Anglicanism's poetry of the Deity drenched ordinary

In a recent post on the North American Anglican, J. Brandon Meeks offers a wonderful reflection on poetry and what he terms "the metaphysics of wonder".  What does poetry do?  It calls us back from the boredom of a godless world:

we have become bored with ordinary things, thinking them insignificant, inconsequential, irrelevant to our own illustrious existence. 

Poetry calls us to gaze afresh on the ordinary as Gift.  And so:

Faithful poets are like priests, who with thanksgiving offer up handfuls of the world back to God.

That line in particular struck me as explaining something of the long and noble tradition of Anglican priest-poets and the wider tradition of Anglican poetry.  It might also have relevance to the Anglican novel, to the work of Austen, Bronte, Dickens, with their similar focus on the ordinary.  (It is worth recalling here Alison Mibank's description of Austen as representing a "specifically Anglican spirit".)

The contemporary poet Robert Selby (and see the end of this post for a superb example of his work), has highlighted an 'Anglican frame' to poetry:

Rather, by composing poetry from a position of an understanding of, and sympathy with, the tradition one is writing from, that poetry will inherently bear some continuity with what has gone before. In England, that means with the 'Anglican frame'.

I would want to push this somewhat further, noting that poetry with an 'Anglican frame' has emerged beyond the English context: in other words, there seems to be something within the Anglican experience which encourages such poetic expression.  When Selby particularly emphasises that a characteristic of the poetry to which he refers is that it "consecrates ordinary life" he identifies this fundamental feature of Anglican poetry.

Rowan Williams - himself, of course, a contemporary exemplar of this tradition - has stated likewise with regards to Herbert and Vaughan:

But what I want to suggest ... is that we can read them as offering complementary statements of the same persistent Anglican theme or trope. They are both interested in hiddenness – that is, in the disparities between what appears and what is true ...

Celebrations of hiddenness and as such articulations of at least one highly significant facet of the Anglican sensibility of the period.

Anglican poetry expresses a quiet, respectful but deep and abiding joy in gazing upon the Hidden within the ordinary.  Perhaps this is, at least in part, due to the ordering of Anglicanism: to grace experienced within the ordinary stuff of parish church, of seasons and community, of national life, in the Bread of the Eucharist being "such as is usual to be eaten" (the 1662 rubric), in what Wordsworth described as "a genial hearth, a hospitable board, And a refined rusticity" of the parsonage, in the noble vernacular of the Prayer Book, in the decent modesty of the Communion Table (do read Malcolm Guite's poem 'Communion Table, St Edward's, Cambridge' as a glorious example of this).  In other words, Anglicanism is all about the grace hidden within the ordinary.

In C.S. Lewis's description of Hooker we see the theological vision embodied in poetry with an 'Anglican frame':

Few model universes are more filled - one might say, more drenched - with Deity than his.  ‘All things that are of God’ (and only sin is not) ‘have God in them and he them in himself likewise’, yet ‘their substance and his wholly differeth’ (V.56.5).  God is unspeakably transcendent; but also unspeakably immanent.  It is this conviction which enables Hooker, with no anxiety, to resist any inaccurate claim that is made for revelation against reason, Grace against Nature, the spiritual against the secular. We must not honour even heavenly things with compliments that are not quite true: ‘though it seem an honour, it is an injury’ (II.8.7).  All good things, reason as well as revelation, Nature as well as Grace, the commonwealth as well as the Church, are equally, though diversely, ‘of God’.  If nature hath need of grace’, yet also ‘grace hath use of nature’ (III.8.6).

From this vision flows poetry with an 'Anglican frame', that quiet, respectful yet deep and abiding rejoicing in the ordinary, in the grace hidden within our experiences of the ordinary, of landscape and marriage, of parish church and commonwealth, of Bread and Cup, of rest and labour.  Such poetic expressions, an enduring characteristic of the Anglican experience, lead us away from the banality of the secular to a recognition of the Deity drenched ordinary.

The foreshore mud at low tide the nave,
the oyster racks in rows like pews
each side of a shining aisle,
the vault still blue
even as the sun low in the chancel
falls from the table, behind Swale,
the incoming tide of night
clouding holy ground
and the privileged interred - 'Whitstable Cathedral', Robert Selby (printed in The Spectator, 29th April 2019).