Tuesday, December 5 - Love's Austere and Lonely Offices

Malcolm Guite is a British priest and poet whose book Waiting on the Word is an anthology of poems for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany with notes accompanying each poem.  I recommend this book and his book of sonnets, Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year.  The poems in Waiting on the Word aren't all overtly religious, though not because they're 'secular'.  Rather, there isn't a neat divide between the two, which is what draws me to Guite's writing and criticism.

One of his selections is a poem by Robert Hayden.  The poem is called "Those Winter Sundays":

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Hayden's poem glimpses a man remembering his boyhood, experiencing his father's routine of work.  He knows in the 'now' of the poem what he didn't know in his boyhood: of love's silent action going largely unrewarded and unrecognized.  Guite's close reading of Hayden's poetry focuses in on the father.  He endures the 'blueblack cold'.  His cracked hands continue to work.  Getting fires going.  Working hard, even on Sundays when others could rest from their labor.  "No one ever thanked him."

Guite sheds light on the autobiographical quality of Hayden's poem:

"Robert Hayden (1913-1980) was brought up in an impoverished household in an African-American district where his father worked for a pittance as a manual labourer.  It was not an easy childhood, and the house was filled with the tension of a breaking marriage and the suppressed anger that so often accompanies oppression.  Hayden alludes to this in 'fearing the chronic angers of that house'.  So this is no cosy, nostalgic and retrospective romanticizing of poverty in the manner of Hovis television adverts.  And it is for this very reason that we can credit the depth and reality of the hidden and practical love, in spite of all, to which this poem witnesses." (Guite, Waiting on the Word, 23)

According to Guite, the fact that this poem is not nostalgic makes the conclusion of the poem all the more powerful.  This is a clear-eyed memory, romanticizing nothing, and finds a bright light amidst the darkness.  Guite goes on to remark that the repetition of "what did I know" prepares us for the "elevation and universal reach" of the final line: "love's austere and lonely offices."  This phrase powerfully gets to the quality of love as a duty, unrewarded, that resonates strongly with Christian love, which is to be extended not only to friends but to enemies, whose left hand's giving should be anonymous to the right hand, which gives without regard for what is received.

Guite remarks ultimately that though his father's loving office was 'lonely' and 'austere', there is a happy paradox to be found in the warmth of Hayden's closing recognition of the power of his father's gift.  Hayden, our country's first black poet laureate, looks into the past, recognizes the gift, and through the poem, allows us to recognize it as well.  Through Hayden's expression, love's austere and lonely offices strengthen us in our own resolve to love whatever the cost, to love steadfastly and ardently, even if no one were to ever know.