"Heaven - Haven"

Our Poem of the Week brings us to a harbor of a special sort, not one that you’ll generally associate with armies. It’s by the priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom we’ve featured here at Word and Song several times, most recently in the poem "Peace", which is what the speaker in today’s short poem seeks, but also in a poem called "The Soldier", wherein he celebrates the men who give up their peace and even their lives to protect the peace of others. The heading of today’s poem is “A nun takes the veil,” and it is she who speaks to us. Hopkins will later in his career change, perhaps, his view of whether life in a monastery or a convent is indeed a haven from the struggle and the conflict of good and evil, a shelter from the tears of life. When, for example, he writes about the Jesuit saint Alphonso Rodriguez, a lay brother in Palma, Majorca, whose daily task was to wait at the door of the house, Hopkins says, rightly, that should the war be “within, the brand we wield / Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,” then the world may hear nothing of it, and yet the fight may be titanic and the conquests heroic.

Be that as it may, in this poem we will assume that the young woman desires peace and will find it, and that it is good and wise for her to do so. The haven of the convent will be for her an earnest of heaven. Those two words are not related, but their similarity intrigues Hopkins, who plays upon the old meaning of haven: it is a harbor for ships: German Hafen, common in place-names for towns on the sea or on navigable rivers, such as Bremerhafen. That place, you may remember, was where the Nazis were going to take Captain Von Trapp, to serve in their navy, but the Captain and his family escaped to the landlocked haven called Switzerland. Still, in our poem, we must think of ships and the wild sea, a life tossed about with storm and stress, and many tears. The speaker wants a haven instead, and a fuller spiritual life, one that is already just an altered vowel away from heaven.

In the life she looks forward to, the springs of fresh water never fail. It is what Jesus says to the Samaritan woman at the well, that he has “living water” to give, “springing up to eternal life.” This water is fresh, not brackish; it is ever-flowing, not standing and growing foul. Along with the fresh water, she says, “a few lilies blow,” meaning that they bloom: and there again we hear the words of Jesus, now applying with peculiar force to her decision to leave behind a world of material gain and loss. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow,” says Jesus. “They neither toil nor spin, but Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” We are not to set our hearts and our worries on what robbers can break in and steal, and what rust and moths consume — to turn to another passage in the same Sermon on the Mount. The lily was also a symbol of purity and of the Resurrection, nor is it unusual to associate that flower with the vows of chastity and holy poverty: see for instance that splendid film, Lilies of the Field.

In the second stanza, we meet the image of the sea, and of the harbor, the haven. The “swell” refers to the rising of the water, here given as something silent and slow, as when the tide comes in. The water is “green” not because there is something wrong with it, but because, perhaps, you can see the greenery of the harbor reflected in it, or the green plants just below the surface. It is “dumb” because it does not rave and roar — and that may well suggest the vows of silence that some religious orders take. How much there is to think about and to love, if only we are in a silent place and are ready to hear!

A few words about the meter of the poem: the two short stanzas are metrically alike. The first lines have three strong beats; the second lines have two, though verging upon three if we read them with emphasis; the third lines scan as iambic pentameter, of a really muscular sort in the second stanza; and the fourth line returns to three beats. So it’s 3-2-5-3, but with this additional feature: the last line of the second stanza is NOT iambic, and its rhythm, “and OUT of the SWING of the SEA,” suggests the very roll of the waters it describes. “Thus far and no farther,” we say to that sea.

“The Lady of the Lilies,” Patty Prather Thum. Public Domain

     I have desired to go
          Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
     And a few lilies blow.

     And I have asked to be
          Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb
     And out of the swing of the sea.