The Double Vocation

I cannot recall, since Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest who is also a good English poet. The matter may seem irrelevant; yet it is not, for priests, like family men, have a vocation that is bound to colour all their thinking, and the extreme vulnerability of priests to public or private scandal must often have dissuaded those who have had the gift from the dangerous second vocation of being poets. If they do write poems there is a standing temptation for them to write edifying verse and avoid the terrors and ambiguities of a vocation that hinges on the public expression of private knowledge. Therefore (already prepared by Peter Levi’s first book, The Gravel Ponds, and his magnificent translation from Yevtushenko) one opens his second book with a certain dread and joy – dread of some easy attempt to fake a credit balance in the account books of the spiritual life, joy that a man exists who can bear the weight of the double vocation –

. . . And even in so quiet a place
winter comes; whose antique face tonight
hangs close, troubles my sleepy ease,
broods among rain and ponderous storm-light.
One turns over an old newspaper,
its yellowing grim rumours of violence,
the slow degrees of murder; I should prefer,
supposing neither capable of defence,
black private water, a leap into suicide,
where hours and seasons ritually move
in a public dark no violent wish can divide
dull-chiming leaden feet from grave to grave . . .

It is a bold priest who publicly expresses his private preference for suicide over murder. The reward of boldness is, in this case, a wintry fire, and what began as the jottings of a seminary student who loved animals, solitude and his friends, has become a latter-day simulacrum of the mournings of Jeremiah. Peter Levi’s poems are simultaneously faithful to his private knowledge and to the harsh contours of modern life.

1964 (318)