Moments of Grace by Elizabeth Jennings
"Moments of Grace" is a poetry collection by Elizabeth Jennings, published in 1979, that reflects her development as a poet and her exploration of profound themes such as loneliness, relationships, and spiritual awakening. As a prominent figure in the post-World War II British literary movement known as the Movement, Jennings distinguished herself with her straightforward, rational verse, contrasting with the more romantic styles of her contemporaries. The collection features a wide range of subjects, from contemplations on nature and love to meditations on death and moral dilemmas, with a notable emphasis on the interplay between suffering and grace.
Throughout "Moments of Grace," Jennings weaves Christian themes into her poetry, blending her religious beliefs with her reflections on human experience. The poems often highlight the redemptive potential of suffering, suggesting that moments of grace can emerge from both natural beauty and human struggles. Notably, the collection addresses complex issues such as euthanasia, presenting a nuanced perspective on life and death.
Jennings's work is characterized by its quiet yet profound observations, inviting readers to explore the intricate connections between faith, nature, and the human condition. The collection culminates in a poignant "Christmas Suite," which emphasizes vulnerability and the shared burdens of humanity. Overall, "Moments of Grace" serves as a thoughtful meditation on life's challenges and the moments that illuminate the path toward healing and understanding.
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Moments of Grace by Elizabeth Jennings
First published: Manchester, England: Carcanet New Press, 1979
Genre(s): Poetry
Subgenre(s): Lyric poetry; meditation and contemplation
Core issue(s): Death; grace; healing; love; nature; suffering
Overview
Moments of Grace was published nearly thirty years after Elizabeth Jennings gained recognition as one of the original nine members of the post-World War II British literary movement simply called the Movement, a group that valued straightforward, rational verse over the romanticism that typified the works of Dylan Thomas and the emotionally weighted imagery of earlier English poetry. The plain diction and cool treatment of poetic subjects that had earned Jennings her place in the 1950’s Oxford group alongside Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn, and Philip Larkin still imbues Moments of Grace; the 1979 poems remain quiet and restrained as they plumb such charged topics as loneliness, abandoned relationships, and spiritual epiphanies. The scope of Moments of Grace—from light musings about lowly insects to quietly reverential poems and pithy reflections on death, law, and misrule—is broader than it was in Jennings’s early work.
Early in Jennings’s career, critics noted that she was the only woman and the only Catholic in a movement of “angry young men” with working-class roots and political agendas. A physician’s daughter with religious inclinations and classical tastes, young Jennings favored formally structured poems that observe rather than moralize; singularly among Movement members, she adhered to traditional, nonpolitical subjects such as love, nature, and the passage of time. Critic Robert Conquest amusedly likened her position in the firebrand Movement to that of a schoolmistress among drunken marines. Nevertheless, by the time Jennings wrote Moments of Grace, the heyday of the Movement had passed; the Oxford-based poet had weathered stints in advertising, librarianship, and book publishing; and, since earning a 1949 master’s degree from St. Anne’s College, she had written, edited, or translated more than twenty volumes of poetry. By 1979, Jennings was a seasoned poet at midlife, probing increasingly religious and philosophical questions as well as some controversial issues.
Moments of Grace opens with “Into the Hour,” a decidedly religious poem about healing. The speaker asserts that grief, loss, and ghosts of the past have given way to sunlight and a slowly spreading Paradise. The poet does not know how to pass beyond grief or how to celebrate the passage but, in a steadfastly faithful way, understands that suffering can be fruitful: “I have come/ Into the time when grief begins to flower. . . .”
The notion that suffering can be redemptive is Christian; that poetry can confirm the healing is typical Jennings. In fact, after the publication of her first full-length book of verse (Poems, 1953) earned an Arts Council prize and catapulted Jennings into England’s literary limelight, her next ten books included two specifically focused on healing in mental institutions. Recoveries (1964) and The Mind Has Mountains (1966) describe an obdurate doctor, dispossessed patients, needles, and psychological anguish in hospitals where Jennings landed after a suicide attempt and recurrent mental breakdowns in the 1960’s. These give way to a cautious sense of promise in Moments of Grace. Accordingly, “Into the Hour” closes with the speaker looking ahead to new love, offering a mutedly optimistic entry into the rest of the collection.
Some moments of grace described by Jennings are truly positive, arising from a child’s glance, an epic sunset, or a moment’s respite from a wearying day. Some moments build bridges to ancient wonders, pastoral people, or artistic creations, as outlined in “Braque’s Dream,” “A Proustian Moment,” and “Outside Greece.” More often, however, key moments reveal danger lurking beneath the surface of earthly things. In “Goldfinch,” the plucky appeal of a bird masks predatory inclinations, and in “The Sermon of Appearances,” dancing motes exact a price from those drawn into their glittering momentum. “Forgiveness” uncovers a cycle of anger and apologies, “An Elusive One” exposes “counterfeits of love,” and secrecy separates lovers in “Love Needs an Elegy.” The darkest moments, conveys Jennings, arise with arguments, exits, and betrayals. As poetry, which Jennings held is a search for order, they become manageable.
Moments of grace that are prompted by nature—stars, the Moon, seas, gardens, woods, breezes, skies, and trees aplenty—offer a window to the elusive positive or a profoundly direct link to God. Soaring birds serve as divinely inspired examples of steadfastness in “Spirits” and “A Chorus of Creation,” as do “upward-turning” Tuscan trees in “Cypresses.” Dramatic sunsets bring peace. Stars form bright necklaces adorning the heavens, from which a creator watches attentively. What goes awry on earth is tempered, however briefly in these moments, with nature’s steadier, closer connection with God. For Jennings, moments of grace are reminders that God is present, pivotal illuminations for the disappointed, the frail, and the flawed inhabiting her poems.
Unique in the collection, “Euthanasia” addresses a highly controversial moral issue, one pivotal to the Roman Catholic Church. The poem is told from the point of view of a patient among many who fear death by legally sanctioned caregivers.
The law’s been passed and I am lying low
In the poem, seemingly imprisoned patients face pain with composure, but they are terrified of death by euthanasia—even though they once purported to choose death over illness. Feigning hardiness to protect themselves, they grow weaker. Ultimately, the poem pits the changeable will of patients against the law permitting euthanasia, and also against “murdering ministers” with the surreptitious power to take life.
Christian Themes
“My Roman Catholic religion and my poems are the most important things in my life,” said Jennings, whose craft and faith intertwine via biblical places, religious figures, and Christian metaphors and themes in a lifetime of poems. In Moments of Grace, references to Gethsemane, Jerusalem, Paradise, and Eden crop up in the final few lines of poems whose titles and treatment are otherwise secular, as does the sun as metaphor for a Communion wafer. To profess love’s willingness to overcome adversity, another poem draws on biblical phrasing—“seven times seven”—used in scripture to signal God’s works. Some poems, including “A Beseeching,” move beyond reference and metaphor to formal prayer: They acknowledge the reign of the Lord or the Virgin and then request divine help.
Christian themes are most explicit in “Christmas Suite in Five Movements,” the closing work that recounts Christ’s birth. Vacillating between images of a crying, needy babe and an adult Christ bearing crucifixion scars, Jennings’s version of Christmas emphasizes vulnerability. It also expresses a mutual need of humans for Christ and Christ for humans.
. . . This God fears the night,
As portrayed by Jennings, the Christ child is not the pacific infant of traditional holiday fare; he is very noisy, very fearful, and very human. Similarly, when the story jumps in time from the newborn to the mature Christ, it highlights emotional and physical discomforts—a disturbing dream, exhaustion, blindness from the sun, as well as a great deal of dust, heat, poverty, and cold. Why? The raw humanity underscores what Jennings calls the “terrible truth” of Christ’s suffering. Graphically portrayed, Christ’s suffering makes redemption real for people bearing their own burdens, including the burdens of unfulfilled love, misspoken words, and ebbing powers depicted in Moments of Grace.
Jennings’s Christmas suite closes without fanfare, focusing on the “tiny flesh/ And flickering spirit” of the Christ child. In a mixture of the Lord’s Prayer, the sacrament of Communion, and a sense of Christianity enduring, the closing lines of the collection offer quiet but potent hope: “Give us this daily Bread, this little Host.”
Sources for Further Study
Foisner, Sabine. “Elizabeth Jennings: Against the Dark.” In English Language and Literature: Positions and Dispositions, edited by James Hogg. Salzburg, Austria: University of Salzburg Press, 1990. Shows how Jennings renders imagination sacred, facilitates communion with God, affirms order over earthly chaos, and garners salvation from suffering.
Gramang, Gerlinde. Elizabeth Jennings: An Appraisal of Her Life as a Poet, Her Approach to Her Work, and a Selection of the Major Themes of her Poetry. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Despite awkward phrasing and text wedded to the obvious, includes a comprehensive bibliography and an interview with Jennings.
Riggs, Thomas, ed. Contemporary Poets. 7th ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 2001. Examines contemplation, projection, saints (including Saint Catherine and Saint Augustine), and mystical revelation in Jennings’s work.
Shelton, Pamela, ed. Contemporary Women Poets. Detroit: St. James Press, 1998. Traces Jennings’s entries into the experiences of artists, religious figures, the desperate, and the aged.
Wheeler, Michael. “Elizabeth Jennings and Gerard Manley Hopkins.” In Hopkins Among the Poets: Studies in Modern Responses to Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Richard F. Giles. Hamilton, Ont.: International Hopkins Association, 1985. Compares similar poetic treatments of innocence, suffering, and childhood. Notes parallels in tone and alliteration.