On the Great Dane

I have experienced another of those happy coincidences that wide reading, both online and in the old-fashioned way, makes less coincidental. In the May 6 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Carlin Romano, that magazine’s critic at large and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, travels for a thoughtful and very original story to Northfield, Minn. That's home of the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, the largest Kierkegaard research library in the world.

Romano’s speaks with 94-year-old Howard Hong, co-founder of the library and translator, with his wife, of the Danish philosopher’s complete works. He asks Hong about Denmark’s recent brush with Muslim fanaticism after one of the nation’s newspapers published satirical cartoons depicting Mohammed. What would Kierkegaard, Denmark’s problematic native son, have said? And what did Kierkegaard have to say about Islam? Quite a bit, as it turns out.

When I stumbled on Romano’s story, I was rereading Collected Poems 1945-1990, by the Welsh poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas (1913-2000). Thomas wrote in English and learned Welsh only late in life. His poetry is harsh, bitter and beautiful, and it’s not surprising that he admired Kierkegaard, whose prose possesses the same stringent qualities. In the 548-page Collected Poems I own, published by Phoenix Press of London, three poems deal explicitly with the Danish philosopher, and of course I may be missing less explicit allusions. The first is titled “Kierkegaard,” from the 1966 volume Pieta:

“And beyond the window Denmark
Waited, but refused to adopt
This family that wore itself out
On its conscience, up and down
In the one room.
Meanwhile the acres
Of the imagination grew
Unhindered, though always they paused
At that labourer, the indictment
Of whose gesture was a warped
Crucifix upon a hill
In Jutland. The stern father
Looked at it and a hard tear
Formed, that the child’s frightened
Sympathy could not convert
To a plaything.
He lived on,
Soren, with the deed’s terrible lightning
About him, as though a bone
Had broken in the adored body
Of his God. The streets emptied
Of their people but for a girl
Already beginning to feel
The iron in her answering his magnet’s
Pull. Her hair was to be
The moonlight towards which he leaned
From darkness. The husband stared
Through life’s bars, venturing a hand
To pluck her from the shrill fire
Of his genius. The press sharpened
Its rapier; wounded, he crawled
To the monastery of his chaste thought
To offer up his crumpled amen.”

Next, “A Grave Unvisited,” from Not That He Brought Flowers (1968):

“There are places where I have not been;
Deliberately not, like Soren’s grave
In Copenhagen. Seeing the streets
With their tedious reproduction
Of all streets, I preferred Dragort,
The cobbled village with its flowers
And pantiles by the clear edge
Of the Baltic, that extinct sea.

“What they could do to anchor him
With the heaviness of a nation’s
Respectability they have done,
I am sure. I imagine the size
Of his tombstone, the solid marble
Cracking his bones; but would he have been
There to receive this toiling body’s
Pilgrimage a few months back,
Had I made it?
What is it drives a people
To the rejection of a great
Spirit, and after to think it returns
Reconciled to the shroud
Prepared for it? It is Luke’s gospel
Warns us of the danger
Of scavenging among the dead
For the living – so I go
Up and down with him in his books,
Hand and hand like a child
With its father, pausing to stare
As he did once at the mind’s country.”

Finally, “Balance,” from Frequencies (1978):

“No piracy, but there is a plank
to walk over seventy thousand fathoms,
as Kierkegaard would say, and far out
from the land. I have abandoned
my theories, the easier certainties
of belief. There are no handrails to
grasp. I stand and on either side
there is the haggard gallery
of the dead, those who in their day
walked here and fell. Above and
beyond there is the galaxies’
violence, the meaningless wastage
of force, the chaos the blond
hero’s leap over my head
brings him nearer to.
Is there a place
Here for the spirit? Is there time
On this brief platform for anything
Other than mind’s failure to explain itself?”