Divine rhyme
C. H. Sisson The Botsford Book of Religious Verse Elizabeth Jennings (Botsford pp. 92, £595) 'One does not have to be in love to watch or read Romeo and Juliet or Chaucer's Troilus and Creysede . but it does of course help If one has been in love.' So it is with this anthology, as Elizabeth Jennings suggests m her short introduction. It is not, she explains, a book of devotional poems, but of 'poems on religious themes' – and that expression is wide enough to take in Arnold's Dover Beach or Gray's Elegy as Well as the more specifically oriented work of Herbert or Southwell. In this way she has Produced a book wide enough in its sympathies to catch the attention of anyone With even a fleeting sense of 'something far more deeply interfused,' yet one that makes sense for those who still have access to the language of historic Christianity. In any case, it has been the editor's aim to control her selection 'by the same critical criteria which we bring to bear on poems with any other subject.' The volume is, that is to say, intelligent and literate, and if it includes bits of Shakespeare, Milton and Blake that will be familiar to anyone who has read any English poetry at all, there is much that will be less familiar – from several centuries.
The volume belongs to that class of anthology, scorned only by pedants, which is primarily pleasurable and serves at once to open new fields for the young and to tempt back those who are in danger of losing their better reading habits. It is in no sense academic and it is not comprehensive historically or in any other way. It is a book to dip into, the more because it is a pretty book, with four illustrations in colour as well as a couple of dozen in black and white. There are end-papers from Fra Angelico. The rest of the illustrations include, besides the mediaeval matter which is too many people's exclusive notion of what a religious picture should be, Constable and Cotrnan who may be said to be as marginal as Wordsworth, and no more out of place in the setting the editor gives them.
In a sense, any anthology starts from the time of its conception rather than from the earliest times it admits. The past, after all, is larger and more varied than any of us can conceive. So, for that matter, is the present. Elizabeth Jennings has herself written religious poetry of distinction, and this gives her search through the past and present a particular interest. (It might be added that she discreetly observes a rule which used to be general but which has gone the way of some other good manners, that an editor should not include his own work in an anthology.) What she gives us is a personal selection, which has a unity beyond that of the general subject. It would be rash to try to define this more intimate unity, but the editor is certainly no stranger to the 'fear' and 'anxiety' she finds to be characteristic of the twentieth century in which, she says, 'it is difficult to find true religious verse because this is not an age of faith.' I am not sure that! believe in 'ages of faith', nor that the Middle Ages were less given to 'materialism' than the present age. All ages are ages of credulity; it happens that less of it is now classifiable as 'religious' than was the case hitherto. But the truly 'religious poet' is a great rarity, and since poets are, so far as ordinary human dispositions go, a pretty average lot, I suspect that true faith has always been a rarity too. However that may be, Elizabeth Jennings finds half-a-dozen poets of the 20th century to include --not all of them, certainly, patterns of faith.
If one had a criticism of what is certainly a very pleasing volume, it would be to wonder whether, after expanding her notion of 'religious' to include Wordsworth's pantheism, the editor has not contracted it a little, for the 20th century, in the direction of mere churchiness?
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