Home in Biblical and Antwerp City Poems – A Journey

Abstract

AbstractSince 2003, the city of Antwerp has a poet laureate. Following the classical and Renaissance models, the Antwerp poet laureate writes, performs, and materializes poems for the city. Also in the Hebrew Bible, texts occur that qualify as city poems avant-la-lettre, even though the writers remain anonymous and the texts are part of a larger corpus with a different purpose. This article reads three Antwerp city poems alongside with biblical Psalm 137, in search for the poems’ constructions of cities as homes. The selected texts each introduce the city (i. e., Antwerp for the Antwerp city poems; Jerusalem and Babylon for the psalm) and its possible identification with a home place in ways that are conceptually and stylistically similar. The poems only differ in their final portrayals of the home, themselves connected to the different context of each poem. Throughout the texts the poets explore and question the spatial categories of ‘city’ and ‘home.’ The analysis reveals that being at home both in biblical and Antwerp city poems is connected to childhood, which allows redefining the urban space. The poems conceive cities as a mobile category that is internalized if being defined as home space. Stylistic interventions, in particular the use of inclusios and contrast, help creating and establishing the city-as-home-space in the selected city poems. The juxtaposition of old and new city poems sharing the same topic offers new insights into the textual construal of cities as homes, a process that proves to be similar for the three Antwerp city poems and the biblical psalm.