The Half-Hearted Archangel

Light verse, perhaps.  

Who'd have it. Well, Auden did because he edited the Oxford book of it and wrote plenty that might be called as much. If it's good enough for him, it ought to be good enough for me.

Who's to say what's 'light' and what's serious. Robert Lowell was serious but once copied out a letter from his friend Elizabeth Bishop and passed it off as a poem and was surprised to find she wasn't quite so much his friend any more. Was he serious?

I'm afraid I remain intermittently obsessed with the litany of objections to Christianity and, extending outwards from it, a huge proportion of what was offered in the sixteen years, was it, of education I was presented with. It has taken me this long and counting to recover from so much of what I was told.

Somewhere along the way somebody said poetry was the highest form of art but I can't help but suspect they didn't have a record player.

This poem isn't entirely serious because I did it with reference to a rhyming dictionary on a rainy Tuesday afternoon for something to do. It appears to have too much of an agenda to be 'poetry' but, then again, its agenda is to have less of such a thing so maybe it is serious after all. Something better may come of it but I amused myself for a while with it and if enjoyment isn't the point of poems then I don't know what is.

The Half-Hearted Archangel 

Shepherds might have been less impressed
By an archangel steeped in doubt
And they’d be right. How can you trust
Someone who’s not prepared to shout
their message as if it is true
and also so beyond belief
that there is nothing else to do
but take or leave it. Such is life.

Some poets, or some poets once,

Were thought to be like archangels,

Possessed of such wild importance

That they, too, belong in gospels
Where they reveal their radiant news
Which would, of course, be news to us,
Sequestered in our downbeat views,
Who think such things must be bogus.

 

Come off it, lad, they should have said,
We’re shepherds and we’ve seen it all
And there is not the slightest shred
Of evidence in such a tall
Story to make us leave our flocks.
Away with you. Leave us in peace.
What you say’s a load of rubbish.

Such attitudes would have released

 

Them from their role in the scriptures

And make for better poetry
And, yes, less dramatic pictures
But much, much less idolatry

Because poetry need not say
Anything so daft or absurd.
No archangel should betray
In the beginning was the word.