God's Silence in Anthony Hecht's The Fire Sermon and George Herbert's DenialL

The poem suddenly becomes much darker in the last stanza and a Billy Collins explains how teachers, students or general readers of poetry ‘torture’ a poem by being what he believes is cruelly analytical. He says, “all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it”. Here, the poem is being personified yet again and this brings about an almost human connection between the reader and the poem. This use of personification is effective as it makes the

Throughout the Novel Silence, Shusako Endo depicts the cultural clash between Christianity and Japan. We feel the frustrations that this brings, and are provoked to ask questions such as, why is God silent in the midst of his people’s suffering? But the greater question it begs is what cultural implications have we placed on Christ? Do we expect him to act as a hero in our culture would? He transcends time and culture, but do our expectations and experiences cast a shadow on our impression of God? The theme of the silence of God, suggested by the title is brought to light throughout the novel, and perhaps the reader can see this as one cultural expectation placed on Christ by a particular group of people based on their perceptions or experiences. Their experiences in life cast a shadow on their impression of God, and Jesus is to be a cultural hero in their frame.

The holocaust unleashed unparalleled cruelty and suffering to a great number of people; Elie Wiesel survived these hardships, but his innocence was shattered. For this reason, he wrote Night to share his personal memories of his time spent in the concentration camps and details the transformation of his faith and understanding of God. Each person Elie writes about attempts to reconcile their agony with their faith, albeit many fail or have their faith transformed. In this paper, I will describe how Wiesel’s understanding of God transforms as he experiences tragedy and how the various prisoners come to terms with their faith.

Eliezer watched a young boy get punished during his stay in Auschwitz and questions where god is to protect him, but it only turns out it was too late. Eliezer watches a young boy get hung and abandons his faith,”And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where is he? This is where-hanging from the gallows..’ That night, the soup tasted of corpses”(65). And from then Eliezer struggled with his faith and his rebellion during Rosh Hashanah, which was the Jewish New Year. “What are you, my god? I thought angrily. How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to

In the memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel, a young boy and his family from Germany are put into Nazi concentration camps, only to find what the true horrors are. During the holocaust millions of innocent people were killed by the German leader “Hitler”. Throughout the times in the Camps, faith and God is questioned. It is shown that it can be hard to keep faith in God, when faced with hardships.

In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the Holocaust and its atrocities are presented to us in a detailed manner. However, this book takes us deeper than just the physical triumphs and horrendous encounters, but also the pain of loosing complete faith in God. Wiesel goes as far as saying “In the depths of my heart, I felt a great void” (60). Anyone who went through such an atrocity, where the most unfathomable things occurred, where children and families were ripped apart and murdered, would question or even loose their faith in a God.

Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, is about his struggle as a young Jewish boy, alongside his father, to survive the Holocaust in the midst of World War Two. Through his devastating odyssey, Wiesel witnesses how peoples’ faith diminishes over time while living in the camps, especially when people have reached the nadir of their suffering. As a result, people in the camps, and especially Wiesel, have faith that God will save them. As time passes, however, many, including Wiesel are equivocal, and question why their Almighty Creator is letting them go through this pain. Later, once they have been through hell, to them God is gone, along with their faith, and God is dead.

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson portray God as Distant in their written work. Whitman, in his Poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” give the reader this idea of a distant God along with Emily Dickinson in her Poem “I know that He Exists”. After reading and closely analyzing the selections, there is plenty of evidence that humanity is striving for a connection with God but that God reserves himself and keeps distance from our daily lives almost to the point of questioning his existence. First, Whitman portrays God as distant and humans trying to establish a mental connection with him throughout his poem a noiseless patient spider. He uses a spider shooting its web as a symbolic meaning of the souls of humans seeking for that relationship with God.

The poem talks about a man- an anonymous “he”- a perfectionist whose poetry was understandable and who, himself, understood “human folly” and the human psyche like “the back of his hand”. He was

An example of this is Herbert’s looking towards the Bible for stylistic inspiration rather than to alien imagery and ideas of Donne. Another very important and distinctive characteristic of the poetry is Herbert’s introduction of two quiet final lines, resolving the previously mentioned argument within the poem, without answering any specific points mentioned. The doubts in faith and religion are expressed in intellectual terms by Donne, and the argument is answered in this intellectual style too. Herbert, although occasionally exploring the doubts in an intellectual manner, answers his doubts with emotion. In this specific way, Herbert conveys an explicit insight that one is unable to argue or reason with God; one is aware of God’s presence or one lacks this awareness and guidance.

The short stanzas containing powerful imagery overwhelm the readers forcing them to imagine the oppression that the speaker went through in

“The relationship between the energies of the inquiring mind that an intelligent reader brings to the poem and the poem’s refusal to yield a single comprehensive interpretation enacts vividly the everlasting intercourse between the human mind, with its instinct to organise and harmonise, and the baffling powers of the universe about it.”

A major difference between Herbert and Manley’s poems lies in the poet’s feelings on prayer and God’s response -- or lack thereof. Herbert makes his speaker sound hurt by God. He laments “O that thou schouldst give dust a tongue / to crie to thee, / And then not heare it crying! all day long / My heart was in my knee, / But no hearing” (16-20). The speaker argues to God that He gave humans tongues with which to pray and cry out to Him, though He does not respond. The speaker mentions his knees, too. Knees are typically what people in prayer fall on to in respect and awe or desperation and fear. This metaphor is full of impact and power, as he is so desperate for answers that his very heart has left his chest and settled in his knee. Herbert repeats the phrase “But no hearing” (15, 20) to reinforce the idea of God’s unresponsiveness to his speaker’s prayers and pleading. The speaker feels more betrayed at God’s unwillingness to answer his prayers than anything else. Ironically, he gets his wish at the very end. God answers his prayers by

Artillerie is a portrayal of one of the many spiritual conflicts between God and the author’s soul, it exhibits many of the typical characteristics of Herbert’s poems, and it ends on the dominant themes of Herbert’s poetry: submission of his will to God’s. Similarly to his contemporary John Donne, Herbert is often in conflict with God in his religious poetry, but unlike Donne, Herbert in Artillerie, ‘lays down his weapons, crosses over into God’s camp, and finally surrenders unconditionally.’1

Unlike Donne’s intellectual argument against faith, Herbert’s doubts are from a more emotional based rebellion that seems to conclude faith must fill the gaps logic makes in religion. His doubts and dissatisfaction with religious life led to Herbert writing ‘The Collar’, “collar” suggests a symbol of restraint that the speaker wants to be liberated from. The speaker views himself as a farmer who has a barren harvest, so ‘… through this metaphysical conceit the speaker implies that the secular life is full of fertility and abundance that he cannot experience' (Ray, 2014, p. 54) which supplies his reason to want to abscond when he does not feel he has found favour with God. However, the poem ‘… is a soliloquy overheard, and interrupted, by