A Review of "The Cutting Edge," by Malcolm Guite

"The sciences long remained like a lion-cub whose gambols delighted its master in private; it had not yet tasted man's blood." - C. S. Lewis, De Descriptione Temporum

In "The Cutting Edge," from his new book The Singing Bowl, Cambridge poet Malcolm Guite describes what happens when the big cat tastes not only man's blood, but God's. Guite packs this poem until every line curls and sings with the pent-up power of a coiled spring. The kinetic uncoiling of the full piece leaves the careful reader stunned. Here is the poem in full:

At my back, like you, I always hear
The edge, the cutting edge is coming near.

Not the blind fury
With the abhorred shears,
But this is what I fear:
The stealthy scissors of a blinded time
Cutting through accretions of the past
Dully and daily deleting whatever is not next,
Sneering and sniping and snipping,
Excising every sign-post from the text,
Parsing all the parts that point away
To something other than our circled self.

I know the angels were the first to fall;
Cherub and seraph spiralled down
In circling curlicues of sacred text,
Flaring in ink and paper to the floor,
The shredded evidence of our affair,
Our old, embarrassing affair with God.
And God himself will follow soon enough;
A little word so easy to excise,
Another snippet from the cutting room,
A sweeping on the heap of history.

But still at night I tiptoe to the door
To rustle through these severed strips of love,
And strew my heart with scraps of poetry,
Forbidden hopes and shards of mystery.
They rustle through me in my waking dreams
And so I'll have a heart-, a head-, a handful when
The scissors come for me.

For at my back, like you, I always hear
The edge, the cutting edge is coming near.

The poem leads with irony as Guite invokes Andrew Marvell's famous, "To His Coy Mistress." In that poem, a young man seeks to wheedle his lover out of her virginity by invoking the relentless march of mortality. What Marvell's narrator hears at his back is "time's winged chariot hurrying near."

But that is merely death, and here the poet dismisses it almost casually: "Not the blind fury/With the abhorred shears." These two lines invoke the myth of the three fates, the oldest and scariest of which was Atropos who with her "abhorred shears" severed the thread of each person's life when the chosen moment arrived. The end of physical existence, the speaker assures us, poses a small threat in comparison to the loss of one's soul while still alive.

The linked imagery continues as the next stanza unfolds: Atropos in Greek means "un-turning." Now the lines abound exactly in imagery of revolving as words like "spiralled," "circling curlicues," and "flaring" seem to hold out hope of a relentless fate who finally relents. In fact, however, they depict the final falling of the severed thread. And this is not the thread of an individual existence as the previous stanza has made clear. It is "the text" that this force pares away. Those two words cover a lot of territory, but when written by a Christian priest, a safe bet says they at least include, and perhaps center on, the Holy Bible. Guite's language does the work of describing the attitude behind much of this sort of Jesus Seminar-style textual criticism. These are "stealthy scissors" that are "Sneering and sniping and snipping," a series of alliterations keen enough to give the reader's tongue a paper cut.

Then more allusion and yet more irony: "I know the angels were the first to fall," a phrase invoking the story of Lucifer's eviction from Heaven. But wait! These are the good angels, "Cherub and seraph," and human scholarship, not divine justice, lops them from glory. They spiral, circle, and flair: The words recall William Butler Yeat's "Sailing to Byzantium," where the speaker petitions the heavenly beings to "perne in a gyre," to whirl downward like the thread that whips through bobbin and spool until a movement so swift as to be imperceptible weaves individual filaments into one continuous cord. These heavenly hosts, by contrast, spin and twist, not into seamless unity, but away from oneness and into isolation. What Wordsworth said of modernity Guite says of modernity's engagement with divine revelation: "We murder to dissect."

Nor is any of this the product of "pure reason," passionless science that follows only where the evidence leads. Guite does all the work of unmasking the lie of disinterested scholarship with the single line about, "Our old, embarrassing affair with God." Yes, Christianity, religion of all sorts, arises from a deep emotional yearning; our theology is an "affair." At the same time, rationalism debunks this yearning not because the desire is inherently untrue (How can a desire be "untrue" in that sense?), but because it "embarrasses" (another emotion!) rationalist assumptions.
"And God himself will follow soon enough." Untwist the text that contains sacred revelation and ultimately the Revealed One disappears.

And then the furtive, subversive final stanza: "At night," "tiptoe," "forbidden" - the words conjure the image of a prisoner who sneaks into the open air. "Rustle" appears twice in four lines, and Guite is too good a poet to have done this because no other verb offered itself to his vocabulary. This word, and no other word, here creates the sound and feel rolling and wallowing in slivers of the written words of our ancient faith. "So I'll have a heart-, a head-, a handful" - the narrator stashes scraps of truth like a survivalist who stocks his doomsday bunker with MREs.

And "bunker" is the right word. Because it is a question of "when," not if, "the scissors come for me."  The lion has tasted man's blood. Shears wet with the life of Divinity cannot be stopped from turning on the human hands that wield them. And so the opening lines repeat at the end to sew up the poem. But while grim, the ending is not despairing. Though understated and apologetic, the enduring picture of this poem is the refrigerator raid on the leftovers of revelation and the daring child in his pajamas who pads down dark hallways to feast his fill. If the grownups have starved us with science, perhaps we must indeed come as little children.