Today’s Poem: Easter Morning

James Matthew Wilson reads Joseph Bottum

Flowering dogwood (Wikimedia Commons)

Poet, critic, and scholar James Matthew Wilson holds the Cullen Foundation Chair in English at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, where he is founding director of the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry and criticism, most recently the poetry collection Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds. His honors include the Hiett Prize from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and the Parnassus Prize awarded by Memoria College. He has also twice received the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s Lionel Basney Award.

Today Wilson offers a reading of “Easter Morning,” by Poems Ancient and Modern co-founder Joseph Bottum, with exposition of the thought of the poem’s dedicatee, the philosopher René Girard. “Easter Morning” is the opening poem in Bottum’s latest collection, Spending the Winter.

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James Matthew Wilson writes:

Long ago, we have been told, the uniform vision of the world was a tragic one. Clan and society, culture and ceremony, had emerged in the wilderness. Human life had its joys, rites, and traditions that made a light in the darkness. But, as our ancestors believed, however hard they labored to carve out a place for themselves in the world, one day the power of chaos would return to wipe them out. Nature could be placated and coaxed to give life, but its dominion was permanent and led to death. To hold the darkness at bay, our ancestors conceived of a ritual sacrifice, an offering of one of their own to save the life of the many. 

The philosopher René Girard did not invent this story, but in reflecting on it, he discerned something significant. All the civilizations of the world have their rituals of sacrifice. Every people has its scapegoat, whether the boy with his throat slashed by a pagan priest and left in marinate in the bog for millennia, or the Jew shipped off to the death camps by Nazi Germany. If every case, the scapegoat must be sacrificed, and that sacrifice was thought a good. 

Girard saw only one exception to this universal rule. According to the Christian scriptures, God had sent his only son into the world. The people of Jerusalem, fearing their destruction at the hands of the Romans, conspired to bring about his death on the cross. As Christians look at that dying God they see not a good, but the greatest of evils. They see that the aboriginal sacrifices of mankind forced another to pay with death for the sake of society’s survival. Christ’s death undoes the cycle of sacrifice by exposing its cruelty. It brings all natural sacrifice with its coercion and violence to an end by the Son of God himself willingly taking the place of the sons of mankind. Christianity overturns the old order because Christ himself undergoes an evil to teach us that no one else should ever again be subjected to it. 

Girard is rightly regarded as one of the most insightful philosophers and literary critics of the twentieth century. He was also a friend of today’s poet, one of the hosts of this newsletter, Joseph Bottum. Bottum celebrates this friendship in his poem, “Easter Morning,” which he not only dedicates to Girard but uses as an occasion to reflect on Girard’s great insight on “violence and the sacred.” 

The poem begins with such appropriately seasonal beauty, as “Quick as dawn, the dogwoods have raised / Improbable awnings,” that one may not anticipate the high seriousness to follow. Bottum depicts the “clean April day” and his young but growing daughter, Faith, darting about the yard. But long ago, in this pastoral land and in every other land, “with ragged knives, / Cold priests once tried to wake the leaf” by offering to the gods of nature a sacrifice of blood. The economy of “sacrificial debt” is perfectly natural, but so is it natural to savor, as the daughter does, the evanescent beauty of the world. It is even natural to find a trace of beauty in the lights of “tracer rounds,” as the television news shows footage of the Second Gulf War (which began one month to the day before Easter in 2003). 

Although “History labors,” as Bottum notes, the brutality of nature has nonetheless been transformed. As the “parish bells” begin to ring, calling all to Easter Mass, we cannot help knowing that rituals of scapegoating, cycles of violence, persist. But, as the old Easter hymn says, “death has no dominion, the risen Christ is Lord.” And so the poet “waits” for the Lord to rise and free us of our bloodied bonds. 

Bottum is an inveterate fiddler with poetic meter. Here we find the ten-line tetrameter stanzas quirky but never loose in their cleverness. Sometimes a line will be wholly iambic (“The bloodroot flowers near her feet”); most of the time we find a combination of iambs and trochees, as in the first line which begins with three trochees before its final iamb. So also, while the poem may look blank, in fact there is a trace of a rhyme scheme, with the second, sixth, and tenth lines of each stanza rhyming. Bottum thus adds a spirited prosodic restlessness to this poem of the spirit’s renewal and salvation on the day of the Resurrection.

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Easter Morning 

by Joseph Bottum 

for René Girard

Quick as dawn, the dogwoods have raised  
Improbable awnings, christened with rain.   
Thrusts of witch-hazel, stands of rue,   
And there — there, across the stream, 
In the shade of those dark-lichened rocks — 
White phlox and geranium strain 
To reach the angled light. One bright 
Morning, a clean April day, 
Amazes familiar paths with a green 
Tangle and baizes the winter’s stain. 

Faster each Easter, my daughter flies 
Past tumbled mounds where brambles grow. 
The bloodroot flowers near her feet 
As delicate as bible leaves, 
And slow, persistent ivy kindles 
On old trees. The year will know 
A fresh redemption — Burning green,  
The greenwoods glow — till ash 
And thorn fall back to sleep, 
Counterpaned again with snow.

Beneath such trees, with ragged knives, 
Cold priests once tried to wake the leaf, 
The root, the branch: the frozen world 
That needs new life for spring.  
A lamb, a child — the shrouds of snow 
Would melt in their warm blood, as grief 
By grief, pain by vengeful pain, 
We paid the sacrificial debt 
That swells with each repaying death. 
And where in time is time’s relief?

My daughter runs by the brief flowers: 
Touch-me-nots among the stones, 
Bluebells and sorrels, Solomon’s seal. 
Every spring pretends a pity 
For all the pretty, short-lived things.  
Last night I watched the fire zones, 
The bombers’ plumes and tracer rounds, 
Blooms of war on the TV news. 
And now in these green trees I see 
The graves of gods and a grove of bones.  

History labors, a worn machine 
Sick with torsion, ill-meshed, 
And every repair of an old fault 
Ruptures something new. The sacred 
Knife no longer hallows woods, 
But winter’s blood still springs refreshed 
And an altered world still summons death.  
As long as we endure ourselves, 
Innocence will come to grief 
And mercy must remain unfleshed.

The parish bells begin their carols, 
Down through the trees like flourished prayer 
The Easter call resounding. Time 
Reaches forward, hungry for winter, 
And what will save my daughter when even 
Hope is caught in the ancient snare?  
A cold fear waits — till all that had fallen, 
All that was lost, rudely broken, 
Crossed in love, comes rising, rising,  
On the breath of the new spring air.  

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