Writing Christian Poetry: A Dragon Common Room Collection

The Dragon Common Room collects and connects threads of history, literature, mythology, and art to craft stories with Christian symbolism that guide us and cast their light in us.

We are on a quest to resurrect the English language from the tomb of Modernity and its corporate and scientific jargon. We seek to revive this trade language with the heartbeat of poetry that has been discarded from the culture of the Anglophone World. Simply put: without poetry, our language dies. We're waking the dead.

COMING SOON: A FAËRIE TALE, FULLY-ILLUSTRATED, WITH DRAGONS

Draco Alchemicus is an epic fantasy in five acts. It’s also a voyage to leave the limitations of the Enlightenment for the mystical and mythic realm, in the spirit of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and create a story that will unearth the buried monsters of the empires that have connected the entire world in electric light.

Each Act will be released as a single volume, with accompanying original illustrations. The complete poem will then be released in a lavish omnibus edition boasting 500 stanzas and 125 full-page illustrations.

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Writing Christian Poetry

A DRAGON COMMON ROOM COLLECTION

EVITA PILAR DUFFY-ALFONSO LINDSEY ESSELMAN MATTHEW HECK CONRAD MOJICA ANA RATH JACQUES REYNOIR AN ANONYMOUS SCHOLAR

EDITED BY

RACHEL FULTON BROWN

Copyright © 2023 by Rachel Fulton Brown, Somebody, Matthew Heck, Lindsey Esselman, Evita Pilar Duffy-Alfonso, Conrad Mojica, Jacques Reynoir, and Ana Rath (née Wood). All rights reserved.

This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, broadcast, or online publication.

979-8-218-25360-8 Print

979-8-218-25361-5 Ebook

www.dragoncommonroom.com

Then the Lord answered Job out of a whirlwind, and said:

"Who is this that wrappeth up sentences in unskilful words?

Gird up thy loins like a man: I will ask thee, and answer thou me.

Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if thou hast understanding.

Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest or who hath stretched the line upon it?

Upon what are its bases grounded? Or who laid the cornerstone thereof,

when the morning stars praised me together, and all the sons of God made a joyful melody?"

—Job 38:1-7

Contents

Introduction

Rachel Fulton Brown

Of Expedite, Procrastinators’ Saint

Somebody, a scholar

The King of Songs

Matthew Heck

A Melody of Mud and Mysteries

Lindsey Esselman

A Fighter and her Typewriter

Evita Pilar Duffy-Alfonso

Alma Mater

Conrad Mojica

Musings and Visions of a Birdkeeper’s Son

Jacques Reynoir

Though He Slay Me

Ana Rath

Endnotes

Rachel Fulton Brown

By the Same Author

Introduction

RACHEL FULTON BROWN

I have no business writing poetry. I have no formal training in writing poetry; I have never taken a course in writing poetry; the only poems I have published have been long-form narratives that I wrote with a group of amateurs whom I assembled on the social media platform Telegram, and occasional verses that I have posted on my blog Fencing Bear at Prayer. And yet, in Autumn 2021, I offered a course at the University of Chicago on Writing Christian Poetry, for which ten students enrolled. ¹

The course was cross-listed in History, Religious Studies, Medieval Studies, and the History of Christianity. We had no textbook on writing poetry, although we did have a handbook on the arts of the trivium which included sections on meter and rhyme (John Martineau), and we had readings in the history of European Latin literature (Ernst Robert Curtius), the laughter at the heart of Christian literature (Anthony Esolen), Christian theology and the poetic imagination (Malcolm Guite), and the spiritual history of English literature (Andrew Thornton-Norris). ² There was one assignment for the quarter, with no exceptions: write 50 stanzas of eight lines each in iambic pentameter (400 lines total) on a Christian theme of your choice. All ten students rose to the challenge; seven of their poems are published here.

I have taught at the University of Chicago for nearly thirty years. I have regularly included creative options in my assignments for final papers, for which students have frequently written poetry, including poems in Old English, Dwarvish, Elvish, Black Speech, and Portuguese for my course on Tolkien: Medieval and Modern, and praises of Our Lady (in English and Latin) for my course on Mary and Mariology, but this is the first course I have taught for which writing poetry, more particularly writing Christian poetry was a requirement. It was important for my pedagogical purposes that students were willing to do both, not because the course was intended as an exercise in conversion (although some students came to the course hoping for the context in which to explore such an experience), but because I wanted the students to learn something about the way in which Christianity depends on poetry for the expression of truth, as well as the practice of goodness and the experience of beauty.

Once upon a time, Christian education included training in meter and rhyme, particularly in Latin, because once upon a time, the arts of language were seen as bound up with the purpose of human existence: contemplating, serving, and praising God. As poet, philologist, and master story-teller J.R.R. Tolkien put it in Mythopoeia, the poem he wrote to convince C. S. Lewis of the worth—and truth—of myths, most particularly Christian myths:

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme

of things not found within recorded time. ³

Poetry is the art of putting language to music, of fitting words to the heartbeat of a meter. For Christians, this means participating in the work of the Creator—as Tolkien put it, in sub-creation—through imitation of God’s great Artifact, Creation, made, as the Scriptures tell it, through the Word (John 1:1-3) according to number, weight, and measure (Wisdom 11:21). Modern secular poets have for the most part abandoned meter to work solely with words laid out in patterns on the page; read aloud, their poems are difficult to distinguish from prose. Conversely, medieval Christians had no word for what we call poetry or verse, writing even their prose in rhyme. What we call poetry, they understood as making (poiesis) in all its rhetorical forms. ⁴

What, then, is Christian poetry? We may think first of Dante Alighieri (d. 1321), writing rhyming, metrical verse in the vernacular at a time when Latin was considered the proper language for theology, but in English, Christian poetry begins somewhat earlier, back in the seventh century with the cowherd Caedmon, who was inspired to write verses on the stories of the Creation, the Fall, and Redemption—allegedly without any training in either theology or Latin verse. Now, Caedmon sang at the behest of a certain someone who came to him in a dream,

...let us praise the Creator, Guardian

of the heavenly kingdom, his power and purpose,

his mind and might, his wondrous works.

He shaped each miraculous beginning,

each living creature, each earthly kind.

He first made for the children of men

Heaven as roof. Then our holy Shaper

crafted middle-earth, a home for mankind:

our God and Guardian watching over us—

eternal, almighty—our Lord and King. ⁵

According to Bede, the venerable eighth-century historian of the Anglo-Saxon church, Caedmon’s poems covered the whole narrative of the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation, including the departure of Israel from Egypt, the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension into Heaven of the Lord, the coming of the Holy Spirit and the teaching of the Apostles, as well as the terrors of future judgement, the horrors of the pains of hell, and the joys of the heavenly kingdom. ⁶ For Caedmon, as for late antique Christian poets like Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator, and Avitus (not, to be sure, household names at present), poetry was primarily a form of narrative, a way of making the