It is good, however, to find a fellow poet, whose virtues complement your lack. Avison, as is well known, was poet with a strong (and strongly Protestant) devotional streak. Devotional poetry is not my strong suit either. This makes Avison a poet who is different in just the right ways from me and that is perhaps why her books come down off my shelves with some frequency. One poem I find very fine is called “The Promise of Particulars” (Avison; 2004, 210) and not only is it very fine it also deals a crucial philosophical issue. We might call it the knowledge of singulars. The sciences, of course, often seem to shun the knowledge of singulars thinking the general and the repeatable so much more congenial to the mind. Alas, sciences such as paleontology are often stuck with the task of explaining not arrowheads in general but THAT arrowhead and how it got in THAT cave: where the singular is concerned, we must craft a story not isolate a law. Poets too, and we can cite Blake and Hopkins as pertinent examples, are also concerned not just with things but with THAT thing and the distinct note it utters in the great symphony of being. Whether in search of ‘inscapes, or the ‘minute particulars’ of existence, the ‘pulse of the globule’ or the singular moment of time, some poets, at least, would dig down to the granular level of the individual to find in it the eternal. In this, if St. Thomas is to be believed, they do not retreat from the divine knowledge but move in one direction towards it, towards the ‘esse’ that is the act of every creature. God has the most minute and accurate knowledge of particulars. (Aquinas; 1952, I, Q14, A11) I think the late Ms. Avison might actually have appreciated this comparison so together with her I will consider particulars and their promise.

We start with a simple idea: travel. “Foreign travel alerts/ awareness, ice sheeted, sore, blurred.” This could be travel in the physical sense of course but also in an intellectual or spiritual sense. As we shall below death may even be a form of travel. We do not, it seems, see the world till we travel. The quality of our general perception of things is quite poor as we see it not just through a haze of abstractions, intellectual and linguistic constructs, the ‘cool web of language’ as Robert Graves says, but we see it in the light of a habit of attending away from the quotidian and familiar towards other things we judge ‘important’ based, generally, on fairly ego-centered concerns. We replace the particular with a generalized kind of awareness that covers us a sheet of ice. We are cold and frozen, held in and restrained by an external covering. We are ‘blurred’ and even ‘sore’. I wonder about ‘sore’. We do not usually think of our vague everyday awareness of things as ‘painful’. Nor, to evoke another possible meaning of ‘sore’, does it make us angry. ‘Sore’ may just refer to tedium and fatigue: the overfamiliar world fails to stimulate our energies and we become restless and jaded. We often get ‘sore’ in this sense staring at a computer screen! Sore though can also suggest a disease which gives us ‘sores’ (like Job!) or a hurt or wound in general. For Avison, I suspect, this sore is the great ‘world wound’ or ‘world sorrow’ of which Hopkins speaks: the fall and expulsion of paradise.

We might take this as confirmed by the following lines which, as so many poets have done, links childhood to the paradisal state of humans: ‘For the first-stepping child doorway at home…”. Stepping through a doorway is, oddly, my own first memory which makes this line seem to me unnervingly canny. A child ‘steps’ through the womb into the world of light but also may simply step through a door to see something it has never yet seen and behold it with the same profound attention to its novelty and particularity. A child emerges from the womb as Adam awakes in paradise or as a curious toddler peers behind an unfamiliar doorway. Avison then adds: “or shore of remote foaming sea…”. This adds a note of the sublime or panoramic though to the child wonders are micro level just as they are macro level: the wonder of the doorway IS the wonder of the foaming sea though to us they would be very distinct sights. I can certainly stare at an ocean in wonder but I can recall being able to stare at a painted block with wonder as if it were an ocean and that seems to be the experience evoked here. All of the above,we are told “all, everywhere…” burns with “minutiae, risk and wonder.”1 Minutiae we have already touched on. Wonder we know from Aristotle is the beginning of philosophy: the rapt beholding from which understanding slowly blossoms. ‘Risk’ though implies growth and change and the possibility of failure. “Tangle risks itself in space.” as Avison tells us in another poem. (Avison; 2004, 219) It is also the possibility of disease for as we are told in yet another poem: “Growing cells are the most vulnerable to cancer.” (Avison; 2004, 258) The next step forward in the paradisal state may well be the fall: the child may open a door it should not. Indeed, the myth of the garden implies strongly that this is just what, inevitably must happen and we cannot shrink from the consequences terrible though they may be. “He not busy being born is busy dying” said another poet and we might say the same of those not busy falling. (Dylan; 1965)

Next, we get to the heart of the matter: “for the spirit released…” On the most literal and direct reading this release would be that of death which has the ‘promise’ of shattering our ‘ice-sheeted’ sensations, acquired over a lifetime, and open us to new possibilities and forms of knowledge. A secondary sense may be more general: the ‘released spirit’ may be a spirit enlightened to new forms of seeing by grace including, as in Hopkins, disciplined meditation on the natural world. For such a seeing “…all is vivid, nothing routine or lost to awareness.” As in travel (the metaphor with which we began) our habits of seeing, generalized and flattened by the limits of attention, are disrupted such that things shine, as it were, in their original, given light as ‘data’. We then continue with some beautiful lines: “and yet in that one-eyed/ heart-whole wonder/ tiny particulars will be known within wholeness.”

In approaching these lines, we might switch gears a bit and consider what I said above about St. Thomas and his account of God’s knowledge. Poets know what he is talking about. “To see infinity in a grain of sand…” says Blake. (Blake; 1978, 506-508) “For one pulse of an artery/I knew that one is animate…” says Yeats. (Yeats; 1950, 187) Normally we synthesize or analyze, break down or agglomerate objects of knowledge. We oppose the individual to the general or vice versa. If one is a visionary like Blake, though, the microcosm opens out into the macrocosm as each smallest thing contains the whole in its own distinct mode or relation. In a ‘tiny particular’ you will see wholeness and vice versa in a single flash of intuition.

God knows this way according to St. Thomas. As the act of pure being God’s ‘esse’ encompasses the acts of all other creatures. (Aquinas; 1952, I, Q.13, A11) Moreover, as pure, uncircumscribed form without composition of act and potency the act of God’s intellect encompasses the totality of his essence and all effects that flow from his power. This gives God knowledge of his own being and knowledge of all possible beings. As perfectly comprehending his power he knows all effects contained virtually in that power and thus knows all beings actually produced. (Aquinas; 1952, I, Q.14, A.5) Thus, God’s knowledge encompasses the inmost ‘esse’ that actuates each individual thing. To switch from philosophy back to poetry: the totality of divine knowledge is rich, saturated with all other content noetic or existential. It is ‘whole’ as containing the most intimate knowledge of every ‘tiny particular’ part, the most intimate knowledge of the relation of part to part and the fullest comprehension of each part’s relation to the whole. Avison claims this kind of knowledge for the ‘released spirit’ though Aquinas himself is more circumspect on THAT point saying, in effect, that we shall have in the direct, undivided, intuition of God whatever other knowledge may pertain to our blessedness.2 (Aquinas; 1952, 1, Q.89, A.4) This cannot be everything for we cannot measure with our intellect the infinity of God’scausal power though it may well be something, even (perhaps) everything known by God as created (though not everything that could be created).

Avison gives us two images of unity to speak of this released state: that of the eye and that of the heart. ‘Wonder’ will be one-eyed because we will see in one comprehensive act. Normally we are ‘two-eyed’: there is a division in finite knowledge between universal and particular. Part of our intellectual operation is sensible (passive) and part is intelligible (active). This is partly overcome in the act of judgment, where we unite form and matter to affirm the ‘esse’ of creatures. This, however, is only possible to a certain extent: we are dependent on the receptive capacity of sense which determines and restricts the scope of our knowledge locally and temporally. Thus, much of what we know even about the physical world is inferred rather than directly perceived. This puts limits on our capacity to love as well so that we are neither ‘one-eyed’ nor ‘heart whole’: our affections are divided as is our knowledge with all too tragic consequences. The ‘released spirit’ however is not bound by the conditions of sense knowledge. St. Thomas says it will know not by the ordinary means of abstracting and collating from sense but by the ‘infused’ species of the divine essence. (Aquinas; 1952, I, Q.92, A.1) It will satiate its intellect on one object of knowledge and its will on one object of desire. It will be one eyed and heart whole not in a restrictive sense but in an expansive one for in this species are comprehended all the ‘particulars’ it behooves the blessed to know. As we know many- in-one in the species of things so in the divine ‘species’ we know potentially all (though actually some) in one.

We then continue with the following image which I quote in full: “The late sun, spoking under storm/against prune-coloured stormclouds to the west/haloes and breathes among/the luminous leafless branchtips-/ivory, lilac, saffron, bronze/ (the oaks against the rusting evergreen)”. There is much to consider in this glimpse of the setting sun including two unfamiliar verbs; to ‘spoke’ and to ‘halo’. Spoking may well contain a suppressed reference to ‘spoken’ but I assume its primary meaning here is to ‘put out spokes like a wheel’. The setting sun emits rays that evoke the spokes of a wheel in a halo like circular pattern: thus it ‘spokes and haloes’ rays of light. This vehicular image evokes the traditional notion of the sun as a chariot. It also evokes the ‘wheels’ that appeared to the prophet Ezekiel: a theophanic vision of the divine glory. We meet the sun in this capacity again and again in both poetic and philosophical tradition. The sun, apart from appearing in his vehicular glory as divine chariot or chariot wheel, also breathes. I assume this refers to radiating or emitting heat and light: here figured perhaps as the ‘breath of God’ or spirit. The following images particularize the ‘late sun’ mentioned above. The branches the light breathes over are leafless and the evergreens ‘rusting’. It is late autumn or perhaps early winter. The divine vision is on point of disappearing: perhaps in the death of the viewer or perhaps in an even darker ‘death of god” such as the crucifixion or holocaust. Still, there is light to evoke the colors which may, for Avison, have a purely personal significance though they seem to range from brilliant white ’ivory’ to darker ‘bronze’.

At any rate this vision is a “moment” that winks and is gone. It is “one pulse of the artery” as Yeats says. We can analyze each bit of the poem discursively but we cannot, as readers, see them altogether as vision, a fact being brought home to me even as I type for my computer is resisting Avison’s compounds ‘stormcloud’ and ‘branchtip’ with garish red lines! The poem is a fragmentary witness to whatever it is Avison ‘saw’ in that moment in that sunset even as that was a fragmentary glimpse of what is to come. “But”, she says “all is shaped in prospect of the/glory”. The ‘promise of particulars’ is about just that: the foretaste of the bliss we are promised. Promise no doubt carries the biblical sense of covenant here: we are given a glimpse of divine ‘glory’ by way of anticipation but the fulfillment of the promise is for the world to come. The glory ‘shapes’ or gives determinate form to what we see here and now towards the end envisioned. We have seen that Aquinas gives us some conceptual purchase on the experience delineated in this poem for what that is worth. If the stories of the last days of Aquinas are true, if he indeed experienced raptures that caused him to dismiss all his written output as ‘straw’ conceptualizing on such matters may not be worth much though it may represent the best we can do for now.

I will end with the following from another poet we, Richard Crashaw: ‘Types yield to truths; shades shrink away/ and their night dies into our day.” (Crashaw; 1927, 294)

References

Aquinas. Summa of Theology (Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. London, 1952)

Avison, Margaret. The Collected Poems Vol. Two. (The Porcupine’s Quill, Erin, 2004)

“Heavy Hearted Hope”

“The Promise of Particulars”

“Enduring”

Blake, William. The Complete Poems (Penguin Books, London, 1978)

“Auguries of Innocence”

Crashaw, Richard. The Poems English, Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1927)

“Lauda Sion Salvatorem”

Dylan, Bob. Bringing it All Back Home (Columbia Records, 1965).

“It’s All Right Ma I’m Only Bleeding”

Yeats, W.B.  The Collected Poems of W.B Yeats (The Macmillan Company, New York, 1950)

“Meditation in Time of War”

[1] Here we face the difficult problem of whether something is ‘in’ a poem or not. ‘Burns’ here suggests Pentecostal fire or perhaps the flame of prophecy. Whether that is ‘in’ the poem or not it may well be ‘between’ the poem and a given reader who might find it a fruitful association. Given the solar imagery in this poem I think it a line worth pursuing in a longer study of this piece.

[2] One thing that would be given in the vision of God’s essence would be perfect self-knowledge (seeing myself as I am in God). This might involve some post-mortem memory of those things in my personal history that betray the activity of God in it. Such particulars, if appropriate to the perfection of the intellect and will of the human person, would indeed be seen in ‘wholeness’ insofar as the beatific vision would be the ground of our knowing them and not vice versa. In the same way the blessed will know and rejoice in each other.

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