Poetry and Prayer
1
Both poetry and prayer are regarded by some as a way of making things happen. For others, the efficacy of both their powers is doubtful at best. In a “Critical Forum” series transcript in which Ted Hughes introduces several of his poems, he does so by insisting that “Poetry is traditionally supposed to be magical”, and that this magic “is one way of making things happen the way you want them to happen”.[1] Understanding the uphill distance he needs to cover in order to render this more plausible, he continues:
That somebody’s prayer should affect the course of some other person’s disease, is not so incredible – we call that ‘the psychological effect’, ‘the power of suggestion’ or even ‘the projection of healing energy’.
The leap from suggestion to healing energy is noticeable, and one gets the sense this final item is what Hughes is truly interested in.
It is worthwhile noting that Hughes collates “prayer” with “magic”, and poetry with both these things. Traditionally “magic”, the crafting and enacting of spells, might be associated with a higher degree of self-importance than is the case with the act of prayer: any man may pray, but only one with specialized knowledge may cast a spell, or so it is understood. This is apparent in Hughes’s own account: magic is for making things happen how “you want them to happen”. It is the force of one’s own vision impacting the landscape, with the suggestion that it does so against the will of whomsoever else is involved.
In the Gothic, spill means “report, discourse, tale”.[2] This helps indicate why the separation of prayer and spell would be rash; and if they are separated in our usual idiom it is most likely the result of our (still largely dominant) Christian heritage asserting itself against our Pagan heritage. The egotistical aspect of the spell is that it suggests no intermediary force, no immediately discernible governing power to which man appeals. This is a misperception: in every instance, language is the intermediary power. Hughes clarifies his “psychological effect” by saying, “Everything lies in the dramatic power of the blessing or the curse, our own susceptibility, and our total ignorance of the laws or the anarchy of fate”. The implication is that the magic is an act of fiction to be bought into, and the extent of that belief decides the extent of the requisite action. In this model, it is a kind of mimesis-in-reverse which enforces the effectiveness; those involved are bent to the conventions of the text, should it function as intended (and should it be itself appropriately rendered).
This model does not hold, however. Even Hughes contradicts it by introducing the idea of the poem “composed and recited before the hunt in order to make the hunt successful”. At first this appears reasonable, as the hunter is thus “psychologically prepared, hypnotized into the alertness and concentration of perfect confidence, etc”. When it comes to speaking of his own “curious encounters with the old-fashioned type of hunting magic”, the functionality of this model falters:
I worked at this piece over two or three days and finished it. At last it seemed to me I’d got it just right. The following day I caught a large salmon. And two days after, two more salmon, one of them even larger. The impression on me was that somehow I’d broken down their resistance. Everything had to happen as in the poem.
Hughes can hardly be suggesting that the poem improved his skill in a comparable manner to the almost-ecstasy experienced by a tribal hunter. If the “original motive for the poem was not [...] to bring the salmon into [his] power”, it is certainly how he regards its effect in retrospect – their nature has been altered, not his.
Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” [3] presents an ontology based in language in which “language [...] means the tendency inherent in the subjects concerned – technology, art, justice, religion – towards communication of mental meanings”. The use of “means” in relation to language is a useful irony: in Benjamin’s system, language is the medium through which objects announce themselves. Language does not so much mean as speak itself through man (to whom the capability of naming belongs exclusively): “Naming is that by which nothing beyond it is communicated, and in which language itself communicates itself absolutely. In naming the mental entity that communicates itself is language”. The result of this model is that objects in their true selves remain inaccessible, known only by the languages through which they announce themselves. The strength of the composed word, then, within this system, is immediately apparent; if perception is contingent on (in fact, consists of) language, the written and spoken word has the power to interact directly. Attention is also implicated as fundamentally communicative. In regarding an object, the exchange is somewhat mutual (somewhat in that the languages differ). Hughes supports this with another hunting anecdote:
Anybody who has done much stalking of wild game, for instance, knows that there are two successful attitudes of mind. One is to concentrate on the fact that the game is already dead: it is a certain kill. This has the effect of paralysing it, or it seems to have. The other, is to deflect one’s attention: not look at the game except in occasional glances.
It is important to note that the wild game here is not necessarily conventionally aware of the hunter. This involves both a suggestion of language working in an extra-sensorial manner (the animal here is aware of being in the act of announcement, and so according to the hunter’s own now-apparent linguistic presence, must choose the nature of that announcement lest it be chosen on its behalf) and also an on-going privileging of the human, naming language, whose comparative force can affect the linguistic nature of the language-quarry.
In all these examples there is the matter of action being deserved: the keen-witted hunter is rewarded with compliant prey; the summoner’s repeated rituals fill him with an inner resolve and shift of attitude he calls a spirit; the devout Christian sees his reward and knows his sins have been pardoned. Ted Hughes catches some monstrous fish. He has got his salmon-stupefying poem “just right”, so language judges the quality of this poem such that the salmon cannot help but be stupefied. The linguistic natures of both the fisherman Hughes and that of the salmon have been changed, such that he is here given the title of fisherman, and such that salmon are big things whose nature it is to be caught and eaten. If language is the intermediary force to which man appeals, what are the implications? Benjamin states that, “an existence entirely without relationship to language is an idea; but this idea can bear no fruit even within that realm of Ideas whose circumference defines the idea of God”. Yet “in the beginning was the Word” and “the Word was God”.[4] God becomes God with the Word already in place: the notion is subordinated. Benjamin appears reluctant to release his God completely to the workings of his own system, a system where language is God.
2
It has been the particular power of the church building, in whatever form that church takes, to gather people to it and, in so doing, define a community. Within England and Wales we may still regard the city as a settlement possessing a cathedral. Without this name we might think a settlement to be smaller, less densely populated than statistics reveal. People may move away to a “true” city, drawn by the suggestion of its name to what they perceive as a new way of life (and thus it is). The power of the church lingers within these operations of language, even as the building itself is overlooked and poorly attended. In his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking”,[5] Heidegger uses the example of a bridge to demonstrate the influence (indeed, the constituent nature) of language on the landscape:
[The bridge] does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. [...] With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighbourhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream.
Implicit in this is the idea that, just as the bridge has rendered its landscape, the word “bridge” has transformed the beams of wood or metal or stone from their prior natures, as if the word itself had looked upon the materials and sculpted them into its image. “The bridge gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals”[6] and those gathered cannot help but exist as those gathered by the bridge ought to exist: for instance, crossing. Hughes says the same of the poem which “stands there, permanent, vivid and powerful, and tries to make [the poet] continue to live in its image”.[7] It is doubtful whether the poem would have quite the same effect on any other reader: the poet has a past voice instilled within the text, which summons the appropriate owner of that voice to the poem (i.e. everything else associated with it, that self). Nevertheless the reader will be gathered towards that voice and changed according to it; it is easy to see the fairytale danger in the casually abandoned scrap of paper, the written word whose force of character may be such as to eclipse the reader’s, or take control of his body.
“Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction”,[8] says Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. In the case of the church this reception is more influential and extended. The aura of the building is collated with and expanded by the aura of those rituals and ritual-based art forms contained within it (and which it connotes). So it is that the aura of the church and the auras of the prayer, the hymn, the liturgy, the Deposition all cohabit within one another, with the result that the hymn sung beyond the confines of the cloister, as it were, will be approached with the church already firmly established outside of its physical manifestation. Further to this, the church is at all points in connection with The Church, that being both the linguistic progenitor of the building and (so) also being the organisation that privileges this method of gathering and which is itself gathered. The church therefore exists with all other churches around it, under it, above it and within it, alongside a sharing of those who are gathered. The power of a religion is based within the power of the word and of naming, and so within the power of gathering: “as man should name all kinds of living creatures, so should they be called”.[9]
Why then, given the necessarily reproduced nature of the poem and, even more so, the common prayer or hymn, do their auras remain undiminished? First, while the object of the poem – the page, say — may be reproduced, the artwork itself is not. The poem or prayer’s capability to render a landscape around it is unparalleled by other forms of art. The one poem calls its readers to it through the reproduced items. Those pages and books, in this instance, are themselves akin to architecture in that both are “work[s] of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction”.[10] The prayer will render its own particular landscape in concert with a rendering of its church — they may coincide, but the coinciding will probably not be complete. So it is the memorised and uttered prayer may bring comfort regardless of circumstance. As the poem or prayer is read, uttered or sung, it is re-spoken. This re-speaking brings the poem into contact with not only its own landscapes, but also that of the reader. A kind of mutual gathering occurs, through which the caster of a spell, say, gains a sense of his own dominion over a landscape. It is of course a false sense, though, as it is again language which holds sway, and which here allows the poem or prayer to add that landscape to its repertoire (and which may be called back by first calling back that reader) and to immediately alter it in accordance with its properties and other landscapes. The fact that to speak or read the poem is to invoke it in every sense and attribute reveals another aspect of its resilient aura. By talking about an urn one may summon the urn-ness of the urn, and so the language-urn, but not the urn itself. Thus the need for reproduction arises. This has important implications for the man-made thing in general. Man creates by language, in a mock-approximation, says Benjamin, of God:
In man God set language, which had served Him as a medium of creation, free. God rested when he had left his creative power to itself in man. This creativity, relieved of its divine actuality, became knowledge. Man is the knower in the same language in which God is the creator.[11]
Man makes things with no knowledge of their inner being, possessing only their announced language-selves to work with. Already the thing is flawed, and its unknown inner status, perhaps already a mess, will degrade further when reproduced. The textual artwork does not suffer this, being a thing composed entirely within language.
All art has the capability to gather, but none has more innate potential to do so than poetry and prayer, given any single poem’s ability to gather in its own way from almost any position. And, indeed, any kind of art can make the gathering method of another landscape or building part of its own range, just as Wallace Stevens’s artefact, the jar, summons that “slovenly wilderness” and transforms it so that it is “no longer wild”.[12] It is the linguistic art form’s unique ability to do so in such a widespread manner, however. Poetry and prayer, then, are things incomparably shared.
3
There is something inarguably stirring about a mass of voices risen in a single form, such as in chanting or reciting. This may move one to joy, especially if it is shared in, or to fear, particularly if it is not. So it is that common prayer gains its momentum, with a very unusual kind of utterance. The members of the church are joined in an act of communication, but do not communicate directly with each other; they raise their voices to God, and so to language. Nevertheless the number of speakers affects each speaker individually, with the result that each is further emboldened as the mass grows. A biologist or anthropologist might see this as evidence of our pack-oriented social attitude, and indeed it probably is. We see in this, however, that the power of prayer is founded in its being shared; a change in character (that emboldening) is not just the placebo effect or what Hughes suggests we might call “the psychological effect”, but also a change in landscape, and therefore in language. The congregation speaks in unison, with high spirits, and all this is the transformative work of the prayer. Such is that transformative influence that each man or woman ceases their existence as such and becomes the congregation. Here is a single speaker made up of those gathered, with one voice. Prayer is speaking them and through them.[13]
The subject of judgement has already been raised, such that it requires some clarification as to what this method of judgement is, and what, therefore, is doing the judging. It has been imagined by many of various faiths that the strength of a deity much depends on the number of its followers. It is probable that this notion comes from the very visceral increase in strength that prayer undergoes. So it is that people convene with the idea (perhaps not fully recognised) of empowering their deity and, they hope, discharging some of that power onto their own lives. They commune with their deity through prayer and, as they are remade, become inseparable from that prayer and that deity (being language) for the duration. It is important, however, that the congregation does not view God as anything so (in their minds) insubstantial as mere language. God is, perhaps, the bloodied figure of Christ, in obvious anguish. Though the scripture, the priests, the theological texts all may remind their faithful that God is something apart from them, they cannot help but see his wounds, his generous or punitive hand. Indeed, prayer is a request of physicality to a physically perceived (often anthropomorphised) being. It is a request of physicality in that it asks for actual change or preservation — the protection of livestock and shelter, the boon of some salmon — or in that it is a declaration of love and devotion, which is founded in a physical state. It is also physically judged: by that devotion, by the generous or righteous acts of the praying individual. Into this contract the congregation enters both in component parts and as a whole; so it is that an entire town may be forewarned by a passing comet, or chastised with blight.
In The Screwtape Letters[14] the eponymous devil tells his nephew Wormwood that “One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray ‘with moving lips and bended knees’ but merely ‘composed his spirit to love’ and indulged a ‘sense of supplication.’” He continues: “That is EXACTLY the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence, as practiced by those who are far advanced in the Enemy's service, clever and lazy ‘patients’ can be taken in by it for quite a long time.” Coleridge should have realised that the kneeling is one of the prayer’s formal, structural concerns. His act is judged unfitting by that physical standard. The combination of the physical and the verbal by which communion occurs (that becoming part of God) functions in such a way that it reminds the worshipper that the physicality itself is part of the word. Christ is “the word made flesh,[15] and the communicant will partake of His flesh, the Eucharist; that Eucharist is a manifested symbol of the communion taking place, and the ritual is one of giving thanks: εὐχαριστῶ, meaning “I thank” and used as such throughout the Septuagint and the New Testament. That giving thanks occurs in both the verbal, performative sense — whether in prayer or in the minds of the communicants as they consume the body of Christ — and also in the physical sense, as the ritual act. The bread and the wine are singularly in touch with language: it is as if the communicant swallows the words “thank you” so that they may speak themselves through him in a manner he alone cannot. What is being communed, then, is language with language. With this in place it seems that some kind of transubstantiation must occur. The bread is made flesh (which is the word made flesh) and the flesh re-enters the continuum of language.
4
The editor of a small poetry publisher, Flarestack, states in its guidelines for submissions that, “One of our eminent poets has said that all poems are love poems. I like that. My line is that a good poem is a letter to God.”[16] He continues by saying, “Of course, you have to wonder whether God would enjoy ‘see-it-coming-a-mile-away’ end-rhyme, or would find it boring and look for some other kind of dance with words”. The implication, of course, is one of quality. The prayer is hardly ever judged on its linguistic content; indeed, the more nebulous and vague the content of a prayer, the more popular it may become. Its specifics are found in the unusual degree of ownership that occurs, by which the speaker has a sense of re-possession of the prayer’s content. The persona of the prayer, implied or otherwise, is designed to be slipped into without any obstacle. As has already been shown, the power is also largely found in the prayer’s physical, shared elements, and so also its sphere of influence, of which this vagueness is a key device. The poem, its language, is a prayer to a God of language. It is not, in fact, a letter at all: the letter may lie there, inert, un-invoked. The poem exists only in the act of invocation (which does not mean that it depends upon its readership) and, thus, convocation. The editor here asks that the poet consider whether his work can hold up under the scrutiny of God, which is to say, beware your linguistic sins. Just as the physical sins of the prayer may differ according to faith, location, etc, so will these linguistic sins. Again they are inextricably tied to landscape, to the poem’s way of gathering, and are decided upon by the interplay of languages that make up that landscape. This is a matter of connotation and allusion, by which the textual landscapes summon their readers, and are also summoned to one another. The manners of gathering that are innate to each landscape will be different, often only very slightly, but with the result that, gathered as they are, they overlap, and the poem’s own landscape must appease or else oppose them. The opposition might be called “originality”, and has something akin to Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence;[17] and we might locate the will to appease in the advice given to new writers that they should imitate their predecessors.
The somewhat unfortunate, and humorous, upshot of the editor’s remark that a “good poem is a letter to God” is that he has effectively pronounced himself God. Naturally, issues of authoritarianism would seem to arise. It would be easy to name the editor (any editor) tyrannical in his role and proclamation. However, language is speaking these particular canonical requirements into him and through him: thus is he gathered. His special distaste here for the “’see-it-coming-a-mile-away’ end-rhyme” indicates the particular landscape, and its criteria, to which he belongs. There is something almost Bakhtinian about this manner of judgement. In his essay “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”,[18] Bakhtin defines the novel as a discourse composed of a series of interlocking, inter-illuminating language strata. It is the novelistic images of language themselves that function as the primary means of representation, says Bakhtin. Language represents language. The author himself is “almost completely outside” these language images; it is only the author’s “parodic and ironic accents that penetrate this ‘language of another’”. Bakhtin is reluctant to commit his author to a Barthesian death within the text, and, given what we have set out as language’s ontological nature, he need not do so; the author is himself composed and inhabited by language, drawn towards linguistic strata, their landscapes. So it is with our editor above. These “parodic and ironic” accents are important to the judgement of the poem, however, and are the primary avenue of that judgement. Parody and travesty play an integral role in Bakhtin’s inter-illuminating, dialogic model, such that the parody is the natural other half of a serious work, even with the implication of their completing one another. They constantly represent each other, alongside being gathered and gathering countless other language planes. In invoking the poem, its particular strata are brought immediately into conflict or conspiracy with those to whom the reader belongs. The bisection of the interplay of these particular strata is what generates the method of the linguistic judgement.
Epilogue
Prayer still exists in abundance today, even if the revered-of-old church building is not so well-attended. The proliferation of “self-help” texts, of most kinds, is one testament to this, whether their methods be through autohypnosis or the summoning of angels. In “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”,[19] Wallace Stevens warns against the “pressure of reality”, “the pressure of an external event or events on the consciousness to the exclusion of any power of contemplation”. The relative increase of media “noise” over the past century might go some way to explain a decline of interest in poetry. In conflict, the contemplating word has been dominated by that of unthinking gratification. This is coupled with a generally-felt admonishment of what is termed “escapism”, with its implications that what is most unpleasant, disquieting, counter-productive, is in fact what is most real. Stevens addresses this well when he says:
We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession. In its ultimate extension, the truth about which we have been insane will lead us to look beyond the truth to something in which the imagination will be the dominant complement. It is not only that the imagination adheres to reality, but, also, that reality adheres to the imagination and that the interdependence is essential.
The relative resurgence of interest in very recent years in poetry, at least within the UK, suggests that either the readership has grown accustomed to the sudden swell of the non-contemplating word, or that the contemplating and non-contemplating words have reached a kind of uneasy compromise in media such as the internet, whose gathering capabilities are enormous and varied.[20] More importantly, though, poetry’s reception suffers from the fact that people have forgotten — or now doubt — the efficacy of words upon the actual. Poets also are perhaps not without responsibility, too often content to strip their craft of its alchemical qualities for the sake of appeasement with the non-contemplating word.
© 2008
Salt Publishing Limited 
