Sealey Challenge Day 23: Bucolics

Pastoral Devotional

Maurice Manning’s third collection Bucolics was published in 2007, which seems like a lifetime ago (before I was married and had three kids; the year I got my first poem published). But taking time to peruse this in the early morning felt like a devotional. I’d already owned another book of his, and heard him read and speak at the 2023 Calvin Festival of Faith and writing (along with Christian Wiman and Kaveh Akbar, which was a great experience).

But what I love about this collection is its simple, sustained rhetorical positioning of the speaker, a simple laborer who spends his days observing his natural surroundings, the tools and movements of his industry, and pondering what it might teach him about “Boss,” a term we take to refer to the divine.

The choice of Boss here implies so many possibilities about social positioning. What I like about it is not only that it elevates the laborer and his thoughts to the role of a prophet, but also the choice of the word “Boss,” implying that the relationship with the divine is one involving employment—that the machine of the world is a capitalist one. In this way, Manning’s choices at portraying the speaker’s worldview, alongside his curious belief in a benevolent “Boss,” seem to be sympathetic and tender. The meditations of the speaker seem to surpass that economic system and save him from its despair.

The consonance and meter of the poems are musical and delightful, as well as the insights and questions of the speaker:

O all those sparkles all that glimmer
my eyeballs never want to blink
away from you when I know for sure
you’re up there making shimmer Boss
you’re laying by a little light
for later on [. . .] (VIII)

O I get by all right
a beech seed here a feather there
a locust wing a wing as light
as air besides it lets light through
I get a double portion from you
I tie my purse strings tight but put
this in your pocket all I have
I’d lay it on the table Boss
for you [. . .] (IV)

The speaker is driven by curiosity and wonder, and the poems read like psalms, like someone sincere in his thirst to know the divine—but also grateful for the manifestations of God in the natural world. Though he is constantly questioning, he also seems to find his own answers as he ponders the natural world. Manning implies in this way that nature is the way we find a connection with God—that’s how we get our answers.

It reminds me of one of Thomas Merton’s journal entries. (I recently read Seven Story Mountain this summer, and began perusing A Year with Thomas Merton, and have really enjoyed reading about his experience seeking God). In his January 4 entry, entitled “The Speech of God is Silence,” he says:

For the first time in my life I am finding you, O Solitude. I can count on the fingers of one hand the few short moments of purity, of neutrality, in which I have found you. Now I know I am coming to the day in which I will be able to live without words, even outside my prayer. For I still need to go out into this no-man’s-land of language, which does not quite join me to others and which throws a veil over my own solitude.

When I pondered this a few weeks ago, I had a realization of my own—that when I’m seeking to feel close to God, to get answers, I expect it in the form of language—in subtle ideas in my mind—but usually in language. What if that expectation is limiting me? Isn’t God also in the silences? Coming from a faith tradition that embraces revelation as a gift available to any sincere seeker, and that espouses unique tenets that give me peace and answers—I also recognize that we tend to expect to have ready answers for so many things. But the ability to cultivate a relationship with God through silence, through just being in the stillness, oriented, grateful—this is no less of a worthy pursuit.

This is why I love Manning’s rhetorical orientation in these poems so much. Being open to what’s around us all day long, and seeking—this is what I think it means to continually have a prayer in one’s heart. When I go on a morning walk, and listen to the birds—as cliche as it sounds, it opens me to the moment, to the presence of feeling the divine in everything.

The poems do shift their purposes though, indicating the speaker’s deep desires to understand, the frustration at not always knowing his position before God.

am I your helper Boss or am
I not do I bring in the hay
for me or you or only for
the horse I help the horse he helps
me too why sometimes Boss he hooks
his head across my shoulder just
to rest it there [. . .] (LXXVII)

I don’t like that that moment when
you turn me out alone to graze
to grae is such a hot-faced slight
as close as breath but never close
enough to know if I was hitched
for real or if the hitching Boss
I felt was just a feeling sweet
but not the honeypot itself
which swings the gate right back to you
O tell me why I can’t hold back
this bitter thought are you the bee
or just a stinging story Boss

This last poem (LXXVIII) ends the collection, leaving the yearning unanswered. But the consistent desires throughout the poem implies that this speaker can’t help but continually turn to that relationship, even without expecting answers. And in the meantime, be fed by the delights of his insights of the beauty of the world he’s given.