AUGUST 2005 - ISSUE 5 - ISSN 1448 - 632

STRIKING THE METAPHYSICAL CHORD: HOW THE GIFTS OF NATURE IMAGE SALVATIONS GREG SMITH

 

ABSTRACT

Very busy about modern life, we ordinary people usually miss the wood for the trees. But poets can very often offer readers valuable insights about what really counts, what undergirds our existence. They can observe what happens with insightful eyes through the movement from description to metaphor through to metaphysics. The article reports readings from three Australian poets on the theme of rain to say that in the continuity of the seasons nature's gifts are instances of interim salvations. For, in their timeliness and plenty, drought-breaking rains foreshadow the final salvation promised in Jesus.

In the coming of rain, the doubts, fears, hesitations, rejections, and futility that drought causes are abated or even resolved. I mean that with the rain comes recovery, certainty, growth, regeneration and transformation. Prompted by these optimistic facts, I will read three poems on rain, a highly emotive word in our sunburnt country. The discussion will report on readings of Judith Wright’s “Dry Storm,” Les Murray’s “The Warm Rain,” and Kevin Hart’s “The Storm.” I find that the gifts of nature are interim reliefs and rescue, and that in striking the metaphysical chord in their poems, these three poets image our final salvation.

I will employ an interpretative hermeneutic to frame up some observations on how the gifts of nature like rain can be termed ‘interim salvations.’ These image that final salvation Christ promised. I will be plotting how the movement of meanings from experience to metaphor and back again accumulates richer resonances. The discussion will be exploring poetry’s multi-levelled meanings as it accumulates greater meaning in the movement from raw experience through metaphor to strike chords on a metaphysical plane. 

This imaginative movement could be likened to hearing the harmonics or overtones in a chord, as the focus moves from experience as a note, through a chord to its harmonic. Just as the solo line resides much amplified in the symphonic poem, so meanings become richer as we plumb layers of imaginative experience. The following discussion shows how sometimes poets strike the metaphysical chord as they explore the significances of events in their poems. While readily recognizing the disharmonies, we will be striving to perceive those heavenly harmonies that can call beyond our normal range of reading expectations. For metaphysical explanations are those supplied by the broadest possible interpretive framework.

In no less likely a place than scripture, rain attains a powerful metaphoric force. In the Book of Psalms, great tremors and plenteous rain marks the presence of Adonai in Psalm 68: "The earth trembled. The sky also poured down rain at the presence of the God of Sinai — at the presence of God, the God of Israel" (68:8). Then also to confirm his ownership of the world and his pledge to restore it, Yahweh sends rain just when it is needed: "You, God, sent a plentiful rain. You confirmed your inheritance, when it was weary" (68:9). In Psalm 72, the Chosen One is represented as being most timely and desirable as is the rain: "He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that water the earth" (Ps 72:6). His beneficience is as natural and essential as the waters.

Then in the liturgical psalms, rain is associated with God's blessing and selection: "Passing through the valley of Weeping, they make it a place of springs. Yes, the autumn rain covers it with blessings" (84:6). Finally, it is right to praise God for unlike man he alone makes the rain for the earth: "Sing unto the LORD with thanksgiving . . . Who covers the heaven with clouds, who prepares rain for the earth" (Ps 147:7). Rain may be rare in Palestine but when it comes, it proves God's choice and his intimate connection with the land and its fate. It is one of the key symbols to denote God’s caring and connection with the land. That metaphysical chord is the religious key to understanding in our readings of the poems to follow.

Judith Wright’s metaphysical mindscapes: “forming into one chord”

The physical landscape Judith Wright celebrated is a real Australian one, consisting of “tree-frog and dingo, rainforest and sea coast, stark cliffs and eroded hills, bushfire and flood, dust and drought, wind and rain, flame-tree and cicadas, gum tree and cyclone.” [1] These features are not just visual images in her poetry but each has its distinctive oral/aural communication to make; each has its poetic and phonological identity with ready resonances in the ear of Australia’s collective memory.  These natural images show an assimilated sensibility, an unselfconscious pride in being Australian, and “a sense at once of the fundamental community of common humanity to which we all belong.” [2]   Let me focus on one element of that mindscape in particular, that of rain.

Judith Wright’s landscapes are imaged in her wordscapes, indeed may we say, they reflect her mindscapes. Thus her poetic images could be characterised as bearing multi-leveled applications: the physical, the metaphorical and the metaphysical. For the mystery and power of a unified view and focused vision in reading reality lies in her now iconic images. Accordingly, her metaphoric wordscapes represent the natural elements in their operational dynamics. In her discussion of the spring rains for instance, we can access her metaphysical mindscapes.

To see the metaphoric overtones at work, let us consider “Dry Storm.” [3] This an apostrophe to the storm, like a prayer for relief, from pain, even a cry for salvation:

O ease our restlessness, Wild wandering dark,

vague hurrying depths of storm, pause and be full,

and thrust your fullness into our desire

till time release us, till we sleep.  And wake

to a cool sky and a soaked earth left bare

to drink its light in peace. (17-22)

This climax of her poem is a woman’s prayer, with its hopeful plea to the sky for the long needed relief of soaking rain.  This poem’s petitionary form is surrounded with feminine enticements and sexual imagery, fusing lore and mystery in its plaintive appeals for relief.  As if in a prenuptial, this process of relief is anticipated [4] before Fulfilment in a foreshadowing with joyful anticipation. The invocative plural petitioners identifies the “our desire” as the collective voice of the local farming community with the whole of humanity. The heart-felt prayer achieves almost universal validity.

Wright here again explores important polarities to fuel a dramatic tension in its atmosphere of expectation. The poem suggests that the long-awaited drenching, the fulfilment, indeed a world’s financial salvation (for it involves national economics beyond just local morale), which calms sexual restlessness. However for Wright, that restlessness is not destructive but is good and productive. Yet empirical reality offers only the hard paradox that the dry storm she writes about holds yet another delusion; it is merely thunder and lightning and thus a teaser; for that she says it “means ill.” The only realistic response in that need is to hope.

Caught it seems between wonder and irony, her voice’s perception of things soon transfers to a more generalised view at a second level of meaning removed from just description or depiction, to seek answers to the why of things. Typically, Wright dwelt on the paradoxes in birth and love and time and death, for example, “love that knew not its beloved” (“Woman to Child” line 10), “you shall escape and not escape” (“Woman to Child”), “Lion, / Look upon my flesh and see / that in it which never dies.” [5] (“Lion”) and “Open, green hand, and give / the dark gift you hold.” (“Dark Gift”). [6]   Grappling with those tensions is evident here in “Dry Storm.”

Her metaphoric landscaping comes to be a creative exercise in imagination when it assumes the purpose of interrogating life, and thus “Dry Storm” becomes an opportunity for etching out possibilities beyond conventional understandings. Her visions may have a philosophic ring to them but the point is always not greater cognitive insight but deeper relatedness with life and the environment. Hers is a holistic appreciation of reality. Exploiting the ambiguities in paradoxes, her interrogations seek to bring the texts to life. So for me, her aesthetic endeavour signals a more salvific sensibility about exciting possibilities offered by ultimate explanations.

Wright’s ‘metaphysics’: “spring’s return”

Let me elaborate on Judith Wright’s metaphysical mindscape, the “what it means.” Her poem’s voice seeks some meaningful coherence, “some Parmenidean constancy.” [7] It is true poets are not philosophers, but “poets generally try to articulate not whole world-orders, but, instead, to crystallize moments of emotional perception, and to make them clear and significant to every man.” [8] Wright relates the sense data to some central general meaning, as she illustrates well in another poem, “For Precision”:

. . . forming into one chord

what’s separate and distracted; making the vague hard –

catching the wraith – speaking with a pure voice,

and that the gull’s sole note like a steel nail

that driven through cloud, sky, and irrelevant seas,

joins all, gives all a meaning, makes all whole.[9]

That phrase “makes all whole” typifies her intellectual framework. It features connectedness for seeking continuities in the regenerative cycle of the seasons and inevitable birth and death. She brings it all together in a metaphysical shell “forming into one chord.” We might loosely call this distinctive and contemporary metaphysics ‘her epistemology of the senses’ or ‘a logic of the heart’ whereby the feminine perception and intuition offer an alternative way of regarding reality and of unifying it.

Her finest poems in Woman to Man and The Gateway have this genuine metaphysical note, and they are, moreover, expressed with a disciplined clarity that is not common enough in modern poetry. [10] Much of her inspiration lay in her effort to comprehend in one vision the antinomies of birth and death, growth and decay, love and loneliness, union and isolation.  In her best work, this effort results in a tension of ideas and an intensity of feeling that suggests a coherent universe and even an identifiable metaphysics.

Judith Wright’s persistent rejection of materialism, greed, violence, exploitation and oppression shows how her metaphysical framework is strongly saturated with an ethical vector, with an ethics of justice towards an indigenous treaty (still unrealised in 2005) and a practical respect for the natural environment.

Thus, her metaphysical framework undergirds her attitudes beyond the words, in the intuitions, ethics and convictions that motivate, enliven and create images prophetical of salvation.  I would characterise her metaphysics in her term, “spring’s return.” In it, I find Wright’s own advice for living a positive life. It is her celebration of life’s recurring wholeness and fertility. She explains:

Traherne said nothing had been loved as much as it deserves. Though growing old I lament too few answers to beauty’s sight and touch, too many words. I sit here now intent on poetry’s ancient vow to celebrate lovelong life’s wholeness, spring’s return, the flesh’s tune. [11]

In my reading of Judith Wright, I have found many invitations to practise this positive outlook, in defiance of negative cynicism and a pervasive pessimism.  Being positive orients our lives to enhancing human dignity and seeking the sublime. It is not merely as a personal preference, but quite evidently an essential constant for survival and happiness, as a society and as the human race. It is the basis for building any expectation of salvation.

In her motifs of recurrence, restorative action and renewal, Wright intuited some sense of the sublime:

[She] is in the metaphysical tradition of Brennan in its search for the lost unity of perceptions and creation and an unwillingness to accept social or biological determinism . . . . [Her poetry is] modernist in orientation and expresses the crises in Western culture in mid-twentieth century; the failure of language; the dislocation of subject and object which leads to a despiritualised utilitarian world, and ultimately to the atom bomb; and the provenance of love and poetry in such a world.” [12]

Being positive in defiance of the negatives is an acquired practice, a mind-set, and a precious orientation that we cannot allow to waver. To apply her ‘metaphysics’ as I have called them, I believe her advice is still intensely pertinent: people as individuals, families, churches and societies all need to ‘think positive’ anticipate better outcomes, and resist today’s multiplying negatives. Her hope for the “spring’s return “is a harbinger of salvation.

Rain in Les A. Murray: “peppercorn puddles”

When considering how the cycles of nature image the salvations that are possible and are being won, Les Murray’s “The Warm Rain” [13] must surely be regarded as a wonderful patterning of images of refreshment and natural fulfilment. The arrival and effects of a fall of plenteous warm rain on the farm is described with joy. Through a plural voice, the poet and his family view the developing scene through their window as through a sepia-like frame of a ‘forties still picture. They are emotionally involved in the developing drama of regeneration, as that rain is their farm’s life-blood. With this rain beginning in its “peppercorn puddles,” it is no less true to say their salvation is being won. Nature’s gift lies in her cycles of refreshing rain.

The poem reports more than a casual event or an afternoon’s literary entertainment; its genius lies in retelling a miracle. In eight verses of thirty-nine lines, the poet narrates the wonderful refreshment of rain’s affecting everything, from the farm’s natural life to the farming family’s hopes. Various signs of its arrival structure the description. The rain is first perceived as “a subtle slant locating the light in air” in a wonderful image of perception and light that prepares us for the more complex devices to follow. The next sign is the knotting of pepper-white dust into peppercorn puddles. The rain darkens leaves to lustre; the forest’s canopy is gradually saturated until its leaves’ dullness grows into sheen with vibrant colour as the rain does its cleansing work.

References to road traffic vitalise the descriptions with sibilants and everyday imagery: the rain dissolves “the race way of rocket smoke behind cars,” and the refreshing wetness makes lorries whiz, until “fixtures get cancelled.” Finally, emergency workers are called out to shovel away its welcome excess’s damaging effects. An air of normality, and of typical but reliable predictability guides the reader / viewer to plot the course of the subsequent few hours. Rain is the expected life-blood of the farm and the community and the nation too. The saving rain is a salvation expected, welcomed, and widely felt.

Its effects are widely experienced. In the following night’s TV reports, meteorological maps link this local fall with the nation’s overall weather, in patterns “like the Crab nebula.” Their “borders swell over the continent and they compress the other / nations of the weather.” The falls saturate everything: “crepe-myrtle trees heel”, “every country dam brews” and “air and paddocks are swollen.” In sympathetic fallacy, the ocean too pumps up and “explodes in gigantic cloak sleeves,” as “the whole book of foam” opens disclosing the very sea’s foundations. Nature roars in joy and exultation.

In all this superfluity, Murray’s humans are reminded that they are but insignificant ‘chirpings’ in nature’s grand plan. They are but thoroughly contingent upon it; their words cause nothing, their science is merely descriptive, and they are participant spectators if partial and chance beneficiaries for being there by chance. Worse, for many who lack spiritual insight into the numinous, their watching the rain has no effect upon themselves nor on the rain’s capacity to progress the season’s growth. Their viewing adds no aesthetic or ethical dimension where previously “grey trees strip bright salmon.”

Mere spectators might take it for granted thus losing a precious moment for insight and thanks that warm rain should evoke. These people lose the opportunity to celebrate the event of the downpour by “hiding the warm rain back inside our clothes.” But for the more numinously aware, rain betokens family and continuity and spirituality; for the lucky ones like the poet’s family viewing it together within an economic framework, the rain’s life-giving plenitude replaces notional possibility with sure continuity. Now with morale reaffirmed and attuned to its mystery, these people to gain a wonderful humility about its natural cycles.

Readers find in this poem to be another reassertion of Murray’s paradigm of a rural Acadia, and another wonderful demonstration of the divine design for creation. Unfortunately however, in choice lies salvation. For some recipients either lose or learn from the rain just as only some readers with insight will benefit from the poem’s forty lines, just as the forty days and forty night of Noah’s flood were a lesson to those faithfully aboard the ark and a destruction for the wicked world focused on sin city mores.

Hart’s saving wisdom in the rain: “water whooping through drains”

A similarly joyful, but more realistic voice emerges upon the arrival of a storm in Kevin Hart’s “The Storm.” [14] Here the poet sees the benefits of the rain beyond the damage and injuries the violence of the storm inflicts.

Stanza one’s eight lines record nature’s own keen anticipation (“a thrill runs up the leaves’ spines”) in the abrupt event of the unforeseen arrival of the storm. Its action is powerfully depicted. In stanza two, the meditation almost becomes a profit and loss analysis as the poet concludes that its gains outweigh its costs. The poet conveys a very practical attitude, which quickly slips into a theological vein to echo the Gospel injunction about the futility of worry and the impermanence of things (no doubt echoing Matt 6:28 on not worrying like the wild flowers about the future). Rain’s arrival reveals his longing for change. Stanza three builds on this application to arrive at a timely understanding based on a metaphysics underlying what he sees.

It is true the storm brings damage – “[w]ith claws that slash my window” (8). In its suddenness, it catches the poet out with a full wash on the line; it even lifts “the shed roof for a trampoline” in its violence.  He feels its effects beyond the built environment, for like a cutpurse it frisks “the tree for sparrows and their eggs.” Indeed and worse, the storm is upsetting – it reminds the home-owner of the perhaps deliberately shunned “loose tiles” for the storm will “pry into each crack” as if to shame him in his neglect or more typically to embarrass him in his over-stretched resources when it comes to home maintenance. He feels well and truly reminded that, “I need to learn that nothing lasts / Lord knows, / I need to learn it fresh each year”(16-18).

But beyond all this damage, violence and shame, the storm brings refreshing rain. For this boon alone, he says, he will let it do all it can do, “so long as I hear water whooping through drains . . .” His only condition is met – rain comes in abundant plentifulness. The storm’s unexpected and sudden arrival brings plenty of rain, and obviously plenty of consolation, relief and joy (“whooping”).

The storm brings refreshing wisdom too. Stanza three shifts the meditation into an harmonic when, as a result of the storm's action, the poem's voice reflects upon the meaning of things. In particular, it reminds him about the impermanence of things and immortality of the soul. The storm has caused him to reflect that water comes in many forms, as solid hail it thrashes, as rain “with claws that slash my window”, and as placid lake water it reflects moonlight. The one element in three forms does a variety of functions. It should not be assessed, nor indeed blamed, for just one of these three. More pointedly, he comes to realise that “the soul is hail thrashing a stone wall / and not always a lake in moonlight” (20-21). Paradoxically too, the element that underscores a moonlight sonata can also cause domestic catastrophe. Readers learn it is of the nature of any event of plenty to overflow on good and bad, new and old, reserved and public alike.

Hart’s recourse to explanatory metaphysical categories (“soul”) raises the meditation to a comprehensive closure in the third movement of this poem. His meditation moves from what is rather pleasingly ordinary (the arrival of a sudden storm) to generate a timely reminder about what is enduring. First sensing the thrill in the leaves’ spines in their expectation of rain, then feeling the clawing action of the thrashing rain in its duration, and now finally learning the lesson of the rain (“Who in the world would teach me that?”), the poem records significant events in the poet’s imagination in the same sequence as they are generated in the natural order. They are based on facts, ordinary facts, but show the poet’s unique power of creative imagination that can glean what counts as useful knowledge by interpreting the cycles of nature.

This garnered wisdom is not just a personal intuition of some inaccessible subjective worth; this is worth reporting and publishing, for it is wisdom for humans and shows a path to find philosophical even a religious understanding of the human condition. He finds that, despite all its frustrations, deceits, and trauma, the human journey has a direction to a happy goal, and his evidence lies in these natural sequences. That the storm caught him unawares in its sudden attack just reinforces his understanding of the habit humans have of forgetting that nature has a recurring pattern of refreshment. Their habit of misinterpreting its worth by selecting only its localized damage just shows how they too easily relate events solely to themselves, measuring their import by its effects on their human selves and property only.

But as the poet shows, if we humans were to dare to perceive a little further beyond the usual limits of our own self-interest, if we were to embrace an understanding of life as being designed for fulfillment, it might just give us something of more worth to know and live by. So more insightfully now in hindsight, he concludes, the storm has given him “more than I wanted of today” and of course more than he ever expected. The time of trial and endurance was actually ultimately productive. Wisely, he notes this gain is “something I cannot put down / Now or ever.” While his poem suggests that such arresting knowledge can come from the senses, its metaphysical meaning comes only with the creative action of poetic imagination.

Conclusion

Our discussion has surveyed the restorative effects of saving rain. Australians know well what this means personally and economically, for rain in a long parched land brings real transformation. Sustained rain brings personal and community regeneration and social and economic recovery. It is the key to community survival and continuity. Our discussion has surveyed the treatment of rain in three Australian poets. Judith Wright showed that rain is essential to the natural life cycle, and that fertility and transformation are expressions of that natural process. Her metaphysics of continuity, intuition and coherence strikes a metaphysical chord in her phrase, “spring’s return.” It “makes all whole" ("For Precision") by “forming into one chord ("For Precision"). In support, Les Murray dramatises a celebration of rejuvenation and recovery in “The Warm Rain” to allude to its being a regular miracle when “every country dam brews” and “air and paddocks are swollen.” The rain’s life-giving plenitude replaces drought’s remote possibilities with sure continuity. Its healing and causative action is a numinous pledge of continuity.

Finally in Kevin Hart’s “The Storm,” we saw how the rain, when it is recurrent, brings renewable joy with “water whooping through drains.” This is a meditation on continuity; recurrent rain affirms Nature’s certainty just as an immortal soul is the image of personal continuity. The rain brings more than a plenteous downpour – it brings on a reflection about continuity approaching a metaphysical intuition; it brings an overflow of saving wisdom, which is “more than I wanted of today.” In these three readings, I am finding that rain is a powerful trope describing real and interim salvations, and is a powerful evocation, certainly a recurring literary motif and certainly like Noah's palm twig, a recurring pledge of refreshment and restoration foreshadowing the final salvation promised to the world in the unique life, death and resurrection of God's only beloved Son.

 

References

Brissenden,  R. F., “The Poetry of Judith Wright.” Meanjin 54 (Spring 1953), 255-267.

Croft, J., “Responses to Modernism, 1915-1965.” In Laurie Hergenhan, (ed.), The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Australia, 1988, 409-429.

Hall, G.V., “Australian poet and prophet (1915-2000).” National Outlook.  (November 2000). 26,

Hart, K., New and selected poems. Pymble, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1995.

Murray,  L.A., Subhuman Redneck Poems. Potts Point, NSW: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1996.

Murray, L., (ed.), Collected Poems 1961-2002. Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002.

Scott, R.I., “Judith Wright’s World-View.” Southerly Number Four, (1956), 189-195.

The Gregorian Missal for Sundays. Solesmes, France: St. Peter’s Abbey, 1990.

Wright, J., Judith Wright: Collected Poems, 1942-1985. Pymble, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994, 2002.

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[1] Gerard V. Hall, “Australian poet and prophet (1915-2000)” National Outlook.  (November 2000). 26, [On-line] Available: http://www.acu.edu.au/theology/Judith.htm [2003 March 25].

[2] R. F. Brissenden, “The Poetry of Judith Wright.” Meanjin 54 (Spring 1953), 258.

[3] Judith Wright,  Collected.Poems 1942-1985, (hereafter C.P.), (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1971, 2002), 191.

[4] Reminiscent of the joyful liturgical text complete with singularly festive Alleluias, a veritable hapax phenomenon in Advent: “Rorate coeli de super, et nubes pluant iustum: aperiatur terra, et germinat Salvatorem,” (trans. Skies, let the just One come forth / like the dew, let him descend from the clouds like the rain./ The earth will open up and give birth to our Saviour.” Is 45:8, Ps 18. The Introit of the Fourth Sunday of Advent. The Gregorian Missal for Sundays (Solesmes, France: St. Peter’s Abbey, 1990), 180.

[5] Lines 3-4, “Lion” from “The Gateway” (1953), C.P., 86.

[6] Lines 17-18, “Dark Gift,”from “The Gateway” (1953), C.P., 71.

[7] Scott, R.I., “Judith Wright’s World-View.” Southerly Number Four, (1956), 189.

[8] Scott, World-View, 193.

[9] Lines 13-18, “For Precision.” From The Two Fires (1955), C.P., 129.

[10] Brissenden, “Judith Wright,” 260.

[11] “Unpacking Books.” CP., 388.

[12] Julian Croft, “Responses to Modernism, 1915-1965.” In Laurie Hergenhan, (ed.), The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. (Ringwood, Vic: Penguin Australia, 1988), 423.

[13] Les Murray, Subhuman Redneck Poems, 93. C.P., 442.

[14] Kevin Hart, New and Selected Poems. (Pymble, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1995), 46.

 

Greg Smith is a doctoral student at Australian Catholic University, McAuley Campus at Banyo, and an English literature teacher in Brisbane.

Email: greg.hub@pacific.net.au

 

 

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