The Burning Fields by David Middleton
**Concept Overview of "The Burning Fields" by David Middleton**
"The Burning Fields" is a poetry collection by David Middleton that reflects on themes of memory, loss, and the connection to place, particularly rooted in the cultural landscape of Louisiana. Middleton, a lifelong resident of the state, infuses his work with Southern imagery and personal narrative, often employing a conversational tone alongside traditional rhyme and meter. The collection opens with a tribute to his grandmother, capturing her Southern heritage and optimism, and it concludes with a poignant piece about a pecan tree that symbolizes continuity amid mortality.
Middleton also addresses broader historical contexts, such as the legacy of the Civil War and the impact of World War I on Southern identity. Other poems explore personal grief, specifically the relationships with his mother and grandfather, using nature as a recurring motif to convey both sorrow and comfort. The title poem, "The Burning Fields," draws parallels between environmental destruction and historical tragedy, resonating with contemporary audiences familiar with events like Hurricane Katrina.
Throughout the collection, Middleton engages with Christian themes, reflecting on faith and spirituality while acknowledging the complexities of tradition. He connects his reflections to the wider literary and philosophical traditions, showing a deep respect for diverse perspectives within his own faith and beyond. Ultimately, "The Burning Fields" presents a rich exploration of personal and cultural narratives that invites readers to engage with the emotional landscapes of memory and belonging.
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The Burning Fields by David Middleton
First published: Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991
Genre(s): Poetry
Subgenre(s): Lyric poetry; meditation and contemplation
Core issue(s): Attachment and detachment; connectedness; time
Overview
David Middleton has spent nearly all his life in the state where he was born, Louisiana. Growing up in Saline, in the northwestern part of the state, as of 2006 he lived in Thibodaux, in southeastern Louisiana, near the Mississippi Delta. There he composed The Building Fields. The poems are short to medium-length and use rhyme and meter. They also, however, have a conversational, personal quality, and Middleton’s use of contemporary language avoids archaisms and stilted expressions.
Middleton begins and ends the collection with poems dedicated to the memory of his maternal grandmother, surnamed Sudduth, who died in Saline in 1962. The opening poem, “The Vision,” describes the grandmother’s memories of her southern past in vivid, sensory terms, describing the plants and birds of the region as well as the grandmother’s grace and courtesy. The grandmother’s optimism about what awaits her in the afterlife is conveyed charmingly and unpretentiously. The closing poem, “The Family Tree,” describes a pecan tree in the grandmother’s backyard. The combination of the tree’s abundance and mortality, its fertility and its vulnerability to nature’s ravages, become symbols for the grandmother, whose bodily mortality is offset by the continuity of the poet’s memories of her.
“The Vision” is followed by “The Patriarch,” a poem dedicated to the memory of the poet’s grandfather. A white, male southerner, he was haunted by the legacy of the Civil War. “His” war, however, was World War I, and Middleton makes the important point that this first major conflict since the battle between the Union and the Confederacy was important for southerners because it enabled them to channel their patriotism into a worldwide battle for democracy, as opposed to a regional resentment.
Another poem of mourning, for Middleton’s mother, is much more personal. “The Quiet Garden” is an intimate and moving meditation on the close and essential bond between mother and son. Like the other poems of mourning, this poem invokes nature imagery to stress both the melancholy and consoling aspects of change.
Middleton also looks back to the southern Agrarian writers, such as Allen Tate and the Tennessean novelist Andrew Lyle (who died in 1992, but not before offering a strongly positive blurb for the jacket of the first edition of The Burning Fields). In “The Agrarians,” Middleton argues that these thinkers, though self-consciously rooting themselves in the southern rural tradition, also were at pains to call upon the entire tradition of the West. They strove, Middleton stresses, to communicate essential truths not fundamentally grounded in any specific culture or place. Some might argue that Middleton fails to mention the Agrarians’ strong sympathies for white supremacism and offers an overly optimistic reading of their legacy. Other poems about honored predecessors, including tributes to Father Francis L. Kerne and the scholar of the Victorian era John Hazard Wildman, are more personal, sketching character traits the poet admires and wishes to recommend to the reader.
The title poem, “The Burning Fields,” relates the destruction of sugar fields in southern Louisiana by fire that spread from oil refineries. Though fire, not water, is the elemental agent of disaster here, the scene will resonate strongly with post-2005 readers aware of the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Katrina on the same region.
“On the Suicide of the Chairman of the Math Department” contrasts a mathematics scholar’s skill at quantitative reasoning with the despair he experiences in his inner life. The poem’s clipped, terse pace achieves pathos without being overly sentimental or melodramatic. Similarly evocative of a mentality closed to consolation is “The Stoic,” one of the volume’s most intriguing poems. Written in the first person but not necessarily in Middleton’s own voice, the poem, measured in strict quatrains, succeeds in sketching a sensibility utterly remote from any sort of higher calling, a mindset that refuses inspiration or idealism.
Christian Themes
Middleton is an active Episcopalian, the poetry editor for the Anglican Theological Review, and an elected member of the Guild of Scholars of the Episcopal Church. An indication of both Middleton’s theological perspective and his sense of the Christian life is the central sequence of The Burning Fields, “The Middle World,” which is dedicated to Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). Voegelin was a conservative thinker who left Germany during the Nazi era and taught for many years at Louisiana State University, where Middleton was his student. Voegelin was interested in the idea of tradition in both the classical and the biblical worlds—interests that Middleton, who ends this primarily Christian volume with a series of poems on incidents from classical mythology, would maintain.
Middleton writes about the essential generalities of Christian faith, but he examines them through the prism of felt experience. In “The Shepherd,” the speaker recalls seeing a Christmas pageant as a young boy. He then traverses the same ground many years later as a mature adult. Instead of being a trivial memory of childhood fun, the Christmas pageant now seems profoundly symbolic of life’s meaningful losses.
Middleton shares many of his Christian themes and interests with T. S. Eliot, a poet widely influential on the southern Agrarians, who were his teachers and forebears. In “Epiphany in Baca,” Middleton seems to write a deliberate sequel to Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi,” describing the return of the three wise men from Bethlehem as Eliot had evoked their arrival. In “The Buried Life,” Middleton praises the life of H. J. Sachs, another of Middleton’s teachers. Sachs was just the sort of freethinking Jew whom Eliot, in his 1934 essay collection After Strange Gods, deplored as unlikely to contribute to an ordered society with a strong sense of tradition. Middleton praises Sachs for acknowledging his religious tradition at the end of his life, but at the same time the poem does not leave the reader feeling as if a lifetime championing secular ideals has been a total waste. A shorter, related poem, on the alleged deathbed conversion of the poet Wallace Stevens, makes a similar point. It testifies to both the honor of a life spent largely without the consolations of religion and the pleasure the soul gives itself upon an acknowledgment of faith.
Middleton is generally optimistic about the ability of art to embody Christian meanings. In “For a Needlewoman” and “The Maker in Lent,” both dedicated to women, Middleton celebrates the anonymous craftspeople whose dedication to sacred art has provided an ordinary yet compelling illustration of the way the numinous can surprise and animate the world.
Middleton is not narrowly sectarian. In “Two for Taliessin” he shows the continuity between Celtic paganism and Christian spirituality. Though he is an Episcopalian, in “Thomas Tallis to William Byrd, upon the Late Dissolution of the Abbeys” he laments the seizure of Roman Catholic monastic properties by King Henry VIII of England. Henry VIII was the founding father of the Anglican tradition, from which Episcopalianism derives; Middleton does not, in other words, blindly endorse every aspect of the history of his own tradition. “Lines for the Dormition of the Virgin” uses the image of the Dormition (earthly death) of the Virgin Mary to castigate secular modernity. Middleton suggests that the Virgin Mary’s unique combination of fleshliness and abstract spirituality is meaningless amid the vast wasteland of the modern age.
Sources for Further Study
Middleton, David. Review of Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems. Anglican Theological Review, January, 2003. In reviewing the great nineteenth century Christian poet Christina Rossetti, Middleton offers his own thoughts on how to achieve spiritual intensity in poetry, as well as on the role the individual sensibility can play in religious poetry.
Middleton, David. Review of Hours/Moon and Sun/A Hymn of Simon Peter, by Kenneth A. Lohf. Anglican Theological Review, Fall, 1999. Middleton’s review of his fellow Christian poet gives an overview of Middleton’s own aesthetic preferences.
Sampson, Dennis. “The Authentic Voice.” The Hudson Review 45 (Winter, 1993): 668-676. The reviewer is uncomfortable with Middleton’s formalism but praises the vivid portraiture of the people depicted in the poetry.
Stanford, Donald E. “Wintersian Formalism.” Southern Review 104 (Winter, 1996): 164-167. Although mentioning The Burning Fields only briefly, Stanford provides an informative general discussion of Middleton’s poetry, his relation to the formalist aesthetic of Yvor Winters, and his debts to previous Christian poetries.
Tota, Frank P. Review of The Burning Fields. The Hollins Critic 30, no. 1 (February, 1993): 19. Short but perceptive review concentrating on its southern and religious themes.