Across the Page

I wasn’t aware that Madeleine L’Engle had written a volume of poetry till I went looking for this title, published in 2000, in the fiction section of the library and couldn’t find it. (I’ve discovered since that she has at least one other collection, The Weather of the Heart, which I’ve yet to see). Though L’Engle is most familiar for her fiction, her autobiographical Crosswicks Journal books and her treatise Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art have achieved a level of recognition as well. Her poems appear to be less well-known. I consider A Cry Like a Bell a treasure.

This book starts with a brief intro by Luci Shaw, and contains poems written from the perspective of different biblical characters, and filtered through L’Engle’s speculative imagination. Some of them are characters in starring roles, but quite a few are the the less textually fleshed-out but indispensable characters: Gershom, Herman the Ezragite, Balaam’s donkey, the ram slaughtered in Isaac’s place. A few characters warrant series: Mary, Abraham and Isaac, David. But many are given a single “bell-tone” in this feast for the ear.

I liked the book partly because I’ve written a few imaginative pieces myself from within the perspective of Bible characters who’ve caught my fancy. The Bible includes plenty of poetry, but it’s frustratingly terse about many of its main players. With the exception of the Psalms, we don’t get many passages of “inside” description of how characters feel. We can often guess easily enough; it doesn’t take much imagination to grasp how Mary felt at the foot of the cross. But generally speaking, those of us who enjoy the readerly voyage into other personalities aren’t often indulged in the biblical stories. So L’Engle’s poems supply a welcome glass of water to a parched, if perhaps unfair, expectation of the text.

It’s not a tepid glass, either. Much of the devotional poetry I’m familiar with flirts with (or dives headlong into) the sentimental or the dogmatic. But these poems are refreshingly honest, deeply reflective, and have a simplicity that feels more like life than a churchly emanation. In this volume, Malchus, the high priest’s servant whose ear is cut off by an enraged Peter, saves the ear that fell to the ground after Jesus gives him a new one. Isaac begins by stating flatly, “From now on, no fathers are to be trusted. I know.” The angel who appears to Mary in “Annunciation” is sorrowful, fearing to ask of her the task he knows will be almost unbearable.

The variety of speaker is matched by variety of form. Some, like the opening poem about Eve, are consciously molded to a form:

When we left the garden, we knew that it would be forever.
The new world we entered was dark and strange. Nights were cold.
We lay together for warmth, and because we were afraid
of the un-named animals, and of the others: we had never
known about the giants, and angels gone wild. We had not been told
of dwarves and elves; they teased us; we hid whenever they played…

This poem, with its carefully crafted six stanzas, six lines each, abcabc rhyme, poses a contrast to the rapid-fire staccato of the second poem about Ishmael and Hagar finding water in the wilderness:

Light
eye-thirsting for light
oh come
sight-drenching
night-wrenching
cloud-clearing
fountains of light
refreshing
renewing
caressing
blessing…

L’Engle attempts a number of different formal approaches: sonnets, dialogues, a character’s response to one of the epistles, others. The diversity testifies to L’Engle’s sophistication as an artist, and the content reflects the sweeping imaginative reach readers of her fiction have come to expect. I’m glad she tried her hand at poetry, especially considering her initial obstacles as a 5th grade poet, which she mentions self-deprecatingly in a commencement address here:

There was a poetry contest which was open to the entire school, and judged by the head of the English department. The entries weren’t screened, or I’d never have got one in. My poem won the contest, and my home room teacher predictably said, “Madeleine couldn’t possibly have written that poem. She’s not very bright, you know. She must have copied it from some place.”

Poor teacher. She lived to reconsider her criteria of judgment, I’m sure. I recommend A Cry Like a Bell to anyone who needs a dash of water on spiritual drought, to fans of L’Engle who (like me) may be unfamiliar with her foray into poetry, and to those looking for imaginative devotional writing to be savored.

There’s another review of this book online here, and a sampling of her poems from other sources here. Poetry Friday is at Wild Rose Reader this week.