Praise and Lament, Part 6: Praise in Yehuda Amichai and Gerard Manley Hopkins

So, now we’re going to move from the valley of lament to the plateau of praise. In many ways, praise is the more difficult mode to write well. The great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai discusses this in his poem “The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy” from his book Open Closed Open, beautifully translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld.

Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000)

What Amichai describes so well in this poem is the way in which our psyches are hard-wired to record every detail of an unpleasant situation. This tendency may be a survival mechanism to keep us from repeating destructive experiences. But we humans are not well attuned to recounting the positive. That takes a different kind of attention.

Nevertheless, poems of praise are some of the most ancient in human culture. Many forms of writing or speech or song are traditionally vehicles of praise: psalms, hymns, odes, litanies, blasons (the blason is a form of love poetry that enunciates all of the beloved’s features one by one).

Just as the lament focuses on loss, on absence, the poem of praise focuses on presence. But the poem of praise is not concerned with something that is obviously present. It’s about drawing attention to something present that deserves or demands more of our attention.

One of the earliest forms of praise literature is the psalm. The Hebrew word for “psalms,” tehillim, literally mean “praises,” in this case, praises of God. Let’s say you wanted to write a poem praising God or the spiritual side of life and you wanted to do it using objects or things or creatures in the world that are the clearest manifestations of the divine. What would be the most obvious things to inspire a sense of spiritual awe? You might choose children’s innocence, sunsets, mountains, beautiful skies, rainbows, etc.—things that are self-evidently beautiful or pleasant.

Well, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a sort of modern psalm where he praises God through unusual objects or things in the world. Hopkins was a great poet and an Irish priest who lived from 1844 to 1899. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins

It’s very interesting what Hopkins chooses to single out as evidence of the divine. Here’s the poem:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

What sorts of things does Hopkins choose to praise, and therefore to connect to the sacred in his poem? He doesn’t focus on days when the heavens are a clear blue, but on mottled skies. He praises not constancy and perfect complexions but what is “fickle, freckled.” He spotlights grungy, physical work: “gear and tackle and trim.” In what way are these manifestations of the divine, if God is, as he says, “past change”? Don’t these things seem like the opposite of the divine?

When I taught this poem in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage in the summer of 2015, my colleague, the poet Anne Caston, had an interesting interpretation of Hopkins’ choice of things to praise in this poem: “Hopkins understood something about the nature of God to accept the ‘flawed’ and ‘marred’ things in His creation. I love that notion too, that there is a part of the spiritual that sees the beauty and elegance of the ‘flawed’ things.”

One thing writers can take away from this poem is that praise needs to have an element of surprise. There’s a goody-goody side to praise that can be predictable and cloying. Avoid crystals, butterflies, waterfalls, sunsets, and cute babies, unless you can find something to praise in these things that you’ve never heard anyone laud before.

The artistic context of Hopkins’ poem is also interesting. Around the time that Hopkins wrote this poem, the United Kingdom and Ireland were in the midst of a serious medieval revival. You’ve probably heard of the Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Morris, for instance. 

The families of Pre-Raphaelite artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones

Influenced by the art critic John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites took their name from the idea of going back in art to the time before the Renaissance painter Raphael, whose work they felt represented a sophisticated corruption of the innocence, sincerity, and freshness of medieval art. During this period of the industrial revolution, in literature as well, there was a yearning for a more innocent and pure art. Many artists turned to or imagined a period when art was inspired by faith and the importance of craft. That’s why this school in the visual arts was also called the Arts and Crafts movement.

In his poetry, Hopkins harked back to the rhyme and alliteration of the very earliest English verse, dating back to the Middle Ages. This was the period of Old English, the Anglo-Saxon roots of English before the influence of French and Latin became predominant in the era of the Norman conquest. You can listen here to a recitation of one of the greatest poems of Old English, “The Seafarer,” so you can hear the alliteration and strong rhythms that characterized the literature in English in its earliest days.

By using the sort of alliteration and rhyme from an earlier period in the history of the English language, Hopkins evokes the faith and values of that period as well. But I think one of the take-aways from Hopkins’ poem is that the thing that you are praising—or lamenting—can shape the way you praise or lament it. It has to shape the way you praise or lament it.

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Utopias and Dystopias in Fiction

We seem to go through waves where several works of utopian fiction are published in succession, and then waves where dystopian visions prevail in literature. Sometimes these waves overlap, like when a retreating wave in the ocean slides under a new breaker, and their ripples interweave.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about utopias and dystopias in fiction—I’ve been listening to an audiobook of David Lodge’s A Man of Parts, about H.G. Wells, a biographical novel about that English writer. Wells wrote several books that could be considered both utopian and dystopian, but he was essentially an optimist. One of his novels, in fact, is called A Modern Utopia, published in 1905.

The other reason that these ideas have been crossing my mind regularly is that my son is deeply involved in reading contemporary bestsellers that take place in dystopian worlds, such as The Hunger Games and Divergent. He can’t read those books fast enough.

H. G. Wells came of age with the generation that grew up before World War I started in 1914 and before the Russian Revolution took place in 1917. Several writers of those pre-war years were drawn to writing utopian fiction. In addition to Wells’s novel, there was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopian fiction, Herland, published in 1915. Not too long before that, William Morris’s book News from Nowhere appeared in 1890 (the word “utopia” means “nowhere” in ancient Greek).

William Morris, illustration from News from Nowhere

Utopian visions might have been particularly appealing to those generations because they were formed by a period in history that saw the beginnings of modern technology and the rise of many progressive movements. It was the era of the airplane and motorcars, and the hope that electrical appliances might reduce the drudgery of daily life (which they have, to quite a degree!). The spread of socialism and feminism seemed to promise the overthrow of some of the most entrenched forms of human oppression.

Following the rise of communism and fascism in the mid-twentieth century, though, utopian visions became suspect. Communism and fascism, were, after all, misguided utopian projects, or more accurately dystopian projects masquerading as utopian movements. Not only that, but the promise of the new technology was soured by the use of aerial bombing and other modern weapons in World War I, when so many millions died in the trenches, and the invention of atomic weapons during World War II. The middle of the twentieth century gave rise to two of the most influential dystopian novels, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931) and George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1948). Not long before that, in 1920, Karel Čapek’s dystopian play, R.U.R. (which stood for Rossum’s Universal Robots) showed the nightmarish side of modern technology in its depiction of a robot mutiny that wipes out humanity.

That midcentury gloom changed, though, with the rise of the New Left in the 1960s, and the rebirth of feminism and the growth of the ecology movement in the 1970s. Once again utopian visions overtook dystopian, closely linked to the global rebellions of that time. That period witnessed the green paradise of Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (published in 1975), where the Northwest coast of the United States becomes an ecological haven, but pitted against a dystopian remnant of much of the rest of the country. That period also gave rise to Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), another novel that contrasted a simpler, utopian society with a hostile, neighboring dystopia.

That same year another favorite of mine among utopian novels was published, Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. This book’s main character is a material guy who is transported by an auto accident to an alternate world where the goal of life is to act in such a way that one has good dreams. Each morning, the members of a cohort recount their dreams to one another to see how well their conscious life is in harmony with their subconscious. 

One could also mention Ursula LeGuin’s sci-fi The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), with its utopian look at gender roles, portraying a world where no one is either male or female, but everyone becomes both at different times, unpredictably, depending on hormonal and seasonal fluctuations.

That wave of optimistic utopian visions, sparked by the social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s has given way to an unrelenting series of dystopias in the present day, from the potboilers I mentioned earlier, such as The Hunger Games, to the more literary Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, a book I very much admire. In Cloud Atlas there are two different dystopian futures. One is highly technological, where clones are slaves to humans, but begin to rebel, to no avail. Another is a post-nuclear-war society in which modern technology has mainly been lost, and large areas of the planet have become dead zones. Tribes of survivors in Hawaii live on subsistence agriculture, victimized by whatever vicious marauders are in the ascendancy at the moment.  

Why this current wave of dystopian fictions? It’s partly that the political movements of the 1960s and 70s have run their course, either making reforms that have been absorbed by the existing political systems, or failing to make really substantive changes to daily life. In this time when the headlines are dominated by the almost inevitable momentum of global warming, by the War on Terror, and by a reawakened Russia encroaching again on its neighbors, it’s difficult to imagine a world in which there will ever be an end to armed conflicts, or a world in which a truly sustainable economy could be a reality.

I can imagine that eventually global realities will again give rise to mass movements for change. And those movements will have their dreams, and their utopias. The pendulum will swing back.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer