Open AccessSinging and dancing in the cruellest month: A reflection on theology and poetry in a time of COVID
Author(s) -
Christopher Southgate
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
theology in scotland
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1465-2862
DOI - 10.15664/tis.v28i1.2184
Subject(s) - poetry , sorrow , singing , literature , the arts , art , argument (complex analysis) , covid-19 , famine , history , theology , philosophy , visual arts , medicine , management , archaeology , economics , disease , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
This article explores what contribution poetry and the arts can make to the human experience in a time of pandemic. It argues that artistic productions can ‘enlarge the heart’ such that sorrow and anxiety are not removed or defeated but are, as in the biblical text, ‘woven […] into a larger imaginative story.’ This argument is made through close examination of three poems: T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, written in 1922 during the Spanish flu epidemic; “Quarantine” by Eavan Boland, set during the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s; and Malcolm Guite’s “Easter 2020”.