Religion: Poetry of Faith

The greatest writing in human history has been religious writing—though most modern poetry reflects little sense of it. In a natural desire to show that poets and religion have been on speaking terms in the past, mediocre British Poet Alfred Noyes has collected an anthology, The Golden Book of Catholic Poetry (Lippincott; $3.50). In it readers will find such hardy perennials as Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, Francis Thompson.

They will also find an interesting section devoted to non-Catholic poets who, Noyes feels, expressed Catholic thought and Catholic emotion. These include Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning. Especially timely are the atomic-age overtones in Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres, written by Agnostic Henry Adams.

The anthology is rich in attempts of mortal man to express the inexpressibles of religious experience. One of the best is Convert Gilbert Keith Chesterton's The Convert:

After one moment when I bowed my head

And the whole world turned over and came upright,

And I came out where the old road shone white,

I walked the ways and heard what all men said,

Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed.

Being not unlovable but strange and light;

Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite

But softly, as men smile about the dead.

The sages have a hundred maps to give That trace their crawling cosmos like

a tree. They rattle reason out through many a

sieve That stores the sand and lets the gold

go free: And all these things are less than dust

to me Because my name is Lazarus and I live.