Two poems at the Garden Tomb

Two poems at the Garden Tomb May 27, 2018

 

The tomb in the garden, or whatever
“He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.” (Matthew 28:6)  The Garden Tomb, in East Jerusalem.  (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

 

A few days ago, in remarks that I shared with a group at the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, I shared a couple of poems that I find meaningful.  I’ve shared each of them more than once here on this blog, but think that I’ll do so yet again:

 

1.

 

I’m very fond of the excellent second-tier English poet A. E. Housman (d. 1936), who, along with writing such works as “To an athlete dying young,” from A Shropshire Lad, was a distinguished classicist at the University of Cambridge.  The melancholy mood of many of his poems speaks to me.  I’ve even made a minor pilgrimage to his grave.

Housman was an atheist, and sometimes a hostile one.  But he had moments of yearning.  This poem, entitled “Easter Hymn,” captures those feelings of longing for a belief that, in the end, he simply couldn’t muster:

 

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

 

Please bear in mind that, historically and classically, Syria included not only the contemporary nation that bears that name, but the areas today known as Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon.  So Jerusalem can, justly, be termed “Syrian” in a certain sense.  (It certainly wasn’t in Israel when Housman wrote, because modern Israel didn’t yet exist.)

 

2.

 

Then I shared “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” by the late Pulitzer-Prize-winning American novelist John Updike (d. 2009):

 

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

 

Posted from Paris, France

 

 


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