For Marcel Văn, as for Pope Francis, Christian contemplation is an experience of the beauty of God. We know him and at the same time love him with a love that wants to regard and respect the mystery of the person’s reality. This is tied up with many ideas about the contemplation of the beauty of nature. But it is also distinct, insofar as the world of persons, the world of grace, isn’t exactly the world of nature.

One particularly evocative poem of Marcel’s brings all these themes together. It’s called “The time when poetry is born” (OWP15).[1] I’d like to explore this short piece and draw out some thoughts and conclusions from it.

The poem

“The time when poetry is born” comes down to us in the Other Writings, a set of notebooks that Marcel worked with and on. Their contents are all over the map. Some are retreat notes, others personal notes, still others sociological or psychological sketches for his spiritual director—and some, as here, poetry.

We also know a little about the history of this poem. A couple of weeks after composing it, Marcel sent it to his spiritual director “without any commentary, so as to see if you understand it.” In the letter he dispatched from Saigon to Hanoi, he goes on to ask that the poem be seen by someone with familiarity with literature, for the purposes of criticism and appreciation (To Father Antonio Boucher, 2 Mar 1951).[2] In fact, a footnote in the Correspondence shows that Father Boucher “show[ed] it to the choir brothers and they all think ‘that it is very good, especially the last sentence [or line].” I think that’s a reasonable reaction.

Here are the contents of the poem as recorded in the notebook:

Dedicated with love to my holy religious sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus.

It is thanks to you my sister that I got to know “poetry.”
Naturally, at that age I knew nothing of it.
The beauty of the fields with a thousand colours,
The gentle breeze on the tufts of rice
Gave rise in me to no emotion.

The filao tree on the side of the mountain,
The spring which spurts at my feet,
The sound of music left me unmoved;
I understood nothing then of poetry.

Then spring came with the flowers
Of pervasive perfume which prompted nostalgia.
However, my hand had no wish to gather them,
Being happy to gaze on them in silence.

And that persisted until the day
When on the hill I made the acquaintance
Of this flower completely imbued with the delights of love.
Strongly attracted by such beauty…

I gave myself to this flower;
Intoxicated by its perfume, in the singing wind,
I remain attached to it, to be never separated.
And since then, poetry has been born in my heart.

14-2-1951 J.M.T.[3] Marcel

My Father, you see that this poem contains nothing but a description of nature: fields, spring, mountains, etc., but that all these things have a spiritual meaning. I think you will find here nothing difficult to understand.[4]

As usual with poetry, it is probably worth reading it a couple of times and letting its weight, connections, and themes sit with us before doing any detailed thinking about it. Marcel, after all, is convinced that this is a piece with some important meaning, and he suggests that, at least in Vietnamese, it might have risen to a quality rather greater than normal.

Interpretation

It’s not easy to interpret a poem about poetry. There is not much of a clear marker for where imagery ends and meta-commentary begins.

A general summary of the poem could go like this. Marcel claims that he knows “poetry” thanks to Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. In fact, he only met her when he was fourteen. After meeting her, however, something in him changed. That something is not just what we’d normally called “poetry.” It seems to have a much broader range.

What Marcel initially does not know is the beauty of nature, creation, landscapes, geography, flora, and so on. He is quite broad with his description of that beauty. The terms he uses are visual (“colours,” “on the side”), auditory (“sound,” “music,” “singing”), tactile (“the spring which spurts at my feet”), and olfactory (“perfume”). He does not connect all this to feelings (“moved,” “nostalgia”).

At some point, he meets the Little Flower who shifts his perspective. Now, he takes note and his feelings issue into a “love” that directs itself at “beauty.”

What this love is, however, is not gregarious, controlling, or manipulative. It is quiet. The author tells us that he “had no wish to gather” the beautiful things that he saw. He was quite content “to gaze on them in silence.” He gave them their space. This isn’t the kind of emotional interaction that seeks to possess, consume, or alter things. Notably, Marcel has avoided the fifth sense, taste, because it is much more closely connected with consumption. The emotional interaction he envisages is one that gives space to breathe. It respects the constitution of what is loved. It appreciates. It loves without a dominance of self-interest. The attraction is towards the inherent “beauty” of the Other.

Simultaneously, the love that we can have also gives our very self. Because he was “attracted by such beauty,” the author “gave [him]self to this flower.” Now, what kind of beauty did this flower have? It was of course a beauty that manifested itself in being “completely imbued with the delights of love.” In other words, love is what made it beautiful. And that beauty inspired him to love, but with a love that respects constitutions and limits and acts as a gift of self, rather than a possession, consumption, or need to change and manipulate.

In other words, Marcel condenses into one poem basically everything that I already pointed out that he teaches in my previous post on the connection of beauty, love, knowledge, unity, and contemplation.

But he also fuses together a new notion. It’s poetry. This is the time when poetry is born. It’s born in an aesthetic encounter. This means, on the surface, the encounter with beauty. Appreciation of nature and human creative output are born in one moment. But these things also “have a spiritual meaning.” Obviously, we can’t stop there. It is contemplative prayer, or something like it, that is intended.

In the fusion of the sense of poetic creation and the sense of appreciating natural beauty, we obviously have our human “aesthetic sense” in the most encompassing form: nature, culture, outside me, inside me, appreciating, generating.

In the further addition of “spiritual meaning,” we have all that the Little Flower herself stands for in relation to the beauty of the love of God—and the other flowers of the field. We have contemplation—and the action that it generates.

In a sense, what Marcel is describing is the birth of what Pope Francis would call “our God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense” (Querida Amazonia 55–56).

Consistent pattern

The interpretation I’ve offered might seem far-fetched. How is some twenty-two-year-old with an elementary-school education coming up with the same connections and notions that Pope Francis would only put into the Magisterium seven decades later? Does he really mean to do all this? Isn’t this too much to swallow?

But Văn was precocious and smart. He was poorly initiated into rational inquiry and human disciplines, but he was unbelievably intuitive. His human experience was vast. And he abandoned himself entirely to grace. It’s not completely unbelievable.

At any rate, there are plenty of testimonies from his letters that would leave a very distinct impression that he has in fact connected all these things together, at least intuitively, even if not in laborious detail.

Consider how Marcel talks about the composition of poetry, noting the connection to the inspiration from the natural world, the givenness of the intuitive grasp, and the notion of simple beauty:

Jesus spoils me a lot. I ask myself what he does so that the verses come so easily to my mind. I sometimes happen to produce three poems, one straight after the other. But I have not the time to write them, so I let them drop and give them back to Jesus. Jesus sends them to me at any time: sometimes at prayer, sometimes during the visit to the Blessed Sacrament: once whilst walking, it sufficed for me to hear the song of a bird, for the verses to spring to mind spontaneously. I have never had to make an effort to compose. I find that my poems are beautiful and pure, because they are produced at moments when I feel a genuine emotion which excludes all dreaming coming from the imagination. (To Father Antonio Boucher, 30 Mar 1951)

And this passage, which gives the same emphasis on experience of natural beauty, sudden conversion of thoughts or inspiration, and grace:

From that moment Jesus remained my only book of meditation and recreation. And that was really the case. Jesus has never disappointed me. Verses continued to spring as usual, and even beautiful ones. In no way was I saddened or preoccupied. God is never short of a method for teaching me. It is sufficient for a breeze to pass for verses full of meaning to flow and enter into my poetry. This is how God spoilt me when I was prone to sadness. (To Father Antonio Boucher, 30 Mar 1951)

To his younger sister he likewise describes another of his poems (“Call from afar”) as “full of meaning and very beautiful, in which I relate to you the route I have travelled to answer the call of Jesus.” That is, he connects beauty and the life of grace. Then he adds:

My poetry is usually easy to understand. Without being too elegant, it contains many verses which hide many beautiful thoughts. Although not having any importance my poems remain a secret that only the Master of novices knows about. I wish, however, to communicate to you a few of the good feelings that love causes to pour forth from my heart, so as to make your love for Jesus stronger, and to make you understand that when one loves, one has to hesitate no longer nor to be afraid. (To Tế , 21 Apr 1951)

He writes later on this theme to his sister as follows:

When one accepts a new duty, there are also many complications and doubts, which results up till now in my time being limited, even being lacking. I hope that after having become accustomed to and having put things in order, my work will be less all-consuming and I will have the time to write down some poems which are simmering in my heart at this time. However, in this world, I find the poems I have composed very imperfect. I sigh ardently for the day when I shall be in heaven. There, with my gaze fixed on my divine Spouse, I will make the most original rhymes gush forth in quantity, so that, then only will I dare to attribute to myself the title of poet, “Poet of Love.” (To Tế , 29 Jul 1951)

We are witnessing a constant of his thoughts, especially during the year of “the time when poetry is born.” Beauty has one ultimate source. He sees it in nature. He experiences it in grace. In both cases, he knows and he loves, but the love is one that respects persons, natures, and constitutions, not possessive and consuming. All this flourishes in the same aesthetic sense as he creates, often quite spontaneously, poetry. He doesn’t keep this to himself. He communicates it, because beauty and love are themselves communicative and want to spread their influence.

Marcel Văn tells us of “the time when poetry is born.” I love to stand at a distance, respect that, and appreciate the beautiful moment that he explains the genesis of “our God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense.”

[1] OW = Marcel Van, Other Writings, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 4; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2018). Additional system for abbreviations explained on page 14, e.g., OWN = notebooks; OWV = various writings.

[2] To = Marcel Van, Correspondence, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 3; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2018).

[3] J-M-T = Jesus-Mary-Thérèse.

[4] It is unclear to me what to make of the italicized commentary at the end of the poem in the notebook version. Was it sent to Father Boucher? It is addressed to him. At the same time, Marcel declares in his letter that he is sending the poem without any commentary.