Bucolics

In the opening sentence to his essay “Poetry and Religion,”* Mark Jarman says

Just as poetry persists in the face of widespread indifference, so has a sense of the religous in poetry continued to exist despite the indifference of most poets to religion. It might be better to modify the word indifference or to refract it into ignorance, nostalgia, and animosity. Nevertheless, the religious impulse in poetry endures; many poems being written today show that urge to be tied to or united with or at one with a supernatural power that exists before, after, and throughout creation.

Aha, thought I, when I read this sentence, I have found my way to talk about Maurice Manning’s Bucolics (Harcourt, 2007). Others have spoken of the prosody, of the simplicity of the voice, have desribed the collection, Manning’s third, as a series of 78 numbered pieces that read like rustic psalms.

Well, let me take that qualification back. The Book of Psalms itself was supposedly written by a rustic, attributed to the shepherd king David and using the language of shepherds and others who live close to the earth. So the term “rustic psalm” is tautological.

A psalm of course is a sacred song. A bucolic is at once a pastoral poem and a herdsman/shepherd/farmer.

Maurice Manning’s Bucolics are spoken to a deity called Boss:

I
boss of the grassy green
boss of the silver puddle
how happy is my lot
to tend the green to catch
the water when it rains
to do the doing Boss

There they are defined, Boss and bucolic, on the first page, the overlord and the servant.

“I do not believe,” says Jarman, “that there is one genre of religious poetry being written in America today, as there was in England in the 17^th century…” Jarman is, of course, speaking of those poets we call the Metaphysicals: John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvel, et al.

It could be argued that Manning has set out to write an American metaphysical poetry. He began this work with A Companion for Owls, though it might be argued that it was there in the very beginning. Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions was, after all, a book of visions.

Jarman himself says, on his cover blurb to Bucolics:

In these marvelous addresses to the Almighty, Maurice Manning reminds us of our agrarian roots and that our best metaphors for the ineffable all spring from the soil. These psalms, powerful and hectoring, tautological and unique, are reminiscent of King David’s. They are spellbinding.

Spellbinding is an interesting choice of descriptor.

To return to Jarman’s essay, first published in 1991, he goes on to say:

The desire for atonement, secularized by the Romantic movement, takes a characteristic form in American poetry about nature. …The poet William Matthews has observed humorously that American literature is “thick with forest Christians” and that the theme of many nature poems is “I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.” The satire is effective because of its self-evidence. …What interests me, however, is how in approaching the mystery with religious respect, American poets anthropomorphize nature, even to the point of domesticating it … in order to make it inviting, and most importantly, inviting to us.

Is Boss an anthropomorphized version of nature? I asked myself that often, reading the poems. That would be the easy answer, for me any way. But if he is, he isn’t always that inviting. Sometimes he is remote and cold:

XII
why Boss why do the days drift by
like a leaf asleep on a bed of water
does the leaf forgive the tree that let
it fall into the water does
it know how stiff the river’s face
can be how smileless…
when all the leaf was trying to do
is cuddle Boss does cuddling move
the likes of you are you the river or
the thing that makes the river’s face
so still…

In talking about her book Inventing Niagara at this year’s Kentucky Women Writers Conference, Ginger Strand commented on the way humans like to think of nature as something over apart from us, something we do not partake of. According to Jarman, Americans have

a fundamental belief …that nature or the earth is better than the world where we actually do our living.

Manning’s bucolic lives in nature. His companions seem to be a horse and a dog, sometimes a fox or a rooster drop into the poems, but as far as other humans go, this creature seems lonelier than Caliban, as much a creature of the earth, as enslaved of the Boss as Caliban is of Prospero (speaking of spellbinding).

XXII
yes I’ve tried to hide my face
behind a tree I have been glad
to see the river run with mud
so fast it will not hold my look
but believe me Boss I can not hide
I can not muddy you I can
not chop you from my stony field
you’re like a weed…

“Yet,” says Jarman,

in the pantheistic view of nature I have been describing, the idea of reconstitution as reincarnation is strong; certainly it is implicit in the Christian sacrament of communion.

I don’t find much of the New Testament in Bucolics. Though the bucolic is a farmer and caught in the cycle of nature, speaks of haymaking, the plow, the hoe, though he jokes with the Boss, calls him “you sneaky devil, you cut up,” he may have more in common with Job than with Peter. He compares himself to the horse and the hoe, not to the seed.

LXXVIII
…Boss
I don’t like that that moment when
you turn me out alone to graze
to graze is such a hot-faced slight
as close as breath but never close
enough to know if I was hitched
for real or if the hitching Boss
I felt was just a feeling sweet
but not the honeypot itself
which swings the gate right back to you
O tell me why I can’t hold back
this bitter thought are you the bee
or just a stinging story Boss

And so the story ends, on a bitter question.

Like unto Jarman’s question:

Is it no longer possible [after the violence of the 20^th century] to see history in religious terms, as a function of the personality of God, a God capable of judgment and mercy and expecting obedience?

Certainly the bucolic seems to take great joy in the world the Boss has given him but his constant complaint is that the Boss won’t answer his questions.

It probably isn’t fair to compare Bucolics to the nature poetry Jarman cites in “Poetry and Religion.” Though there are trees in the poems, leaves and branches, there is little of the forest, the wild. There is none of the violence that Jarman sees as lying at the heart of Christianity. There are none of the noble predators that populate the poems of Mary Oliver. A fox shows up in dreams, on the edge of things, a mystical fox:

LXIX
beyond the field this time
he’s back once more the fox
beyond my doings Boss
beyond my little day

The hawk is having fun riding the wind: “I wonder if you said listen Red / I’m going to let you ride the wind / you won’t even have to flap”. And while the bucolic interacts with a buzzard, the bird is not the vehicle of resurrection that he is in Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Vulture.” He’s more a clown, an incompetent:

XLVI
the way that buzzard hops it makes
me sad to see him Boss the way
he flops around I know his wings
won’t work he’s got a naked tail

And as Manning’s carrion-eater is not a high-soaring vulture but a grounded old buzzard, so Bucolics is not nature poetry but pastoral, agrarian, concerned with the barnyard and not the forest. The bucolic lives in the country of Wendell Berry, the mad farmer. In fact, he might be called a mad farmer in his own right.

The simplicity of the vocabulary, the praise of apparently simple things like a red bug on a leaf or a drop of rain on a black branch, might fool one into thinking these are simple poems. But the simple diction has overtones of William Blake, and however jocular the bucolic’s language, the spiritual problems he sets forth in these poems are as knotty as anything in John Donne.

__________
*Quotes from “Poetry and Religion” taken from Mark Jarman, The Secret of Poetry (Story Line Press, 2001)