‘Love-Runes We Cannot Speak’: Sacred and Profane Love in The Pentecost Castle
Geoffrey Hill’s sequence The Pentecost Castle is both attentive to its poetic progenitors Calderon and Lope, and independent in its ambiguous use of the contrahecha a lo divino. Considering the debate between Schleiermacher and Hegel over the place of religious feeling, I read Hill’s sequence as a m...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2012
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2012, Volume: 26, Issue: 2, Pages: 199-213 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Geoffrey Hill’s sequence The Pentecost Castle is both attentive to its poetic progenitors Calderon and Lope, and independent in its ambiguous use of the contrahecha a lo divino. Considering the debate between Schleiermacher and Hegel over the place of religious feeling, I read Hill’s sequence as a meditation on the capacity of poetry to reliably communicate religious feeling. I suggest that the poems cannot successfully represent assured faith, but instead show a condition of doubt that is necessary to fully depict religious experience. Connecting the sequence to Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, I suggest that desire frustrates the poems’ religious metaphors, but the desire for nothing allows the poems to illustrate a subjective engagement with God that is at the heart of both Weil and Schleiermacher’s philosophies. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frs010 |