Many Gods — Background and Themes

Geographic Specificity as Spiritual Crucible

Rice's poems are firmly located: 'Love in Japan,' 'Maple Leaves on Miyajima,' 'Penang,' 'By the Taj Mahal,' 'On the Yang-tse-kiang.' These are not mere backdrops but active participants in the speaker's spiritual reckoning. In 'The Proselyte Recants,' set in Japan, the speaker recalls 'the fair golden idols / Sit in darkness and in silence' and the 'temple drum beats solemnly and slow,' yet the poem's title signals a rejection of conversion. The landscape itself—'the mountains brim with mist and sun'—weaves a 'spell' that the speaker cannot escape. Similarly, 'The Christian in Exile' (Mandalay) depicts a lonely figure who 'cares not for old splendours' but longs for 'a simple Sabbath hymn,' while the surrounding 'Buddha-built pagodas skyward swim' evoke only pity. Place becomes the arena where competing faiths collide, and the speaker's stance is often one of unresolved tension.

The Sea as Unstable Metaphor

Water imagery pervades the collection, but it is rarely serene. In 'All's Well,' the sea is 'illimitable,' 'mouthing madness to the moon,' and 'seething' with 'endless sorcery.' 'The Sea-armies' personifies waves as 'wild sea-armies led by the wind,' a 'ravaging horde' that 'have many a ship to rend.' The speaker watches them 'beyond us in the bleak star-buried dawn,' yet the poem ends with the hope that 'Life will restore / Unto her world the hope they have withdrawn.' This oscillation between chaos and restoration is typical. 'Waves' and 'Navis Ignota' (unknown ship) likely continue the motif. The sea is never simply a setting; it is a force that mirrors the speaker's own doubts—'the old peace that God is, tho all unproved' comes only after the sea 'grew softer.'

Voices of the Displaced and the Doubting

Several poems adopt personae who are outsiders: 'The Proselyte Recants' (a convert who reneges), 'The Christian in Exile,' 'The Parsee Woman' (who refuses the sky burial for her child), 'The Conscript,' 'The Nun.' These figures embody cultural and spiritual dislocation. In 'The Parsee Woman,' the speaker cries, 'Cast me out from among you, I will not see my child / Laid aloft where the vultures / May clamour for him, wild!' The defiance is personal and visceral, rooted in a specific religious practice. 'The Christian in Exile' is 'a stranger lonely, / In a land strange to all his faith and dim.' Even the more abstract poems, like 'The Barren Woman' or 'Old Age,' use a first-person voice that feels isolated: 'I have heard the wild geese, / I have seen the leaves fall.' The collection's title, Many Gods, suggests polytheism, but the poems more often depict individuals struggling to find or keep a single god amid a cacophony of beliefs.

Readers will find that Rice's poems reward attention to their formal craft—regular rhyme and meter, varied stanza lengths—and to the way he embeds philosophical questions in concrete imagery. The collection does not argue a thesis but presents a series of spiritual encounters, each unresolved. Approaching the poems as dramatic monologues rather than autobiographical statements may clarify their tensions. The table of contents, with its juxtaposition of place names and abstract titles, itself suggests a mind moving between the particular and the universal.

There are days when Rice’s temples feel less like sanctuaries than beautiful, echoing rooms—and I find myself drifting back to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s quieter certainties instead. Her faith wasn’t untroubled either, but it held a steadier flame than his oriental seas. That old The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume 2 — A Reader’s Guide has been a gentle companion on such afternoons. Strange how two poets can speak to the same longing, so differently.