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Walking On Water
May. 13th, 2011 03:14 pmWe are going to close out our sonnets from Burt’s and Mikics’s “The Art of the Sonnet” --
What? Oh, please, I know hearts are breaking all over LJ because we won’t do more, but we must move on. There is an almost fathomless wealth of art to be plumbed and we are not getting younger.
As I was saying, I am going to close with “A Dream” by Charles Tennyson Turner. The poem captures most poignantly the tension between faith and doubt, as it so happens. It was published in 1864, when doubt about a biblically literalist and supernaturally infused Christianity was climbing to its height, a time, for instance, when Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was only recently published, a time also when a more fervent faith still ruled the hearts and imagination of much of the population, a time, in short, when the God question was more fraught than in our own time.
In the opening half-line, Turner tells us that it is a morning dream that he is going to relate. This is a point that registers well with me, because I understand that the dreams we have in the morning, just before waking up for the day, have perhaps the greatest force on us, since these are the dreams that we are more likely to remember and take with us into consciousness, whereas I suppose that more dreams held in the small hours of the night will never make it to conscious memory and will remain lost forever in the dark and thick wilderness of the unconscious, albeit perhaps not without a force of their own.
After that introductory half-line, the rest of the sonnet is the dream, which opens with a river’s raging torrent. The editors point out that such waters figure often and prominently in Scripture, and it could be an image of bounty or threat. The second quatrain introduces another person, a figure to whom we might equate with today’s New Atheists, a Richard Dawkins or a Christopher Hitchens, although not so imperious and militant in the mid-nineteenth century. Their New Atheists were then known as neologists and that is the term Turner uses.
This neologist is demanding proof from God of His existence. And then it happens. Christ comes walking on the raging water as in the days of old with Peter, John and Matthew and the boys. The neologist is awestruck and trembling before the Lord and the miraculous. But, in the last line, the poet looks again and sees only a dry riverbed - nothing.
_ _ _
I dream’d a morning dream - a torrent brought
From fruitless hills, was rushing deep and wide:
It ran in rapids, like impatient thought;
It wheel’d in eddies, like bewilder’d pride:
Bleak-faced Neology, in cap and gown,
Peer’d up the channel of the spreading tide,
As, with a starved expectancy, he cried,
“When will the body of the Christ come down?”
He came - not It, but He! no rolling waif
Tossed by the waves - no drown’d and helpless form -
But with unlapsing step, serene and safe,
As once He trod the waters in the storm;
The gownsman trembled as his God went by -
I look’d again, the torrent-bed was dry.
-- “A Dream” by Charles Tennyson Turner
What? Oh, please, I know hearts are breaking all over LJ because we won’t do more, but we must move on. There is an almost fathomless wealth of art to be plumbed and we are not getting younger.
As I was saying, I am going to close with “A Dream” by Charles Tennyson Turner. The poem captures most poignantly the tension between faith and doubt, as it so happens. It was published in 1864, when doubt about a biblically literalist and supernaturally infused Christianity was climbing to its height, a time, for instance, when Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” was only recently published, a time also when a more fervent faith still ruled the hearts and imagination of much of the population, a time, in short, when the God question was more fraught than in our own time.
In the opening half-line, Turner tells us that it is a morning dream that he is going to relate. This is a point that registers well with me, because I understand that the dreams we have in the morning, just before waking up for the day, have perhaps the greatest force on us, since these are the dreams that we are more likely to remember and take with us into consciousness, whereas I suppose that more dreams held in the small hours of the night will never make it to conscious memory and will remain lost forever in the dark and thick wilderness of the unconscious, albeit perhaps not without a force of their own.
After that introductory half-line, the rest of the sonnet is the dream, which opens with a river’s raging torrent. The editors point out that such waters figure often and prominently in Scripture, and it could be an image of bounty or threat. The second quatrain introduces another person, a figure to whom we might equate with today’s New Atheists, a Richard Dawkins or a Christopher Hitchens, although not so imperious and militant in the mid-nineteenth century. Their New Atheists were then known as neologists and that is the term Turner uses.
This neologist is demanding proof from God of His existence. And then it happens. Christ comes walking on the raging water as in the days of old with Peter, John and Matthew and the boys. The neologist is awestruck and trembling before the Lord and the miraculous. But, in the last line, the poet looks again and sees only a dry riverbed - nothing.
_ _ _
I dream’d a morning dream - a torrent brought
From fruitless hills, was rushing deep and wide:
It ran in rapids, like impatient thought;
It wheel’d in eddies, like bewilder’d pride:
Bleak-faced Neology, in cap and gown,
Peer’d up the channel of the spreading tide,
As, with a starved expectancy, he cried,
“When will the body of the Christ come down?”
He came - not It, but He! no rolling waif
Tossed by the waves - no drown’d and helpless form -
But with unlapsing step, serene and safe,
As once He trod the waters in the storm;
The gownsman trembled as his God went by -
I look’d again, the torrent-bed was dry.
-- “A Dream” by Charles Tennyson Turner
