Elizabeth Jennings
Spiritual Sunday
Dana Greene, a former colleague and author of a book on Denise Levertov, has now embarked on a biography of Elizabeth Jennings, a British religious poet popular in the 1930s. Jennings was a friend of J. R. R. Tolkien—both were Catholics—and Dana says that she had a wonderful talk with Tolkien’s daughter about her.
As Jennings was unfamiliar to me, I went in search of her poems. I came across the following lyric about the creator spirit:
A Chorus
By Elizabeth Jennings
Over the surging tides and the mountain kingdoms,
Over the pastoral valleys and the meadows,
Over the cities with their factory darkness,
Over the lands where peace is still a power,
Over all these and all this planet carries
A power broods, invisible monarch, a stranger
To some, but by many trusted. Man’s a believer
Until corrupted. This huge trusted power
Is spirit. He moves in the muscle of the world,
In continual creation. He burns the tides, he shines
From the matchless skies. He is the day’s surrender.
Recognize him in the eye of the angry tiger,
In the sign of a child stepping at last into sleep,
In whatever touches, graces and confesses,
In hopes fulfilled or forgotten, in promises
Kept, in the resignation of old men—
This spirit, this power, this holder together of space
Is about, is aware, is working in your breathing.
But most he is the need that shows in hunger
And in the tears shed in the lonely fastness.
And in sorrow after anger.
Jennings appears to focus more on the small aspects of existence than the large. While God may be an “invisible monarch,” unknown to some but trusted by others, Jennings is most interested in how God shows up in tiny moments–the quiet close of a day, the eye of a tiger, a child falling to sleep, a promise kept. The tiger and the child may be allusions to Blake, who also saw in them the hand of God.
The poem ends with images of “tears shed in the lonely fastness./And in sorrow after anger.” Jennings suffered from severe depression, so the hunger she mentions may allude to the human heart, which longs for but finds it difficult to open itself to love and forgiveness. God is in that longing and in the renewal that comes through the shedding of tears and through feelings of remorse.
