Questions for Ecclesiastes by Mark Jarman
"Questions for Ecclesiastes" by Mark Jarman is a poetry collection that delves into the complexities of faith, doubt, and the human experience as viewed through a Christian lens. Drawing inspiration from his familial background—his father was a preacher and his grandmother was a poet—Jarman engages with themes of religious belief and its real-life implications. The titular poem employs a narrative style to explore a poignant incident involving his father's ministry, questioning the role of faith in the face of tragedy and the silences of God during profound human suffering.
Throughout the collection, Jarman's verses wrestle with significant theological inquiries, utilizing a contemporary voice that resonates with both skepticism and hope. His works reflect the struggles of believers who seek meaning in the teachings of Christ while grappling with personal and existential questions. Jarman's mastery of language and rhythm, influenced by biblical texts, invites readers to reflect on the intersection of faith and reason in their lives. Notably, the poems balance serious contemplation with moments of humor and intimacy, illustrating the poet's deep connection to his family and the natural world. Ultimately, "Questions for Ecclesiastes" serves as both a meditation on the nature of belief and a recognition of the ongoing quest for understanding in an ever-changing world.
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Questions for Ecclesiastes by Mark Jarman
First published: Brownsville, Oreg.: Story Line Press, 1997
Genre(s): Poetry
Subgenre(s): Lyric poetry; narrative poetry
Core issue(s): Expectancy; faith; illumination; knowledge; silence; works and deeds
Overview
The son and grandson of ministers in the Disciples of Christ Christian Church, Mark Jarman employs his skills as a writer to address essential aspects of the Christian faith. The poet was initially impressed by his maternal grandmother, Nora Pemberton, who was an unpublished poet and short-fiction writer, and his father, Donald Ray Jarman, who as a preacher had a masterful command of language. He was further inspired by British poet Donald Davie, whom he admired for his willingness to openly express his Christian faith in his poetry. Of him Jarman has written, “Davie’s religious life was intimately involved with this poetry. This realization . . . led me to engage my own religious beliefs directly in my writing.” Questions for Ecclesiastes continues a conversation about God, expressions of faith, and why faith matters in daily life begun in Jarman’s first book of verse, North Sea (1978), in which he initiated the theme of questioning the real-life applicability of Christian teaching and the example of Jesus.
Jarman is unique as a poet of Christian-themed verse because he challenges intellectual complacency. For him it is insufficient to mouth doctrine or espouse Jesus as a role model. For example, in the title poem, “Questions for Ecclesiastes,” Jarman narrates an autobiographically inspired incident in which a minister (his father) is called to the home of a young female suicide to offer the family comfort and religious perspective. The aim of the poem is to question God’s will in the death of the girl and also the usefulness of the preacher as an emissary of divine will. Divided into nine paragraph-style stanzas, the poem begins in the past tense and ends in the present tense, allowing the speaker to retell the story and then analyze its outcome. Six of the stanzas start with “What if.” Eight of the nine present essential questions about blind faith, and the ninth ponders why God keeps the incomprehensible “a secret” from both those willing to believe and the already devout Christian. Throughout the poem, the preacher’s words and gestures at consolation are made to seem useless because he cannot explain why the girl killed herself, and his talking is contrasted to God’s silence on the matter. The tension creates what Jarman calls the “urgency” that “gives religious poetry its power.” Jarman stated that he adopted the rhythm of this poem from that of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament of the King James version of the Bible. One of the accomplishments of the poem is its responsiveness to biblical language on a contemporary theme.
Jarman’s personae embrace the potency of faith and organized religious worship as formative in ordinary life. In testing the merit of a worldview shaped by Christian doctrine, Jarman’s poems assert a positive place for faith and doubt in the mind and heart of the Christian. “Transfiguration,” with its poignant final stanza opening “I want to believe,” captures the struggle for the Christian to believe in such logic-defying aspects of Jesus’ life as his resurrection and transfiguration. This poem, divided into seven stanzas, opens with Jesus, as described in the Gospel of Mark, flanked by Old Testament figures Moses and Elijah, who accompany him on his ascent into heaven. The first stanza sets the scene, allowing the focus to shift to the metaphoric aspects of “transfiguration” as the kinds of change in the body of the sick person and in the human person of Jesus. The poem develops by elaborating on the promise of eternal life and the quest of the faithful who “want to believe” that the transfiguration happened, that the sick can be cured, and that the changes one undergoes in life are really part of a larger plan designed by God. The persona of this poem, like others in the collection, is that of the unsettled Christian who has more questions than answers about theological matters.
Questions for Ecclesiastes, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, is important because it previews the first of the “unholy sonnets” that grew into Jarman’s 2000 book-length collection of the same name. These sonnets were inspired by British poets John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, known for their contribution to the sonnet form and to English-language poetry dealing with the Christian struggle. Although most of Jarman’s sonnets are serious in tone and topic, a few, such as sonnet 12, illustrate Jarman’s humor and dry wit. In this poem, a “pious man” who is a bit too verbal in his love of God, loses everything to a flood and asks God why this had to happen to him. He is disarmed by God’s candid and irreverent reply, “I can’t say/ Just something about you pisses me off.” Using the child’s hand game of making a church with the fingers, Jarman suggests that worshipers are trapped by “Holy Terror” (sonnet 2). In sonnets 10 and 11, he contemplates the role of the poet as the divine singer, in the tradition of King David.
Not all the poems in Questions for Ecclesiastes are on religious themes. Jarman also writes eloquently of his love for his wife and daughters and shows his keen eye for detail in describing scenes in nature.
Christian Themes
Having established the range of God’s interactions in everyday life and people’s attraction to or need for the idea of God, Jarman spotlights his thesis that because no one can live up to the ideal faith described in Scripture, the quest to believe is as important and somehow more real than believing without questioning. In the poem “The Last Supper,” the speaker considers the many imitations in life and art of the Last Supper to be found in suburban houses and suggests that the Last Supper is the story of a family trying to reconcile its competing interests, just as the Christian is called to reconcile or balance faith and reason. Belying the apparently happy gathering of the family is the “loneliness of God,” whose will is not fully known or embraced. In the final poem of the book, “The Worry Bird,” the speaker remembers how his parents told him to give all his cares to the worry bird, a garage-sale bird statue that sat in his bedroom. The bird takes on the traits of the Holy Spirit in the mind of the mature poet, who has been acculturated to pass his cares on to God.
In Jarman’s poetry, little in the world makes sense. Things are constantly changing—his children grow up, his parents age, he travels from place to place, and time passes while death hovers relentlessly—as the Christian tries to reconcile competing interests in the material and the spiritual worlds. Yet, through all the uncertainties, Jarman remains optimistic, writing that if and when God’s kingdom comes, “We’ll greet him as children would have done,” with cares absorbed by the worry bird and with innocence, steadfastness, clarity, and purity of heart.
Sources for Further Study
Jarman, Mark. Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Collection of previously published essays on poetic themes. Contains an autobiography that includes the helpful partial memoir, “ Body and Soul, Parts of Life.”
Jarman, Mark. “Poetry and Religion.” In Poetry After Modernism, edited by Robert McDowell. Brownsville, Oreg.: Story Line Press, 1998. An analysis of various religious poetry and the place of religious themes in contemporary American poetry with close readings of T. S. Eliot, John Berryman, Jorie Graham, and others.
Murphy, Jim. “A Conversation with Mark Jarman” Image 33 (Winter, 2001-2002): 63-78. An interview in which Jarman covers his composing process, his influences, and his intentions for his poetry.
Opengart, Bea. “God-Wrestling as Postmodern Rhetoric in the Work of Three Contemporary American Poets.” Literature and Belief 23, no. 1 (2003): 23-37. Applies the theory of sociologist Arthur Waskow, who used the phrase “god-wrestling” to describe the struggle to believe in the poetry of Jarman and two contemporaries and to address their tendency to pose questions about faith without providing answers in the course of their poetry.
Vela, Richard. “The Subject of the Poem: Religion, the Everyday World, and the New Formalism in the Poetry of Mark Jarman.” Pembroke Magazine 33 (2001): 283-290. Describes how Jarman achieves intimacy through his style, his perception of common events, and reliance on forms of interrogation that fail to resolve the complexities of life and faith, demonstrating that there are no neat endings or easy answers to the provocative questions his verse raises.