While writing this article, conscious of these two directions that poetry stimulates, I was reminded of George Fox’s injunction ‘Mind the Light’*, an inward listening that allows an internal ordering our life. For Fox this is also linked to a profound awakening to the world around him: ‘All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter…The creation was opened to me.’**

*George Fox Epistles IV, (4) https://qbi.earlham.edu/gfe/e001-020.htm    ** Hugh McGregor Ross, George Fox a Christian Mystic ‘The consummation’ https://www.george-fox.info/ex8.htm

 

Here is one poem by the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), which guides us into a profound inner stillness:

But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm –
writer, the bottomless ocean
we launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins,
that calls us out over
our fathoms. What to do
but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still?

 

Like all poems this one deserves to be read slowly, maybe even aloud, to catch the rich resonances of meaning. Quakers will immediately respond to the idea that ‘silence’ is a place where we are most free from all that clutters our lives. It is also a place of depth in our being ‘the bottomless ocean’, where our words, our thoughts, like an ‘armada’, can never reach. And the second stanza, affirming that this ‘silence’ can open us to ‘a presence’, suggests that this is dependent on our capacity to be open to it: it is our margins, that open or close this connection to something higher and that can lift us out of the depths of our confusion. And we are left with this wonderful closing question and advice ‘what to do/ ‘but draw a little nearer… by remaining still’.  This takes us back to the ‘silence’ in the opening line. And the odd word ‘ubiquity’, from the Latin ‘everywhere’, suggests how such an experience can bring us into touch with all that is most liberating to our human experience. This is a powerful meditative poem.

A poem from a century or more earlier, by the English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is equally powerful in its vision of what is possible for us as human beings. The poem begins with what sounds like a lightning flash celebrating the vital and living power of God in the world. But this then turns to a picture of the disrespect and violence that the world has suffered because of human activity. Hopkins was writing from the North of England during the height of the Industrial Revolution.

 

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

 

And yet, in the second stanza of this sonnet, Hopkins sings of the redemptive power of the earth.

 

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

It is the unusual, yet vibrant musical language with its chiming sounds that allows Hopkins to draw us into the life force at the heart of things: ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’. And it is this that enables Hopkins to bring to life an extraordinary vision of how the breaking of dawn over the earth’s egg-shaped curvature, is a powerful redemptive reminder of the Holy Ghost’s daily transformative power: like a giant bird warming the earth into life each day. Again, this event is given powerful life by Hopkins’s renowned mastery of creating verbal music that echo’s the sense of what he is describing: World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. The exclamation ‘ah!’ and the inversion of the rhythm and the sounds ‘W/b’ into ‘B/w’ in the last two words, and the strong stresses that fall on ‘bright wings’ register the shock of recognition of the living presence of the Holy Ghost. So ‘bright wings’ is the instant when the poem’s hidden cause of God’s Grandeur becomes actively present.

 

The American poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry (1934-) expresses a similar sense of despair and hope in the following poem ‘The Peace of Wild Things’:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives might be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

This poem captures with graphic immediacy how contact with the natural world can be a source of healing. Especially, the poem captures the sense of presence that the speaker experiences between the stillness of the water and the waiting stars. It is a real moment of grace. The poem is a powerful reminder of how such contact with nature can liberate us from the automatic and thought-filled activities of our daily lives and from the chaos in the world at large.

These ideas are also expressed by the Australian poet Judith Wright (1915-2000) in her poem ‘The Wattle Tree’:

The tree knows four truths-

earth, water, air, and the fire of the sun.

The tree holds four truths in one.

Root, limb and leaf unfold

out of the seed, and these rejoice

till the tree dreams it has a voice

to join four truths in one great word of gold.

 

-Oh, that I knew that word!

I should cry loud, louder than any bird.

O let me live for ever, I would cry.

For that word makes immortal what would wordless die;

and perfectly, and passionately,

welds love and time into the seed,

till tree renews itself and is for ever tree-

 

Then upward from the earth

                                         and from the water,

then inward from the air

                                         and the cascading light

poured gold, till the tree trembled with its flood.

 

Now from the world’s four elements I make

my immortality; it shapes within the bud.

Yes, now I bud, and now at last I break

into the truth I had no voice to speak:

into a million images of the Sun, my God.

 

This is one of Wright’s most mystical poems in which she celebrates the alchemy of creativity through the symbol of the flowering Wattle Tree. The poem begins with her philosophical and scientific reflection on what a tree is made of: what truths underlie its life- earth, water, air and fire. She then imaginatively enters into this unfolding life force, sensing the force of the seed bursting from the ground, synthesizing all four elements, and expressing itself through this extraordinary bounty of thousands of tiny suns all forming one huge sun: ‘one great word of gold’, the flowering, sun-filled wattle tree.

Judith Wright is here expressing her experience of how our connection to nature can also be a deep connection to ourselves. Wright here sees and touches nature with immediacy and awe that is profound. And through her description, she is inviting us vividly into the process of this miraculous moment.

The next stanza ‘-Oh, that I knew that word!…’ is an appeal to herself to go even deeper into this experience, to somehow link herself to the expressive power in nature. And for her as a poet, and as a spiritual seeker, it is a longing to be one with this transformative ‘word’ of gold. Then in the next stanza her poetry becomes a dance in which the shape of each line in the stanza physically mirrors the powerful energies, one after the other, entering the tree:

 

Then upward from the earth

                                            and from the water,

then inward from the air

                                            and the cascading light

poured gold, till the tree trembled with its flood.

 

This visual arrangement of the lines is Judith Wright’s way of dancing (both her readers and herself) into the dynamic process she has been describing. It is indeed balletic; it demonstrates how art, dance, poetry, all have this power to lift humanity out of its rigid, habitual structures. So now in the last stanza she (and we as readers) can celebrate this achievement as she describes her integration with the energies of nature:  her becoming the ‘bud’, which now – in the very act of writing this poem- has, like the tree itself, burst into ‘a million images of the Sun’. Legitimately she can affirm in the last two words, ‘my God’; this is a transcendent liberating moment in her life.

In conclusion, Judith Wright, along with other three poets here quoted, demonstrates how the music of poetry can draw us into a state that can heal us at the core of our being. We have had R.S. Thomas’s directive to ‘draw a little nearer to/such ubiquity by remaining still’, Hopkins’s affirmative vision that ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’ and Berry’s experience of being freed from the human ailment of taxing ‘our lives with forethought/of grief’ by entering into ‘the peace of wild things’. These are all wonderful examples of the healing power of poetry.

Editors Note

Silver Wattle Course on Judith Wright April 9-15th, 2026

Michael Griffith (with Doug Amarfi from Canberra Meeting) will be conducting an April 9-15 course at Silver Wattle Quaker Centre on Judith Wright, who lived in Braidwood which is in the same region as Silver Wattle. The course will focus on her environmentalism and her concern for the original Indigenous inhabitants of Australia. For details and registration please go to: https://www.silverwattle.org.au/upcoming-courses

Quaker Poetry Group

There is also a regular Quaker Poetry Group that meets online on Fridays from 5-6.30 Eastern Australian Time. If you are interested in joining and would like more details please contact our secretary Rose Griffith at rosegriffith@bigpond.com

 

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