When David Daiches was invited to give the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1983, the first thing he did, sensibly enough, was consult the deed Lord Gifford wrote when founding the lectures to find out what they were meant to be about. Daiches discovered that their purpose was to promote the study of natural theology, that branch of philosophy that looks for evidence of God in creation, that is, nature.
Daiches was an interesting choice, for although he was raised in an Orthodox rabbinic household, he had discovered his religion early in English poetry. The resulting ten lectures explore the variety of ways God emerged or was significantly absent in selected poets.
The opening lecture presents God under attack in the biblical book of Job. Here, Daiches’s lifelong knowledge of Hebrew enables him to bring out subtleties often obscured in translation. Job knows himself to be blameless; the conventional piety of the time—as his friends tiresomely remind him—maintains that suffering of the degree Job experienced must have come from God and that Job must somehow have deserved it. Job insists on confronting God himself. God answers his questions about the relation between power and justice by not answering them directly but by describing the mysteries of nature. Job relents, although the “words of the divine voice,” as Daiches concludes, are not really a justification of the ways of God to humankind.
This task of justification was undertaken by John Milton in Paradise Lost, the topic of Daiches’s second lecture. In his analysis of what he calls “the only completed successful epic poem in the English language,” Daiches intuits a counter-poem, in which the world Adam and Eve face after their expulsion from “the effortless peace” of the Garden of Eden was “something more interesting and more testing.” In spite of everything, Daiches concludes, the world that emerges is “the world we want and need. So God is justified, in a way that might perhaps have surprised him [Milton].”
In the third lecture, “God and Nature,” Daiches examines psalms that present nature as a demonstration of the glory of God. For the Psalmist, God’s existence was a given, brought to the observation of the natural world. Deists went further. For them, nature offered proof of God’s existence; examples from Pope illustrate this. Among other poets treated in this lecture, Daiches presents Wordsworth, who saw not only God’s hand in nature but “a profound correlation between the workings of Nature and the mind of man (the “sense of sublime” in “Tintern Abbey”). Daiches concludes the lecture by musing on the number of eighteenth-century “religious natures” experiencing not just melancholy and doubt but driven to madness by a fear of their ultimate damnation, remarking “there is little trace of this in earlier periods, at least not in the poetry.”
The fourth lecture is devoted to Dante, who shows a third possible stance in relation to God alongside addressing God (devotional poetry, either praise or complaint) or telling readers about God (Milton). Dante illustrates the way of visionary experience.
The effect of the loss of implicit faith in the nineteenth century is the setting for the fifth lecture, “Mood Poetry: The Dilemma of Solipsism.” For his prime example, Daiches chooses Tennyson, but he also deals with Matthew Arnold. They illustrate what Daiches calls the Victorian elegaic mode. Daiches contrasts this with another poet of self, though in a different way, Whitman, before turning to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the tension of whose poetry lies not in the struggle against doubt, but in “the difficulty of reconciling a love of Nature and of poetry with his priestly vocation.”
Tennyson features as well in the sixth lecture, “Poetry and Science: The Poetry of Doubt, Atheism and Stoicism.” Unlike skeptics in the eighteenth century, Victorians experienced skepticism not as liberation but as a source of worry. Science no longer led to Deism but to doubt. Daiches quotes many passages from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, in which the poet seems to will himself to faith. Poems by Arnold and Clough, however, are expressions of loss of faith, whereas James Thompson’s City of Dreadful Night is “avowedly atheistic, one of the few explicitly atheistic long poems in European literature.”
The effect of Calvinism’s teaching of double predestination, and its corollary, antinomianism, is explored in the seventh lecture, “Calvinism and the Poetic Imagination.” Robert Burns’s Holy Willie serves to satirize this dour worldview. Burns grew up in a less rigid household and aligned himself with tolerant Christianity throughout his life. Interestingly, his preference for the Moderates led him to defend patronage, the system whereby pastors were placed by vested authority instead of allowing congregations to elect their pastors, a form of the democracy he normally espoused. The peasantry, it seems, preferred the Auld Licht, with its emphasis on the torments of hell. “So Burns, passionate critic of social inequality though he was, found himself on the side of the gentry in religious matters.”
Three poets form the focus of the eighth lecture, “The American Experience: From Puritanism through Post-Puritanism to Agnosticism”: Edward Taylor, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. Daiches points out the mixture of Bible paraphrase and homely language in Taylor’s long-unknown poetry. Dickinson, meanwhile, illustrates what Daiches calls a “post-Puritan sensibility.” “She did not embrace the great New England philosophy of her day, Transcendentalism, but something of its mystic power.” Her poetry is “religious in a highly idiosyncratic way.” When Daiches turns to Wallace Stevens, he finds an agnostic not troubled by his doubts.
Lecture nine, “Types of Vision,” focuses on two modern Scottish poets, Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid. Muir came late to poetry; later than that, he became convinced of immortality. His poetry is not devotional, “but the great myths of both the Greek and the Christian tradition haunt his memory.” I was surprised by MacDiarmid’s inclusion. The little I knew of him emphasized his rabid Scottish nationalism and militant Marxism. According to Daiches, the latter interest was limited to phases, while a mystical turn of mind was more consistently present.
In the final lecture, “Poetry and Belief,” Daiches discusses how to appreciate literature that expresses beliefs we don’t share. That we should learn such appreciation is for Daiches a given. He considers some of the methods often cited, such as appreciation of technical features for aesthetic pleasure, with no consideration of the work’s ideological content. This, he concludes, is too facile: “Surely nobody says that Dante is a great poet merely because of the skill with which he handles terza rima.”
Unlike music or visual art, which present us with pure form, literature “brings form to bear on a communication.” Daiches illustrates what is needed to receive this communication by telling of his family singing Psalm 126 after meals as “the mere routine expression of religious duty.” Years after he no longer sang it as a religious exercise, he read it slowly as a poem and discovered its “haunting beauty.” It didn’t matter whether he believed God “had personally brought his people back from their Babylonian exile.” The lesson Daiches draws from this is that the inner distance he had gained from the psalm’s system of belief enabled him to appreciate “the full richness of what was said.”
Daiches suggests that the system of belief used in a work of literature is “a groundwork patterning of ideas about ultimate matters that can be used to sustain a structure of meanings, suggestions, resonances, overtones that reach out far beyond the limits of that belief to enrich and illuminate our awareness of some aspects of the human condition.”
Throughout these lectures, I enjoyed Daiches’s erudition, which he employs not to dazzle, but to share insight with the listener. I gained much by reading them. ( )