COLD GRACE: CHRISTIAN FAITH AND STOICISM IN THE POETRY OF J. V. CUNNINGHAM

This process of dealing with experience - verification, assent, conviction, and further validation by tradition - resembles Cunningham's procedure as he makes his way in his post-Catholic life. The alternative to accepting doctrinal certainties as the key to dealing with experience is to work out for oneself the issues of truth and falsity. He follows this procedure both in his development as poet as well as in his philosophical life. In "The Journal of John Cardan" he writes:

For to write is to confront one's primary experience with the externally objective: first, with the facts of experience and with the norms of possibility and probability of experience; secondly, with the objective commonality of language and literary forms. To be successful in this enterprise is to integrate the subjectively primary, the immediate, with the objectively communicable, the mediate, to the alteration of both by their conformity to each other, by their connexity with and their immanence in each other. It is the conquest of solipsism, the dramatic conflict of self with, on the one hand, reality in all its objectivity and potentiality, and, on the other, with philology in its old and general sense: or, with private and with public history (CE 427).

As Marcus Aurelius recommends, Cunningham adopts an attitude of indifference toward those aspects of experience which do not meet the test of "reality in all its objectivity and potentiality," as in poem 8 of "Epigrams: a Journal" (CP 40), in which he examines satirically those who set up specious impressions of terror in order to test their Stoic mettle. Against all such misguided use of specious experience, he affirms rather that the mind is in control:

If wisdom, as it seems it is

Be the recovery of some bliss

From the conditions of disaster

Terror the servant, man the master

It does not follow we should seek

Crises to prove ourselves unweak.

In the last line of the poem he affirms the proper Stoic stance toward such misguided treatment of experience: "I have preferred indifference" (ibid. 41).

Evaluating the "impressions" of experience involves self-discipline and self-reliance by means of the human resource Marcus Aurelius calls "Inner Reason," (ProQuest: Greek characters omitted or Cyrillic characters omitted.) or, in Staniforth's more metaphorical translation, the "Soul's Helmsman" (Dorset 58). Cunningham uses the metaphorical version of "Inner Reason" literally in "The Helmsman: An Ode" (1934; CP, 9-10) and as the title of his first book. The literal helmsman, Palinurus, who failed in wakeful discipline, appears at the end of the poem:

So sailed guileful Odysseus, so sailed

Pious Aeneas,

And cloudless skies brought sleep,

Stilling th'unmasterable, surging deep,

The helmsman stilled, his sea-craft guiding.

O too confiding

In star and wind and wave,

Naked you lie in an unknown grave.

Palinurus thus serves as symbol of the Reason that must remain alert and awake at its task of guiding the soul through the dangerous seas and storms of human experience. In his prose comment on the poem, Cunningham, speaking of "the course of a man's life... through experience to maturity," warns that "if he should ever feel secure, he will drowse and fall from the wheel like Aeneas' helmsman Palinurus, whose unburied bones will finally wash up on some unknown shore" (CE 420-21).