Rupert’s Land News: In the workshop you conducted recently while you were in Winnipeg, you said, “I’m more a priest when I’m writing a poem, and I’m more of a poet when I’m celebrating the Eucharist.” Can you tell me more about what you mean by this?
Malcolm Guite: I had the vocation to be a poet, in a sense, first. When I first realized I had a vocation to the priesthood, I thought it might be uncomfortable to do that too, despite the great series of examples that had gone before me. But I gradually came to realize that what you want to achieve from a poem is to invite people, through the richness of language, onto a kind of transformative journey. So, one enters the poem, and then through the images of the poem and the elevation and beauty of the language, they have something transformative happen to them, and they emerge from out of the poem changed; they’ve been on a journey. Then they’re sent back from the poem out into the world with clearer vision.
Now, I realized once I became a priest and I was, in every sense, celebrating the liturgy, that that’s exactly what happens in the Eucharist—and in any liturgy. The liturgy is itself poetry. So, in a sense, the thing I was trying in my small, particular way to do as a poet, I was also invited to do as a priest. I came to understand the liturgy in poetic form, and it followed therefore that I began to think about poetry liturgically.
Gradually, it got to the point where I realized that when I write poetry, the priest in me is fully alive to what I’m doing. And there’s a pastoral and priestly and sacramental element to the way I write poetry. But I also realized that my whole feeling about liturgy and what it is, and what it is pastorally, was poetic. So now I see the two vocations as absolutely a single vocation mediating itself in different aspects.
RLN: You mentioned that you felt the call of a vocation towards being a poet before being a priest. Can you tell me what you’ve learned about vocation as a whole, and then how you have experienced this in your life?
MG: Vocation is a universal thing. The first vocation to which we have responded fully, all of us, is the vocation to exist. We are called into being by God. It’s a really important insight—one I drew particularly from Coleridge. He sees the cosmos itself as a divine poem—one that is right now being uttered forth. For Coleridge, the cosmos is less like a piece of clockwork and more like an utterance. If I give you a poem, you could spend a year on the chemical composition of the paper and the ink, and you could look at the geometrical formation of the letters, and you could study it without ever knowing it was a poem. Then, if you discovered it was a poem, that wouldn’t take away the truth of any of the physiological things you found out about it, but it would add something to it.
So, once you’ve got the idea that God speaks, He says, “Let there be light;” “Let there be cosmos;” He also say,s “Let there be you; let there be me; let there be Malcolm.” That has implications. It means that you only exist because God has spoken and called you; He has literally called you out of nothingness into being. That’s a vocation. The “voca” bit of the verb is literally “call” in Latin. In a sense, He’s not only calling you, He’s expressing you; He’s vocalizing you.
Coleridge puts this beautifully in a letter he wrote to Thomas Clarkson, the great founder of the campaign against the slave trade. Clarkson had a bit of a crisis because he knew it was so obvious that slavery was wrong, but every two years, over twenty years of campaigning, Parliament rejected the bill to abolish it. Clarkson sent a letter to Coleridge saying that he was not just giving up on campaigning, but that he was losing his faith. He had no idea anymore of the divine. Coleridge says, and this is so good, “My dear Clarkson, don’t worry for a moment at all whether you have any idea of the divine, but never forget that you are a divine idea. You were there in the mind of the logos, in the mind of the eternal Word, before the beginning. You and I are logoi from the logos—we are little words from the Word—that were spoken.” That’s a really radical idea. He tells him not to give up because Christ has not finished saying to the world what he intends to say through Thomas Clarkson. So, he sums it up: “Try not to become an impediment in the speech of Christ.”
Now, think about all this in relation to the question of vocation. Think about every one of us as not only poems in ourselves being spoken about by God, but parts of this bigger epic that he’s doing, which is the cosmos and the world. Every single person has a unique part to play in this utterance. Every person is made in the image of God, and one of the things He makes us to do is to do our own making and creating and shaping. And that doesn’t just mean if you’re a painter or a poet or a musician; it means if you’re a father or a mother or a daughter or a son or a colleague or a friend. You have a creative role in shaping these things. That vocation is universal. But within that, we discern the particular things we think God is calling us to do.
I wanted to be a poet simply because my mother had given me lots and lots of poetry as a kid, and I loved it. I thought I was called, vocationally, to be a schoolteacher. For five years, that’s what I was; I taught English and Drama in a public high school for five years. I got married by then, and my wife was a deaconess, so I thought one in the family was enough. But I was deeply studying John Donne, particularly his sermons, and in the course of that, I began to wonder whether I had a call to the priesthood.
And I put it off for a while, first being trained as a lay reader and then a lay preacher, but I realized there was still a sacramental aspect to it. And I thought it would be really embarrassing if I had a vocation to the priesthood because at that time, my wife was a deaconess and then a deacon, and we were still a decade off the final movement that allowed women to be ordained priests. I thought it would be totally wrong if I was ordained a priest before my wife, considering she’s five years my senior and had been in ministry for quite some time before she even met me. So, I said to God, “I’m going to take my wife’s opinion on this question as a word from You.” I was pretty sure she’d say, “one in the family is enough.” Of course, when I said to her, “Look, I know this is a dumb idea, but I wonder if God is calling me to priesthood.” And she just looked at me and said, “Of course, I’ve known that for years.” So, my last excuse was taken away from me, and I pursued that vocation. And I wrote this poem, which drew from the first of the Advent antiphons, “O Sapientia,” which was just about the very things I’ve been saying to you about the nature of vocation:
I cannot think
I cannot think unless I have been thought,
Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken.
I cannot teach except as I am taught,
Or break the bread except as I am broken.
O Mind behind the mind through which I seek,
O Light within the light by which I see,
O Word beneath the words with which I speak,
O founding, unfound Wisdom, finding me,
O sounding Song whose depth is sounding me,
O Memory of time, reminding me,
My Ground of Being, always grounding me,
My Maker’s Bounding Line, defining me,
Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,
Come to me now, disguised as everything.
So, I then think of all my poems as words from the Word, and I see the divine Word as underlining the meaning of everything. The two vocations of poet and priest came at different points in the time of my life, but I now perceive them as twin aspects of a single vocation, which is partly the vocation just to be the particular person that I am and no other.
RLN: What advice would you have for those who want to engage more with their prayer through poetry?
MG: The first advice I give is actually a piece of advice I received from the end of a poem by Seamus Heaney. He’s got a sequence called “Station Island.” In one of these, number 11, he records a piece of advice he was given from the other side of a confessional grille, which is to read poems as prayers. This doesn’t just mean to read poems which happen to be prayers as prayers, or to just read religious and Christian poetry—it means to read poetry. How do we do that? Read poetry consciously in the presence of the Holy Trinity. Imagine reading a poem and reading it with Jesus. Jesus is looking at it with you; you are sharing it with your Saviour. That’s transformative because you’re bringing everything into the light of Christ.
One of the greatest poets in the Anglican heritage, George Herbert, has a poem called “Prayer,” in which he offers you, in the space of a sonnet, twenty-six different emblems or images to help you reflect on what prayer is. It doesn’t even have the verb to be; it’s prayers:
Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
Every one of these, if you reflect on them, teaches you about prayer. To take one up for an example, the second line, “God’s breath in man returning to his birth,” is a prayer. Now, obviously, he knew that the word “breath” in the Greek of the New Testament and in the Hebrew of the Old Testament simultaneously means “spirit” as well as “breath” and “wind.” And so, if you think prayer is God’s breath in the return to his birth, one way of looking at that is that in just a couple of breaths, you can go through the entire creation and salvation story and enact it again. When you breathe in, you can be Adam in the garden. Everything starts with this. And God breathes into the human being, into Adam, and Adam became the living spirit. So, our breath in is God’s breath out. You can breathe in, and you can recognize that you’re created, alive, and a conscious living being. And this isn’t just air in my lungs, this is the gift of the spirit of God. And you can thank God for that.
But now I have a problem. I can’t hold my breath forever. But I know it’s the breath of life. I have to breathe out, but every time we breathe out, we’re rehearsing that last breath. One day, we are going to have to give the breath of life back to the place it comes from. So, I can breathe in with Adam in the garden, but who can I breathe out with? Well, just as I’m wondering about how to do that, I find myself with the second Adam, and He’s beside me, and He’s stretching out His arms on the cross, and He breathes out His last. He says, “God, into Your hands, O Lord, I commit My spirit.” And I think that if He can do it, I can do it. His breath can carry my breath. And I breathe out.
But it’s more than just that. Because if I’m in the garden with Adam, then I’m with Christ on Good Friday when He breathes His last and dies on the cross. Now, I’ve heard people describe Holy Saturday, that strange poise between Good Friday and the glory of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, as the earth holding its breath. And I thought, no, it’s not the earth that’s holding its breath, it’s heaven that’s holding our breath. Our life has been breathing.
Then, what happens on Easter Day? It’s a new Genesis scene. Jesus appears in the upper room to His terrified disciples. And what does He do? He breathes on them and tells them to receive the Holy Spirit. So, I breathe in with the first Adam, I breathe out with the second as He dies, and then when I breathe in the second time, this is my risen life; the risen Lord Jesus is breathing into me. And I know that I have the breath of the life of heaven, and as I die, I will be risen again. I can do all this in a couple of breaths. A lot of people talk about centring and breathing exercises for your prayer life, but that’s not a new idea. So that’s just one example of one line of a poem, one image of twenty-six, that can guide one in prayer.
RLN: Have you explored poetry in other languages? If so, what has that taught you about their language and form?
MG: I had a reasonably good grasp of French when I came up to the university, and I was quite influenced by French poetry, mainly in terms of sounds and its usefulness in English. There was a particular verse of a poem by Verlaine that I really appreciated:
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.
Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;
I think I appreciated it because I was able to understand its meaning just from the sound of it before I was able to use my vocabulary about the long sobbing of the violins in autumn. The translation is inadequate to that. So, sometimes it’s good just to read it in the original language to hear the sound of it. Sound, in that sense, is untranslatable.
Now, let’s look at a book of poetry that’s in another language, which I don’t have, but which is hugely influential on me, and that’s the book of Psalms. Now, obviously, one of the difficulties of translating poetry, particularly rhyming poetry, is that you can’t translate the rhymes. But you have this extraordinary, basic poetic technique of the Psalms, which is called parallelism. So, “Open my lips; my mouth shall show forth thy praise.” The same thought is presented in a slightly different form. C.S. Lewis, in his reflections on the Psalms, coins a brilliant phrase when he says that the rhyming of the Psalms is thought-rhyme, not sound-rhyme. He regards this as an act of providence because you can translate the thought-rhymes successfully in a way that you cannot translate simple sound.
