A Pastor & a Poet
David's Crown: Sounding the Psalms by Malcolm Guite
It is a rare man who is called to the offices both of poet and minister. Even if the history of verse does turn up an occasional Herbert or Hopkins, the two talents seldom join in the same person. This is not necessarily regrettable; the man of the cloth, with his duty to admonish and edify, and the man of the pen, seldom famous for his moral qualifications, are by nature vines of different soils, and to graft one onto the other has
resulted mainly in unhappy vintages.
In the reign of Henry the Fourth, one John Lydgate, a monk of Bury St. Edmunds, wrote at the behest of the Prince of Wales his Troy Book, a curious and interminable production that has found few modern readers. A modern encyclopedist sums up his merits mercifully with the statement that "he was no Chaucer."
Another who sought to combine these two employments was the Puritan Michael Wigglesworth of Harvard. His best-known work, in its day quite popular, is entitled The Day of Doom. A doggerel work abundantly liberal in its deployment of hellfire, its threatenings gained for its author a reputation of unimpaired orthodoxy in the fold of his fellow saints. Among their many admirers, Wigglesworth's verses won the esteem of no less a champion than Cotton Mather, who composed a short funerary ode for Wigglesworth expressing the double-edged hope that the book should accompany its author to heaven.
To pass from such sad past examples to Fr. Malcolm Guite's most recent collection is a pleasure. He writes in the best tradition of Anglican devotional verse and has achieved in these verses a rare perfection of form in the simplest language. He takes his place naturally as a part of that company of living Christian writers that includes James Matthew Wilson, Sarah Ruden, and Anthony Esolen. Among the poets of his own communion, Guite appears to be more the child of George Herbert than John Donne. He prefers tenderness to irony, and earnestness to wit.
He has drawn his inspiration from the psalms, a body of poetry famously resistant to the attempts of Anglophone poets to fit them into the common molds of English verse. Guite has accepted this fact, and has given us imitations in the spirit of the Davidic songs rather than a hackneyed versification of the Authorized Version. Therefore he escapes embarrassments of which this stanza from the Bay Psalm Book may serve as a fair example:
Let cleave my tongue my palate on
If mind thee do not I;
If chief joys or'e I prize not more
Jerusalem my joy.
And the challenge of the psalms for the English-language poet is not merely the difficulty of converting the Hebrew originals, with their absence of meter and copious parallelisms; there is also the dangerous temptation of trying to represent the cri de coeur tone that animates their pleadings by recourse to that brand of sub-poetic rhetoric, common to bad hymns, that falsifies religious emotion with a gluttonous serving of would that'sand O what a glory's. Guite is never guilty of pious exhibitionism. Neither does he find himself in the awkward position of flying with wings pinned together with so many exclamation points.
Right Modulations
We find in this small book's introduction that much of it took shape as the fruit of Guite's meditations on living through the great Season of the Virus that has brought an end to so many of our flimsy securities. Yet even if these poems are one man's response to a historic catastrophe, they do not feel as if they are the inalienable property of this historic moment. Contemporary matters are the grist, and not the heart of this collection:
Then let the chaff of life just blow away,
The cynic scoffer and the evil troll,
The hunters and the haters who hold sway
In raging twitter storms, the ones who scroll
Through hate- and hit-lists in their tiny rage
Are dust upon the mirror of your soul.
What future life this work may have it would be frivolous to predict, but Guite has assuredly written something finer than a metrical commentary on current events touched over with Christian tinsel to comfort troubled souls. Allusions appear in several places to interior frailties and spiritual dry spells felt by the author himself; a modern psalter without such confessions would of course be incomplete. Thankfully, our poet does not forget that confession should end in praise, and not the other way around. He is not his own main subject and does not offer his readers the undesired spectacle of penitential theatrics. He is not one of those poets who would have us believe that they suffer frequent dark nights of the soul simply from turning on the evening news. By nature, he seems to be a man of almost Buddhist tranquility:
Thomas Banks lives in North Carolina and teaches online at the House of Humane Letters. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared in First Things, The New English Review, Quadrant, The Imaginative Conservative, Crisis Magazine, The St. Austin Review, and other publications.
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