Hospitable Poetry # 12

Kate Bluett on Middle English Lyrics

If you are new to our series, here is the link to find the intro on hospitable poetry and the previous posts by Renee Emerson, A. A. Kostas, Brit McReynolds, Mark Rico, Esther Jane, Kilby Austin, Zane Paxton, Robert Charboneau, Nick Chapman-Jones, Rosa Lía Gilbert, and Riley Morsman.

Kate might be the most prolific poet I know. Her ability to produce poems seemingly on demand is breathtaking. She has published some of my favorite poems I’ve read on Substack including “Answer” and “Silence.” When I read Kate’s words, I get to experience familiar Scriptures anew and witness a conversation between texts I hadn’t considered in juxtaposition to one another. A formalist at heart, Kate explains the benefits of submitting one’s writing to the rigorous demands of hymn writing. Please subscribe and be deeply encouraged by her poetry.

I want to thank each one of you for reading, sharing, and making this series such an ongoing joy!

Love, Abigail

Wooded Landscape by Gillis van Coninxloo (1544-1607)

Reflection by Kate Bluett

To me, a hospitable poem is a poem with an open door. On first reading, there is a phrase or an image I can grasp immediately. I don’t have to reread the poem to get anything at all out of it: Something is clear on the first encounter. That clarity is often what invites me to read the poem again, and then I find that the open door leads into an entire room, or even a whole house. I don’t have to walk around the outside of the house looking for a way in; the door is open, and even if I don’t read the poem again, I’ve caught a glimpse of something that beckons me on.

With this as an introduction, it will probably come as no surprise that much modern poetry presents a closed door to me. So often I read a poem and come away wondering, “What did I just read?” There was nothing in it—nothing—that invited me further, that offered itself to my understanding. I don’t mean to say that poetry must be fully comprehensible in all its facets on first reading, only that something, no matter how small, must be instantly graspable. The writer needs to offer a handhold to the reader. The writer has to open the door, not shut it and dare the reader to find a way in. And then, if it’s a really good poem, the reader enters through the door and finds the world beyond expansive rather than reductive. It’s not that the open door makes the poem’s full meaning instantly comprehensible, but that the open door leads to a place of meaning upon meaning, opening further into that world beyond the door. But the door has to be open.

What opens the door? Often it’s a description of something so recognizable, the reader immediately sympathizes with it, even (perhaps especially) if the description itself is an unusual or indirect take on the subject described. For example, in the first poetry book I ever bought for myself, an anthology of the best poems in the English language purchased when I was in the seventh grade and took myself very, very seriously as a writer, I found this gem that has stayed with for 35 years:

Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
the small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
and I in my bed again!¹

This anonymous lyric, first written down in in the fifteen hundreds but probably considerably older, captured me. I knew nothing at that time of agriculture or of homesickness, but that apostrophe, “Christ, if my love were in my arms!” comes back to my mind over and over. Here is a narrator waiting for something—the wind, the end of the drought, a good harvest—to come, and that anticipation wells over into his longing for his own homecoming, his own restoration to what he loves. The open door is not in his saying, “I want to go home.” The open door is in that upwelling cry, “Christ, if my love were in my arms!” that is both swearing and begging.

It was lucky for me, in seventh grade, that I first encountered this poem cast into modern English. Reading poetry in Middle English—the English of Chaucer—is more challenging, but I often find in it the same open door inviting me into an expansive place. Human nature hasn’t changed that much down the centuries. Some of the unfamiliar words are barriers, yes, but even what I can recognize among the unfamiliar intrigues me and draws me on. That makes it worth the trouble of looking the words up in the glossary:

Lord, thou clepedest me,
And I noght ne answerde thee
But wordes slowe and slepy:
“Thole yet! Thole a litel!”
But “yet” and “yet” was endeles,
And “thole a litel” a long weye is.²

This little gem, circa 1300, sings out in the voice of everyone who’s ever hit the snooze button on their alarm clock:

Lord, you called me,
And I answered you with nothing
But slow and sleepy words:
“Wait yet! Wait a little!”
But “yet” and “yet” was endless,
And “wait a little” a long way is.

Who is unfamiliar with that “long way”? I certainly know it all too well. And this is a case in which the glossary helps draw us into expansive meanings: I’ve translated “thole” as wait, but it also means “suffer.” For the Christian audience, circa 1300, this would have been instantly convicting. Resisting the call to deeper conversion is not only asking the Lord to wait, but to suffer “a litel” more.

Another gem from the Middle Ages has similar wordplay for a similarly serious subject. Here, though, the imagery is for me instantly striking:

Now goth sunne under wode,—
Me reweth, Marie, thy faire rode.
Now goth sunne under tree,—
Me reweth, Marie, thy sone and thee.³

What does that intriguing image in the first line mean? “Now goes the sun under the wood?” I admit, I had to read an essay on this one to wrap my head around it, but that image was always drawing me in:

Now goes the under the wood,—
I pity, Mary, your fair face.
Now goes the sun under the tree,—
I pity, Mary, your son and you.

The sun is setting behind a forest, but it’s more than that. This ordinary, daily happening is the inversion of good: the sun is being conquered by an earthly thing. The wordplay here is crucial. The sun is falling to the forest; the Son is falling to the wood of the cross. And again, the glossary helps push the door open farther: “rode” in the second line is both “face” and “rood,” meaning “cross.” Mary has her own cross to bear here in witnessing the death of her son. But for me it’s that phrasing in the first line that opens the door initially. The poet doesn’t say “the sun sets,” but “the sun goes under the wood.” I can see it sinking; I can see the shadow stretching out to me from that forest. I have entered the open door and am inhabiting the world of the poem.

I don’t need poetry to be easy; sometimes the simplest poems are incredibly expansive. But it cannot lock itself away in the writer’s idiosyncratic language and expect me to love it. Mere self-expression, without references to something we can share, does not create hospitable poetry. The poems I have cited here are all Christian and rely heavily on Christian tropes and language: They may not be hospitable outside the Christian world. We may not always be able to write in a way that is hospitable to everyone when we write from conviction. But even across such divides, poetry can invite us into experiences we do share.

Myrie it is whil somer ylast
Wyth foweles song;
But now neigheth wyndes blast
And weder strong.
Ei! Ei! What, this nyght is long,
And I wyth wel muchel wrong
Sorwe and murne and faste.⁴

Here, an anonymous writer ca. 1225 reaches out across the years to tell us:

Merry it is while summer lasts
With birds’ song,
But now comes near the winds’ blast
And weather strong.
Ay! Ay! This night is so long,
And I with very much wrong
Sorrow and mourn and fast.

Pleasure is short; regret is long. No one needs to be a Christian, or a resident of medieval England, to understand that, to enter this poet’s harsh winter and weep with him. But because he opened the door into an expansive place, we can walk about with him, beating our breasts and remembering the past. Because that’s what hospitable poetry is: truly human poetry that lets us see each other at the same time it lets us see ourselves. It welcomes us not into words or images only, but our own and others’ humanity.

***

If you would like to read more Middle English lyrics, I highly recommend One Hundred Middle English Lyrics, edited by Robert D. Stevick.⁵

1. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westron_Wynde)

2. (https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2013/02/thole-little.html)

3. (https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/nou-goth-sonne-under-wode)

4. (https://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medlyric/merryitis.php)

5. The introduction is solid, and all the poems have been standardized into one representative dialect, using only the letters we currently use in modern English. It does not contain “Western wind, when wilt thou blow,” however. That one I found in Immortal Poems of the English Language, edited by Oscar Williams.