155 - Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible Volume 1: Genesis to Malachi Volume 11: Gospels to Revelation

Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible
Volume 1: Genesis to Malachi
Volume 11: Gospels to Revelation
By Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder
Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993. 481 pp. and 391 pp. $25.00 per volume.

The editors of this superlative double anthology note in their introduction that of the two great heritages of English poetry, the classical and the scriptural, the latter, though "every bit as venerable as the classical, has never received the attention accorded its chosen twin. Like Ishmael and Esau, it has led a shadow existence. We hope that this collection will finally bring the scriptural tradition out of the shadow and into the light."

Having lived with Chapters into Verse only two months, I cannot pretend to have mined all its riches, which range over the centuries from the fourteenth century Friar William Herebert's paraphrase of Isaiah 63: 1-6 ("What is he, this lordling, that cometh from the fight/With blood-red weed so grisliche dight . . . ") to a forcefully "grisliche" rendering of Paul struck down on the road to Damascus by W. S. Di Piero, who was born in 1945. The centuries between are represented by those poets one would expect to find talking back to God-Milton and the Metaphysicals, Anne Bradstreet and Gerard Manley Hopkins-and by a great many unexpected guests from all eras who have been inspired to write some of their best verses in the margins of the King James Bible, including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Browning, A. E. Housman, and George Eliot-all bouncing off Deuteronomy, and Samuel Johnson, Countee Cullen, Delmore Schwartz, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Burns, responding to the wisdom of Proverbs.

Sometimes the poets can give a luster of contemporary significance to what seem tired metaphors, as when Edna St. Vincent Millay condenses a familiar passage from Jeremiah ("Make bright the arrows; gather the shields . . .") into a vivid exhortation for military preparedness that would gladden the heart of the Pentagon's chief chaplain. Sometimes they retell a well-known tale and find cruel new meanings, as in Stephen Vincent Benet's caustic "King David." Often, especially in earlier times, they simply recast the prose of the King James translators as verse, a tactic that

156 - Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible Volume 1: Genesis to Malachi Volume 11: Gospels to Revelation

can backfire (the original is hard to improve on) but that continues to lead poets into temptation. James Schuyler, one of the most unexpected of those assembled, is represented by an airy free-verse riff on the Lord's Prayer that specifies Product 19 as his daily bread.

Each poem is preceded by the relevant passage of Scripture, so that one need not have a Bible in hand to compare and contrast. There are indices by title, by first line, and by poet, each conducive to its own kind of browsing, and the introduction (which is repeated, unaltered, in both volumes) does not insist overmuch on the scholarly side of things. Indeed, this is not an anthology aimed at the academy and the classroom, but at those readers (once a majority) who expect poetry to be, primarily, a literature of wisdom. Poets catering to such expectations are at risk of coming across, at times, as sounding brass and tinkling symbols (none of the chosen poets picks up on I Corinthians 13:1), but the editors have done a find job of finding poems that enlarge on the human dimensions of Scripture, and chaff is at a minimum.

Within these 872 pages are many mini-anthologies of poems inspired by the same scriptural passages. The Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection engender a great many poems, as one would expect, but Matthew's and Mark's accounts of Christ walking on the Sea of Galilee, just because it is a story to challenge one's inner Doubting Thomas, provokes memorable poems from James McAuley ("Christ, you walked on the sea,/But cannot walk in a poem, Not in our century . . ."), James Dickey (who tells how he walked on the water himself as a boy), Allen Ginsberg (who, in "Galilee Shore," reminisces characteristically of "the thrill of the first Hashish in a holy land-," Robert Lowell (also caught in a characteristic moment of existential angst), and Oscar Wilde, whose sonnet "E Tenebris" easily takes first prize.

Those books of the Bible that are themselves most readable tend to provoke the richest poetic response, but one must be especially grateful to those poets like William Blake and Christopher Smart who can unseal the scrolls of an obscure apocalyptist like Zechariah. Altogether, this is one of the great desert island books, and, assuming one's first choice as a marooned reader is the King James Bible itself, one could not well do better than to choose Chapters into Verse as its companion.

Thomas M. Disch
Barryville, NY