesh prefigures liberty/ To end travail and bring to birth/ Their new perfection in new earth.”  Not only does this passage echo the hope of “God's Grandeur,” but it employs two reinforcing biblical images.  The references to “travail” and “birth”-the existential connection of suffering and distress with new life and hope-come out of Romans 8:22 where the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail until now.”  The reference to the “new earth”-a future made possible by God's grace and human action-refers to Revelation 21:1-4, in which the Apostle John envisions a new earth where God will live with his creation.

Clearly the theme of “Sabbath Poem VI”-as in “God's Grandeur”-is the divine concern (and hope) for the natural environment.  But both Hopkins and Berry perceive a human role and responsibility for carrying out the work of God.  While Hopkins in “Ribblesdale” seems skeptical of the ability of “selfbent” and “thriftless,” exploitive and improvident humanity, to take responsibility for writing the wrongs, Berry sees more potential.  He uses the metaphor of marriage in “Sabbath Poem I (1992)” to characterize this divine-human endeavor, suggesting that the human relationship to the non-human world is cooperative-even spousal.  He concludes the poem with the lines: “The work [is] divine and human/ By which we live on earth.”  He clarifies the cooperative role further in “Sabbath Poem VI: To Den (1982),” where he extends the relationship to healing.  He writes that “There are two healings: natures,   and ours and nature's.”  “Nature's” healing, he explains “will come in spite of us, after us,/ over the graves of its wasters.”  But “The healing/ that is ours and natures will come/ if we are willing, if we are patient,/ if we know the way, if we do the work.”  A great part of the work for Berry is poetry-that essential discipline.  His work has become a voice for Christian ecology and conservation in our time.  Utah writer Terry Tempest Williams calls him “our nation's conscience.”

A century later, what remains of Hopkins' ideals for Planet Earth as echoed in Berry's writing?  The short answer is: essentially everything.  Specifically, concerning the intrinsic-as opposed to instrumental-value of nature, Berry would agree.  Though his poems go further, affirming the sentience of non-human life, and conflating the human body with the world's.  Hence the human presence in the natural environment is Berry's ideal.  Concerning human responsibility for destruction of nature, Berry's poetic vision is more graphic and cataclysmic than Hopkins', though he holds out more hope for recovery as a divine-human endeavor.  Berry recognizes divine interest in the fate of the planet though his poems also portray a vision of Heaven's Kingdom descending and the development of a new earth.  And as Hopkins implies, Berry conceives salvation not in terms of disembodied individual “souls” escaping earth, but in terms of God's saving Creation-for him the fate of humans and non-human life is inextricably linked.  Furthermore, he conceives the destruction of the natural world as blasphemous, resulting in forfeiture of all salvation: human and non-human.

When, in 1967, Lynn White published his article, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” in the journal Science, claiming that Christianity was largely responsible for ecological problems, he was probably historically only half right.  Christian theology and practice has historically been ambiguous toward the importance of ecology, as suggested by the title of        H. Paul Santmire's book, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology.

 Santmire believes that despite the historical ambiguity, the trend since the mid-twentieth-century has been toward Biblical interpretation and theological practice that conceives non-human nature in God's redemptive as well as creative scheme.  And he anticipates that the “travail of nature in Christian theology” will “ come to a blessed ending.”

Perhaps some progress toward restoring the environment has been made from Hopkins' time to our own through valiant efforts by a growing number of Christian ecologists.  However, too little effort has been invested by Christian writers-poets in particular-in what should be primary: the salvation, holistically understood, of humans and their environment.  About this Berry writes, “I know some good work is being done [but] . . . . I am worried because I wonder how successful a mere scattering of good workers can be in maintaining a continuity or a tradition.”

But if the fragmented Christian community could unite-the Vatican with its compelling science, Evangelicals with their hard-won political capital, mainstream Protestants with their numbers and traditional interest in ecology-more progress could be made.  Berry's dream of a new earth might be realized.  But that dream will never be realized without poets and prophets.  I agree with former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky

and others that poetry has an important place in and potentially powerful effect on culture.  I believe it because of the integral relation of language to social and political action and power, which are motivated and legitimized by linguistic practice.

Whatever becomes the popular-or, in our circles, the Christian-vision of the environment and the human place and role in it, created largely by our poets or those who assume the prophetic role, will determine the actions or inactions that follow.  Contemporary voices must join Wendell Berry and a few other sensitized Christian poets to create an ecological vision, ways to talk about Christian care and responsibility, and concrete means to justify action as Hopkins attempted in his theologically informed ecological poems, and as Berry has accomplished in the growing body of his work.

NOTES

Bennett “Hopkins”/