The Ontological Poet: Review of Outside the Gates of Eden byDavid Middleton

David Middleton
Measure Press, 2023; 98pp.; $25 (hardback)

David Middleton’s Poetics in Outside the Gates of Eden

In the afterword to Outside the Gates of Eden, David Middleton offers a “statement on poetics” entitled The Striking of the Lyre: Demodokos in Modernity. Reflecting on the volume’s contemplative, pastoral, and sometimes elegiac voice, Middleton cites Jacques Maritain’s notion of poetry as a “revealer” of the “radiance of the ontologic mystery grasped by the intuition of the poet.”

A Pastoral Journey: From Eden to Redemption

From the Garden of Eden to the Fall and finally to the Redemption offered to humanity by a new Eden and Paradise, Middleton’s melodically taut pastoral poems offer a way of knowing and being with God that adopts the mystery and order of His creation as a structure for the sequence. The attuned reader will hear not only references to scripture, visual art, and classical epic but also the prosodic rhythms of Wordsworth and the agrarianism of the rural South. Middleton’s Christian aesthetics sit comfortably alongside Catholic poets like Dana Gioia and James Matthew Wilson and continue to be shaped by the Catholic paintings of nineteenth-century French artist Jean-François Millet (a subject he explored in his 2005 The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet).

The Light and Shadow of Rural Life

In formally precise measures that proclaim and so cast light on shadowy visions of rural life—farming, reaping, threshing, gleaning, shepherding—Middleton also echoes the songs of Homeric bard Demodokos, whose melodies famously cause Odysseus to melt into uncontrollable weeping. While readers are perhaps not expected to dissolve into tears, they are moved by Middleton’s commentary on secular modernity as a continual negotiation with pain, suffering, disappointment, fear, and anger. They are offered solace by God’s creation as a source of joy and hope.

Engaging with the Modern World

Middleton turns not only to the lives of epic heroes, Arcadian shepherds, and characters from scripture but also to the everyday experiences of those who suffer the mundane frustrations of high cholesterol, split infinitives, and modern colloquialisms. In Modern Times, the poet mourns the absence of the formal prefix “Dear” in letters or emails. In Two Poems on Quietude, a retired university departmental chair finds peace in “music, books, and tea / Blank paper and this pen,” tangible antidotes to the terrors of “Reports, bad budget news, / Evaluations, pleas / For grades, tense interviews, / Administrationese.”

The everyday measures of these commonplace poems meet the journeying beauty of poems like The Voyage of Pytheas, To Her Who Bears These Verses, and Churches, while Calling Down the Birds gently invokes the peace that birds bring to humanity in desperate need of insight into its earthly and heavenly habitats. Many of these poems situate Louisiana and its residents as a compass point for navigating faith and a forever revised and retranslated liturgy. Middleton insists that the art with which we engage will define our experiences of life as well as death. As he writes in The Potters Epitaph, “Inside an urn my strong hands made / Those hands are in their ashes laid.”

Reimagining the Marginalized Figures

For me, the most compelling poems are those in which Middleton reimagines the lives of figures who are familiar but marginal within their own stories: the infamous Man of Porlock, the older brother of the Prodigal Son, and Millet’s poor who labor grimly in the farmlands of rural France. In An Exmoor Tale, the Man of Porlock appears not as the villainous debt-collector who curtailed the writing of Kubla Khan, but as a kindly soul intimately connected to the land who happily writes off Coleridge’s debt. Only later does he read the poem “Whose birth he’d interrupted with his knock” and bring Coleridge’s fantastical creations into relationship with his local landscape:

And there he read of things he could not know
Except by correlation to a world
He nurtured as its substance nurtured him:
A holy river like the river Exe
Rising at Exe Head, flowing south through shale,
Unmeasured caverns Bristol Bays’ deep caves
Below Great Hangman Cliff, an eastern mount
Dunkery Beacon, mystic honey-milk
Those hives and cows he tended long before
He’d be The Man from Porlock evermore.

The Elder Son and the Burden of Resentment

Connections to the land also abound in Testament of the Elder Son, in which Middleton narrates the parable of the Prodigal Son through the perspective of the brother who remains to work on his father’s farm as “a steward of the corn and egg and seed.” While his younger brother squanders his wealth in “dissolute living,” the elder brother steadily labors on his inherited estate, where the “swaying grasses say my name.” In mellifluous measures, Middleton captures the brother’s resentment of his father and indifference to his brother:

Though he, in his warm mercy, barely heard,
So flush with lush forgiveness unrestrained.
He said again that all he had was mine —
As if it could be otherwise by law —
Although a third was gone among the swine
Whose latest feeder’s new gold ring I saw.

The elder brother continues to manage the estate and, after his father dies, marries and ensures stable futures for his children. The younger brother, however, meets a different end:

And what of him for whom the calf was slain,
A rioter welcomed home with riotous dance?
He soon sought that far country once again,
His contrite heart no more than circumstance.
And when at last word came that he had died
Of drunkenness, disease, and poverty
I placed him with his father, side by side
In shallow graves beneath a carob tree.

Conclusion: The Ontologic Mystery of Existence

Middleton voices the confusion and sad expectation of many a reader of this parable but does so with a profound respect for scripture, captured by the poem’s steady iambic pentameter and careful retelling of Luke’s story. At once quietly perceptive and cosmically directed, Middleton’s poems unfold the ontologic mystery of existence, even as they remind us of God’s immediacy in our revealed creation.