In a Hazelnut

I'm gathering speed for a pending conference paper, so here is the first section of my draft essay on appearances/ uses/ appropriations of medieval visionary and anchoress Julian of Norwich in contemporary poetry.

In a Hazelnut:
Julian of Norwich in Contemporary Women’s Poetry


Also in this revelation He showed a little thing,
the size of an hazel nut
in the palm of my hand,
and it was as round as a ball.

I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought:
“What can this be?”
And it was generally answered thus: “It is all that is made”.

(Julian of Norwich, Revelation of Divine Love, translated into ‘sense lines’ as the text ‘A Lesson of Love’ 1980 by Fr John Julian OJN)

Visitors to St Julian’s Church in Norwich will be met by a mixture of resources. The church itself is a reconstruction of the eleventh-century church where Julian, in the fourteenth century, became an anchoress; it contains a reconstruction of the ‘cell’. Next door is a small, charity-run visitor centre, a response to continuing interest in this medieval mystic who became the first woman to write (so far as we know) a book in English. The ‘Revelation of Divine Love’ is a complex text documenting a series of sixteen visions which the woman we know as Julian experienced, aged thirty and a half, during a near-fatal illness which she had prayed for in her youth. It is thought Julian wrote/ dictated a ‘short text’ soon after her visions, and a subsequent ‘long text’ some twenty years later. The Long Text in particular is image-rich and though profoundly Christian, notably speculative as to the nature of grace and of Divinity – there is for example an extended passage on the motherhood of Christ. This is the mystic who has inspired a remarkable renaissance of interest in the twentieth century and whose appeal to pilgrims, scholars, therapists, artists, and poets, continues to grow.

If you know nothing else about her Revelation you will almost certainly be familiar with ‘All Shall be Well, and All Shall be Well, and all Manner of Thing Shall be Well’. Then there is ‘Thou Shalt Not Be Overcome’, ‘Thou art enough for me’; ‘Love was His Meaning’ and more. Images of enclosure are also prominent in the Revelation: ‘In his love we are enclosed’. These are memorable quotes and as inscriptions on card, bookmark, key ring and so on provide comfort for many. There’s even an Anglican version of the rosary – prayers said and counted on a string of beads – which uses Julian’s phrases for its mantra-like repetitions. The ‘quotable Julian’ is quite a successful enterprise; yet it has its critics – feminist theologian Grace Jantzen, for instance, who identified the dangers of an unquestioning passivity which such quotations, taken out of context, might inculcate in their consumers. But Julian quotations are not confined to greeting cards. It’s not surprising that some of these phrases have found their way into poetry, particularly since a modern English translation of Julian first became widely available in 1904 (by Grace Warrack) and, since 1970, plenty of others. So TS Eliot famously wove ‘All Shall Be Well’ into the culmination of the Four Quartets. Eliot was not the only poet to draw from Julian – we have recent Julian references from poets Charles Wright and Geoffrey Hill. Here though I will introduce four women poets who have taken Julian for a theme, whether her life, imagery, myth, or linguistic legacy. Such poetry has I suggest increasingly moved from imagining Julian’s life to a more personal appropriation, whether lyrical or experimental. Taken together it offers redemptive complexity to a mystic who has been somewhat plundered for simple solace. First though, a brief theoretical enquiry as to why Julian is of such contemporary cultural interest.

One of the most compelling aspects of speculation about Julian is that we have almost no biographical information about her – she avoids autobiographical references in her own text. Was she originally a wealthy single noblewoman, a nun or bereaved mother? Did her husband and/or children perhaps die in an outbreak of the Black Death? When did she become an anchoress; what was she like, when did she die? She offers a site of projection, reflecting contemporary concerns. She is in effect a ‘veiled woman’ in more ways than one: there is ‘a veil’ over her biographical details; as an anchoress, she is literally veiled, and most likely never seen even by those who consulted her street-facing window for spiritual discernment. Symbolically this hidden-ness of Julian’s has strong symbolic resonance with theorist Luce Irigaray’s description of a woman veiling herself in order both to protect and disguise the fact that she has ‘nothing to be seen’; lacking phallic visibility biologically, and culturally, she adorns and erases herself from the sexual economy, becoming a space for projection but also a place of instability where language itself can buckle. In Irigaray’s writing, veils and veiling are a recurrent trope, and the position of the (veiled) woman is one of unstable centrality in the prevailing “masculine order”: “How can one trade on something so empty? To sell herself, woman has to veil as best she can how price-less she is…. Whence the importance she vests in fabric and cloths to cover herself with…woman weaves in order to veil herself…and restore her in her wholeness.” Her only language, in this position, is one of subversion, which opens up the indefinable space of the mysterique. I will return to the linguistic aspects of this theory: first I would like to show Julian poetry as an example of imaginative and metaphorical projection.

Denise Levertov’s ‘The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342- 1416’ appears in her 1987 collection Breathing the Water. After a prolific and politically engaged poetic career British born Levertov developed her spiritual commitment and became Roman Catholic. Her perspective can therefore be considered Christian although her sequence of Julian poems are interested predominantly, although not completely, with biographical ideas about Julian; events that might have occurred in her childhood or early adulthood to pave the way for what Levertov clearly considers to be both mysterious and comforting. But facts are sparse and it is necessary to speculate: “ To understand her, you must imagine…” And Levertov does just this. Some scenes in the first section of the two-part, six poem sequence are positively pastoral, a lost England characterised by ‘the dairy’s bowls of clabber, of rich cream,/ ghost-white in the shade, and outside/ the midsummer gold, humming of dandelions’. Levertov imagines glass church windows depicting stylised scenes of the crucifixion, Mary and ‘the throne of God’; her poem itself acts like an instructive glass window ‘coloured like the [idealised medieval] world’: ‘calves were lowing, the shepherd was taking the sheep/ to new pasture..’.

The poem with most biographical ambition is Levertov’s second in this sequence, however, which alludes directly not only to Julian’s age at the time of her visions (one of the few facts in Julian’s own text) - ‘Thirty was older than it is now’; but also to Julian’s petition for three ‘wounds’ (of contrition, compassion and longing for God, again according to Julian’s own text). Levertov speculates that ‘if she had loved,/ she had been loved. Death or some other destiny/bore him away’ although Levertov supposes ‘she had not married’ prior to her anchoritic life, something which is now in some scholarly contention (though still without proof either way). Julian’s unusual learning (for a woman) is beyond contention however: ‘Somehow,/ reading or read to, she’d spiralled/ up within tall towers/ of learning, steeples of discourse’. Levertov depicts a basically linear ascent of literacy, rather than staying with Julian’s own imagery of inner space and enclosure – the anchorhold, after all, was a ‘room of her own’ where Julian was able to think and write. Interestingly, Levertov, like many popular modern commentaries (often with little acknowledgement of the extremely different circumstances and world view of medieval society) also insists that there is an affinity between Julian’s experience of life and ours: ‘she lived in dark times, as we do’. This sentiment can all too easily be construed as proof that Julian’s life and message are especially important for us, here, now – it can equally be seen as a symptom of our ability, perhaps our need, to project our own situation onto a distant other and find there consolation.

Levertov’s speculative second poem addresses her major other affinity with Julian’s own project; that of the power of metaphor – and particularly embodied metaphor, that which connects directly with the body and its possibilities. To desire wounds in Julian’s time was ‘not…neurosis’ but ‘the desire to enact metaphor, for flesh to make known/ to intellect’. And although Levertov does not gloss over Julian’s bloody visions of the crucifixion or her parable-like visionary narrative fragments, her poetry twice settles on Julian’s homely but mysterious metaphor – that of the little thing, the size of a hazelnut, resting in the palm of the hand, and representing all that is which owes its existence entirely to the grace of God. In Levertov’s fourth poem the hazelnut is sourced backwards to a childhood memory of an egg cupped in the palms: ‘Just so one day…/her mother might have given/ into her two cupped palms/ a newlaid egg, warm from the hen;/ just so her brother/ risked to her solemn joy/ his delicate treasure,/ a sparrow’s egg from the hedgerow’. The poem contains its own explanation of this ‘macrocosmic egg’ (whether or not Levertov was aware of 11th century mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s vision of the ‘cosmic egg’ is not known, there is certainly a resonance between the two images): ‘waking each day within/ our microcosm, we find it, and ourselves’; here Julian’s divine imagery of ‘all that is’ is our extrapolated lesson: full of enclosed potential; a poem, rather than a swift soundbite, a small round object in the hand, packed with subject for meditation.