Poet’s Commentary on “Echoes”

(Originally entitled “There is a Presence”*)

Prof. Stephen Palmquist, D.Phil. (Oxon)

Department of Religion and Philosophy

Hong Kong Baptist University

(stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)

When composing “Echoes” I set out to express in an artistic form the cognitive dissonance we sometimes feel between the depth of divine Presence in our experience and the often perplexing shallowness of the various “presences” we experience in our daily life. By starting out with a reference to “every time” and “every space”, the first stanza highlights the contrast between these mundane presences and what religious believers might call “God’s Voice”. If the poem has a “primary” message, it is that God is in all these perplexing presences, though not always (or ever?) in a way that enables us to explain or fully comprehend that Presence with neat rational formulae.

The poem’s original title was “There is a Presence”, simply because meditating on this line is what inspired its creation. The new title highlights my attempt to carve an echoing effect into the structure of the poetry in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most obvious example is the rhyme scheme, which might seem at first to be rather trite but on closer inspection turns out to be (I hope) more than just Hallmark material. The second and fourth line of each stanza rhyme with each other, while the first and third lines of the first and third stanzas rhyme with the equivalent lines of the second and fourth stanzas. With a skilled vocal reading, this regular but asymmetrical rhyming scheme conveys an impression similar to a series of echoes.

Another echoing effect is the subtle transformations of the first word in the first and third lines of each stanza. “Ever” (a universal, rationally affirmative term) becomes “Ev’ry” (introducing the particularity of human experience) by changing only one letter, which in turn becomes “Very” (expressing affirmation), when the same letters are merely rearranged, and is finally resolved into “Never” and “Ne’r” (indicating a negation), as the echo fades. Whereas these pairs remain the same in the first three stanzas, the fourth pair changes, first by adding a letter, then (as if to negate the negation) by removing two (as if to portray a mini-echo reverberating within the last stanza), while also preserving the same total number of letters for this pair (eight) as exhibited by each of the pairs at the equivalent positions of the first three stanzas.

A stabilizing force amidst these echoing effects is the constancy provided not only by rigid adherence to a consistent form (four seven-line stanzas, etc.), but also by the repetition of “In” and “From”, respectively, at the beginning of the second and fourth line of each stanza, and of “Echoes” as the lone word constituting each stanza’s fifth line. By changing the title from the original, overly rational “There is a Presence” to the less explicit “Echoes”, I hope to emphasize the experiential basis of the entire poem, as well as calling attention to the never-changing fifth line as the key to appreciating the interplay between the multitude of presences and the one Presence.

The “ultimate” echo portrayed in the whole poem is the moving hyphen that separates the sixth and seventh lines of each stanza. Just as in the biblical account of Creation God rests on the seventh day, so also the interplay between the sixth and seventh lines depicts the transformation of human understanding of these echoes (the sixth day being the day human beings were created) into the simple reality of the divine Presence at rest.

The first stanza introduces the spatial contrast needed for a rational understanding of any echo: “near” and “far”. Here reason is self-assured, seeing divine presences everywhere, with the “disgrace” of “oblivion” safely out of reach. Ironically, at this early stage of its development, human reason cannot quite grasp the Presence, but is cut off (as depicted by the hyphen) just as it is about to reach its Great Conclusion. This could be taken to represent a simplistic, overly-objective approach to religion. The believer tries to view God as a particular, but is stopped short at the “a”—blocked by the power of the very Presence being described (in line six), the power that resists being reduced to a mere object of rational thought.

The second stanza introduces human emotion into the mix: “fear” and “hope” being the new contrast that carries the echo into its second revolution. The phrase “hope’s disenchantment” expresses the sentiment felt by the maturing believer who realizes that the objectified God has receded into the background of the “seventh day” and we are left with an “is”: the presence of our fears and hopes keeps us going, because even here the distant source of these echoes (God’s Voice) imposes itself on us—only now in our “hearts and souls” as well as in our “minds”.

The third stanza takes us deeper than emotion, into the realm of human sensibility: we are “moved” by wordless sensations as well as by the unspoken meanings of our words—for “sense” has a double meaning here. And yet, the divine Presence seems close to being “quelled” when pretentious (though perhaps well-meaning) believers try to pacify our pain with the pat answers of a religious person who remains deaf to the echoes of God’s Voice in the depths of his or her own human experience. Or, for some people, this paradoxical pacifying of pain is self-inflicted: it may come in the form of drugs or over-work or—dare I say?—excessive devotion to a religious tradition. In any case, the result (somewhat perplexingly, yet true to reality) is that as the echo fades (for here our reason allows us to hear only the bare “There” of our original statement of faith), the Presence is experienced more fully and authentically than ever before.

Finally, the echo itself is silenced, for in the fourth stanza the sixth line is emptied of all words. When the poem is read aloud, the dash should be expressed by a weighty pause before the last line is intoned. For the poem’s last line is no longer an echo, but is the Word itself, made manifest. This cannot happen through rational proof, no matter how much we might gain from reason’s (quite necessary) searching. Yet (again paradoxically), even here the “reign” of reason cannot be “dispelled”. These negations in the fourth stanza are necessary because, without the “resounding” of human reason (human words), we could never be aware of the echo; nevertheless, “reason’s resounding” must be silenced (the sixth line must become void of words) in order for the Word of God to appear in its complete form in the poem’s concluding line.

* Alternative possible titles, perhaps more suitable for a publication whose readers might prefer a more explicitly religious designation, are “Echoes of the Voice of God” or “The Divine Voice”.

This etext is based on a prepublication draft of the published version of this essay.

Send comments to: StevePq@hkbu.edu.hk

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