PART II, ARTICLE VII: THE USE OF VOICE AND COLOR IN POETRY, SECTION IV

As pointed out, the poem about the wheel barrow contains sixteen words: “so much depends/upon/a red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water/beside the white/chickens.” The full text of Isaiah 1.18 has thirty-four words in the King James Bible: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” But, coincidentally, it has only sixteen words in the Hebrew, the same number as in the poem by Williams about the wheel barrow. The LORD, through his prophet, is as economical about the way of salvation as a frugal poet is about the pastime of a boy. The way of salvation is often compacted in few words in the Bible in order for a sinner to be saved by a glance. The reader’s eye can ricochet on a verse and have the substance of it pass through his eye and into his mind. What do we so often hear from saved sinners but that their change came about through quick and close contact with one single verse? Moreover, Isaiah 1.18 could have been even briefer than it is. There are two illustrations of transformation in it of virtually the same import: from ‘scarlet’ color to ‘white as snow’ and from ‘crimson red’ to the color of ‘wool.’ Without the second illustration, there would be only eleven words. God can present the way of salvation in eleven words. He can reduce it to that. A person has no time to read the Bible? Has he time to read one verse? Has he time to read part of a verse? Has he time for eleven words? He has no time to meditate on what he reads? Can he meditate on eleven words? He has lots of time to reminisce. But he has no time to reason with the LORD? We tend to talk a lot about our childhoods, don’t we? But do we reason with the LORD about everlasting-hood? Do we reason with the LORD about where we are ultimately going and how to get clean enough to get to an eternity in heaven instead of a lockdown in hell from which no escape will be possible?       

Williams was a poet who used color to convey feeling through a nostalgic voice. Isaiah was a prophet who used color to teach the way of salvation through the voice of the LORD. Like the poem by Williams, Isaiah’s verse is a sentimental monologue, full of tender feeling: “Come now…though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” The voice in the verse of a modern poet can soothe us; the voice in the verse of an ancient prophet can save us.

PART II, ARTICLE VII: THE USE OF VOICE AND COLOR IN POETRY, SECTION III

A writer often speaks in another person’s voice—almost all the time in works of fiction. But speaking by proxy occurs in non-fiction as well. This is the case from Genesis to Revelation, even when Job is voicing his side of the debate, for example, because all of Scripture is the word of God. The Spirit of God is not only breathed into Scripture. In some places, God speaks out from it to address the reader directly. The following Bible verse (Isaiah 1.18) is attributed to Isaiah, but it is the voice of God that we hear:

Come now, and let us reason together,

saith the LORD:

though your sins be as scarlet,

they shall be as white as snow;

though they be red like crimson,

they shall be as wool.

Whether this verse of poetry speaks to you or not will depend on your standing with God and how receptive he has made you to his word. As universal as this verse is, speaking as it does to each sinner in need of cleansing from sin’s pollution, the original correspondent was the southern half of God’s children, the kingdom of Judah. As did the poem by Williams, Isaiah’s words identify me. My sins were as scarlet and crimson but now are white as snow and wool. The voice of the LORD has gone out beyond Old Testament Judah and forward in time. I heard God’s voice of reason and I hear it regularly. Like a poet, Isaiah reaches beyond the grave in the words that he wrote, not merely to resonate through the voice of mortal man, but to reason and to save through the voice of God.

Unlike the poet, Isaiah did not use up a lot of stationery to compose his verse. God inspired; Isaiah wrote; the verse was completed. Like in The Red Wheelbarrow, Isaiah’s verse is colorfully qualified, and the same two colors are employed. Sins are scarlet and crimson, and then white as snow and wool. Instead of describing kinds of sin, Isaiah simply paints them red—the color of blood—the color of penalty and redemption, murder and sacrifice. Then suddenly he paints them white—the color of purity and righteousness. Sins are depicted as red and then white to convey the effect produced by atonement: the covering of sin with righteousness divine. Only by the shedding of blood are sins made white. The contrast of red and white will suggest pictures from the Bible: blood running over wool—even drops of blood on snow. In Isaiah’s day the lamb was led to the slaughter to cover the sins of Judah. When the lamb was cut, the blood spilled over the wool—a sacrifice made for sin. Red sins are dyed white in the crimson tide of a sinless lamb.

Sins are pictured red, Isaiah’s color for guilt; then they are pictured white, the color of purity. The change is effected through the blood of the innocent victim. By bleeding for the sins of the guilty, the innocent victim provides a pure covering for the sinner. The sinner becomes, in the eyes of God in the court of heaven, white like the lamb whose blood is the color of sin. From God’s holy perspective, sin’s penalty and the innocent blood must come together to atone for sin; atoning blood is required to reconcile man to God. It is the only medium through which sinners may be cleared of guilt. An innocent victim must become guilty red, the color of sin that needs whitening. Sins are turned white by the blood of a pure victim; the red stain of guilt is dyed white like snow through sacrifice. “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow,” the prophet says. “Scarlet in the Greek is called ‘dibasson’, because it is ‘twice dipped’, and the art of man cannot wash out the dye again. But though our sins are of a scarlet colour, God’s mercy can wash them away” (Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance, pp. 78, 79.)  

A Personal Lamb is prefigured for atonement, then, not only in animal sacrifices, but in poetic verses. Now the blood of Jesus Christ has done away with typical sacrifices; and thousands of new appeals to ‘reason together’ about this intersection of history have been composed in the forms of sermons and hymns by members of God’s Church. “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?/Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?/Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour?/Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?/Are you washed in the blood,/In the soul cleansing blood of the Lamb?/Are your garments spotless?/Are they white as snow?/Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?” (Elisha A. Hoffmann, Are You Washed in the Blood?) So fully did the pure Lamb of God suffer for sin that the apostle Paul says that on the cross he was ‘made sin.’ His scarlet blood covers guilt with whiteness; his blood, the color of sin, is the purifying element: the only way given by God, through grace and faith, to appropriate righteousness in exchange for damning iniquity. Isaiah 1.18 speaks of atonement; Jesus Christ is the atoning Word. The KING of KINGS and LORDS of LORDS is the only lasting solution for sin, for he is the final sacrifice for it, without benefit of which each and every sinner is doomed to be covered in his own red guilt forever. “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still” (Revelation 22.11.) The Lamb of God is termed the ‘lamb to the slaughter’ in Isaiah 53. As prophesied, the pure Lamb was bled to turn red sins white. “And in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain” (Revelation 5.6.) By virtue of his immaculate blood, the unjust, the filthy, the unrighteous, and the unholy may be as white as wool and snow—as white as the righteousness of Christ in the eyes of a presently offended God. The verses surrounding Isaiah’s compacted poem on atonement are instructive for showing us some of the necessary connections and benefits that attend forgiveness (which forgiveness is on the ground of atonement), as well as the consequences that follow should the sinner refuse to reason with God. To ‘put away the evil of your doings’ (Isaiah 1.16) speaks of repentance. To ‘learn to do well’ (verse 17) is to gain understanding for doing good works, several of which are mentioned: as relieving the oppressed, pleading the widow’s case, and defending the fatherless. To be doing good works is a mark of having repented. He that is willing and obedient (verse 19); that is, willing to repent, willing to do good, and willing to have his sins made white ‘shall eat the good of the land,’ which land, spiritually considered, can be nothing and nowhere but heaven. He who chooses to rebel instead of reason ‘shall be devoured with the sword’ (verse 20.) As with the poem by Williams, Isaiah 1.18 hangs on its first words, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD.” The Lamb’s blood can dye red sins white. But the sinner must be willing to reason with the LORD regarding the way of righteousness. The LORD desires to reason together. Does the sinner disbelieve in the doctrine of creation? There is an answer to that. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38.4.) Does the sinner have a personal matter against God? “Produce your cause, saith the LORD; bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of Jacob” (Isaiah 41.21.)

PART II, ARTICLE VII: THE USE OF VOICE AND COLOR IN POETRY, SECTION II

This modern poem will say little to some people. Perhaps, at first glance, it might seem simplistic and irrelevant. But this efficient poem will engage the memory of many a man who has lived in the country. 

If a poem does not identify you, relate to you, or speak within your range of knowledge, you may be helped by identifying the poet—by finding him out through an external source. The poem above identifies me as a boy; therefore I have not found it necessary to seek information from outside to settle the poem’s meaning. If my interpretation is askew, it will be due to lack of research; but no harm will be caused. A good poem can convey parallel interpretations. 

Someone ‘needs’ this wheel barrow badly. What is the wheel barrow like? Because the rain glazes on it, it is plain that the red wheel barrow is new. Because so much depends upon it, it may be that it was recently acquired to get a job done. Maybe it belongs to a boy who will depend upon it to make his summer’s wages. But the message, probably, is more carefree than this. It seems unlikely that Williams speaks as a detached observer, though that is possible. I believe that his description of the wheel barrow points back to his leisurely experience as a boy. The words, moreover, are words that a boy would use. The chickens, for example, are not called leghorns, but merely white. The plainest English is used to impress the reader with what the poet feels. The poet muses. He feels. Then he fashions a poem to share the feeling that his musing has dredged up. This poem, I have little doubt, is the product of reminiscence. It was not gotten right without pitiless pruning. The whole recollection is reduced to sixteen words, not one of them unnecessary. The wheel barrow, for example, is beside ‘the’ white chickens, not just ‘white chickens,’ indicating that other chickens might have been near, though not ‘beside.’   

The poet colors his poem in qualifications: the wheel barrow is red; the water is rain water; the rain water is glazed; all of this beside the chickens, which chickens are white. The feeling of the poem, however, hinges on the first three words: ‘so much depends.’ How exhilarating is the sight of a red wheel barrow to a boy: how it looks beside white chickens—a wheel barrow so new that rain water still glazes it! It is no longer raining, else the water would run, not glaze. So the boy is preparing to go out and work his wheel barrow in the fragrant air. There’s mud and rocks and puddles of water. So much depends on that red wheel barrow. To the boy, the happiness of the day depends upon it. What an easy pleasant life on his way to the barn with his shiny new wheel barrow.

Williams Carlos Williams died the year before my life started. Not long after he died, I became the farm boy that his poem calls to mind. If he was like most writers, Williams accomplished what he set out to do: reach beyond the grave to cause someone to feel. I do not know anything about his worldview. But I know that he was a sensitive man, at least during the composition of his Red Wheelbarrow. The voice in this poem is the voice of a boy inside a man. According to Robert DiYanni, “A poem in which a speaker addresses a silent listener is called a ‘dramatic monologue.’’’ (Robert DiYanni, Literature, p. 429.) Since every poem must address a silent listener, I would not set much weight on Mr. DiYanni’s scheme of classifying. Nevertheless, what he says does elicit the notion that Williams’ poem must be, if not a dramatic monologue, then a ‘sentimental’ one, given its nostalgic tone.

PART II, ARTICLE VII: THE USE OF VOICE AND COLOR IN POETRY, SECTION I

 

The involuntary association of words, objects, or persons with colors is called ‘synesthesia.’ As a boy, my synesthesia had mainly to do with girls. Each girl in my class at school had her own color. Some girls were black, others yellow, one was orange; there was even a blue girl and some silver ones. Girls did not dye their hair back then; and the girls in my school, all of them, were Caucasian. So my mental images of girls as crayon colors had nothing to do with race or dye. Natural tones and hues evoked girls’ true colors. How spectacular it was to have these crayon girls distributed randomly about the room! As a man, my synesthesia has mainly to do with words. And as a Christian, it has mainly to do with biblical words. One day awhile ago I read and liked a poem that was overtly colorful. This triggered my synesthesia so much that biblical associations were automatically suggested. That is how I came to write this unusual article. 

I faintly remember the first poem that I wrote. It was a sentimental tribute to a black farm cat that we called Bob. Typical of amateur poetry, the element of rhyme predominated. My teacher, not expecting much and pleasantly surprised by my little strength, scored me ten out of ten for that project. No poetry assignments were to follow, unfortunately. I thought infrequently of poems after that, and grew up.

It wasn’t until about the age of thirty that, as a man set apart, I thought of poems again. I had been reading the Bible in a desperate search for truth while intermittently exposing myself to literature. During the couple of months that it took me to read the Bible for the first time, I was undergoing an awakening to literature. In my daily perusal of the Scriptures, I discovered incomparable poetry. No poetry in the philosophical mold can equal Ecclesiastes; no poetry in the form of devotion is comparable to the Psalms; no poetry in dialogue can arrest us like the book of Job; no poetry is as colorful, dreadful, and multi-layered as the book of Revelation. To further slake my thirst for poetry I bought several anthologies and I read their poems from beginning to end. I read commentaries. I studied technique and structure. I learned how to identify things like unrhymed iambic pentameter, which stretched my patience and failed to stick. I tried to read Milton and even Chaucer, gave up, and then tried again. Despite the impediments of complex rules and archaic language, I relished my new exploits. I had been awakened. It may be that my awakening was part of the illumination that the Holy Ghost imparts in the born again experience; I am not sure. But I still think that the awakening preceded the regeneration. Notwithstanding my uncertainty as to the sequence of these divine acts or how or if they were mingled and mixed, I know that around that time I was unexpectedly blessed with a palate to taste the written word. Until this happened, poetry was no more attractive and comprehensible to me than calculus was. Unless the poem was straightforward and simple like the one that I wrote as a child, I did not understand it any better than a poet knows how to pound sand. I do not mean by the awakening that I became instantly or particularly able to interpret poems. I mean that I could now detect in the poem the importance of beauty and philosophy to the poet. The poet was not being purposely obscure, after all. He was trying to convey his idea as concisely, truly, and prettily as possible. He was trying to convey the ideal of his idea. I do not mean that my awakening shed light on poetry of the postmodern sort, however, for no one can be awakened to see something sensible in lines that were never meant to communicate sense. Every thinking person will see nothing but randomly written words or phrases in postmodern verse, for this kind of poetry is written to disclose whatever the reader wishes to see in it, and therefore, no certain idea. So I recognized that the poet had a distinct outlook that he wished to make known and that to some degree this outlook I could now perceive. I further noticed that even when the poet spoke through a voice that was not his own, he was revealing something about his beliefs. Each person writes, after all, what his mind dictates it is mannerly for him to compose. One cannot hide from responsibility by speaking in the voice of another. Is the ventriloquist not responsible for what his dummy says? The poet’s voice is a significant factor, if not the chief one, in determining the thrust of a poem. I am not referring to the voice that conveys the tone of a poet’s work as a whole. I refer to the specific voice that speaks out from the particular verse—the voice chosen by the poet to tell his poem. For example, in a poem the poet may speak as a soldier, a father, or the boy that he used to be; or he may speak for someone else entirely. It does not take the reading of his whole body of work to confidently insist that the voice of Leonard Cohen may be fairly coined as indecent spirituality, or devotional indecency. That is his voice generally considered, even though this or that poem of his, taken strictly in context, might not exhibit this voice.  

So to interpret a poem, the poem’s voice must be identified. Where the poet is coming from must be determined. In the poem that I wrote in grade five or so, I spoke in the voice of a boy. In the following poem by William Carlos Williams, the voice is that of a man about being a boy. Perhaps it is the voice of Williams himself:

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

(Robert DiYanni, Literature, p. 491.)

PART II, ARTICLE VI: DESIRE AND INFLUENCE IN THE LIVES OF TWO POETS, SECTION VIII

Desire, if not under arrest, even in its earliest stage, can disfigure the complexion of a perfect moment. Some contacts are too flawless to risk their marring. While attempting to drive away from a church I had visited for the first and, I think, only time, I discovered that I had parked my front tire into a rut. Then this pretty young woman—just a few years younger than I was at the time—upon seeing that I was not able to rock my car out of it, came over and easily pushed me out. She was so happy to have done it; I was pleasantly taken aback. We both smiled; I drove away; and we never saw each other again. Nine out of ten single men, maybe, and some married ones too, would have taken advantage to ask her out for coffee ‘to repay her for her kindness.’ How convenient would that have been? But how pathetic? Any more contact than we had had, I knew, would have dashed the scene to pieces. Some things remain perfect because they are never touched. There is an element in desire that desires to dirty its hands. Desire dirties its hands when it touches the untouchable.      

Even for the Christian man, libidinous desire is not wholly subdued until death or the redemption of the body (if alive) at the second coming of Christ Jesus. But under the Lordship of Jesus today, a new power is available to control this desire: to suppress it, smother it, redirect it, or transform it. Without this grace from God, man has little with which to fight desire; and if his desire is for women, he will seek them out, or seek them out afresh, and, like a Benjamite up from the vineyards, attempt to catch what he can (Judges 21.21.) He will go back to his women, to his Woman Substitute—to the only image of God that he has an appetite for and feels comfortable with. He will turn to a frail alternative to Divine Eternality, and try to be satisfied with that.

PART II, ARTICLE VI: DESIRE AND INFLUENCE IN THE LIVES OF TWO POETS, SECTION VII

In spite of Solomon’s addiction to women and devotional failure, at some point in his life (it is disputed when) he did realize that pleasures ‘under the sun’ do not satisfy: not position and power, nor honor and achievements, nor even wealth and women; and he wrote a poetic disquisition on the subject. This, of course, is the book of Ecclesiastes, which is Solomon’s autobiography of an existential crisis. During this existential crisis he pondered the meaning of life, and the subject of women never entered the debate, at least not directly. Cohen, contrariwise, is tormented by his desire for women. They are at the center of his debate about life.

By the wisdom that God gave him to govern Israel, Solomon concluded that man’s all is to fear God and to obey his commandments. This conclusion, offered for acceptance to each one of us, is recorded at the close of Ecclesiastes. Though God does not give men wisdom in the same fashion as he gave it to Solomon, nor to the same extent, he does give it: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” (James 1.5.) It would be wisdom itself to accept Solomon’s conclusion on life and meaning; and then, upon acceptance of this, we would be made wiser in the performance of our trade. 

What poetry could Leonard Cohen write if he were to repent toward God and apply divine power to control desire? What if he were to ask God for wisdom to supplement his talent? He would never write a song to rival Solomon’s because God no longer inspires the writings of men like he once did for a few. But if he were to come under the authority of God, Leonard Cohen’s song, much because of his natural endowments, would be a 21st century classic. About Cohen’s poetry, one cannot conclude: “But where many beauties shine in a poem, I will not be offended with a few blemishes” (Horace.) His work is more than blemished. Its many beauties cannot make amends for profuse carnality. Of his poems, it might be said, though hyperbolically, of course, that they contain “features so beauteous that they had been worthy to shine in everlasting gold, if he had chosen rather to praise our God; to whom he preferred foul monsters, and defiled his fluent language with obscenity” (Prudentius.) 

There is no lack of love poetry in the world, even of a chaste character. Not all poets are playboys, thankfully; some of them have been able, at least in verse, to keep desire on the leash. The newly married Nathaniel Hawthorne knew something about the sweetmeats of marital bliss; he almost wrote at length about this kind of love. “Would that my wife would permit me to record the ethereal dainties,” he says, “that kind Heaven provided for us, on the first day of our arrival! Never, surely, was such food heard of on earth—at least, not by me” (Arlin Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne, p. 146.) He might have written an epic love poem; because of his florid style, the moral restraints of American Victorianism, and his respect for the bashfulness of his wife, it would have resembled Solomon’s verse more than Cohen’s. Solomon wrote about his experience of sexual love. Why didn’t Hawthorne? Why wouldn’t anyone? Maybe some things are best not written about, even emblematically, if their composition were to render, even to a degree, ecstatic encounters too earthy. It is perhaps as difficult for a writer to abstain compositionally as it is for a philanderer to be sexually disciplined.

PART II, ARTICLE VI: DESIRE AND INFLUENCE IN THE LIVES OF TWO POETS, SECTION VI

Now more than thirty years after the poem above was written, Cohen, in his mid-sixties, is still dominated by desire. It’s his inspiration; and women are his Muse. A protégé in a Buddhist monastery, he tries to exorcize the ‘demon’ through asceticism. But he is not religious enough; Buddhism is a poor choice. Desire draws him downward, and Cohen drowns in lust. Here are two stanzas from a song that he recently wrote: 

“The ponies run, the girls are

young,

The odds are there to beat.

You win a while, and then it’s

done—

Your little winning streak.

And summoned now to deal

With your invincible defeat,

You live your life as if it’s real,

A thousand kisses deep.

“I’m turning tricks, I’m getting

fixed,

I’m back on Boogie Street.

You lose your grip, and then you

slip

Into the masterpiece.

And maybe I had miles to drive,

And promises to keep:

You ditch it all to stay alive,

A thousand kisses deep”

(National Post, May 12th, 2000.)

Though usually it is shabby criticism to assume that the poet is the subject of the poem that he writes, this one is tailor-made to fit Cohen’s desire in the crisis of advancing age. In this poem, with some help from Robert Frost, is he not confessing his longing to repossess the girls that he once had? But when you get old, the ponies are faster, the girls are younger. You go back and forth from womanizing or flirting to reality: ‘your invincible defeat.’ You’ve lost your grip on ‘Boogie Street.’ But you want to ‘ditch it all’—all your obligations and ‘promises,’ like maybe your promise to defeat desire in a monastery.

One of the ‘four noble truths’ that Buddha is alleged to have apprehended is that desire must be annihilated. So Buddhism is made to order for Leonard Cohen—if the practice of Buddhism could annihilate desire, that is. Desire is tenacious. It defies age. The Buddhist monastery can’t eradicate it even in an old man. So Cohen continues to meditate on the seduction of women. He continues to write about it. Desire compels him. 

When a man has not been reconciled to God, he will worship a substitute. What more natural substitute than members of the opposite sex bearing the image of God? Young women remind man of life and vigor; their skin, until marked by trouble and time, is man’s alternative altar. Maybe Cohen is craving to relive what might have been his most profound religious experience: his ‘masterpiece.’ Are not women his religion, and desire the conduit?

In a sense, women are a religious experience, and men do want that experience to last forever. To a man, the imprint of God is most noticeable on the opposite sex. When man and woman unite, this is, at its marital best, a devout experience between two creatures made in the image of the One to be worshiped. Of course, men know that the women they desire are not able to impart salvation. But many men who are distanced from God act as if that were possible. Instead of choosing one woman, which limitation would leave room for God, they spend their resources and energies on many women. These are men who live ‘under the sun,’ as Solomon puts it in Ecclesiastes—men who live for base desires. They cling to their sexual objects as if for salvation. The man who is determined to live for desires ‘under the sun’ hates the thought of mortifying his desire for women because women are the best experience ‘under the sun’ that he has ever had. The poet ‘under the sun’ does not want to give up his source of inspiration, especially when that source is Woman.