“The most wisdom is a creature to done after the wille and counceil of his heyest, sovereyn friend . whether so that we ben foule or clene we arn at one in His loveing.”

Julian, LXXVI

(the wisest thing we can do is to fulfil the will and council of our high and sovereign friend … whether we are foul or clean we are the same in His love.)

The Australian poet Alec Derwent Hope passed away on the 13th of July 2000. Stanley Weirsma, the late professor of English at Calvin College, once disparagingly described Hope as the last of the “nineteenth century poets”, his form and style could seem rather archaic. Yet in the subjects his poetry sought to express there is timelessness. He wrestled in particular with the isolation and alienation of modern life.

On one level Hope’s dislocation was partly about geography. Like many white Australians he felt torn between a passionate love for the “Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey”; and a sense that his home down under was a long way from the centre of things. He described Australia as “without songs, architecture, history . where second-hand Europeans pullulate timidly on the edge of alien shores.” Her cities were “five teeming sores” and her intellectual life he thought a “desert” (though he hoped that “still from the deserts the prophets come” and spoke of a “spirit which escapes / the learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes / which is called civilisation over there.”).

More deeply, Hope wrestled with a sense of the physical, emotional, and spiritual barriers that hold us apart. In opposition to Donne, he considered humans to be “wandering islands”: “You cannot build bridges between wandering islands; / the Mind has no neighbours, and the unteachable heart / Announces its armistice from time to time, but spends / Its love to draw them closer and closer apart.” In the poem Pyramis, he noted that it is our desire to build monuments to ourselves that fill our time and make it hard to consider others. He mourned a passed world of innocence: “The world I grew up in belongs to the past; / round my cradle, behind my pillow there stood / Hercules, Samson, Roland, / Robin Hood / To say: Stand firm, stand fast! / My unripe soul, groping to fill its need, / Found in these legends a food by which it grew ./ We have lost that world. How shall my son go on / To form his archetypal image of man? / Frankenstein? Faust? Dracula? Don Juan? / O Absolom, my son!” In an other poem he talks of the bird that loses its ability to find its way home: “Try as she will, the trackless world delivers / No way, the wilderness no sign, / The immense and complex map of hills and rivers / Mocks her small wisdom with its vast design. / And darkness rises from the eastern valleys, / And the winds buffet her with their hungry breath, / And the great earth, with neither grief nor malice, / Receives the tiny burden of her death.”

To make it through this “trackless world”, we each need our guides, the maps to take us Home. The heroes of the world are transitory, and few provide much in the way of role models. Julian notes that even our own spirit can be misleading telling me I am “a wretched creature, a sinner, and a liar to boot.” In doing that it puts distance between God and us. We need to turn back and see our Lord for who he really is, “the wisest thing we can do is fulfil the wisdom and council of our high and sovereign friend.”

A.D. Hope also knew of our need to turn from the world, in his reflection on the death of Pius XII, he speaks of the autumn trees at Amherst and what they teach him of human life. “Seven years have passed, and still, at times, I ask / Whether in man, as in those plants, may be / A splendour, which his human virtues mask, / Not given to us to see? / If to some lives at least comes a stage / When, all the active man now left behind, They enter the treasure of old age, / This autumn of the mind. / Then, while the heart stands still, beyond desire / The dying animal knows a strange serene: / Emerging in its ecstasy of fire / The burning soul is seen. / Who sees it? Since old age appears to men / Senility, decrepitude, disease, / What Spirit walks among us, past our ken, / As we among these trees, / Whose unknown nature, blessed with keener sense / Catches its breath in wonder of that the sight / And feels its being flood with that immense / Epiphany of light?” Do we need to wait for the Fall of our life before we shall see that truth?

Martin & Jude de Graaf