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CHAPTER 1

The Tyger by William Blake (1757-1827)

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night,
In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
And what shoulder, & what art,
What the hammer? what the chain?
When the stars threw down their spears,
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night,
Most famous now for his poem, 'And did those feet in ancient time', in its musical setting by Parry sung at cricket matches and weddings, William Blake was a poet, mystic, and painter. 'Tyger, Tyger' is from Songs of Innocence and Experience and falls heavily on the experience side of the scales, with 'The Lamb' as its counterbalance on the side of innocence.

'Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee?'

Why would this poem be chosen for Good Friday? Because the creation of a streamlined killing machine tiger symbolises the problem of evil. How can a loving, powerful, creator God allow suffering in the world?

The rhythm of the poem has the clank of a blacksmith's hammer hitting the anvil. But what I like most is that it consists entirely of unanswered questions. This is no sceptical modernist writing, though. It is a visionary Christian poet of 225 years ago.

The fact of these questions is not a declaration of doubt, but a positive readiness to challenge God with an essential paradox of religion (and also of life) that violence and passivity are part of the human condition and part of the physical creation itself. For example, the force of gravity enables life, yet it is a major threat to life. God is in the heat and hazard of the forge as well as in the still small voice of calm.

To question faith is not to deny Christ, but to look for different perspectives. It's like those wonderful moments in Alan Bennett's play The History Boys when the maverick teacher, Hector, makes his scholarship class think for themselves, defend their assertions, and see history in a much wider, interdisciplinary context.

It's no accident that William Blake asks whether he who made the Tiger also made the Lamb, and in the text written in Blake's own hand Lamb has a capital letter, referring to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Did he who made the rapier thrust also make self-giving love? Did he who made self-giving love also let the soldiers drive nails through his own hands?

How does a loving father look on his son's crucifixion? Answer: it is God himself who suffers. Are you convinced?

Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955)

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself. So a woman will lift her head from the sieve of her hands and stare at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales console the lodger looking out across a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside the radio's prayer Rockall.
In this very agnostic take on prayer, Carol Ann Duffy is clearly not writing about Good Friday. So why include it here? Because, indirectly, I think, she's exploring that most basic question whether God exists, and the human instinct to seek help from a transcendent other being, regardless of whether you hold to a formal set of religious beliefs. It is the visceral cry of Jesus on the cross, 'My God, my God.' 'Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer/utters itself.'

The first stanza depicts a woman in despair who finds a revelatory moment of reprieve in staring 'at the minims sung by a tree.' On the surface this beautiful image doesn't make much sense, but it's a good example of how the poetic voice can produce a line capable of generating a wide range of interpretations. We should never regard poems as riddles to be decoded, otherwise one might as well write in prose in the first place.

The poet suggests there is something, too, about prayer that echoes childhood: learning Latin or to play the piano. The 'Latin chanting of a train' is to me sitting in class 2A reciting dominus, dominus, dominum, domini, domino, domino. I can hear the rhythmic sound of the train's wheels over the joins in the rails. But is this also an implicit criticism of prayer as unthinking repetition of incantations? 'Pray for us now' is an allusion to the Hail Mary, a prayer Catholics are often asked to say over and over again, like the imposition of a hundred lines at school, as a penance. 'Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.'

'Inside the radio's prayer ...' is a humorous reference to Radio 4's shipping forecast, of immense value to mariners, and soothing to insomniacs who wake early and can't get back to sleep. Finisterre is of course French for Land's End, or maybe the Biblical 'All the ends of the Earth'. What a pity some jack-in-the-Met-Office decided to change the sea area 'Finisterre' to 'Fitzroy' – the surname given to the illegitimate offspring of kings. There's an added joke though, that not long after the shipping forecast you get 'Prayer for the day', an earnest attempt to relate religion to life, which in some sense is what this poem does. In our devotional recitation of poems on Good Friday it was important to include questioning voices as well as spiritually assured ones because most people interested in developing a personal faith don't want to shy away from the questions religion poses. Questions are productive, not dangerous. The philosopher Blaise Pascal summed this up beautifully in his Pensées when he wrote, putting words into the mouth of God, 'You would not seek me if you had not found me.'

'Lovest thou me?' by William Cowper (1731-1800)

Hark my soul! it is the Lord;
"I deliver'd thee when bound,
"Can a woman's tender care Cease towards the child she bare?
"Mine is an unchanging love,
"Thou shalt see my glory soon,
Lord it is my chief complaint,
As a teenager I used to sit in the choir of Loughton Union Church on a Sunday night and listen to tediously long sermons, bible-based but none the better for it. Every now and then there would be relief from the monotony when the preacher stirred the emotions with an appeal to the heart. If ever I were to become a minister, I thought, I'd do this every week. 'Say poor sinner, lov'st thou me?' This poem unashamedly tugs at the heartstrings and now I might accuse it of sentimentality. It pulsates with the evangelical fervour of a poet who twice suffered bouts of madness and came under the evangelical influence of John Newton, the Anglican clergyman and former slave ship master who wrote 'Amazing Grace'.

Its regular metre and rhyming couplets create a mood of puritanical simplicity ('Hark my soul! It is the Lord') as Cowper invents a conversation between Jesus and a sinner who could be of any age and either sex. Jesus is like the Good Samaritan healing the wounds of the injured, his love stronger than the maternal instinct, an unwavering love strong as death. In the fifth stanza, Jesus refers directly to his sacrificial death on the cross as 'the work of grace' which will reveal his glory, and then in the last stanza the sinner responds by pleading guilty to showing only weak love in return. But the last line of the poem, 'Oh! for grace to love Thee more!', sums up the great evangelical, Reformation doctrine of Justification by Faith through grace alone. The idea is that people can be in a right relationship with God, not through any good work or cash payment to the Church, but simply through putting their trust in God. Even that act of faith or trust shows no merit on the part of the believer, but is achieved entirely through God grace.

Well, I do think there's something maudlin in William Cowper's verse, but I have to admit when this poem was read on Good Friday in church it made an impact and resulted in a silence that demanded a response.

Ambulances by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Closed like confessionals, they thread Loud noons of cities, giving back None of the glances they absorb.
Then children strewn on steps or road,
And sense the solving emptiness That lies just under all we do,
For borne away in deadened air May go the sudden shut of loss Round something nearly at an end,
At last begin to loosen. Far From the exchange of love to lie Unreachable inside a room The traffic parts to let go by Brings closer what is left to come,
Philip Larkin once said of himself, 'I'm an agnostic, I suppose, but an Anglican agnostic, of course'. Like many of his contemporaries he wanted to shake off religion but couldn't quite let go. In 'Aubade' he described it as a 'vast, moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.' 'Ambulances' picks up the theme of death, and the meaning of life, in a cleverly extended image of an ambulance rushing through the city streets, interrupting ordinary people's lunchbreak and midday shopping, to attend a seriously ill patient. The sight of the patient's 'wild white face' above the red blankets on the stretcher sends a momentary shock of mortality through those who see it, so that for a second they 'sense the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do'. They see themselves in the victim's plight and wonder what it all – 'families and fashions' – adds up to. Everything, from conception, 'the exchange of love', to being confined in the back of this grey 1961 ambulance is suddenly pulled into focus in such a way as questions 'all we are'. There is a sense here too of John Donne: Ask not for whom the ambulance calls, it calls for thee.

To me it's not clear whether this is a totally pessimistic, nihilistic view, suggesting life is devoid of meaning and purpose or whether, in a colourful way, it makes Socrates' claim that an unexamined life is not worth living. The images of 'children strewn on steps', shops, 'smells of different dinners', and 'families and fashions' imply an ordinary, shallow, trivialised existence that begs the question: isn't there more to life than this?

This is the big issue for Good Friday. Surely there is more than this. In contemplating Christ's death one is forced to ask the same questions posed here so arrestingly by Larkin, who is doing an important part of his job as a poet by provoking his readers into thinking for themselves. By contemplating the death of Jesus, a person might be made to think about death itself and whether there is any life or meaning beyond it. We know Christianity replies with a resounding, 'Yes, there is.' The theological term for it is 'eternal' life, which isn't the same as 'everlasting' life. Eternal life is a quality of living based on self-giving, community, consideration for others, and a search for the values that might be considered ultimately important – a life exemplified by Jesus of Nazareth. This kind of reflection would also be the essence of an 'examined life'; and if it has any transcendence – that is to say, if it has potential for meaning beyond the life which spans from conception to that last dash in the back of an ambulance – it is as much potential for the here and now as for the world to come.

Redemption by George Herbert (1593-1633)

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
On the surface this poem looks straightforward enough: an allegory of a tenant farmer who wants a cheaper, more manageable lease. The farmer is everyman and the modern political equivalent is ubiquitous, whether a family trying to negotiate an affordable rent in London or a shopkeeper in Oxford trying to resist another rent rise imposed by a greedy college. He tries to locate his landlord in the manor house, but learning that the landlord is 'on earth' on business, he naturally searches for him in the 'cities, theatres and gardens' where you'd expect the rich and powerful to hang out, but in the end finds him amongst 'thieves and murderers' – presumably the thieves either side of Christ on the cross and the baying crowd wanting blood. There on Calvary, at the moment he was about to give up the ghost, the landlord (God or Christ) grants the man what he desires – a new lease, better terms, redemption and salvation, a future.

At another level I find the poem difficult. It makes biblical allusions that might have been familiar to the educated readers of Herbert's early-seventeenth-century Salisbury but which are almost totally lost on us today. 'Having been a tenant long to a rich Lord' refers to the Covenant between God and the Israelites, brokered by Moses, when he presented the people with the Ten Commandments. It was sealed in the sacrificial blood of an ox. This was an agreement whereby Israel would keep God's laws and in return God would protect them. The 'new small-rented lease' the farmer was after is what Christians call the 'New Covenant', mentioned every time the priest blesses the wine in the Eucharist: 'this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.' In this new agreement God assures people of forgiveness and divine acceptance and in return asks simply for faith.

There's another New Testament echo behind Herbert's poem: the parable of the Wicked Tenants in Matthew 21.33-39 in which a landlord sets up a vineyard, leases it to tenants and moves away to another country. At harvest time he sends his agents to collect the produce, but the tenants kill them. Thinking they'll show more respect he sends his son, but the tenants decide that if they kill the son and heir they'll be able to grab the inheritance for themselves. Herbert doesn't follow this precisely, but in the second stanza God has 'lately gone about some land ... to take possession' and, in the final couplet, despite the compression of meaning and description into such a very few words, the son is clearly being killed on the cross amongst thieves and murderers.

The Musician by R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)

A memory of Kreisler once:
I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,
So it must have been on Calvary In the fiercer light of the thorns' halo:
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Friday's Child"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Brian Mountford.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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