Gustave Doré, “Peter’s Escape from Prison”
Spiritual Sunday
A couple of weeks ago Julia and I were visiting a former history colleague, Dana Greene, who has moved back to Alexandria, Virginia after spending several years heading up Emory University’s junior college, Emory at Oxford. While we were together at St. Mary’s, I always felt a special kinship with Dana because we both received our PhDs from Emory University, and I was fascinated as she told me about her forthcoming biography about poet Denise Levertov (Denise Levertov: A Poet’s Life), whose work I have featured frequently on Spiritual Sunday.
Dana once sent me Levertov’s poem “Beginners,” which for years was taped to my door and which I turned to when we experienced the Gulf oil spill. (You can read my post on it here.) Dana is interested in Levertov’s spiritual vision and emphasizes the poet’s focus on “primary wonder.” What I love about Levertov is that, for her, such wonder is not the end but the beginning. When we experience divine revelation, that’s when the real work begins. That’s how it was for the disciples after they encountered the risen Jesus and how it is for Peter in this poem about his miraculous escape from Herod’s prison.
Somewhat like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Peter realizes that our most challenging task is handling the freedom we are granted. When we can no longer feel the angel, that’s when we hear our own footsteps and experience the “long street’s majestic emptiness”:
St. Peter and the Angel
By Denise Levertov
Delivered out of raw continual pain,
smell of darkness, groans of those others
to whom he was chained–
unchained, and led
past the sleepers,
door after door silently opening–
out!
And along a long street’s
majestic emptiness under the moon:
one hand on the angel’s shoulder, one
feeling the air before him,
eyes open but fixed . . .
And not till he saw the angel had left him,
alone and free to resume
the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of
what he had still to do,
not till then did he recognize
this was no dream. More frightening
than arrest, than being chained to his warders:
he could hear his own footsteps suddenly.
Had the angel’s feet
made any sound? He could not recall.
No one had missed him, no one was in pursuit.
He himself must be
the key, now, to the next door,
the next terrors of freedom and joy.
2 Comments
Dear Robin, Thank you for this, I’ve never read it before. It reminds me of a poem with a similar theme by Mary Oliver. One of my favorites:
Maybe
by Mary Oliver
Sweet Jesus, talking
his melancholy madness,
stood up in the boat
and the sea lay down,
silky and sorry.
So everybody was saved
that night.
But you know how it is
when something
different crosses
the threshold — the uncles
mutter together,
the women walk away,
the young brother begins
to sharpen his knife.
Nobody knows what the soul is.
It comes and goes
like the wind over the water —
sometimes, for days,
you don’t think of it.
Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forth
like a tremor of pure sunlight
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left them
miserable and sleepy,
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it –
tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was —
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer storm.
Very much the same theme, Barbara. I hadn’t encountered previously encountered this poem, which I like a lot, nor did I know that Mary Oliver wrote explicitly on religious themes, even though I’ve previously picked up on Christian patterns in her work (as I did here). In another version of the drama, Moses travels to the mountaintop, communes with God, and then has to figure out how to get us all to live by the ten commandments.