Ancient Muses and Student Poets: Storytelling in Verse

I have asked some of my students at the University of Chicago to quote their work for this article. I am grateful for their enthusiastic response and have honored their wishes to be credited by name or anonymously.

In a world reverberating with poetic speech, Christianity blossomed. Poets retold biblical stories, conveyed their doctrinal convictions, and reflected on their faith in the midst of personal struggle. Drawing from my own research on Greek and Syriac poetry, I decided to design a survey course that would both introduce students to late antique authors and consider how later poets diverged from and sustained earlier traditions. How did Christians respond to and transform received poetic traditions? What habits of biblical interpretation and narration does one encounter in Christian poetry? How does poetry function as a medium for theological inquiry, debate, and ethical reflection? Over ten weeks, thirty-five students from various undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs became my interlocutors for this inquiry. Together we traversed linguistic and doctrinal boundaries, reading across twenty centuries from Syria Palaestina to the Iberian Peninsula, Edessa to medieval England, Renaissance Italy to the contemporary United States.

For the first few weeks we focused on late antique poetry composed in Latin, Greek, and Syriac. We discussed authors such as Prudentius, Proba, Gregory of Nazianzus, Romanos Melodos, Ephrem the Syrian, and Jacob of Serugh with a focus on storytelling, attribution of imagined speech, and their use of the Bible. Students discovered the ways poets expanded biblical stories and foregrounded minor characters to shift an audience’s perspective. Romanos’s dramatic and swiftly paced kontakia opened avenues for examining the role of liturgy and performance for nurturing beliefs and practices.

We discussed foundational works in poetic aesthetics such as Michael Roberts’s The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity and Aaron Pelttari’s The Space that Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity. I introduced students to the field of Syriac literature through essays from Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Sebastian Brock on the creation and amplification of female voices.[1] The writings of Derek Krueger illuminated the ways that Romanos modeled religious subjectivity through poetic narrators. I assigned Karl Olav Sandnes’s The Gospel According to Homer and Virgil to explain the intricacies of Proba’s Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi. The cento, a poem formed from verses and sections of previous works, opened up textually grounded conversations on how some learned Christians engaged classical culture to express their faith in an elevated style. In addition to participating in translation groups, advanced students surveyed the larger landscape of late antique poetry through the work of Laura Lieber and Tzvi Novick on piyyutim (Jewish and Samaritan liturgical poetry).

No one could have foreseen the challenges that arose from teaching in the spring of 2020. With our library limiting access to students and faculty, I had to rethink research assignments and assessment. Ultimately, I chose to supplement close readings and traditional analysis with a more creative assignment: learning through imitation. This project was placed at the midpoint of the course to allow students to pause and apply their newfound insights into the poetic rhetoric of early Christians. Late antique poets – with their penchant for storytelling and dramatization – offered students plenty of examples to emulate. The assignment had two parts:

Part One: Retell a biblical story, a cultural memory, or a story from any religious or philosophical tradition using the techniques we encountered in the poets discussed over the last few weeks. You should imitate artistic styles, interpretative approaches, and modes of presentation. When selecting a topic, narrow your focus on a single scene or narrative moment to explore deeply.

Part Two: Through a short preface and footnotes, reflect on your artistic process in conversation with course readings. What are your primary rhetorical and pedagogical aims? How does form enhance your message? What aspects of familiar stories and characters did you open up for readers? Can you envision a performative context for your piece?

I underscored the openness of the prompt as an invitation for students to customize their work to suit their individual interests and artistic tastes, even while Part Two encouraged students to apply what they had learned from historians and literary theorists. Reading and commenting on their annotations allowed me to have a one-on-one conversation with students, a welcome benefit when the class size had made it difficult to form connections over Zoom discussions and asynchronous platforms. Attention to literary devices like rhyme, alliteration, and rhythm, equips students to consider the particularity of poetry as a medium for religious expression.

The students engaged the assignment in surprising and profound ways. Most composed inspired poetry, but a few applied the narrative techniques of late antique poets to other genres, scripting original plays, writing short stories, and creating visual art.

The most successful submissions reimagined stories from fresh angles. Taking Boethius and Prudentius as models, one student staged The Acts of Thecla as a three-character play featuring the cities of Antioch, Seleucia, and Iconium imagined as women. These figures bore witness to the exploits and miracles of Thecla drawing out the importance of location to the saint’s life. Inhabiting the point of view of relatively minor or intentionally silenced characters, a practice students observed in Greek and Syriac authors, proved a powerful rhetorical strategy. Stories of sexual violence also drew attention as students sought to redress injustice within the biblical texts and give voice to female pain. One student composed and recorded a song from the point of view of Bathsheba (2 Sam 11) to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” In the composition, Bathsheba relates her own story of heartbreak at David’s hands:

Ashamed I was to be used so,
violated by one so powerful and known.
King anointed, exalted, respected.
A destructive end you have pursued
and cursed now are all within your brood.[2]

Reflecting the power of refrains, she punctuated her song with a reminder of the multiple dimensions of Bathsheba’s identity: “Bathsheba, wife taken, mother heartbroken, woman scorned.” The emotions here on display are a good example of the empathetic reading practices students brought to the biblical text. One poem recounted the mental anguish of the concubine in Judges 19 by imagining a young woman’s final interaction with her parents: “But her mother knew, she could always tell/that she did not want to go/home again to her living hell.”[3] Echoing the ways Ephrem and Jacob vivified figures through monologues and narrative embellishment, students pressed beyond sparsely recounted biblical stories to create engaging, emotional portrayals.

By considering the moral deliberations and struggles of biblical characters from a first-person perspective, students understood texts more intimately. One piece, recorded as a rap, captured the eagerness (and subsequent disappointment) of the rich young man who asks Jesus to point out the way to eternal life (Mt 19:16-30; Mk 10:17-31; Lk 18:18-30). Opening with playful ebullience, “All the jewels, all the mules, everything I’ve flaunted, / but when I’m alone man I’m still haunted,” the writer emphasized the conspicuous self-assurance of the youth: “I was so rich that I never had to murder/ I was so rich that I never had to steal/ or tell a lie just to get another meal.”[4] Another student-poet reconstructed the community behind the Epistle to Philemon by assuming the voice of Apphia, “our sister” (1:2). Listening to Paul’s plea on behalf of Onesimus through the lens of Col 3:11, Apphia questions the apostle’s claims, “A servant is not a servant. Might then, a woman be not a woman? Could it be? Or am I only a witness to a discourse that does not embrace [me]?”[5]

Students also displayed a keen eye for poetic form and rhetoric. Imitating the elaborate invocational prayers found in Jacob of Serugh, students crafted their poetic narrator and gave structure to their short compositions. Some took up the formal challenges of composing a cento. Drawing lines and phrases from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (cited in brackets), one student recounted God’s directive to Hosea to marry Gomer:

“My word, O prophet, and effectual might,” [III.170, XII.375]
So spake the almighty maker that one, [VII.174, VI.23]
A servant of God, in hope heard his voice. [VI.29, III.630, 710]
“Elect to wed her, Daughter of Sin, so [III.184, V.216, X.708]
is my will, with that bad woman to bring [III.184, X.837, 983]
A woeful race, own begotten, and of [X.984, 983]
Ere conception, race unblessed to being.” [X.987, 988] [6]

In their annotations students observed how the base texts shaped their new compositions. The lyrics from the Broadway musical, “Hamilton,” led one student to intensify the political dimensions of Jesus’s ministry and death. The words of Aaron Burr slide easily from Judas’s lips: “Now I’m the villain in your history.”[7] More than a simple pastiche of familiar lyrics and verses, the cento fosters evocative parallels and reveals a thoughtful negotiation between source and rhetorical goals.

As critical readers, students not only observed how ancient authors connected distinct biblical passages through the use of imagery and types, but they actively forged intertexts. Responding to the potent maternal imagery of Ode XIX from the Odes of Solomon, one student wove together biblical figures through familiar imagery:

And the Spirit pierced the womb of the Mother,
and she received the holy and made it blood
because from the blood would come the wine for the Beloved.
And the spear pierced the soul of the Mother,
and the holy wine began to flow for the Beloved.[8]

The style of poetic rhetoric even led students to consider the role of chronology in storytelling. They fractured the sequence of narrative action as allusions and foreshadowing troubled linear timelines. Such examples show attentiveness to how Ephrem and others rearranged biblical language and imagery as mosaic tesserae to create distinct expressions.

The present pandemic has, without question, changed the way we teach, learn, think, and relate to one another. In developing this course, I reflected openly with students: what difference does the study of the ancient world and its literature make in times such as these? Throughout the course we discussed how syllabi and historiography reflect conscious decisions. Whose voices are centralized (and marginalized)? What questions must we ask? How does our own experience inform our readings? And finally, where do we go from here? How can we evolve as thinkers and interlocutors?

For those of us teaching and writing about late antiquity, I would suggest that the often-marginalized genre of poetry brings a polyphony of voices to the table. Poetic literature compels us to listen for multiple perspectives: from the imagined voices of female biblical figures to late antique and medieval women such as Proba and Kassia – not to mention modern and contemporary poets. A survey course of such breadth reveals shifts over time and distance, while also unearthing surprising affinities. Students read late antique Syriac poems featuring pearl imagery alongside the medieval English Pearl Poet to query how Christians in distinct historical and geographical contexts returned to a single biblical image to express their visions for faithful living. A class dedicated to the character of Eve featured readings from Narsai of Nisibis in tandem with premodern poets Aemilia Lanyer and John Milton to glimpse the ways biblical storytelling around Genesis participated in the construction of gender. We read the recent edition of Jupiter Hammon’s poetry in conjunction with William Langland’s Piers Plowman to consider how two Christians reflected on social injustices and structural violence through a biblical idiom. For the final class, students compiled their own reading list highlighting the religious aspects of artists including George Herbert and Kendrick Lamar around the themes of death, faith, and suffering.

But most importantly, this assignment encouraged students to develop their own voices. Their fearlessness and imagination – in the midst of crises personal, local, national, and global – affirmed that in both the ancient world and our own today, poetic speech is power.

[1] There are several essays from both authors one could assign, for example: Sebastian P. Brock, “Creating Women's Voices: Sarah and Tamar in Some Syriac Narrative Poems,” in The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity, ed. Emmanouela Grypeou and Helen Spurling (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 125–42 and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, “Spoken Words, Voiced Silence: Biblical Women in Syriac Tradition,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9, no. 1 (2001): 105-131.

[2] Kristen Joseph, English and Literature major and graduate with the class of 2020. 

[3] Paige Spencer, MA student in the Divinity School.

[4] David Kim, MA student in the Divinity School.

[5] Ian Caveny, MA student in the Divinity School.

[6] Emily Barnum, MA student in the Divinity School.

[7] Alexis Wolf, a Comparative Literature major and graduate with the class of 2020.

[8] Viviana Rojas Madrid, a Psychology major and rising senior. 

Erin Galgay Walsh is an Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School.