wordsout
The
sailing of the ark about
commentary
The sailing of the ark
First published in 1992 as part of Breaking the Chains, this sequence of 45 free-form sonnets weighs up the meaning of Christian faith in postmodernity.
The sailing of the ark was written between December 1987 and December 1991, in the form of a letter to my friend Andrew Cornes. I have made some minor recent changes to the text to allow individual sonnets to stand more easily on their own.
The poem
has four phases. Sonnets 1-13 are somewhat world- and
faith-weary as they
recount the emotional cost of balancing dogma against experience. 14-22
deconstruct some of the main paradoxes of faith and the core problem of
biblical
authority. 23-36
find God in obscurity, tracing the incarnation through
the
history of Israel and the nativity to the crucifixion and the paradox
of the
dying immortal. The final section (37-45) considers some of the
personal
consequences of this.
The style—a loose form of unrhymed sonnet—is derived from that of the late New Zealand poet, James K Baxter. Each poem has fourteen lines set out visually in unrhymed couplets, using pentameter as a rough framework for metre. Baxter's sonnets are punctuated in such a way that each is a single sentence, although grammatically he cheats a bit. I have not gone to that extreme in each case, but most comprise only one or two sentences.
In the commentary Sailing out of history I have added some further reflections on the story of Noah's Ark as a use case for considering the authority of the bible.
The drawing of a crucifixion which inspired sonnet 37, is based on sketches of a wood and steel sculpture by Scilla Verney, made shortly before her death from cancer, and reproduced with the kind permission of her husband Stephen.