Gospels in Verse

About the Book

I started to think about making the bible into a poem one day when I was sitting in church, trying not to go to sleep while somebody was reading a passage from Isaiah.  It was the passage that the American artist Edward Hicks used as his inspiration for the many paintings he painted collectively entitled The Peaceable Kingdom.    Its not that the passage was especially boring, any more than other passages from the bible, probably less so than most in fact.  Its just that for the first time, I caught myself playing this game in my mind where I try to rearrange the words of the text to make them into rhyming lines.   We have these little handouts at church showing the readings for the day, and I had been looking at the words as if the reading were a word puzzle, trying to make it into verse instead of trying, as I suppose I ought to have been, to gain some edifying message from what I was both hearing and reading.  At that moment I understood that I had been playing this game in my head since I was a child without ever thinking about it or having any awareness of what I was doing.  There is a kind of round-robin program at church, called the lectionary,  where they assign readings according to a cycle which repeats every three years.  I realized that my rhyming game had invaded all parts of the lectionary, like a flu virus.    I suppose the intent of the lectionary is that, with repetition, the readings come to have a familiar quality, so its easy to let ones mind wander and engage other things.  And I suppose another part of this intent is that it permits the text to become a ritual, wherein we give leave to the faithful, that is, those who appear in church every week for several years, to allow the text to become a kind of music, and to supply their own relevance by meditating on the material of their own experience, as if it were a text being set to this music which is also a text.    I must confess that I did not only versify, I also transposed and ornamented small pieces of a text in my mind while I sat through these readings, so that instead of keeping their stolid and prosaic rectitude the words would don finery and trip forward with a lilt, first hesitant and then quite sure.  When the reading came to an end and I resumed my more or less official duty as congregant or chorister, along with the faithful, standing, sitting, kneeling, singing, praying, listening, waiting my turn, and accurately delivering myself of the correct responses during the liturgy; I forgot what I had been doing in the interlude of the reading, these multiple-recurrent poetic daydreams that came over me every week, every year, and every three years simultaneously.  First, it meant that for my mind it was somehow more natural that the text be expressed as a rhyming verse, because in practical terms that is what I had forced it to become without the least need for doing so.  Second, I began to wonder why the little sections in the chapters of the bible are called verses; if they were meant to be thought of as prose, why werent they called paragraphs?  Then I thought of medieval troubadours and poets like Homer who were supposed to have sung for hours, and that oral traditions depended on poetic structures to make the texts memorable enough to survive, and measured enough to go with the music.  After a while it began to seem perfectly natural that the bible or parts of it should be rendered over from the relative sterility of prose into the emotionally fraught subjective world of poetry.    I have often seen it written that the Gospel According to John is thought to be more poetic than the other three, and so I was drawn to consider this as my first enterprise.  Actually I made a list of passages that I like the shape of in many different books from both the old and new testaments.   I quickly realized that there were extended stories i

About the Author

Jabez L. Van Cleef writes texts to encourage creative interpretation of traditional religious observances. He is active in choral singing and has been widely published as a science and technology journalist. Gospels In Verse contains his interpretation of the gospels of John and Luke in rhymed ballad meter, along with other passages from the Old Testament and three original sacred theater pieces expressed in verse form. This book is meant to be a resource for church or temple musicians who are looking for original ways to refresh the liturgy, either by composing new music or introducing balladic storytelling to religious festivals. Jabez (the name, from I Chronicles, means he was born in sorrow) lives in Madison, New Jersey with his wife, who is a choral director, and their children