"Through The Water" by James Matthew Wilson

Text of poem here

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-My experience in New York's formalist bohemia

-James Matthew Wilson and his books

-Jacques Maritain & Etienne Gilson

-The iambic decameter effect

-Broken-backed lines

-"The Castle of Thorns" by Yvor Winters

-"The Slow Pacific Swell" by Yvor Winters

-"Mother Carey's Hen" by David Yezzi

-My episode on the above poem

-Encountering water as chaoskampf

-John 13 and 14

-Keats' notion of the "mansion of many apartments"

-"Before the Law" by Franz Kafka

-Paganism as spiritual childhood

-The Univocity vs. Analogy debate between Scotus and Aquinas

-Matthew 4 and 14

-The fisher can't fish himself!

-We should all be more like that giant monster of God, Behemoth

-Job 40

-Edgar Bowers and Sturge Moore

-Baptized in the Sublime

Transcript

Versecraft 3-9: “Through The Water” by James Matthew Wilson

            Howdy everyone, and welcome to today’s show! It feels great to be back in action. For those who don’t know, Versecraft has been dormant the last couple weeks because I was in New York City visiting a bunch of friends and loved ones old and new. I got the chance to finally meet Matthew Buckley Smith of Sleerickets and Alice Allan of Poetry Says in person, which was marvelous: they’re both just as cute and wholesome and brilliant as you would expect, and I had a grand time walking and talking all over gorgeous Brooklyn with them. I also had the honor of meeting literary power couple and hosts with the most Josh Mehigan and Talia Neffson, both of whom are fascinating and almost unbelievably friendly people. While at a soiree at chez Mehigan-Neffson I furthermore had the opportunity meet another poet I’ve admired for some time, David Yezzi, with whom it was so fun to geek out about Shakespeare, Anthony Hecht, and Yvor Winters that I probably stood in the same spot of kitchen hallway for about three hours. I also had great if tantalizingly brief conversations with poet and editor extraordinaire Penelope Pelizzon, who was generous and prepared enough to lend me a sleeping bag in the wee hours of the morning, poet Jan Jacobus and her philosopher husband, the Studs Terkel of ballet Lisa Mehigan, Matthew’s vivacious friend David, and translator from the Hungarian Michael Slipp, among others. I truly have never been in the presence of so many interesting people at once. 

            I also had a chance to see my dear college friend Felipe, the man who got me into poetry, which was beautiful, and my brother and sister, who both live in New Jersey. The three of us Blumovs went up to Nyack for Yom Kippur, where we got to visit with family friends Michael and Sylvie, and that was a blast too. Before I bore you, I’ll end by simply telling you the books I picked up: Robert Browning’s “The Ring and the Book,” which I just got started on; a copy of the Persian national epic, “The Shahnameh,” translated by my friend Dick Davis; John Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid; Richard Aldington’s Collected Poems, which may prove useful on a future episode of this show devoted to Imagism; “The Last Puritan” by George Santayana, recommended to me by Josh; and  “Marius the Epicurean” by Walter Pater, recommended to me by the great poet and editor Ryan Wilson. 

            Lest your patience quickly reach its end, let me also take a quick moment to remind you now that, if you enjoy this episode, please do consider either leaving me a tip, buying a super comfortable and good-looking Versecraft shirt, one of which I’m wearing right now, or simply telling someone you know about this show. It’s only right that I give a shout-out and thanks here to Ernie Hilbert, Susan Spear, my Dad Neil Blumofe, and my mother from another brother Christie Klug, all of whom have been aggressively waving the Versecraft flag in the past couple weeks. And to the rest of you, darling listeners: be like them, and we’ll take over this multi-billion dollar poetry industry two ears at a time. Thanks so much. 

            Today’s poet, James Matthew Wilson, is the man who, perhaps more than any other poet I know, comes closest to believing the same things that I do about art and poetry. Though he is both a Catholic and a conservative, and I am neither of these things, we agree on much else: that poetry has an inherently moral dimension, and that the poet has a responsibility to their audience to be clear, rational, emotionally-tempered, and precise, and ground their thinking in a coherent metaphysics; that traditional forms and meters provide the greatest tools for poetic expression; that a form of Classical theism, built on a foundation of Aristotle and the Stoics, is the soundest existential framework; that Yvor Winters was one of the greatest critics in the history of poetry; and that poetry is at its best when it is spiritual and intellectual.  

            Despite being a poet of considerable accomplishment, Wilson is equally if not better known for being a Thomist scholar-theologian in the tradition of Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, as well as a literary critic who draws from the competing traditions of T.S. Eliot and Yvor Winters. He has published widely in all of these areas, twelve books in total, including the theological-historical study entitled “The Vision of the Soul,” the critical polemic “The Fortunes of Poetry In An Age of Unmaking,” and his most recent book of poems, “The Strangeness of the Good,” the title of which is taken from a line in our featured poem for today. In addition to all of this, Wilson is a founding professor at the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, which to my knowledge is the only poetry MFA program apart from Johns Hopkins and the unfortunately now-defunct World of Versecraft that emphasizes metrical composition. 

            Today’s poem, “Through the Water,” is an exquisite meditation on the spiritual hunger at the heart of the human condition, and the harrowing process by which one must encounter chaos, doubt, and mortality if one is to be awakened to the true splendor of life and divine grace. The poem goes like this, beginning with an epigraph: 

Through The Water

“He must in some way cross or dive under the water, which is the most ancient symbol of the barrier between two worlds.” -Yvor Winters

Far back within the mansion of our thought

   We glimpse a lintel with a door that’s shut,

And through which all our lives would seem to lead

   Though we feel powerless to say toward what.

It is the place where all the shapes we know

   Give way to whispers and a gnawing gut.

And so, in childhood, we duck beneath

   The waterfall into a hidden cove;

In summer, pass within a stand of pines

   Cut off from those bright fields in which we rove,

Whose needles lay a softening bed of silence,

   Whose great boughs tightly weave a sacred grove.

When winter settles in, and our skies darken,

   We take a trampled path by pond and wood,

And find beneath an arch of slumbering thorn

   Stray tufts of fur, a skull stripped of its hood,

Then turn and look down through the thickening ice

   In wonder at the strangeness of the good.

And Peter, Peter, falling through that plane,

   Where he had only cast his nets before,

And where Behemoth stalked in darkest depths

   That sank and sank as if there were no floor,

He cried out to the wind and felt a hand

   That clutched and bore his weight back to the shore.

We know that we must fall into such waters,

   Must lose ourselves within their breathless power,

Until we are raised up, hair drenched, eyes stinging,

   By one who says to us that, from this hour,

We have passed through, were dead but have returned,

   And are a new creation come to flower.

The poem consists of five sestets, giving us a total of 30 lines. If we look at the rhyme scheme, we find a cool pattern we haven’t encountered before— in each sestet there is one rhyming sound that occurs every other rhyme. If “X” represents an unrhymed line, the scheme would read: XAXAXA. Because rhymes not only provide a pleasing sound but a sense of finality, this alternation of unrhymed with rhymed lines produces an interesting aural effect— it makes it seem as if the lines are twice as long as they actually are, as if instead of reading a sestet we were reading iambic decameter triplets. We might interpret this long-strung effect as an attempt by Wilson to mimic the flow of water, the principal symbol of the poem.

Even among formal poets, Wilson is known for the orthodox purity of his technique. Though his work exhibits sensitive rhythmic modulation, he employs metrical substitutions very rarely, and avoids not only acephalous lines but even enjambment when he can. Just yesterday he posted a tweet saying that for years he didn’t believe in amphibrachs. That’s the level of purity we’re talking here. As such, nearly all the lines in this poem are perfect iambic pentameter. Nearly.

Speaking of amphibrachs though, let’s take a look at line 7: “And so, in childhood, we duck beneath.” Technically speaking, this is a line of iambic tetrameter with a second foot amphibrachic substitution. Funky, right? “Not funky at all!” Wilson would probably retort. “That is in fact what my friend Timothy Steele calls a broken-backed line, and it has historical precedent going back to John Lydgate in the 15th century!” And Wilson would be within his rights to say this, because this is in fact a very particular kind of maneuver which involves taking a perfect iambic line and subtracting a beat after a medial caesura, resulting in a line that has a so-called broken back. Not as bad as being headless, I guess, but still— poor lines of poetry. At least they get to have breaks every so often. 

In lines 11, 15, and 17, we have what might appear instances of anapestic substitution, but here again Wilson could offer an explanation. In each case, the word with the extra unaccented syllable can be elided to fit the iambic scheme. We can read “soft’ning” instead of “softening;” “slumb’ring” instead of “slumbering;” “thick’ning,” instead of “thickening.” The fact that these are all present participles and lend themselves easily to elision leads me to believe that this is exactly what Wilson had in mind. 

Other than this, the only lines we might say have substitutions are those that have feminine endings, and feminine endings are of course as traditional a variation as you can get. Even in this department, Wilson shows himself to be incredibly exacting. Aside from lines 11 and 13, we have no feminine endings until the last stanza, and then, in the last stanza, every line but one is feminine. This dramatic contrast in sound allows Wilson to use feminine endings to create a climactic momentum in the poem’s conclusion. This is the poet in the role of a musician. 

Before we begin looking at the poem more closely, let’s take a look once again at the epigraph by Yvor Winters: 

“He must in some way cross or dive under the water, which is the most ancient symbol of the barrier between two worlds.” 

By including this epigraph from Winters, whom Wilson, like last week’s poet David Yezzi, has championed on many occasions, Wilson broadcasts his critical and aesthetic loyalties. The quote itself is taken from a footnote Winters wrote to his own poem, “The Castle of Thorns,” a sonnet which seems to serve as the prompt for Wilson’s poem, and which deals with a similar theme, the struggle for transcendent meaning in life, with water also serving as the symbol of the obstacles through which the soul must pass to acquire truth in the titular castle of thorns. 

The identification of water as a symbol of chaos, dissolution, and the sublime, which the questing soul must encounter but never succumb to, is a motif which runs throughout Winters’ poetry, most notably in the poem which Wilson himself has identified as his masterpiece, “The Slow Pacific Swell.” Many of those influenced by Winters have adopted his symbolic view of water— we saw one example of this in last week’s poem by David Yezzi, where the petrel’s ability to negotiate the waves is made to represent the spiritual negotiation of life’s turmoil, and we will see it again here. 

For Winters, the castle of thorns represented the hard and painful truth of life which it is our goal to embrace—for Wilson, a devout Catholic, the thorns no doubt specifically evoke a reckoning with Christ’s passion, and we will see thorn imagery crop up in his own poem as well. It is also likely that Wilson sees the act of passing through the water in baptismal terms that Winters, a secular theist, would not have recognized. We will return to both of these ideas later. 

Let’s now go back and read the first three stanzas again: 

Far back within the mansion of our thought

   We glimpse a lintel with a door that’s shut,

And through which all our lives would seem to lead

   Though we feel powerless to say toward what.

It is the place where all the shapes we know

   Give way to whispers and a gnawing gut.

And so, in childhood, we duck beneath

   The waterfall into a hidden cove;

In summer, pass within a stand of pines

   Cut off from those bright fields in which we rove,

Whose needles lay a softening bed of silence,

   Whose great boughs tightly weave a sacred grove.

When winter settles in, and our skies darken,

   We take a trampled path by pond and wood,

And find beneath an arch of slumbering thorn

   Stray tufts of fur, a skull stripped of its hood,

Then turn and look down through the thickening ice

   In wonder at the strangeness of the good.

In the first line, the phrase “mansion of our thought” immediately calls two things to mind: firstly, John 14:2, in which Jesus famously says that his father’s house has “many mansions,” which is commonly taken to mean that there are many different kinds of people who can attain the kingdom of heaven, and many different paths to achieving salvation. Given that this poem is ultimately about finding a state of grace, the echo is fitting. It becomes even more fitting however when we recall what immediately precedes this verse in John 13. At the last supper, Jesus offers to wash the feet of all his disciples. When he comes to Peter, Peter balks, and refuses to let his master wash his feet. Jesus then says “If I do not wash you, you have no part with me.” In Wilson’s poem too, going through the metaphorical water is necessary to salvation. Later, in the same chapter, when Peter offers to sacrifice his life to save Jesus, Jesus retorts by predicting that, in fact, Peter will deny him three times before the cock crows. He then reassures the disturbed Peter by making the “many mansions” comment, implying that it is through Peter’s doubt that he will find his salvation. This context makes the reference even more appropriate, given Peter’s appearance in stanza 4 as an example of the soul in doubt. 

The phrase “mansions of our thought” also reminds us of John Keats’s notion of the “mansion of many apartments,” the idea that life is like a house whose further rooms we discover as we mature. The first room we enter is the thoughtless chamber, the chamber of the infant; we then proceed into the chamber of what Keats called maiden-thought, the stage where all life appears fresh, innocent, and delightful. Over time however, the chamber darkens as the mind develops and we become disillusioned. Yet as the chamber darkens, more doors open, leading to even darker chambers, and it is at this point that we must choose our destiny, at the point where we are most beset by confusion and doubt. Similarly, Wilson’s poem presents the soul moving from innocence to experience, from curiosity to the crisis of doubt, which it must navigate and surmount if it is to discover true life. 

Though Wilson alludes to both Jesus and Keats, his conception is different from either. He conceives of the mind itself as a mansion, one of the rooms of which we cannot access, even though we have the inexplicable feeling that behind that very door lies the meaning of our lives. Like Kafka’s nameless protagonist in “Before the Law,” we each feel that there is a portal which can lead us to our destiny, but we are at a loss as to how to gain entry. This forbidden place is one where “all the shapes we know/give way to whispers and a gnawing gut.” In other words, in every human mind there is a hunger for a realm beyond the physical world, a world beyond the familiar shapes of things, of which we receive tantalizing intimations but cannot access.

This yearning for transcendence manifests in childhood as a desire to seek out hidden places, like coves behind waterfalls, which one must pass “through the water” to access, or clandestine forest groves, where foliage blocks the summer light and pine needles muffle sound. The child seeks out places of hiddenness, darkness, silence, enclosure, sensory deprivation “away from the shapes we know,” where the imagination can have reign to pursue its transcendent dream. These are sacred spaces, spaces cut off from ordinary life, elevated to possess a supernatural significance. 

Speaking of sacred waterfalls and groves, which in Greek mythology were the domains of spirits like naiads and dryads, Wilson seems to suggest that every child is a natural pagan, and that Paganism is what happens when human beings naively pursue their instincts for transcendence in nature. Ultimately however, Wilson implies, the pagan outlook is reflective of a kind of spiritual childhood, and the soul must mature beyond this if it is to grasp the actual truth of things. 

This pagan summer of childhood wonder, this Wordsworthian splendor, this chamber of maiden-thought, eventually gives way to an era of darkening winter. In the sacred grove, once a haven that former child has trampled to many times, he finds “an arch of slumbering thorn,” a suggestion both of the door and lintel of the first stanza and the thorny Winters poem referenced in the epigraph. As I noted earlier, we may also view thorns as a symbol of Christ’s passion, and to pass beneath the arch of thorns is to enter a world that one recognizes is filled with suffering, injustice, and sinfulness. If one would gain entry to the door at the back of the mind, one must pass through this realm first. The fact that the thorn is “slumbering” however suggests a glimmer of hope, a possibility of rebirth. This is Good Friday, and Christ will bloom once again in the Easter springtime to come. 

In the meantime though, we are still in the midst of a dark, Melvillean sublime. Hanging from the thorns are “stray tufts of fur, a skull stripped of its hood,” which are metonymies for the necessarily brutal violence of nature, the universality of suffering across life forms, the butchering of the innocent, the seeming amorality of the universe. The mention of the “skull stripped of its hood” also suggest the Grim Reaper, who has revealed himself to us. We must confront not only the cruelty of the world, but our own mortality. 

This is emphasized by the next image, which is a brilliant metaphor for the recognition of mortality: the speaker looks down through the thickening ice of the pond. “Thickening” is the key word here—the pond is freezing before the observer’s eyes. When we look down at a pond of liquid water, we can see our own reflections—when the pond is frozen however, we cannot. The speaker looks down, and presumably sees a reflection of himself that is fading before his eyes as the water freezes. He realizes his own transience, and he feels not only fear but wonder “at the strangeness of the good.” Here, he is feeling the uncanny conflict that all those who would like to believe in the goodness of God must feel—if God is good, why is there so much senseless suffering, violence, and death? Why must I be born only to realize that I must die? If we persist in believing that God is good, we must admit that God’s sense of goodness is very alien to our own—it is strange, mysterious, and terrifying. 

Wilson knows his scholastic philosophy, and it seems to me that here he is drawing on Thomas Aquinas, who argued against Duns Scotus’s claim that human goodness and God’s goodness were univocal, one and the same thing. On the contrary, said Aquinas— God’s goodness is only analogous to our own. Similar enough to be comparable, perhaps, but still radically different, infinitely strange to us. 

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

Far back within the mansion of our thought

   We glimpse a lintel with a door that’s shut,

And through which all our lives would seem to lead

   Though we feel powerless to say toward what.

It is the place where all the shapes we know

   Give way to whispers and a gnawing gut.

And so, in childhood, we duck beneath

   The waterfall into a hidden cove;

In summer, pass within a stand of pines

   Cut off from those bright fields in which we rove,

Whose needles lay a softening bed of silence,

   Whose great boughs tightly weave a sacred grove.

When winter settles in, and our skies darken,

   We take a trampled path by pond and wood,

And find beneath an arch of slumbering thorn

   Stray tufts of fur, a skull stripped of its hood,

Then turn and look down through the thickening ice

   In wonder at the strangeness of the good.

And Peter, Peter, falling through that plane,

   Where he had only cast his nets before,

And where Behemoth stalked in darkest depths

   That sank and sank as if there were no floor,

He cried out to the wind and felt a hand

   That clutched and bore his weight back to the shore.

We know that we must fall into such waters,

   Must lose ourselves within their breathless power,

Until we are raised up, hair drenched, eyes stinging,

   By one who says to us that, from this hour,

We have passed through, were dead but have returned,

   And are a new creation come to flower.

In the fourth stanza, we move from what thus far could be interpreted as a secular philosophical nature lyric and move into the explicitly biblical. Wilson evokes an episode in Matthew 14, where Jesus walks upon the sea of Galilee and invites Peter to join him on the water. Peter begins to do so, but a boisterous wind comes which frightens him, and his faith falters. Because his faith falters, he begins to fall into the water. He is then promptly saved by Jesus, who famously chides him: “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” 

We will note that we have moved directly from the speaker staring down at a freezing body of water, contemplating his mortality and God’s strangeness, to Peter falling through a body water— faced with a crisis of faith, we too are at risk of falling into the water, of falling into the despair of our mortality and God’s strangeness. We should note also the similarity of Wilson’s image of Peter being saved from a close call with the sea with the experience described by Yvor Winters in his poem, “The Slow Pacific Swell,” where the speaker’s sublime, potentially fatal encounter with the ocean becomes a catalyst for self-realization, of his need to maintain a spiritual balance between order and chaos.  

Wilson also shrewdly reminds us of Peter’s status as a fisherman. In Matthew 4, Jesus comes across Peter and his brother Andrew, who are fishing in the Galilee. He famously calls them to instead be “fishers of men,” and they follow him. In the symbology of the poem, to be a fisher of men would be to be someone who pulls people out of the water of chaos and doubt. Ironically, though Peter has been a fisher of men, he himself has severe struggles with doubt, as many religious leaders do. 

Peter’s doubt, his fear of the waters of mystery and death, is contrasted with Behemoth, a mighty beast who comfortably stalks “in the darkest depths,” and so becomes an exemplar, like Yezzi’s petrel, of a soul at peace with chaos, horror, and uncertainty, and deft at navigating them. Indeed, in the Book of Job, Behemoth is described as being “chief of the ways of God.” Initially, the reader may be surprised that Wilson chooses Behemoth, which is often understood to be a land creature, instead of Leviathan, the famous biblical sea beast. Wilson knows his bible well, however. In Job 40:23, God says of Behemoth: “Behold, he drinketh up a river and hasteth not; he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.” Note that Behemoth trusts, while Peter doubts. Note too that unlike Leviathan, who lives in the ocean, Behemoth is said to live in the Jordan river. The Jordan river is the source of the sea of Galilee, where the episode takes place. Behemoth is therefore the most fitting foil to Peter: one is at home in these waters, trusting in God, and one is not. 

In the fifth and final stanza, Wilson moves into an overt moralization of what has come before. Rather than try to avoid the waters of chaos, fear, and doubt, Wilson says, we must fall into them, must even lose ourselves in them for a time if we are to achieve spiritual growth. Here Wilson not only echoes Winters, who was obsessed with honing the order of the soul against the whetstone of chaos, but a poet like Sturge Moore, whose greatest theme, according to Edgar Bowers, was that we must “die into life,” must have both the courage to acquaint ourselves with sublime oblivion and the discipline to pull ourselves out of it. By having such an overwhelming experience, we can refresh and re-sensitize ourselves to the preciousness of beauty and the fragility of goodness, and thereby become greater caretakers of beauty and goodness. I know from my own experience the truth of this— those moments when I have felt the most intense existential terror and doubt are the moment that have been most conducive, upon reflection, to my spiritual health and moral values. 

            Unlike Winters, who, despite his quarrels with Emerson, was himself a Stoic believer in self-reliance, Wilson believes that it is the hand of God that pulls us out of the water, Jesus who baptizes us into a new life, the waters of doubt transfiguring into the waters of the womb. We are, he suggests, imitators of Christ, and we must trust that our individual agonies in the garden are a necessary step to our fulfillment of the divine plan, and that our own encounter with the thorns of passion will pass into a “new creation, come to flower.” 

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

Through The Water

“He must in some way cross or dive under the water, which is the most ancient symbol of the barrier between two worlds.” -Yvor Winters

Far back within the mansion of our thought

   We glimpse a lintel with a door that’s shut,

And through which all our lives would seem to lead

   Though we feel powerless to say toward what.

It is the place where all the shapes we know

   Give way to whispers and a gnawing gut.

And so, in childhood, we duck beneath

   The waterfall into a hidden cove;

In summer, pass within a stand of pines

   Cut off from those bright fields in which we rove,

Whose needles lay a softening bed of silence,

   Whose great boughs tightly weave a sacred grove.

When winter settles in, and our skies darken,

   We take a trampled path by pond and wood,

And find beneath an arch of slumbering thorn

   Stray tufts of fur, a skull stripped of its hood,

Then turn and look down through the thickening ice

   In wonder at the strangeness of the good.

And Peter, Peter, falling through that plane,

   Where he had only cast his nets before,

And where Behemoth stalked in darkest depths

   That sank and sank as if there were no floor,

He cried out to the wind and felt a hand

   That clutched and bore his weight back to the shore.

We know that we must fall into such waters,

   Must lose ourselves within their breathless power,

Until we are raised up, hair drenched, eyes stinging,

   By one who says to us that, from this hour,

We have passed through, were dead but have returned,

   And are a new creation come to flower.