Book cover of A Book of Psalms, by Edward Clarke
A Book of Psalms, by Edward Clarke
Author: Edward Clarke. Review by Jonathan Wooding
Do Friends still know the Psalms? They aren’t mentioned in the subject index to Quaker faith & practice. Do we still care about Myles Coverdale’s translations of them in the Book of Common Prayer (transferred wholesale into the King James Bible)? If Quakerism is a flowering from the stem of the mediaeval Devotio Moderna – the rediscovery of genuine pious practices such as humility, obedience, and simplicity of life, bringing God home to roost in the individual’s heart – then so surely are such courageous and tragic translators of the scriptures in the sixteenth century. Where would any reasonable dissenter have been without their Englishing of the texts?
As a schoolboy, I heard these lines one morning during school assembly, and they’re orienting me forty years later: ‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?’
They’re from Psalm 8, verses three and four, in the King James Bible translation, and I still care about them (just as they seem to care about me). But what is a psalm? And why, for most, have they become unnecessary? Is it our post-Christian failure to remember one function of poetry, the one that addresses itself to something beyond ourselves? This function enables the author to advertise the state of one’s self (inadvertently, or otherwise – it’s a gamble), even to seek a renewal of that self. It isn’t a way of engaging in an empirical investigation into the existence of the proposed recipient. Atheists take note: it doesn’t matter if no one’s listening. Give it an embarrassing (or even an ironic) go. What’s the worst that can happen?
Edward Clarke certainly knows and remembers the function of the Psalms. He has even learnt to read them in Hebrew, a language he has described as a ‘compacted, gnarly language of the desert, fit for meaningful conversation with a shepherd’. He hasn’t done this to tell us about God, but to advertise the state of his twenty-first century self, placed as it is within the ‘eternal silence of these infinite spaces’, as Blaise Pascal wrote.
There’s play and gravitas in equal measure, Clarke being both weighed down with it all, and flying away with the spoils. His preface tells us that ‘These poems are not translations or versifications [of the Psalms]. They are conversations with, and hesitations about, these ancient texts.’ It is a gift to us, and an encouragement too to do likewise – that is, to write our own psalms.
So, what does Clarke make of Psalm 8? A Book of Psalms is technically brilliant, ingenious, witty and decorous, so his Psalm 8 does not disappoint. In fact, it is amazingly apposite to the scale of the task involved in putting psalms at the heart of our religious identity. These psalms are not songs of protest but, as Clarke said in a recent webinar, an attempt ‘to get to the metaphysical heart of our problems rather than protest’. Things are pretty much broken, and yet they can break free for us, even now:
And yet the things which we have heard
Run out as broken vessels
Upon forgotten missals
Under our feet: they break like schemes of rhyme
Through layers of verses to flower in the word.
Their meaning’s dense inside us, folded up
Like cloth of starlight at the end of time,
In beaks of birds, in case we let it slip.
OK. I need a moment. This is a lucid and layered offering – see how the ‘word’ is ‘heard’ still across space and time, even though the ‘missals’ have failed us. ‘Time’ is perfected in a ‘rhyme’, and the memory of birdsong won’t let us go, even beneath the terrifying silence of the starlit spaces – a sculpted pebble, or an ark (a ‘vessel’) dropped into a gathered silence.
Some years ago, I was on a ‘Poetry & Prayer’ retreat at Ripon College, at which it was suggested that psalms occupy a kind of middle ground – not exactly lyric poetry, but poetry which addresses an ‘other’ of some kind. While enthralled by the divine poetry that was served up, we were all struggling to put pen to paper and make our own offerings. It’s that sense of presumption, isn’t it? Look at the giants who have gone before; who am I to raise my voice in footling song? And for religious people, isn’t this altogether exacerbated, too? What, should I compete with scripture, with the song of creation in Genesis, with the whirlwind-consciousness of the Book of Job, with ‘Yea, though I walk’ and with ‘Take no thought for the morrow’? Surely not.
I was reminded of that retreat this morning as I read Psalm 56 (prompted by the Church of England Common Worship Lectionary). I did eventually get up a poem, it turned out, and it was ‘out of’ this very Psalm 56. These are Coverdale’s lines that inspired me to speak up: ‘Thou tellest my flittings; put my tears into thy bottle: are not these things noted in thy book?’
Suddenly, I was able once more to ‘take God out of the dictionary’ and ‘listen for God’s breathlessness’ in a poem called ‘The Scholar at Cuddesdon’. My flittings were important, after all. I could respond to that Quaker challenge that haunts all who write, and who minister: ‘What canst thou say?’ In this spirit too, Clarke engages each of the Psalms in turn, giving them titles and unique poetical forms, which will remind you of the ingenuity of George Herbert, or of Thomas Hardy. These are not casual or earnest effusions (psalms, not spasms!), but well-wrought and hard-earned raids on the inarticulate, as TS Eliot’s ‘East Coker’ will have it.
What does Clarke make of Psalm 56, dare I ask? I read it, and I marvel at its response to that remaining ‘rumour of God’ which troubles our universe. As Clarke writes in his wonderful poetry manifesto, The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry: ‘Poetry matters. It is of central importance to our culture and we endanger ourselves when we forget that. No other art form brings back messages from the silence that is at the heart of our being by using the half-material something that makes us human.’ Edward Clarke’s Psalm 56 is a real showstopper, as a great poem must be – it carries us with it into a parallel (circumscribing?) time-free dimension. We’re no longer telling time-bound tales, we’re free as birds:
The Dove
Of David
The silent dove of distant places
Alights upon a mast,
Is swayed into the dawn upon
A melody we’ve lost:
The sight of her is like a fresh petition
Inside a song of commonplace expressions.
She is that song’s unspoken word,
The gesture of assent,
Which makes assurances of faith
Of petition and complaint:
The consonant that went again and plucked
The flitting vowel in her imperial beak.
And if you send her out once more,
She’ll only reappear
When there is no more sea at last
And doves are here and there:
It is the Spirit that moved upon the deep
That makes this window through which it might escape.
If you believe that God is a God-built-with-words, always was and ever shall be (and that this recognition does not spell God’s redundancy), then Clarke’s psalter may be a life-enhancing supplement to your ordinary devotions, and a goad too to your own religious self-expression. Clarke should have the last word, also from The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry, and, as if in self-fulfilling prophecy, ‘Poets dispose words, in lines that make you pause at their ends, to help you lose yourself to find that greater self that reposes within.’
