I have been a student of your love
and have not graduated. Setting
my own questions, I bungled
the examination. Where? Why? When?
Knowing there were no answers
you allowed history to invigilate
my desires. Time and again I was
caught with a crib up my sleeve.
This poem is the last in a sequence of eleven poems under the title 'Incarnation'. They are part of the Counterpoint collection, published in 1990. They are poems in the interrogative mood, and in this last poem the mystery of the Incarnation frustrates by its elusive allusions, and its answerless, or even unanswerable questions.
In eight lines Thomas addresses the one whose love became incarnate. The 'I' and 'you' are, however, the pronouns of a monologue. What is striking on a slow reading of this poem is the honest self-awareness of someone who not only failed the exam, but asked, and then answered, the wrong questions. Central to the poem are three monosyllabic questions essential to understanding the everyday phenomena and events we perceive. The question where is locative, and places the event. The question why is purposive and seeks explanation. The question when is about temporal placement. Together the three questions triangulate the event enabling the mind to fit it into categories of understanding.
Which misses the point. The student of love is not examining an event or phenomenon, but a relationship. The missing question is the clue to the poem; Who? This is the word that prevents the poem being mere description, and exposes the three questions as category errors. The student of love incarnate fails the final examinations by answering the wrong questions. The questions are not wrong because their answers are irrelevant, but because the questions are secondary. The primary question is who is the 'you' whose love is studied. Who is it who invigilates our desires and uses history to keep us honest?
And yet. For all those efforts to tutor our desires and prepare us for the examinations, the student of love incarnate persists in cheating. There is a crib with the correct answers up the sleeve. And that word 'crib' Thomas has packed with playfulness. The crib is the student's secret revision sheet; it is also the place where love incarnate lies, secretly, vulnerable, the Who of the unasked question.
There is a lightness of touch in this last poem in the Incarnation sequence. There is also the characteristic note in R S Thomas, of unresolved tension and the admitted inadequacy of human answers when faced with the God whose ways are not human ways and whose thoughts are not human thoughts. The line of the sentimental and overplayed nativity hymn 'no crib for a bed',is contradicted by the cleverness of that last line which suggests there was a crib, but it has been stolen by the student of love incarnate who has the answer up his sleeve.
Reading this poem in Advent I sensed echoes of the Johannine theology of the Word, become flesh. John's Gospel embeds divine love in the history of creation and in human history. Love is embodied, and while the great questions of Where? Why? and When? are all answered in the unfolding Gospel, they can only ever be fully and correctly answered in the light of the central, final and primary question of Who?
The author of the Gospel of John would also have said, "I have been a student of your love and have not graduated." It was he who wrote, "No one has ever seen God. The only one who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known." Mystery is not susceptible to our questions, nor answerable to our answers. No student of divine love ever attends a Graduation ceremony. In the divine learning economy sufficiency of knowledge and proficiency in the subject are impossible. However much we cheat, or set our own questions, time and again we come back to the crib.
The reluctant agnosticism of Thomas contrasts with the exuberant confidence and embrace of mystery in Richard Crashaw's poem; taken together they bring us to the crib where we learn that intellectual humility is a precondition of adoration.
“Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span,
Summer in winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth, and God in man!
Great little One, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to earth.”
Diolch Jim, thank you, that’s very helpful.
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Posted by: Michael Evans | December 16, 2018 at 08:39 AM