Winter 1979
New Series · Volume 1, No. 1

INVOCATION FOR A CONVOCATION

Of all SYMBOLICITY

You the GROUND
and over-arching PRINCIPLE,

we here assembled
and as it were addressing you

(though your presence all about us
be not given to answering)

we beg to dare petition that,
proper to the aptitude

whereby Nature has chosen us
as spokesmen of and for all natural marvels,

do help us persevere
in pious competition.

loyal to the sources
of our being....


May we think of ourselves
as having come together

to help us all help one another
by reminding ourselves to be grateful

for that ancestral evolutionary twist
whereby we can now name ourselves

even while not yet knowing
how wholly to define us,

as somehow amidst all bickering
we keep on thinking somewhat

of finenesses within our toughnesses, a grandeur
despite our ways of being raw....


May we, though trying variously
to get ahead,

pause as it were to bow down
not to magistrates

but only to the principle
of our sometimes desire

to do as rightly as we can
by the articulate medium, the Wonder of the Word,

that makes possible the here
convoking of us....

KENNETH BURKE (1897–1993), American critic, was born in. Pittsburgh, Pa. He was music critic for The Dial (1927–29) and The Nation (1934–36). A profound thinker whose writings have influenced other critics, Burke saw literature as “symbolic action”—man must view everything through a haze of symbols (language). Among his works are Counter-Statement (1931); Attitudes Towards History (1937); A Grammar of Motives (1945); Collected Poems (1968); and The Complete White Oxen (1968), a collection of short fiction.

Work that appears on the KR web site is from The Kenyon Review and all applicable copyright restrictions apply.