Miracles of the Virgin Mary, in verse Book

The long narrative poem'be it considered an epic or not'is a rare form today. When John W. Lynch published A Woman Wrapped in Silence'1941, from best I can tell'the form was still prevalent in recent memory. Edwin Arlington Robinson, author of poems like Merlin, Lancelot, Tristram, and King Jasper (which had a notable preface by Robert Frost), had just died in 1935; Robinson Jeffers had already published the more well-known poems of his career, like Tamar in 1924 and Cawdor in 1928, though Medea was still to come in 1946. This is to say that Lynch was not alone in his form, however strange it seem today.

Lynch's style, though, was somewhat odd. His focus was not on the exterior action'as is common in narrative poetry'but on the inner life. For this is a poem of the interior life of Mary. Lynch's voice is an omniscient narrator, occasionally speaking from the modern day, talking about the differences in what the different Gospels report, or about later traditions, but, in general, his view is limited to what Mary is thinking and feeling. This focus on the interior, while allowing intensive psychological description, leads to an abstracted work. Since the narrator is third person, and it is not Mary herself reporting her experience, there is a kind of calmness that reigns throughout the poem, a coolness, which Lynch's fluid blank verse supports. Even in the depths of the Crucifixion, the poem is not very fervent: it is a cool, somewhat detached observer calmly reporting on the mother's inner anguish.

This poem is not in Mary's voice, and, really, it is almost voiceless: Lynch is scrupulous about not putting any words into the mouths of Mary, Jesus, Joseph, or anyone else. I believe Joseph may have a word or two, but that is all: any other dialogue given is in direct quotes from the Douay-Rheims Scripture. This lends strange gaps to the work, as Lynch often shies away from describing what Scripture states explicitly. In many climactic moments, the poem stops, and prose Scripture is inserted. It gives an odd feel to the work, as in the description of the Annunciation, where Lynch's verse merely talks around the edges, commenting on how "Luke had words to tell, but Luke's good words / Are faltering, and halt before they lead / Beyond the outer margins of the light," or how, to Gabriel's speech, Mary "Not, 'Aye,' returned: not, 'Aye, for all the tribes / And all the worlds await.' But secretly, / Uneager, prideless, unafraid, the brightness / Flamed to greater radiance, and then…" her Scriptural response is quoted (7-8).

Throughout the work, Lynch is trying to strike a balance between providing a continuous thread of narrative and keeping strictly to Scripture (as he says in the acknowledgement at the end, he had another priest correct the poem so that it would be brought "scrupulously within the limits of what is factually contained in the New Testament" (277)). Rarely does he bring in anything from legend or tradition, and when he does so, he is very forthright about it, as when he discusses a traditional spot from which Mary is said to have watched when the people of Nazareth tried to drive Christ off a cliff (210-211). Occasionally, he is very harsh about such legends, as when discussing the Flight into Egypt, where he proclaims that people "have been impatient of such wisdom / And have chafed at Matthew and have made / Embroideries of further words to web / The silences he left with intricate / Detailing" (88). Yet Lynch's whole work is, in a sense, like this: all of the episodes of his poem are "embroideries of further words to web / The silences." This is not to say that it is wrong for him to do this: it is simply pointing out what he is doing. He is adding to Scripture, however much he claims he is not, by expounding on Mary's inner life and thoughts.

In general, this expounding aims to portray Mary as any mother, describing her relationship with Christ in ways any mother's relationship with her son might be described. This can lead to touching passages, such as the description of how Mary felt during her forty days of enclosure after her childbirth, before the Presentation: "And she was grateful then, / That for this little while there was no more / Than time, and no more to be asked of her / Than loneliness with Him" (57). (This could be seen as an idealized version of what all maternal leave should be.)

Lynch's view of Mary and Jesus' relationship, though, becomes much more debatable in the latter part of the work, when Jesus is an adult. He portrays Mary as abandoned by Jesus, as shunned by Him, as so often happens with parents and their adult children. That comes through in the Wedding at Cana, at the moment when she and her relatives try to see Him and are rebuffed, and throughout His public ministry. Yet this idea of abandonment continues on: Lynch reads Jesus' words to Mary and John from the Cross as a disowning of Mary. "He'd asked He be to her no longer son! / He'd severed her from Him! He'd asked not tears, / Nor pain, nor life, He'd asked she turn away / From motherhood! That she unbind her bond / In Him, deny her name, her love, refuse / Her own and grant that He was not and she / No longer be!" (246) And this is not all, for, since Lynch strives to strip away tradition and legend, he cannot even depict a post-Resurrection meeting of Jesus and Mary, since it is not mentioned in Scripture. He tries to find a way, but it is always hedged by backpedaling and uncertainty: since Lynch's aim is not to fashion a narrative, but to reflect on Scripture, he cannot forthrightly depict what is not there. Even if His meeting with her is granted, though, Lynch cannot let Mary truly feel joy: "He was alive, but He had not returned. / She knew that now. She'd seen Him, but He'd not / Returned. His name had altered. He had gone" (271-272). The Resurrection, instead of bringing joy, brought confirmation of abandonment: ""These were / The hills without Him now. These were His roads / Without the hope that He might pass, or turn / A lane to bring a shadow in this sun. / This was the world without Him, after Him, / The silence when His words had all been said, / And He had gone. This was her own place, lonely, / And she'd come to it" (273). This is a Mary who seems ever alone, ever abandoned, who does not even seem to feel God with her (oddly, He is rarely mentioned in her psyche, at least after the opening sections of the Infancy Narratives). This is an aging mother whose son has left her for good, spurning the one who bore him, and leaving her, a widow, alone forever. "She was / A woman now who was alone with time, / And in her heart, the wait and ache of time" (275). So the poem ends, with an abandoned, joyless, widow.

It is a shocking portrayal compared to typical views of Mary. In reality, it seems like a view of Mary without the supernatural. Mary does not seem to feel God with her, she does not seem to feel part of His plan, after the beginning; this is the Mother of Sorrows, but not the Lady Full of Grace. No one would say to this Mary, "Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia!" For this mother cannot rejoice, while she feels ever absent from all; this Mary is the true Mother of the Disappeared.

If we put aside the debate on how accurate the representation of Mary's mind is, it's worth a quick look at the verse itself. Lynch writes in blank verse, unrhymed, loose iambic pentameter, just as Edwin Arlington Robinson did in his narrative poems a decade or two before. In general, Lynch's verse is very smooth, flowing easily between lines, with almost entirely common words, so that it is a shock whenever he uses a more obscure or poetic words, as when he speaks of "wolves couchant" or says "the sun was lapidist" (89, 155). Though the general style is older'after all, Milton's epic was in blank verse, as were most of Shakespeare's plays'there are bits that reflect more modern poetic trends, such as his use of sentence fragments connected by ellipses, or sometimes repetitive lines where the syntax breaks down, as in this description of the nailing of Christ to the Cross: "Then the mounting, breaking ring / Of iron bent again to iron, beating, / Beating, sounding to the air on strokes / Of iron, beating to the skies that filled / And rang and held above the world the iron / Beating down and sounding till no more / Of earth, or life, or memory was left, / But only on the air, the beat of iron, / Iron, sounding, sounding beat of iron" (222). Typically, the verse is fluid and focused on describing the mindset of Mary, without too much attempt to use poetic devices to make individual lines or phrases stand out, though there are occasional instances, as in the phrase, "We must not trust too much / The much too ardent mind," or the repeated thesis, "His way with men has been to take men's way" (90, 6). Personally, I like poetry to be more self-consciously poetic; I like the devices, the inversions, the alliterations, the rhymes, all of it, so Lynch's style is not my favorite, but I think he did it well.

In conclusion, Lynch's A Woman Wrapped in Silence is a work of a modern mindset, a psychological analysis of Mary that often seems to strip away the supernatural, set in a now archaic form, the blank verse narrative poem. Because of Lynch's strictness to Scripture, there are necessarily some breaks in the narrative'the lack of a childhood narrative of Jesus, Mary's almost complete absence from His public ministry'where some poets would use poetic license to smooth it together. (An old example is Marco Girolamo Vida's Christiad, a Renaissance Latin epic.). Personally, I found Lynch's verse a bit too plain much of the time, and I would argue with his characterization of Mary's relationship with Jesus, and especially with his lack of description of Mary's relationship with God; however, if I looked at the poem absent the context of Christian tradition and Scripture, I think it powerfully portrays a mother's sense of estrangement from her grown son. The whole first section of the poem shows the closeness, the deep love of the mother for her child; then there is the break of childhood and early adulthood; when the mother and child meet again, when he is an adult, there is a gap'unbridgeable, it seems'between them, a gap that survives death itself. My rating will reflect my personal feelings towards the work, but, if you wish to see Mary portrayed as the true Mother of Sorrows, to the extreme, then Lynch's poem is a worthy read.