Poems about Religion

In the paradox of contemplation of the divine, the sticking point is not so much whether God exists--a tiresome preoccupation--as whether God is worth the trouble if extant. One important reason is the problem of evil, as articulated in the writings of many philosophers and poets, If God be God he is not good; if God be good he is not God. Another reason is the ambiguity, the "unreachableness," of divine presence and agency in the world more generally. That is because God is, ultimately, unknowable by human beings. They are left to postulate and consider God's behavior, if any, but whether they are hostile to the idea of God or eager to express their faith, God as a concept, being, creative principle, or providential presence remains elusive. That is where the poet enters the picture, exploring the problems, ambiguities, and paradoxes of God in a variety of ways.

The creative principle of God is given treatment by Robinson Jeffers in "Shiva," a sonnet that develops that concept through meditation on the behavior of the Hindu god of destruction and subsequent creation. The treatment is somewhat ironic, for the poem's principal focus is destruction, not creation. In the first quatrain, the god takes the form of a preying female hawk that hunts down and kills intangibles that are considered important to human experience, peace, security, honesty, confidence, and liberty. The imagery is the hunting of other birds--pigeons, the heron, and, ultim

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cause faith seems to bear no fruit for the just. 4. "To a Calvinist in Bali" Because the text provides no context for this poem, the reader is obliged to bring some history and understanding of a situational oxymoron. The first stanza characterizes the Calvinist (Puritan) as stentorian moral observer of the world, one of the "elect" whose earthly fate reflects the ultimate fate of his or her soul. The second stanza characterizes the lush, exotic, and sensuous tropical setting of Bali, which could not be more antithetical to cold Boston, Massachusetts, or damp and gloomy Bristol, England. In that stanza, it seems that the Calvinist is uneasy in the setting, a feeling confirmed in the third stanza when it appears that the Calvinist, who is a servant, is possibly a missionary sent to Bali to convert the Balinese from their Hinduism to Christianity. The tropical climate is oppressive (one can almost picture the missionary decked out in a Puritan Thanksgiving costume explaining life to the natives), but the poet is drily suggesting that the sacrifice of comfort can be offered up as a kind of atonement. That idea is paid off in the fourth stanza, which first cites the undoubted culture shock of local social mores and t

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