Church And State - Analysis

A poem that refuses to let the poet off the hook

The central move of Church and State is a self-correction: the speaker starts by imagining a clean, uplifting late-life poem about power subdued, then immediately calls that impulse a lie. The first stanza offers a tempting fantasy of authority tamed: the Might of the Church and the State with Their mobs put under their feet, followed by a private reward—heart's wine running pure and the mind’s bread growing sweet. But the second stanza yanks that sweetness away by naming it cowardly. The poem’s argument is that a poet who sings only purity and sweetness in the face of collective power is practicing evasion.

The first stanza’s comfort: power mastered, inner life clarified

At first, the speaker frames this as fresh matter suited to old age, which suggests the poem is being written with a late-life urgency: not novelty for its own sake, but something meet, fitting, almost morally appropriate. The political picture is blunt—Church and State have mobs, and those mobs are put under their feet. It reads like a desire for control, hierarchy, and quiet. The payoff is inward: once the public tumult is subdued, the private organs of meaning-making become clean and nourishing—wine pure, bread sweet. The tone here is brisk and confident, as if the speaker could simply will a just arrangement into being and then enjoy the clarified self that follows.

The hinge: calling the dream what it is

The poem turns on a single, bracing sentence: That were a cowardly song. The speaker doesn’t merely revise a detail; he condemns the whole posture of the first stanza. The imperative Wander in dreams no more makes the earlier vision sound like a narcotic—pleasant, but irresponsible. What changes is the poem’s standard for truth: it is no longer enough to imagine the Church and State as powerful institutions with controllable crowds. The speaker insists on a darker possibility: What if the Church and the State / Are the mob that howls at the door!

When institutions become the mob

That what if is the poem’s key tension. In the first stanza, Church and State stand above the crowd; in the second, they are the crowd—unreasoning, noisy, threatening. The image of a mob that howls at the door collapses the boundary between respectable authority and raw collective aggression. The door matters: it’s a threshold between the poet’s inner room (where wine and bread are felt) and the public world pressing in. Once the howling is at the door, the fantasy of purity becomes suspect; the private self is no longer protected by the very institutions it hoped to praise.

Wine thick, bread sour: a harsher kind of honesty

The closing reversal—Wine shall run thick, Bread taste sour—is not just a mood swing; it’s a new ethic. Pure becomes thick: experience is denser, less refined, harder to swallow, and perhaps closer to how life actually feels under pressure. Sweet becomes sour: the mind’s daily sustenance no longer comforts; it bites back. Yet the speaker still says shall—a stubborn future tense that sounds like commitment. If the first stanza promised uplift, the second promises endurance: truth that lasts to the end, even if it ruins the taste.

The poem’s dare: is sweetness itself a form of collaboration?

By labeling the sweeter version a cowardly song, the speaker implies that aesthetic consolation can slide into political accommodation. If Church and State are capable of becoming the mob, then singing about them with clean metaphors of pure wine and sweet bread risks laundering their violence into something palatable. The poem doesn’t offer a program or a solution; it offers a stricter appetite—one willing to accept thickness and sourness as the cost of not lying.