Water
If I were called in
To construct a religion
I should make use of water.
Going to church
Would entail a fording
To dry, different clothes;
My liturgy would employ
Images of sousing,
A furious devout drench,
And I should raise in the east
A glass of water
Where any-angled light
Would congregate endlessly.
– Philip Larkin
You could probably create a whole Agnostic Anthology of twentieth-century poetry based on the receding (some would say loss) of organized religion as a guiding, unifying social principle. Though organized religion continues to influence or control much in the modern world, for large segments of the population, it is irrelevant, or one factor among many, or seen negatively, & in any case if you decide your religion is oppressive or unhelpful in some way, you can easily find another. There were always alternatives, but with them often came social strictures & social consequences that no longer apply. There is no longer the sense that someone who doesn't go to church regularly is a bad person or a bad citizen; the indifferent average person who trudged to church dutifully mostly no longer feels the need to keep up the act. The theological disputes that tore countries apart in earlier centuries are now smoothly elided, even by church-goers, who mostly want some sense of ritual & community. It's that loss of centuries-old ritual & (alleged) community that lingers in the twentieth-century mind, for some as a sort of golden past in which there was a common understanding of life & its meaning, for others as . . . maybe just a sense that something that used to be so important is now a semi-forgotten relic, something for the tourist trade, like the old churches dotting the English countryside that Larkin grew up in. (You do have to wonder how true that sense of universal guidance & community ever was; people do tend to think the past was simpler than the present, & the people back then maybe less sharp than we are.)
You can sense this nostalgia in this poem, in which the poet receives the unlikely task of constructing a new religion (the old ones just don't cut it anymore. it seems). But there's a bit of tart comedy underlying the whole concept; who is calling him in? This apparently isn't a desire he felt on his own. When he imagines the situation, he imagines someone (or some organization) calling him in, as if he were a lower-level employee receiving a big project at work. And anyway why are they asking him to create a new religion from scratch? Some sort of social need, we can guess.
That brings us to a genuine social need, water. As with many actual religions, the poet's construction begins with one of the essential elements: water. Living in a frequently drought-stricken state, as I do, you become very conscious of the power of water, &, yes, its sacredness, though as with many holy things you see it wasted & despoiled foolishly. Water is often taken for granted, not given the respect it deserves as one of existence's requirements. The speaker here sees its importance; in describing how he would construct a religion, he tells us he should make us of water; should not only indicates an action one will take in the future (this is mostly a British usage, I think) but also something that one ought, really ought, to do. This first stanza is a single sentence, building up to that one word: water; the rest of the poem flows from that one word in a single continuous sentence, climaxing with the final word, endlessly..
The two middle stanzas give us some details about the new religion; interestingly, no mention is made of any theological underpinning, or any Creator, or any sense that there is something significant beyond or behind or in the water. There is no mention of drinking the water (imperative for the continuation of life, of course) or washing anything (clothes, dishes, oneself) in it. Instead we are given views of the social / community & ritual aspects of religion. Fording a stream & changing your clothes to dry ones: this is not the same thing as bathing oneself or washing one's clothes, of course. But it echoes Biblical injunctions to put on the new self (see for example Ephesians 4:24), & donning new robes or new outfits is a long-time way of announcing a change of status (which may be why Thoreau cautions us against enterprises that require new clothes).
Then we have the Images of sousing, / A furious devout drench, which echoes the cleansing, re-birthing experience of baptism (particularly of the total immersion variety). But we only have images of the soaking in the liturgy, much as traditional religions invoke blood & sacrifice but serve you wine in its place; rituals can only go so far before what is memorable turns into what is too inconvenient to maintain. Again, there is an undercurrent of slight mockery: souse means not only to soak or drench, but is also a slang term for a drunkard; yoking furious & devout conjures up the intense, often destructive, energies that organized religion often unleashes (along with the suggestion of total immersion baptism, this makes me think of downmarket Pentecostalist sects).
But the mockery disappears in the final stanza, whose beauty is striking after the slightly silly images of people fording streams & changing clothes & being drenched furiously. The earlier stanzas are limited to three lines, but this final one breaks out into four. Should makes another appearance, again underlining not only future action but that this is an almost obligatory action. I should raise in the east: again, there are echoes of older religions, particularly Christianity; raise may bring to mind the Resurrection, or the raising of Lazarus, or the raising of the dead during the Last Judgment.. The east is the direction in which the sun rises, & is therefore a traditional symbol of rebirth & new beginnings. What does he raise in the east? That simple but necessary thing in life, a glass of water.
Clear glass, presumably, so the sun rising in the east can hit it & refract in shimmering prisms, the way light so gloriously does. Light of course is also a traditional symbol of the Divine, & of knowledge (see the opening of Book 3 of Paradise Lost: "Hail holy light, offspring of Heav'n first-born, / Or of th'Eternal Coeternal beam / May I express thee unblam'd? since God is light . . . "). And in the water the light will congregate endlessly; congregate not only means to come together or gather but brings to mind the congregations that used to fill the now mostly emptied English churches. Only this time the congregants are not people, but rays of light, light transfigured by the water, & unlike the human congregants, who drift away or die, the light will gather endlessly: a poignant image of humanity lightened into beauty, given an eternal, endless life that the poet can no longer pretend to believe in but still, apparently, longs for.
I took this poem from the Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Anthony Thwaite.
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