Merton becomes obsessed with William Blake . . .
I remember with what indecision I went on into the spring, trying to settle the problem of a subject with finality. Yet the thing worked itself out quite suddenly: so suddenly that I do not remember what brought it about. One day I came running down out of the Carpenter Library, and passed along the wire fences by the tennis courts, in the sun, with my mind made up that there was only one possible man in the eighteenth century for me to work on: the one poet who had least to do with his age, and was most in opposition to everything it stood for.
I had just had in my hands the small, neatly printed Nonesuch Press edition of the Poems of William Blake, and I now knew what my thesis would probably be. It would take in his poems and some aspect of his religious ideas.
In the Columbia bookstore I bought the same edition of Blake, on credit. (I paid for it two years later.) It had a blue cover, and I suppose it is now hidden somewhere in our monastery library, the part to which nobody has access. And that is all right. I think the ordinary Trappist would be only dangerously bewildered by the “Prophetic Books,” and those who still might be able to profit by Blake, have a lot of other things to read that are still better. For my own part, I no longer need him. He has done his work for me: and he did it very thoroughly. I hope that I will see him in heaven.
But oh, what a thing it was to live in contact with the genius and the holiness of William Blake that year, that summer, writing the thesis! I had some beginning of an appreciation of his greatness above the other men of his time in England: but from this distance, from the hill where I now stand, looking back I can really appreciate his stature.
William Blake died an unknown prophet. A poet who walked and spoke with angels every day. On his deathbed, he sang songs and celebrated. It was years after his death that his reputation grew and he came to be recognized as the poetic giant that he is regarded as today. When Merton becomes fevered with Blake's work, Blake was still regarded with suspicion because of his radical religious beliefs. To this day, William Blake is still misunderstood by some, misinterpreted by others.
Tonight, I led a workshop based on the poetry of Louise
Glück. She is a poet whom I've admired for years, but I've never really understood her. Her poetry is dense, full of mysterious emotion. Even after spending a few weeks preparing for this evening, I'm still not sure I get her.
But I'm not sure getting Louise Glück is the point. One critic said this about her work: "We feel before we understand, and we understand very little." That pretty much sums it up for me. I sit here, feeling much, understanding little. Like William Blake's contemporaries. However, I can imagine Louise Glück consorting with angels, like Blake.
In that vein, Saint Marty has a poem he wrote this evening during his poetry workshop. At least he thinks it's a poem.
You be the judge . . .
Doe After a Blizzard
by: Martin Achatz
My son noticed her first, splayed, bloody, broken by a neighbor's fence.
A dead doe, shining in the sunlight that always comes after a blizzard,
sunlight so strong it hurts to step into it. Sunlight that shouts.
The doe was haloed in that light, and my son, only five, said,
Fix it, daddy, reduced me to an Easter Island carving, stone face
immutable in the presence of suffering. I wanted to tell my son
I can't or She's gone or She's with God or some other
emptiness recited in church every Sunday so often that it has lost
its ability to comfort. Instead, I picked my son up, carried him
closer to the doe, whispered in his ear Isn't she beautiful?
I watched his face change, confusion give way to something
seraphic. Yes, he said, nodding. Yes, she is. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
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