"God Works In A Mysterious Way" by Gwendolyn Brooks

Mea culpa: Line 9 also differs from lines 2 and 13 by containing a first foot trochaic substitution. 

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Listen to my new episode with Matthew here ! 

-Check out Ethan McGuire's work here and here.

-Check out Brian Brodeur's work here.

-The Black Arts Movement

-Brooks vs. Hayden

-ANOTHER hybrid sonnet?? (No!)

-Rhythmic motifs

-William Cowper's Light Shining Out of Darkness , The Task, and The Iliad. 

-The Sermon On the Mount

-For clod's sake

-More rhymes, more furious

-Psalm 23

-In Bright Mansions 

-Christian Wiman's article, Mortify Our Wolves

-The Sermon, Remounted.

-Nietzsche's "The Gay Science"

-I'll mortify these puppies my damn self.

Text of Poem:

“God Works In A Mysterious Way”

But often now the youthful eye cuts down its

own dainty veiling. Or submits to winds.

And many an eye that all its age had drawn its

beam from a Book endures the impudence

of modern glare that never heard of tact

or timeliness, or Mystery that shrouds

immortal joy: it merely can direct

chancing feet across dissembling clods.

Out from Thy shadows, from Thy pleasant meadows,

quickly, in undiluted light. Be glad, whose

mansions are bright, to right Thy children’s air.

If Thou be more than hate or atmosphere

step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.

Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.

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Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association
Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet:
Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /)
Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u)
Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /)
Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u)
Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u)
Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /)
Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u)
Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 3-7: “God Works In A Mysterious Way” by Gwendolyn Brooks

So I was about to go record this podcast, and then I realized that Matthew had just released our second interview together on his show, Sleerickets. Naturally I had to stop everything I was doing and listen to how it turned out. It turned out wonderfully, but I will warn you that our conversation is incredibly nerdy and might not be for everyone. Still, if you like hearing me talk, which I’m flattered to think that some of you do, you can get an extra dose of it this week over on Sleerickets—the episode is called “A Winters Tale,” and while our ostensible topic is an essay by Yvor Winters, we also get into loads of other things, from standardized testing to the phenomenon of Golden Ages to the age old question: Who’s better, Homer or Virgil? I have a feeling some of you might get a real kick out of it, so please do check it out if you feel so inclined, which you can do by following my link in the show notes. 

Otherwise, welcome to this week’s episode everyone! I hope you’ve all had a wonderful week, and I also hope that you’ve gotten to see some cute animals recently. Now that it’s late April the woodland creatures are finally coming out of their burrows here in Cleveland—Laura and I had our first bunny sighting of the year yesterday, which was very exciting, and I hear that the little fluffy gray goslings are starting to appear over in Lake View cemetery too. 

            Before we get started today I’d like to extend my gratitude to Ethan McGuire and last week’s poet, Brian Brodeur, both of whom were generous enough to help sponsor Versecraft in the past week. Ethan is one of the most enthusiastic supporters of mine, Matthew and Alice’s little podcasting trifecta, and is a fine writer and poet in his own right. He’s an avid blogger, and you can find a link both to his music and film reviews as well as to his personal website in the show notes. Check him out, he’s a very cool and multi-talented dude.  

            As for Brian, you already know about him and his impressive work if you’ve listened to my last episode. If any of you have ever wondered whether contemporary poets approve of my analyses of their poems, I’ll tell you right now that I always reach out to them and ask, and I’ve only received enthusiastically positive responses so far. With Brian though, I couldn’t possibly have asked for a better one: he sent me a deeply moving and heartfelt note that really made me appreciate the value of doing a show like this. Thank you so much Brian, and I’d just like to let you know that, judging by the responses I received, your poem impressed and touched a lot of people.

            To everyone else, I’d like to thank you so much for listening, and quickly remind you that, if you like what you hear today, you too can help support the show, either by leaving a one-time tip or by becoming a member of Versecraft, which you can do at my link in the show notes. If you’re not in a position to give right now, please try and take a moment this week to let someone know about the show, and we can get this verse out into the universe. 

            Today’s poet is one of the most important trailblazers of 20th century American poetry. Both the first African-American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize and to become the U.S. Poet Laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks is even more impressive for the range of her stylistic mastery, which encompassed both Post-War academic formalism and the freer, more experimental idiom of the Black Arts Movement, as well as the brilliant balance she achieved between vivid, realistic treatments of Black American life and abstract inquiry, timely political commentary and timeless psychological insight. During the second half of her career, she became very attached to her identity as a Black poet, but I think to do justice to her art we must say that she is not only an essential Black poet, but an essential poet of American literature, a voice that speaks not only for a particular demographic, but speaks through the voice of that demographic for all of us as Americans, English-speakers, and human beings.

            Brooks, who lived from 1917-2000, was born in Topeka, Kansas, but moved with her family to Chicago soon afterwards, and Chicago is the city with which Brooks has become indelibly associated. With a truly enviable degree of precocious focus, Brooks decided from the time she was a little girl that she wanted to be a poet, and all of her life’s efforts were dedicated to achieving this goal. By the time she was sixteen, she had already published about 75 poems in small magazines, which is a herculean accomplishment by today’s standards. After high school, she spent a mere two years at a local community college, having no career in mind except something that would allow her the time and focus to write. 

After graduating, she supported herself as a typist and later as a housewife, all while devoting her creative energies to writing and honing her craft. At the age of 27, she finally succeeded, after thirteen years of relentless submission, in scoring a couple of her poems in Poetry magazine. During her teens and twenties, she had developed correspondences and friendships with several of the leading Black writers of her day, including James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Cleveland’s own Langston Hughes. The year after her appearance in Poetry magazine, Richard Wright convinced Harper & Brothers to publish Brooks’s first book, the much acclaimed A Street in Bronzeville. This book, a great critical success, established Brooks’s reputation. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year, and her next book, Annie Allen, won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize. 

Brooks had built her reputation on dense, formally accomplished, highly polished lyrics inspired by the New Critics, poems filled with nuanced, novelistic portraits of urban life. In the late 1960’s however, Brooks’s work took a dramatic turn. After exposure to the ideas of the nascent Black Arts Movement, Brooks decided that her art needed to be more explicitly African American in character, and more directly aligned with African-American activist agendas. This led her to adopt a new style that was looser and more straightforwardly rhetorical than her previous poetry. Interestingly, she followed the classic trajectory of many a mid-20th century poet in moving from rigorous to loose poetic structures, but unlike most, did so suddenly and entirely conscientiously. 

She also forms an interesting contrast to a figure like Robert Hayden, whom we looked at in an earlier episode. Both Brooks and Hayden were giants of their time, and masters of formal craft—their response to the Black Arts Movement however was very different. Hayden was a poet who moved organically from formal to free verse and back as it suited him, yet always attempted to make use of the Western tradition in his art and transmute it back through a Black perspective. As such, he had little sympathy for the radical, canonically irreverent aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement. Furthermore, from the universalist perspective of his Bahai faith, he felt that the tribalism and separatism that the Black Arts Movement embodied was misguided. As a result, he became heavily criticized and ostracized by his contemporaries, and it is only in our own time that his reputation has been rehabilitated to something resembling his actual worth. 

Brooks, meanwhile, like Picasso or Stravinsky, like Cher or Drake, changed her art in accordance with the changing times, and thrived in her second style as successfully as in her first. As a result, not only her later work but her very different early work has always been appreciated, and her reputation has never been in danger. Regardless of whether one is more sympathetic to Brooks’s or Hayden’s view, the contrast in their late 20th century reception forms an illuminating contrast, one that highlights the fact that even when we are dealing with two great and well-known artists of comparable worth, artistic excellence is far from the only factor in determining who remains in the spotlight and who doesn’t. 

For the rest of her life, Brooks continued to remain a fierce advocate for poetry as a tool of social understanding and political change, culminating in her appointment to Poetry Consultant for the Library of Congress in 1985, a position she used to help promote poetry in schools and create prizes and scholarships for young poets. At her death at the age of 83, her name was synonymous not only with an impressive body of work, but with the power of poetry to inspire people of all backgrounds to forge a more decent world. 

Our poem for today comes from relatively early in Brooks’s career, and is a wonderful example not only of her mastery of traditional formal techniques, but of her always fierce moral compass and dedication to addressing real-world problems and broader human issues simultaneously. The poem goes like this: 

“God Works In A Mysterious Way”

But often now the youthful eye cuts down its            

own dainty veiling. Or submits to winds.

And many an eye that all its age had drawn its

beam from a Book endures the impudence

of modern glare that never heard of tact

or timeliness, or Mystery that shrouds

immortal joy: it merely can direct

chancing feet across dissembling clods.

Out from Thy shadows, from Thy pleasant meadows,

quickly, in undiluted light. Be glad, whose

mansions are bright, to right Thy children’s air.

If Thou be more than hate or atmosphere       

step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.

Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.

            Well folks, we have another sonnet here. I just can’t seem to shake them, can I? There’s a reason Shakespeare wrote 150 of them, that’s all I’m saying. To figure out what kind of sonnet we’re looking at, let’s check out the rhyme scheme. In a pattern of smoothly executed consonantal slant rhymes, which produce a quieter but just as orderly effect as true rhymes, the scheme runs: ABAB, CDCD, EEFFGG. “Ah, you will say—yet another hybrid sonnet! The first two quatrains resemble an English sonnet, the set of three couplets resemble the sestet of an Italian sonnet.” You would be right to say all of this, but there is more to consider. Let’s first observe that the volta comes definitively at the ninth line, as we would expect in an Italian sonnet. “Out from Thy shadows” marks an abrupt shift, a turn from curmudgeonly general commentary to an indignant apostrophe to God. Furthermore, if we try to break up the first eight lines into two quatrains, what happens? We end up with two fragments. This is because the third line through the eighth line is composed of one single sentence. Semantically and grammatically linking these lines into an indivisible whole. Functionally then, we have to see the first eight lines as an octet. Though the rhyme scheme superficially suggests a hybrid sonnet, the flow of thought confirms that this is an Italian sonnet through and through. 

            Metrically the lines are very regular, but I’d like to draw your attention to an interesting rhythmic idiosyncrasy, a distinct pattern that occurs three times in this poem. If we look at line two, we see that we can scan it as a perfect line of iambic pentameter. We also see however that we have a very prominent caesura, between the second and third foot, in the form of a period, after the word “veiling.” Because of the strong caesura, we hear this line in two uneven halves—this in turn creates alternate frames of reference for the rhythm, which as a result does not sound as smoothly iambic to the ear as it would otherwise. If we were to scan this line according to how our ear hears it, we would end up with the reading: iamb, amphibrach, trochee, trochee, catalectic trochee. In the grand scheme of things, it makes more sense to scan this line as straight iambic pentameter, but here is a good example of how one can achieve rhythmic variation without resorting to overt metrical substitution. 

            Now let’s compare that line we’ve been discussing, line 2, to line 13. Line 2 goes: “own dainty veiling. Or submits to winds.” Line 13 goes: “step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.” Apart from some subtle differences created by the words themselves, the rhythm is identical. Now let’s look at line 9, the volta: “Out from Thy shadows, from Thy pleasant meadows.” Other than the feminine ending, the rhythm is again identical. 

            It’s difficult to say whether this recurring pattern is merely a rhythmic tic of Brooks’s or if she designed this correspondence intentionally. It is interesting that this rhythm is found in the second and the second to last line, and in the volta: Like an operatic motif, it is a musical element that is introduced in the beginning, utilized in the climax, and brings the conclusion to a sense of symmetrical finality. Regardless of how conscious it is, it certainly adds a harmonious, aural beauty to the poem. 

            Finally, I noted earlier that the placement of the volta in line 9 is semantically and grammatically unmistakable. It is also however rhythmically emphasized. Lines 9, 10, and 11 present us with three first foot trochaic substitutions in a row: “out from,” “quickly,” “mansions.” This downward motion at the beginning of these lines drives them sharply forward, increasing the momentum, and musically emphasizing the heightened emotion which we find at this point in the poem. 

            Let’s now begin the poem again, and focus our attention on what we have determined to be the octet: 

“God Works In A Mysterious Way” 

But often now the youthful eye cuts down its            

own dainty veiling. Or submits to winds.

And many an eye that all its age had drawn its

beam from a Book endures the impudence

of modern glare that never heard of tact

or timeliness, or Mystery that shrouds

immortal joy: it merely can direct

chancing feet across dissembling clods.

            The first thing to note is how the entire stanza, indeed, the entire poem, appears to be a response to the title of the poem. The title itself is in quotation marks, emphasizing to the reader that it is not so much Brooks’ synoptic title of the poem as the phrase which the poem seeks to offer commentary upon. In responding to this phrase, Brooks is putting herself in dialogue with another poet, probably my favorite poet of the 18th century, William Cowper, who coined the phrase “God moves in a mysterious way” in his famous hymn entitled “Light Shining Out of Darkness.” The first quatrain of the hymn, written in common meter, reads: 

God moves in a mysterious way, 

his wonders to perform;

He plants his footsteps in the sea,

and rides upon the storm. 

            Clearly, stealing slightly tweaked titles from Cowper is something Brooks and Jim Morrison have in common. Incidentally, Cowper is also the originator of the phrase “variety is the spice of life.” I’d also recommend to anyone whose read all of Milton but wants more work in Miltonic blank verse, to check out Cowper’s delightful long poem “The Task,” as well as his brilliant translation of the Iliad. 

            Whereas Cowper intended the phrase “God moves in a mysterious way,” to evoke feelings of awe and provide a sense of stoic resilience to his reader, by the time it reaches Brooks in the 20th century in the mouth of someone she knows, it has become a tired platitude, a way to shut down or avoid important spiritual discussions. It may even be that Brooks deliberately substituted the original “God moves” for “God works” in order to let us know that she’s not quoting Cowper directly, but responding to someone who has casually misquoted his line. In any case, Brooks feels rightly that this dismissal is an entirely inadequate response to the spiritual issues of the modern world. 

            She begins the poem by immediately countering the dismissal: “But often now the youthful eye cuts down/its own dainty veiling. Or submits to winds.” In other words, Brooks is saying, the youth of today are not satisfied with seeing the world through the pat dogma that has been passed down to them—they seek to break through this ideological veil and confront the mystery face to face. Brooks contemptuously calls mainstream organized religion a “dainty veiling,” but she also has little enthusiasm for the reckless modernist: such people often “submit to winds—” left without any ideology to serve as their compass, they rely purely on whim, instinct, or the spirit of the times to guide them, and become slaves to mere chance. 

            In the next several lines, Brooks outlines the modern situation with much wit and much bitterness. She notes that many people have drawn their eye’s beams from a Book—that is, they have been able to see and make sense of life through the lens of and by the light of the Bible. “Bible,” which comes from the Greek biblos, simply means book, and the fact that the word “book” here is capitalized confirms that the Bible is the book in question. 

As you may have guessed, Brooks is here making a pun on the word “beam.” In a famous passage from the Sermon On the Mount, Matthew 7:5, Jesus says “thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” The sense of “beam” here refers to a plank of wood, not to a beam of light, but Brooks playfully connects these meanings in order to enrich what she is saying: not only have people seen life through the beams of religion, but they have drawn their eyes’ beams from a book in the sense that they have striven to extract and examine their own faults before casting judgment on others, and used the Bible in order to become better, more moral, more reflective people. 

The visual wordplay only continues from here. These religious people “endure the impudence of modern glare.” Here, glare can mean a blindingly bright light, a light that confuses and dazzles, and also a light that is garish and unsubtle. It may refer to the bright light of modern science, which in its powerful attempt to enlighten the world has ultimately made us more confused than ever before, and it may also refer to the garish bright lights of electric technology, a potent symbol of the artificiality of the modern world. However, “glare” can also refer to the way someone angrily stares at someone. Religious people also endure the “modern glare” in the sense that many secular modern people are hostile towards religious people, thinking them backwards or even barbaric. Brooks condemns these modern people as impudent, tactless, and untimely, incapable of properly considering the “Mystery that shrouds immortal joy.” Brooks is understandably very exasperated: she finds fault with those who blindly follow religious doctrine, but she finds just as much if not more fault in those who judge religion itself on the basis of blind dogmatism, and fail to properly consider the subtle, profound, and mysterious roots of the religious ethos. 

Furthermore, this smug, skeptical modern glare does not offer anything positive in exchange for its rejection of religious life: “it merely can direct chancing feet across dissembling clods.” We return once more to the idea of chance, to the idea that the secular modern human, without any firm guiding principles, becomes nothing more than a victim of arbitrary, chaotic forces. “Dissembling clods” is an odd but rich phrase—it could mean several different things. To dissemble means to deceive. If we take clods to mean clods of dirt, we can see “clods” as a synecdoche for the Earth. In turn, the Earth may dissemble in a couple of ways—either it dissembles in that it hints at a divine order behind it where there is none, or, conversely, that it leads us to thinking that there is no divine order when in fact there is. In either case, the modern person is one who feels suspicious of or deceived by the world. Alternatively, we could remember the fact that, according to the Bible, humans themselves are made out of clods of Earth, and furthermore, that the word “clod” is often used to refer to a stupid person. Taken in this sense, Brooks may be saying that the only good thing modernity can do is trample over those who impose and believe lies. This is all well and good, but it doesn’t leave us with much to stand on. 

Let’s now go back and read the poem again, this time, all the way through: 

“God Works In A Mysterious Way”

But often now the youthful eye cuts down its            

own dainty veiling. Or submits to winds.

And many an eye that all its age had drawn its

beam from a Book endures the impudence

of modern glare that never heard of tact

or timeliness, or Mystery that shrouds

immortal joy: it merely can direct

chancing feet across dissembling clods.

Out from Thy shadows, from Thy pleasant meadows,

quickly, in undiluted light. Be glad, whose

mansions are bright, to right Thy children’s air.

If Thou be more than hate or atmosphere       

step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.

Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.

            As I mentioned earlier, in the sestet we dramatically shift to an impassioned plea to God, which takes the form of an imperious command. In lines 9 through 11, an increase in musical intensity accompanies an increase in emotional intensity—not only do we have the string of first foot trochees that I mentioned earlier, but we also have a brilliant concentration of rhyme or slant rhyme sounds: “shadows,” “meadows,” “glad whose,” and “light,” “bright,” and “right.” All this euphony works in concert to take the poem to a higher pitch.

            Brooks demands God to come “out from thy shadows, from thy pleasant meadows.” This imagery recalls Psalm 23, where the Psalmist says: “he maketh me to lie down in green pastures,” and, “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Beyond the general call for God to reveal Himself, Brooks urges Him: do not merely reveal yourself to those in the shadow of death, or to those whose lives are green meadows, pleasant and happy— do not reveal yourself only in moments of great joy or great sadness. Reveal yourself to all of us here and now, all of us toiling here on Earth to create a civilized world, lost and confused. Do not come in ambiguous intimations and cryptic omens, vague feelings and fuzzy parables, come in undiluted light, unmistakable and cleansing. Echoing Cowper’s poem, Brooks urges for God’s light to shine out of darkness, and thereby drown out the impudent glare of modernity. 

            Brooks then goes so far as to demand that God check His privilege: “Be glad, whose mansions are bright, to right thy children’s air.” The mention of mansions recalls John 14:2, where Jesus says, “In my father’s house are many mansions.” We also of course cannot help but associate mansions with wealth, and Brooks’ call for God to step down from heaven to help his struggling children is also a message for the upper class to step down from their lives of luxury to lend aid to their fellow human beings. Most directly, the phrase also recalls the beautiful African-American spiritual, “In Bright Mansions.” Brooks thereby also adds a suggestion of specifically African-American struggle to her spiritual plea. 

            Brooks urges God to “right Thy children’s air.” To the contemporary reader, this may have a somewhat environmentalist flavor, but even without this association, it is a multivalent statement. By “air,” Brooks could mean the general atmosphere of the times, and in doing so could also be calling back to the imagery of “winds” in line 2. The second sense is complementary to the first: by “air” Brooks could be referring to our attitudes, as in the phrase “putting on airs.” The attitudes of a people and the atmosphere of a culture are highly interdependent however, and to change one would certainly change the other. Both sense of “air” therefore fuse into a single imperative. 

            In line 12, Brooks plays on the imagery of air once again—“if thou be more than hate or atmosphere, step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.” Brooks is saying: if you, God, are more than just an excuse for people to hate one another, if you are more than just an escapist fantasy, a comforting spell of smells and bells, come forth to us in splendor. 

“Mortify our wolves” is one of those phrases that’s strangely cryptic and indirect but has an undeniable power to it, a kind of haunting aura. About ten years ago, the poet Christian Wiman wrote a moving article about his encounters with mortality while struggling with bone cancer, and he entitled it “Mortify Our Wolves,” after this poem. The article has little to do with Brooks, but it’s very much worth reading. 

But what does the phrase mean? Mortification, from the Latin mors, meaning death, means to deaden to physical pleasures and temptations. However, it can also refer to the experience of extreme embarrassment, an embarrassment so strong it makes you want to die. I think we can understand the “wolves” to mean two things at once—firstly, the interior wolves of our own violent and selfish instincts, which, in the absence of a given moral order, may struggle to gain control of us. Secondly, it may refer to those people who have let their internal wolves win out, and have become vicious and cruel in what they view as a merciless, Darwinian world. Furthermore, if we go back to the Sermon On the Mount, we will recall Jesus’s words in Matthew 7:15: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” Brooks’s wolves are the false prophets of modernism, who seek to devour the lamb of God, put on its pelt, and preach false substitutes for religion. 

Brooks urges God to mortify these wolves—to teach them to abandon their desperate love of materiality, and to embarrass them by revealing the baseness of their desires and the falseness of their opinions. The poem ends fiercely and hauntingly with Brooks threatening God with the repercussions of neutrality: If He will not “step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves,” then “we assume a sovereignty ourselves.” Without God, mankind must resort to ruling themselves, with all the chaos and savagery that entails. Some might see triumph or bravado in this statement, but I think that Brooks, like Nietzsche, sees it for what it is: a colossal loss to our experience of reality. In The Gay Science, speaking of the death of God, Nietzsche writes: 

“What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

Whereas Nietzsche would go on to postulate a replacement for God in the form of the Ubermensch who goes beyond good and evil, I don’t think that Brooks would have had any confidence in such a solution—indeed, I think she would have seen it as the tragic victory of the ravening wolves. Though Brooks was a non-religious person, she felt the modern world’s loss of religion deeply, and strove in her own life to embody Abrahamic values such as service to others, the pursuit of truth, and social justice. In the absence of God, she did not, as she threatened, recklessly assume self-sovereignty, but instead made the welfare of humanity her sovereign. The wolves will always come— to live decently and proactively, as Brooks did, is the best way to mortify them. 

With all that we’ve learned and explored, let’s read through this poem one last time, as an old friend:

“God Works In A Mysterious Way”

But often now the youthful eye cuts down its            

own dainty veiling. Or submits to winds.

And many an eye that all its age had drawn its

beam from a Book endures the impudence

of modern glare that never heard of tact

or timeliness, or Mystery that shrouds

immortal joy: it merely can direct

chancing feet across dissembling clods.

Out from Thy shadows, from Thy pleasant meadows,

quickly, in undiluted light. Be glad, whose

mansions are bright, to right Thy children’s air.

If Thou be more than hate or atmosphere       

step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.

Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.