Enchiridion

A poem for my grandpa

2011-11-09T21:19:00.002-05:00

I'm trying to revive this blog again, which is difficult when I haven't been reading much poetry. But I do have several poems of my own I've been meaning to post, so I decided to go ahead and subject you to my doggerel.

I wrote this poem when I lost my grandfather last December. It was for the funeral program, so I had very little time to work on it ... but the real reason it's so bad is that I had so much to say. My best poems are when I'm not particular about what the meaning is, so long as it sounds good. Here I ignored a lot of rules just because I couldn't skip certain things I wanted to say about my grandpa.

* * *

I knew a man with gnarled, damaged hands,

Those hands at work without a moment's pause.

Digging in soil, tending his fertile lands,

Sawing a board, feeling for hidden flaws.

I saw him grasp the stick and lift us high

Above the clouds to gaze on earth below.

Sighting through a camera, his admiring eye

Finding beauty to bring to earth and show.

Whether building a treehouse or pulling stubborn weeds,

He didn't rush, but neither did he shirk.

He always had the time for others' needs,

Letting every child "help" him at his work.

"Face to face!" he cried out near his death,

Hoping to see his Savior soon and near

Praising his God until his final breath

Knowing there would be no need for fear.

Now I see his spirit taking flight,

Above the clouds, his soul a glowing spark.

He races to his God, his soul so light.

May we see you again in Heaven, Arnie Clarke.

* * *

I miss him.

Dirge Without Music

2010-12-15T19:25:00.002-05:00

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

* * *

Sorry about abandoning this blog again. I guess updates are just going to be infrequent these days, but it's not dead yet! I haven't forgotten about it, I'm just sporadic lately.

This poem is in honor of my grandfather, who died a few days ago. He will be very, very much missed. I wasn't ready for this, even though we knew it was coming. I would have liked many more years with this wonderful man.

Here is an article that tells a bit about him. You can see he was a pretty special man.

Prospice

2010-10-01T09:37:00.000-05:00

by Robert Browning

Fear death?---to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,
When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,
The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;
Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form;
Yet the strong man must go:
For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,
Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.
I was ever a fighter, so---one fight more,
The best and the last!
I would hate that Death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And made me creep past.
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,
The heroes of old,
Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness and cold.
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave.
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain.
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!

* * *

We've followed the romance of the Brownings before through their different poems. Elizabeth died before Robert did, hence his reference to clasping her again. Of course his fear of death is much diminished considering he hopes to see his beloved wife again!

Right now my grandma is staring death in the face, and with similar courage. Perhaps you could take a moment to pray for her.

In Memoriam LIV

2010-09-15T15:56:00.002-05:00

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final end of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroy'd,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

* * *

This is a Luna moth I found in the stairwell of our apartment building. It had followed the lights and come inside, but then fell asleep because it thought it was daytime. Moths do this all the time, and call me pathetic, but I think it's sad. I moved this particular moth.

The poem quoted is part of a larger work that Tennyson wrote to process the death of his dear friend, Arthur Hallam. Intellectually, he believes that all things work together for good, that every tragedy has a reason, but despite his rational belief, he doesn't quite get it. He's like a baby crying in the dark (though, as a mother, I'm going to take a wild guess that the baby's not crying for the light, he's crying for his mother!) who doesn't understand what's going on. It's an uncertain poem, stating a moral but then casting doubt on it at the end -- saying, "Yes, I do believe this, but when the rubber hits the road this consolation does not really satisfy me." I like the honesty of it.

Skyscraper

2010-09-08T12:33:00.002-05:00

by Carl Sandburg

By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
out all day that give the building a soul of dreams
and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care
for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman
the way to it?)

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and
parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and
sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,
and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men
grappling plans of business and questions of women
in plots of love.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
hold together the stone walls and floors.

Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the
mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an
architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
and the press of time running into centuries, play
on the building inside and out and use it.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid
in graves where the wind whistles a wild song
without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes
and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging
at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
layer who went to state's prison for shooting another
man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the
end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has
gone into the stones of the building.)

On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names
and each name standing for a face written across
with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving
ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's
ease of life.

Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls
tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from
corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,
and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all
ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of
the building just the same as the master-men who
rule the building.

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor
empties its men and women who go away and eat
and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and
all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on
them.
One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed
elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers
work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water
and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,
and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling
miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for
money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence
holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor
and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip
pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money
is stacked in them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights
of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of
red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span
of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of
crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars
and has a soul.

* * *

I just got back from a trip to Chicago, so I was going to post Sandburg's "Chicago," but then I stumbled upon this one and like it much better. Normally, you know, I'm not a big fan of free verse (or even blank verse, much of the time), but I like the ideas in this poem.

Skyscrapers are so full of people you can almost feel it. Sometimes this is a good thing, and I feel friendly toward all those people. Other times, it's a smothering weight and you feel like a drone in a vast human beehive. My mother hates apartment buildings for this reason, and wrote a lovely poem once that began, "Going into the city, you fear you may lose your soul." I should ask her if I may post it; it was a great poem.

I've posted before about the Incarnation and how it makes the cities so much better, even holy. But there's another side -- cities were made by sinful men, and therefore they are sinful. A city is everything mankind is, concentrated as the people are concentrated.

Contest Winner

2010-08-13T12:07:00.002-05:00

Remember that contest for poems about unborn babies? Well, I chose the winner (some time ago, in fact). This was a less-popular contest, but I did get two or three good submissions.

The winner is Dr. Thursday!

O Secret Trinity

For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast protected me from my mother's womb. I will praise thee, for thou art fearfully magnified: wonderful are thy works, and my soul knoweth right well. My bone is not hidden from thee, which thou hast made in secret: and my substance in the lower parts of the earth. Thy eyes did see my imperfect being, and in thy book all shall be written... [Ps 138:13-16]

There are three broad classes of the special things in which human wisdom does permit privacy... GKC ILN Aug 10 1907 CW27:524

I myself am a mortal man, like all others, and of the race of him, that was first made of the earth, and in the womb of my mother I was fashioned to be flesh. In the time of ten months I was compacted in blood... [Wisdom 7:1-2]

The average time for delivery is ten lunar months, or 280 days.
[Arey, Developmental Anatomy 105]

That hilltop sign, the cross of wood, does teach
In rejection, reality is known.
And, too, it signs a linking part of speech,
In plain addition hides this royal throne:
A yoke of two to plow, seeds to be sown,
A fruitful field where words shall be enclayed,
The good wine poured hints loud of acts unshown...
Our flesh and bone in secrecy was made.

That tree of truth, that truth is one does preach:
How Pi, by love, ascends to Theta's zone,
And Theta, wisely, down to Pi must reach.
From heaven's height a mighty wind has blown:
The sole-begotten from the grave has flown.
Thus we seek those laws which must be obeyed:
The truth uniting seed and star and stone...
Our flesh and bone in secrecy was made.

He Who once glowed like some transcendent bleach,
Emmaus-bound, used a less blinding tone:
He gave his sidekicks clues to fill the breach,
The truth revealed, "how slow" they soon would moan.
The Master chides us too, warns still His own:
Advent will end, the truth will be displayed!
Watch, stay awake, your wits be sure to hone...
Our flesh and bone in secrecy was made.

Oh unborn Lord whose flesh and blood and bone
In secret grew as ten moons glowed and grayed,
Behold us made like you - adrift, alone...
Our flesh and bone in secrecy was made.

* * *

It gets bonus points for being a ballade -- a form I find quite difficult.

Then there's mine, which I am still not a huge fan of, but never did revise. Listen for the sentiment, not the scansion! I wrote it while driving home from work one day, very sore, with the baby kicking the guts out of me. (I must say, it is REALLY nice not to be pregnant! Babies are much more fun on the outside!) It uses a lot of allusion and sometimes straight-out quotes ... but T. S. Eliot did that too, so I don't think it (quite) counts as plagiarism. If you want I can cite my sources.

For Mark, before his birthday

I bear you with a thousand natural shocks;
I wrap you in a silent inner ocean.
I hold you closer than the Spartan child’s fox:
You tear my vitals with your every motion.

I will bear the marks you give me all my days.
I contain you in a mystery beyond speech.
I suffer the scars that only love repays;
The doppler hears two hearts beating, each to each.

That heart will pull on mine for all my years;
I do not grudge you all this passing trouble.
There is a love that’s deeper than my tears.
I walk the earth with pulses that beat double.

Reviving...

2010-08-11T09:10:00.002-05:00

Someone does not want me to bring this blog back. As soon as I wrote the title, I kid you not, the baby woke up. But he is snoozing again, and here I go.

My last post was six months ago. I write that in some shock. I knew posting was going to get less frequent, and maybe take a bit of a break, but I never meant to let this space lie fallow for so long. Lately I have been doing things much deeper than poetry, but I still need that "moment of peace" that poetry provides. And I'm sure you, my gentle readers, do too. So I apologize for leaving you poetry-less for so long.

Of course you are always welcome to read my other blog, but perhaps you've seen it and said to yourself, "But I don't have a kid and am not really interested in the play-by-play of baby life! I want POETRY!" And of course I don't want to be a case in point of how women always drop their intellectual life at the side of the road when they have kids.

Part of what's delayed me so long is that I have a contest open. I've picked the winner, but I also promised to post my own entry, and I hate my own entry. I kept saying I was going to revise it and then post it, but it's unfair to leave my blog on hold just because I'm stuck on this one poem. So I'll post it as-is, and perhaps revise it later.

I leave you with an excerpt from Yeats' "A Prayer for My Daughter":

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment begin a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel,
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

Those of you who have children -- what are your prayers for them?

Song for a Fifth Child

2010-02-11T09:59:00.001-05:00

by Ruth Hulburt Hamilton

Mother, oh Mother, come shake out your cloth,
Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,
Hang out the washing and butter the bread,
Sew on a button and make up a bed.

Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?
She’s up in the nursery, blissfully rocking.
Oh, I’ve grown shiftless as Little Boy Blue(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).
Dishes are waiting and bills are past due(Pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peekaboo).

The shopping’s not done and there’s nothing for stew
And out in the yard there’s a hullabaloo
But I’m playing Kanga and this is my Roo.
Look! Aren’t her eyes the most wonderful hue?(Lullaby, rockaby, lullaby loo).

The cleaning and scrubbing will wait till tomorrow,
For children grow up, as I’ve learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down, cobwebs. Dust go to sleep.
I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.

* * *

This is the kind of mother I expect to be. Housework has never been a hobby of mine, except for cooking. Taking care of children, on the other hand, is something I love. I'll have a clean house when I'm old -- maybe!

You haven't forgotten the poetry contest, have you? I'm still waiting for more entries (including my entry!) before I close it.

The Wreck: Stanzas 13-16

2010-01-22T21:45:00.002-05:00

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

13
Into the snows she sweeps,
Hurling the haven behind,
The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky she keeps,
For the infinite air is unkind,
And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,
Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

The first two lines are nicely descriptive of a ship sweeping out into the snowy ocean. She is leaving the safe haven behind her—what ships do, and yet it would have been so much better if she had stayed. I like the description of the sea spray as “the sea flint-flake”—it’s as black as a flake of flint, and also stingingly hard like flint. You can almost see the waves streaking black beneath the snowy sky.

“Cursed quarter,” to me, suggests yet again the hint that Hopkins makes that God is not the author of the storm, as He is not the author of evil. Instead, the storm is part of the “curse”—one of the ways sin has broken the created world.

The last four lines all use alliteration and other Hopkins-favored sound techniques to show us the harshness of the sea. The snow is like wires, like white fire, but those repeated w’s also force our lips to echo something of the sound of the wind. And “widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps” is a strong description of the mercilessness of the sea—how it takes husbands, children, fathers, and leaves the survivors of these relationships mourning their untimely loss.

14
She dove in the dark to leeward,
She struck—not a reef or a rock
But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her
Dead to the Kentish Knock;
And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel:
The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock;
And canvas and compass, the whorl and the wheel
Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.

Again Hopkins shows us the detail he possesses about the wreck: it was at night, the ship struck a sandbar, it was pulled toward the Kentish Knock. (Wikipedia tells me this is an area of the ocean off the coast of Kent and Essex.) But, though he reports these details with a journalistic accuracy and compactness in the first four lines, he expands on them with the insight of an eyewitness in the last four. The ship is beating on the sand now, as if to conquer it, but the rolling of the breakers are destroying the ship: they will win. The apparatus of the ship—sails, compass, coils of rope, the wheel—are not necessarily destroyed, but they are useless here. The line gives me an instant image of the wheel turning idly with no one standing by it, because steering is pointless when the ship has run aground.

15
Hope had grown grey hairs,
Hope had mourning on,
Trenched with tears, carved with cares,
Hope was twelve hours gone;
And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day
Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone,
And lives at last were washing away:
To the shrouds they took,—they shook in the hurling and horrible airs.

Skip ahead twelve hours (or perhaps twenty-four? We have gone from night, to day, to night again) and hope is beginning to fade. It’s too late for hope; hope is getting old. Day was bad, but night is much worse. The lights the survivors see in the darkness are only their own flares. Up to now there hasn’t been much death—apparently the ship was sufficiently undamaged for people to survive on it—but after all this time they are dying of cold. The icy wind is still blowing and the waves are still washing over the ship.

16
One stirred from the rigging to save
The wild womankind below,
With a rope’s end round the man, handy and brave—
He was pitched to his death at a blow,
For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew:
They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro
Through the cobbled foam-fleece; what could he do
With the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave?

Ah, a hero! A sailor is coming down from the rigging to help the panicked women passengers in the hold. For a moment we are excited and proud—something is being done. But he is thrown down into the sea by the wild motion of the ship. His courage and strong sinewy arms are useless here. The worst of it is in the sixth line: that rope that he had tied around himself to keep from falling has kept him attached to the ship. The survivors have to see his body bobbing through the waves for hours. The hero is no good against the forces of nature.

* * *

All right, I'm trying to resurrect this old series. Hunting through my site meter and blog email, I've discovered it's my most popular series. Tons of people come here because they are searching for some help with this poem, which is hard to understand and has little written about it. One person even wrote me to beg me to finish it. I promised I'd try to get back to it, so -- here I am. I'll try to keep it going. Meanwhile, don't forget my contest below!

Chesterton on Holidays

2009-12-18T12:05:00.001-05:00

The Christmas celebrations will certainly remain, and will certainly survive any attempt by modern artists, idealists, or neo-pagans to substitute anything else for them. For the truth is that there is an alliance between religion and real fun, of which the modern thinkers have never got the key, and which they are quite unable to criticize or to destroy.

All Socialist Utopias, all new Pagan Paradises, promised in this age to mankind have all one horrible fault. They are all dignified. [...] But being undignified is the essence of all real happiness, whether before God or man. Hilarity involves humility; nay, it involves humiliation. [...] Religion is much nearer to riotous happiness than it is to the detached and temperate types of happiness in which gentlemen and philosophers find their peace. Religion and riot are very near, as the history of all religions proves.

Riot means being a rotter; and religion means knowing you are a rotter. Somebody said, and it has often been quoted: 'Be good and you will be happy; but you will not have a jolly time.' The epigram is witty, but it is profoundly mistaken in its estimate of the truth of human nature. I should be inclined to say that the truth is exactly the reverse. Be good and you will have a jolly time; but you will not be happy. If you have a good heart you will always have some lightness of heart; you will always have the power of enjoying special human feasts, and positive human good news. But the heart which is there to be lightened will also be there to be hurt; and really if you only want to be happy, to be steadily and stupidly happy like the animals, it may be well worth your while not to have a heart at all.

Fortunately, however, being happy is not so important as having a jolly time. Philosophers are happy; saints have a jolly time. The important thing in life is not to keep a steady system of pleasure and composure (which can be done quite well by hardening one's heart or thickening one's head), but to keep alive in oneself the immortal power of astonishment and laughter, and a kind of young reverence. This is why religion always insists on special days like Christmas, while philosophy always tends to despise them.

Religion is interested not in whether a man is happy, but whether he is still alive, whether he can still react in a normal way to new things, whether he blinks in a blinding light or laughs when he is tickled. That is the best of Christmas, that it is a startling and disturbing happiness; it is an uncomfortable comfort. The Christmas customs destroy the human habits.

And while customs are generally unselfish, habits are nearly always selfish. The object of a religious festival is, as I have said, to find out if a happy man is still alive. A man can smile when he is dead. Composure, resignation, and the most exquisite good manners are, so to speak, the strong points of corpses. There is only one way in which you can test his real vitality, and that is by a special festival. Explode crackers in his ear, and see if he jumps. Prick him with holly, and see if he feels it. If not, he is dead, or, as he would put it, is 'living the higher life.'

--G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News, 11 January 1908.

If My Head Hurt a Hair's Foot (and a contest)

2009-12-16T17:54:00.003-05:00

by Dylan Thomas

'If my head hurt a hair's foot
Pack back the downed bone. If the unpricked ball of my breath
Bump on a spout let the bubbles jump out.
Sooner drop with the worm of the ropes round my throat
Than bully ill love in the clouted scene.

'All game phrases fit your ring of a cockfight:
I'll comb the snared woods with a glove on a lamp,
Peck, sprint, dance on fountains and duck time
Before I rush in a crouch the ghost with a hammer, air,
Strike light, and bloody a loud room.

'If my bunched, monkey coming is cruel
Rage me back to the making house. My hand unravel
When you sew the deep door. The bed is a cross place.
Bend, if my journey ache, direction like an arc or make
A limp and riderless shape to leap nine thinning months.'

'No. Not for Christ's dazzling bed
Or a nacreous sleep among soft particles and charms
My dear would I change my tears or your iron head.
Thrust, my daughter or son, to escape, there is none, none, none,
Nor when all ponderous heaven's host of waters breaks.

'Now to awake husked of gestures and my joy like a cave
To the anguish and carrion, to the infant forever unfree,
O my lost love bounced from a good home;
The grain that hurries this way from the rim of the grave
Has a voice and a house, and there and here you must couch and cry.

'Rest beyond choice in the dust-appointed grain,
At the breast stored with seas. No return
Through the waves of the fat streets nor the skeleton's thin ways.
The grave and my calm body are shut to your coming as stone,
And the endless beginning of prodigies suffers open.'

* * *

This poem was sent to me by Meredith. Unfortunately Dylan Thomas has never made a whole lot of sense to me: the general gist I get, but many of the individual metaphors puzzle me.

Meredith's explanation: "Basically it's a dialogue: the child speaks in the first three stanzas, and then the mother answers. The child says that if he's going to cause his mother so much trouble, he'd rather not be born at all, but the mother comes back and tells the child to be born and live and rest in her arms."

Thanks, Meredith!

All right, having posted all the poems for unborn children that I can find, I still want more. Time for a contest! The theme is unborn children -- by, about, and to them. You can write in any form, including those we've done on here before -- sonnets, ballades, triolets. It can be serious or funny (or both). Leave them in the comment box or email to enchiridion1 at yahoo dot com.

Four by G. K. Chesterton

2009-11-27T11:12:00.003-05:00

A Grace

You say grace before meals.
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and the pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

Thank-You

I thank thee, O Lord, for the stones in the street
I thank thee for the hay-carts yonder and for the houses built and half-built
That fly past me as I stride.
But most of all for the great wind in my nostrils
As if thine own nostrils were close.

Bootlaces

Once I looked down at my bootlaces
Who gave me my bootlacees?
The bootmaker? Bah!
Who gave the bootmaker himself?
What did I ever do that I should be given bootlaces?

Evening

Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?

* * *

Of all the virtues GKC had -- and he had quite a few, from a talent with words to some excellent common sense -- I think my favorite is his gratitude. He honestly was grateful for everything. For haycarts in the street, and for bootlaces. Every little thing proved to him the loving care of God. In this way, he was like a guest who arrives at a house and carefully notices everything that has been done for him: "Oh, I love the little soaps you put out! Why, there are flowers in my room! A mint is on my pillow! You didn't have to go to all this trouble!"

Why is it that we are thankful for the towel left folded on the foot of our bed when we are staying at someone's house, but we are not thankful for the dew left on the grass in the morning? Both were done because someone was excited to have us here.

You Ruined Everything

2009-11-07T13:50:00.003-05:00

by Jonathon Coulton

I was fine
I pulled myself together
Just in time
To throw myself away
Once my perfect world was gone I knew
You ruined everything
In the nicest way

You should know
How great things were before you
Even so
They’re better still today
I can’t think of who I was before
You ruined everything
In the nicest way

Bumps in the road remind us
The worst of the best's behind us
Only good things will find us
Me and you

Days will be clear and sunny
We’re gonna need more money
Baby you know it’s funny
All those stories coming true

Despite my better efforts
It’s all for you
The worst kind of cliche
I’ll be with you till the day you leave
You ruined everything
In the nicest way

* * *

I admit that this is a song lyric and not, technically, a poem in the strict sense. However, for all I generally don't post song lyrics on here, I do believe that some of them can be appreciated as poems in their own right. Most things I listen to, I listen to for the lyrics.

This song is by Jonathan Coulton, a musician John introduced me to. His songs are generally funny, but they often have real meaning behind them. (Admittedly, the one about the zombies in the office building, or Leonard Nimoy and the Sasquatch, might not have the same depth.) He wrote this song about the birth of his daughter. To quote his explanation,

"I was having a conversation with a friend who had recently become a parent, and she reminded me of something I had forgotten about since my daughter was born. She was describing this what-have-I-done feeling - I just got everything perfect in my life, and then I went and messed it all up by having a baby. I don’t feel that way anymore, but the thought certainly crossed my mind a few times at the beginning."

I sing this song to the baby a lot, on the way home from work. I know that nothing will be the same after the little stranger is born. But I don't mind all that. In fact, even at the moments when I'm lying around moaning because I feel wretched, I tend to add, "But I don't regret being pregnant! I know having a baby is worth this!" (See if I shout the same in labor. ;) )

I feel like I'm coming to love this little mystery, even though I don't know him or her at all. All I have to go on is a fuzzy 7-week ultrasound (looks like a blob, though when you could see it moving and the heart beating it looked a bit more human. (Note: 7-week babies are pretty well-developed -- just too small for an ultrasound to show in any detail.) ), two times of hearing the heartbeat, and my own symptoms. For instance, I know, based on my weird and varied cravings, that this will not be an easy kid to please. Also that, so far at least, there is no suggestion that this will be an "easy baby."

If anyone knows of any poems about unborn babies that I haven't posted yet (and are any good) please do email me. (The address should be posted someplace: at any rate it is enchiridion1 at yahoo dot com.) I really like those poems these days, and want to post more of the same, but so few people have written on this topic. (Does anyone sense a contest coming?)

Education

2009-10-12T16:20:00.002-05:00

by G.K. Chesterton

I would say to all parents
Do you take things equally
How do you know you are not
In the place of Joseph and Mary?

* * *

I have a few important things to say, but felt it would be unfair to leave you without a poem, after you've gone so long without any. So here is a very nice one, one of GKC's early poems.

The important thing I have to say is the same as my excuse for not blogging. My new husband and I are part of a miracle -- a miracle that's been going on for 13 weeks and which we won't get to see the fruit of until April 16th. In short, there is a baby on the way.

My main reason for not blogging has been sickness ... the continuation of the human race is a miracle that sometimes comes with some suffering. Along with that, I have been working again, so I am as busy as can be, so my motto to "keep poetry as a moment of peace" has not exactly been adhered to very well. I can't guarantee things will be better from here on out, though I can promise to try, and I can also direct you to my other blog, which hopefully will be updated a bit more often: A Gift Universe.

So, in case there are any readers who haven't given up on me -- that's my news, and hopefully I'll find a way to blog every week or two at least. Meanwhile, those of you who are parents, take a moment to reflect on what a miracle and mystery that is. If you knew you were in the place of Joseph and Mary, how would you do things differently? I know none of us is perfect, but at the very least, it is good to realize, from time to time, the massive, amazing mission we are a part of.

Love's Trappist

2009-07-21T15:08:00.001-05:00

by G. K. Chesterton

There is a place where lute and lyre are broken,
Where scrolls are torn and on a wild wind go,
Where tablets stand wiped naked for a token,
Where laurels wither and the daisies grow.

Lo: I too join the brotherhood of silence,
I am Love's trappist and you ask in vain,
For man through Love's gate, even as through Death's gate,
Goeth alone and comes not back again.

Yet here I pause, look back across the threshold,
Cry to my brethren, though the world be old,
Prophets and sages, questioners and doubters,
O world, old world, the best hath ne'er been told!

Creation Day

2009-07-13T18:40:00.002-05:00

by G. K. Chesterton

Between the perfect marriage day
And that fierce future proud, and furled,
I only stole six days--six days
Enough for God to make the world.

For us is a creation made
New moon by night, new sun by day,
That ancient elm that holds the heavens
Sprang to its stature yesterday --

Dearest and first of all things free,
Alone as bride and queen and friend,
Brute facts may come and bitter truths,
But here all doubts shall have an end.

Never again with cloudy talk
Shall life be tricked or faith undone,
The world is many and is mad,
But we are sane and we are one.

* * *

Our honeymoon was six days like the Chestertons' -- our wedding day was the day before their anniversary. May we have as many happy years as they had.

So far, I am terribly happy. My love is expansive and goes out to all of you.

From Chesterton's letters to Frances

2009-06-26T10:42:00.003-05:00

... I am looking over the sea and endeavouring to reckon up the estate I have to offer you. As far as I can make out my equipment for starting on a journey to fairyland consists of the following items.

1st. A Straw Hat. The oldest part of this admirable relic shows traces of pure Norman work. The vandalism of Cromwell's soldiers has left us little of the original hat-band.

2nd. A Walking Stick, very knobby and heavy: admirably fitted to break the head of any denizen of Suffolk who denies that you are the noblest of ladies, but of no other manifest use.

3rd. A copy of Walt Whitman's poems, once nearly given to Salter, but quite forgotten. It has his name in it still with an affectionate inscription from his sincere friend Gilbert Chesterton. I wonder if he will ever have it.

4th. A number of letters from a young lady, containing everything good and generous and loyal and holy and wise that isn't in Walt Whitman's poems.

5th. An unwieldy sort of a pocket knife, the blades mostly having an edge of a more varied and picturesque outline than is provided by the prosaic cutler. The chief element however is a thing 'to take stones out of a horse's hoof.' What a beautiful sensation of security it gives one to reflect that if one should ever have money enough to buy a horse and should happen to buy one and the horse should happen to have a stone in his hoof - that one is ready; one stands prepared, with a defiant smile!

6th. Passing from the last miracle of practical foresight, we come to a box of matches. Every now and then I strike one of these, because fire is beautiful and burns your fingers. Some people think this waste of matches: the same people who object to the building of
Cathedrals.

7th. About three pounds in gold and silver, the remains of one of Mr. Unwin's bursts of affection: those explosions of spontaneous love for myself, which, such is the perfect order and harmony of his mind, occur at startlingly exact internals of time.

8th. A book of Children's Rhymes, in manuscript, called the 'Weather Book' about 3/4 finished, and destined for Mr. Nutt. I have been working at it fairly steadily, which I think jolly creditable under the circumstances. One can't put anything interesting in it. They'll understand those things when they grow up.

9th. A tennis racket - nay, start not. It is a part of the new regime, and the only new and neat-looking thing in the Museum. We'll soon mellow it - like the straw hat. My brother and I are teaching each other lawn tennis.

10th. A soul, hitherto idle and omnivorous but now happy enough to be ashamed of itself.

11th. A body, equally idle and quite equally omnivorous, absorbing tea, coffee, claret, sea-water and oxygen to its own perfect satisfaction. It is happiest swimming, I think, the sea being about a
convenient size.

12th. A Heart - mislaid somewhere. And that is about all the property of which an inventory can be made at present. After all, my tastes are stoically simple. A straw hat, a stick, a box of matches and some of his own poetry. What more does man require? ...

* * *

When we set up a house, darling (honeysuckle porch, yew clips hedge, bees, poetry and eight shillings a week), I think you will have to do the shopping. Particularly at Felixstowe. There was a great and glorious man who said, 'Give us the luxuries of life and we will dispense with the necessities.' That I think would be a splendid motto to write (in letters of brown gold) over the porch of our hypothetical home. There will be a sofa for you, for example, but no chairs, for I prefer the floor. There will be a select store of chocolate-creams (to make you do the Carp with) and the rest will be bread and water. We will each retain a suit of evening dress for great occasions, and at other times clothe ourselves in the skins of wild beasts (how pretty you would look) which would fit your taste in furs and be economical.

I have sometimes thought it would be very fine to take an ordinary house, a very poor, commonplace house in West Kensington, say, and make it symbolic. Not artistic - Heaven - O Heaven forbid. My blood boils when I think of the affronts put by knock-kneed pictorial epicures on the strong, honest, ugly, patient shapes of necessary things: the brave old bones of life. There are aesthetic pattering prigs who can look on a saucepan without one tear of joy or sadness: mongrel decadents that can see no dignity in the honourable scars of a kettle. So they concentrate all their house decoration on coloured windows that nobody looks out of, and vases of lilies that everybody wishes out of the way. No: my idea (which is much cheaper) is to make a house really allegoric-- really explain its own essential meaning. Mystical or ancient sayings should be inscribed on every object, the more prosaic the object the better; and the more coarsely and rudely the inscription was traced the better. 'Hast thou sent the Rain upon the Earth?' should be inscribed on the Umbrella-Stand: perhaps on the Umbrella. 'Even the Hairs of your Head are all numbered' would give a tremendous significance to one's hairbrushes: the words about 'living water' would reveal the music and sanctity of the sink: while 'Our God is a consuming Fire' might be written over the kitchen-grate, to assist the mystic musings of the cook - Shall we ever try that experiment, dearest. Perhaps not, for no words would be golden enough for the tools you had to touch: you would be beauty enough for one house..."

... By all means let us have bad things in our dwelling and make them good things. I shall offer no objection to your having an occasional dragon to dinner, or a penitent Griffin to sleep in the spare
bed. The image of you taking a Sunday school of little Devils is pleasing. They will look up, first in savage wonder, then in vague respect; they will see the most glorious and noble lady that ever lived since their prince tempted Eve, with a halo of hair and great heavenly eyes that seem to make the good at the heart of things almost too terribly simple and naked for the sons of flesh: and as they gaze, their tails will drop off, and their wings will sprout: and they will become Angels in six lessons....

* * *

I cannot profess to offer any elaborate explanation of your mother's disquiet but I admit it does not wholly surprise me. You see I happen to know one factor in the case, and one only, of which you are wholly ignorant. I know you ... I know one thing which has made me feel strange before your mother - I know the value of what I take away. I feel (in a weird moment) like the Angel of Death.

You say you want to talk to me about death: my views about death are bright, brisk and entertaining. When Azrael takes a soul it may be to other and brighter worlds: like those whither you and I go together. The transformation called Death may be something as beautiful and dazzling as the transformation called Love. It may make the dead man 'happy,' just as your mother knows that you are happy. But none the less it is a transformation, and sad sometimes for those left behind. A mother whose child is dying can hardly believe that in the inscrutable Unknown there is anyone who can look to it as well as she. And if a mother cannot trust her child easily to God Almighty, shall I be so mean as to be angry because she cannot trust it easily to me? I tell you I have stood before your mother and felt like a thief. I know you are not going to part: neither physically, mentally, morally nor spiritually. But she sees a new element in your life, wholly from outside - is it not natural, given her temperament, that you should find her perturbed? Oh, dearest, dearest Frances, let us always be very gentle to older people. Indeed, darling, it is not they who are the tyrants, but we. They may interrupt our building in the scaffolding stages: we turn their house upside down when it is their final home and rest. Your mother would certainly have worried if you had been engaged to the Archangel Michael (who, indeed, is bearing his disappointment very well): how much more when you are engaged to an aimless, tactless, reckless, unbrushed, strange-hatted, opinionated scarecrow who has suddenly walked into the vacant place. I could have prophesied her unrest: wait and she will calm down all right, dear. God comfort her: I dare not....

* * *

The first time he spent an evening at the Bloggs there was no one there. That is to say there was a worn but fiery little lady in a grey dress who didn't approve of 'catastrophic solutions of social
problems.' That, he understood, was Mrs. Blogg. There was a long, blonde, smiling young person who seemed to think him quite off his head and who was addressed as Ethel. There were two people whose meaning and status he couldn't imagine, one of whom had a big nose and the other hadn't.... Lastly, there was a Juno-like creature in a tremendous hat who eyed him all the time half wildly, like a shying horse, because he said he was quite happy....

But the second time he went there he was plumped down on a sofa beside a being of whom he had a vague impression that brown hair grew at intervals all down her like a caterpillar. Once in the course of conversation she looked straight at him and he said to himself as plainly as if he had read it in a book: 'If I had anything to do with this girl I should go on my knees to her: if I spoke with her she would never deceive me: if I depended on her she would never deny me: if I loved her she would never play with me: if I trusted her she would never go back on me: if I remembered her she would never forget me. I may never see her again. Goodbye.' It was all said in a flash: but it was all said....

Two years, as they say in the playbills, is supposed to elapse. And here is the subject of this memoir sitting on a balcony above the sea. The time, evening. He is thinking of the whole bewildering record of which the foregoing is a brief outline: he sees how far he has gone wrong and how idle and wasteful and wicked he has often been: how miserably unfitted he is for what he is called upon to be. Let him now declare it and hereafter for ever hold his peace.

But there are four lamps of thanksgiving always before him. The first is for his creation out of the same earth with such a woman as you. The second is that he has not, with all his faults, 'gone after strange women.' You cannot think how a man's selfrestraint is rewarded in this. The third is that he has tried to love everything alive: a dim preparation for loving you. And the fourth is - but no words can express that. Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it led me to you.

* * *

Dear readers, here ends my former existence. Tomorrow I will be another person, with a new state in life and a new name. Pray for me as I pass over the threshold. --Sheila

Sonnet Contest Winners

2009-05-31T19:14:00.004-05:00

Signing in, I discovered it has been a month and a half since I last blogged! Time has been flying at an even faster clip than usual. Between end-of-year grading and last-minute wedding planning, the days barely have time to be noticed before they slip by.

But, since I said I would announce the winners "a little after Easter," I will announce them today, on Pentecost. It's close enough, I suppose.

Unfortunately, there were fewer entries than usual. On the bright side, all of the entries were quite good.

Here they are: the top poems from the contest.

First place: Embrethiel

How Many Sunsets

How many sunsets have there ever been?
How many banners of defiant light
Before the pyrrhic victories of night?
How many sunsets have you ever seen
And have remembered? Glory does not stay
Long in the mem'ry if short in the day,
And splendour loses beauty when spread thin,
Like many colours running down to grey.
There is one sunset I will not forget,
When no one else was there with me and yet
I felt the world was watching with my eyes
And that my heart was beating for each one
Whose thousandth sunset moved him so to rise
And silently salute a dying sun.

An excellent poem, one I identify strongly with. Note the volta, at "There is one sunset..." That is a perfect example of what a volta can be. Embrethiel's use of questions is also very good; it draws you in, doesn't it? And all her word-painting ("banners of defiant light," "many colours running down to grey") paints a sunset in my mind.

Second place: Dylan

Saul

Their cloaks lay piled before him as they stoned
One of those wild blasphemers. He looked on
Approvingly as the business was done:
Limbs blood-stained and a brain mortally stunned.
Stopping those upstarts, that hot-headed band
Who placed faith in a cross-killed Nazarene,
This was his duty as a citizen.
So, to Damascus, where more could be found.

Struck by a fearsome flash, he fell prostrate
And felt the full voice of divinity:
"Why do you persecute Jesus the Christ?"
For three days, Saul was blind; scales kept the light
From entering his eyes. Love's mystery
Involved his heart, restored the sight he'd lost.

I like this one. It peers a little into Saul's head, with language suggesting his practical disdain of the Christians. My favorite line: "One of those wild blasphemers." It sounds right. Also, it's a nice break in the rhythm when you run a sentence across a line, because so many lines in sonnets naturally tend to be end-stopped.

Third place: Dr. Thursday

All of the Above

"Any topic will do -- romantic, religious, philosophical, funny. All four would be great. " --Sheila of Enchiridion, March 9, 2009

Adventuresome, I hack through verbal vines
And word mounds melt, to forge the chain of love,
I scan the stars, yet look for One above,
And drop the plumb-bob down the deepest mines.
With compass, integral, and high-speed lines
I seek solutions which fit like a glove,
And spend some moments laughing with the Dove
Who gives Wit sevenfold in hidden signs.

What joy to take up verbal tools to weave
A rhyme on cheese from spoons of chicken-gold;
The scented walnut from the Scrabble box
Deals pork or pyrotechnics - I believe -
All point to One Beauty (so new, so old)
Through keys which open Reason's many locks.

(Note: Dr. Thursday's poetry is always allusive and sometimes a little hard to get. The line which puzzled me was "spoons of chicken gold." He explained that he is speaking of alphabet soup. The rest I think you can puzzle out on your own.)

Honorable Mention: Paul Stilwell

(Untitled)

As wide shores are rained with feeding dunlin,
so every place our drumming sin persists:
depot, hearth, school; our tenor-tide consists
so much of sin, needs we bury it in
a din, heirloomed from stranger, friend and kin;
while those appear upended that resist,
for by fulsome sin we make our sheen subsist:
we winnow, grind, knead digestible, sin.
Still the price of light's our stain's exposure;
but little demarked of our sins' bored tread,
spells some exposed, freely, on another:
as he who accepts light's light imposure
can no longer be the counterweight lead
that holds at mid-height, sister or brother.

Rather Hopkinsian, isn't it, with the swift repetitions of rhyming words? This one, like the previous one, took me a couple of readings. Don't slack off, but read it a few times yourself.

Congratulations, winners! I don't dare announce the next contest yet, because I know I'll be too busy getting married next month to judge them, but here's a hint: Don't worry, I will find a use for all those cheesy poems I was sent. ;) Turns out these poets aren't so mysteriously silent after all.

Loveliest of trees,, the cherry now

2009-04-15T00:04:00.002-05:00

by A. E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

* * *

Cherry blossoms always seem to spark meditations on time. Each year, we only get about a week of them. If you miss them, they're gone.

I walked by the cherry blossoms every day for a week, saying to myself, "Tomorrow I'll come out with a camera, and get some pictures. Tomorrow, I'll stop and enjoy them." But of course it was grade week, and day after day they hung in my path to tempt me, but I passed them by. Finally, on Friday, I had a little time. Only it was sunset, so I didn't get all the sunshiny pictures I'd hoped for. Over the weekend I had company, and only had a moment to glance at them. I awoke Monday morning to pouring rain. The petals lay in soggy masses on the ground and stuck themselves to the cars in the parking lot. I had let the week slip through my hands, and there was no extension -- no hope for another chance. They were gone, and the pictures and memories I'd gotten of them would have to suffice.

Every year it's like that. The short moment we have with the blossoms is almost painful in its ephemerality. You're so eager to enjoy them while they last, but there's a sadness in it, too -- every moment you enjoy them, you think of their fall. The poet might easily have said, "Where are the cherry blossoms of yesteryear?" Robert Frost did say of Nature, "Her early leaf's a flower, but only so an hour." Their transience makes them so precious, but at the same time, it's almost easier to pretend you don't care -- to pass them by, for fear they will make your heart ache when they fall; to feel a sense of relief when they're gone, because at least the tension of their impermanence won't trouble you anymore.

Yet I resolve not to let myself do that. I will instead take the time it requires to capture things that are fleeting. Fifty springs is a short time to see the blossoms in -- but it is worth taking that time.

How often I disparage the time I live in. "Oh, if only I were grown up -- if only I were in college -- if only I had graduated -- if only I had married." I always look toward the future, and I suspect I always will. But it should never be at the cost of the present. The present only comes once, and only lasts a moment.

I got an extension on the cherry blossoms, by the way. I flew to Seattle, where the blossoms are still on the trees -- even despite a hailstorm yesterday. I took a detour across a parking lot today and let them brush against my face. Thank you, God, for a second chance to marvel at your creation.

* * *

Editorial Note: Sorry for the hiatus in posting. I've been waiting for more entries on the poetry contest, and of course running myself to the ground with busy-ness. But try to get your submissions in by the end of the week, so I can finish judging them. I've been getting some lovely sonnets! And I finished mine, too.

Sonnet contest

2009-03-09T17:45:00.002-05:00

Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room
by William Wordsworth

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:

In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

* * *

All right, you've seen the sonnets I've been putting up. Your turn -- write me some! I'm working on one in praise of cheese. What will you do?

Any topic will do -- romantic, religious, philosophical, funny. All four would be great. For tips on sonnet structure, read the most recent sonnet posts.

Love Is Not All

2009-03-07T23:06:00.002-05:00

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by need and moaning for release
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

* * *

I don't think I would, either. Love is more practical than people take it for, which I think is definitely a part of what this poem is about. Here's is the question for you, though: is this sonnet romantic, or anti-romantic?

What I like about it (along with everything else) is that it proves that the sonnet is not dead. I do not believe that the sonnet will ever die. Why, I've even caught E. E. Cummings at it! He tried to sneak it by me, but I caught him. I like it when these modern poets do them as if they're not trying, as if the rhymes just happened. They never contort their sentence order or switch between you and thee so that they can rhyme with more things. They just chat away like they were shooting the breeze over the fence, and the next thing you know, there's a sonnet. It takes a lot of work to make it look this easy.

Sonnet 130

2009-03-03T13:01:00.002-05:00

by William Shakespeare

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak,--yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress when she walks, treads on the ground;

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

* * *

An English, or Shakespearean sonnet. I've added spaces so you can see the different structure. Instead of an 8-line point and a 6-line counterpoint, we have three 4-line points and then a couplet which either contrasts with the rest (as here) or concludes it.

English sonnets are a little easier in terms of rhyme: abab cdcd efef gg. That leaves you with only two of each rhyme. However, that means the sonnet is a little less firmly linked together. English sonnets are also, because of their looser, more rational logical structure, not quite as fierce or intense as Italian sonnets. So, if you want to make a philosophical point, perhaps an English sonnet is the way to go. Imagine you're St. Thomas, writing objection one, objection two, objection three, and then "I answer that ..." Or making an official statement, "Given one, two, and three, it is RESOLVED that ..." But if you want to express something a little bit more emotional, something uncomplicated, with only two steps, I would advise the Italian sonnet.

Many people just pick one or the other and use only that one -- the reasoning for this being that sonnets are addictive, and you start to hear the rhythm and rhyme in your head. The more of one kind you write, the more you want to write. However, I would advise that all prospective sonneteers learn both: that way you have a tool for whatever kind of topic you're dealing with.

To Althea, From Prison

2009-02-14T22:07:00.002-05:00

by Richard Lovelace

When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my gates,
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the grates;
When I lie tangled in her hair
And fetter'd to her eye,
The birds that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.

When flowing cups run swiftly round
With no allaying Thames,
Our careless heads with roses bound,
Our hearts with loyal flames;
When thirsty grief in wine we steep,
When healths and draughts go free—
Fishes that tipple in the deep
Know no such liberty.

When, like committed linnets, I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetness, mercy, majesty,
And glories of my King;
When I shall voice aloud how good
He is, how great should be,
Enlargèd winds, that curl the flood,
Know no such liberty.

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

* * *

A break from our sonnet theme to post a poem that's been floating in my head lately, as I reflect on the notion of freedom. I think we are too accustomed to freedom -- so accustomed to assuming we have it as not to notice when it is taken away. I rejoice in my freedom every day, for I have lived without it -- even without that interior freedom which no one can take from us without our permission.

Yet how often we give that permission! We take dictums and short, easy answers and accept them without thinking. People assume that because we are Catholic, naturally we must just take things "on faith" and not think about them. No! Faith has its basis in reason. We choose to believe because reason tells us the authority is trustworthy. Reason tells us that God can neither deceive nor be deceived. If reason told us otherwise, God could not and would not expect us to believe Him. He allows us to come to Him through our reason.

What, then, should happen when something we take on faith (either faith in God, or in trustworthy men) seems wrong? I may get some objections when I say this, but I still say -- go ahead and question it! If it is true, it can handle the questioning. Go back to the very beginning if you need to -- take the effort you need to go back to square one and prove what you know to yourself. While you're taking that effort, still abide by what you believe, because you believe it, but don't stop there -- examine. If you keep having questions and doubts and refuse to entertain them, they will only grow, until you're years down the line saying, "I guess I doubted even then, but didn't dare say anything." Don't let that happen. Ask the questions now -- trust that there is an answer to every one of them.

If you were in a relationship, and something appeared "off" to you, you would sit down and ask why -- try to discover what it is and whether it's going to be a problem. Otherwise you might find yourself years later saying, "Well, I always assumed it wouldn't be a big deal, but it turned out it was." Instead, you examine the problem, turn it all around and upside down, and once you know it, choose whether to accept it as it is. If you do accept it, you'll know later on that it was with your eyes open, and you will be better prepared to deal with it.

Similarly, if you are in a religious group that you've always assumed you were specially called to by God, and recent events are casting doubt on that group, go ahead and entertain that doubt. It's all right. Don't you trust that the entire basis for your faith in God won't crumble even if you do ask yourself if there might be something wrong?

The truth sometimes hurts, but it will always set you free.

And that is all I am going to say about the recent news. If you know me well, you might know why I'm thinking about it so much ... but I have promised someone that I won't obsess about it, so here's me trying.

The world is too much with us; late and soon

2009-02-10T16:20:00.002-05:00

by William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The Winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

* * *

Another sonnet. Pay attention to the form. Metrically speaking, it's an Italian sonnet, rhyming abba abba cdcdcd. (Italian sonnets can have a number of different rhyme schemes for the sestet.) But structurally, notice that the volta does not take place at the end of the eighth line, as usual, but halfway throught the ninth line (where the dash is). That may seem a small thing, but for a sonnet, that's a huge innovation. After all, there's not much room for variation in a sonnet. More on that point later. First, we'll do an English sonnet for next week. Stay tuned.

From The Ballad of the White Horse

2009-01-27T17:44:00.003-05:00

by G.K. Chesterton

Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.

Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.

Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.

For the White Horse knew England
When there was none to know;
He saw the first oar break or bend,
He saw heaven fall and the world end,
O God, how long ago.

For the end of the world was long ago,
And all we dwell to-day
As children of some second birth,
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgment day.

For the end of the world was long ago,
When the ends of the world waxed free,
When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
And the sun drowned in the sea.

When Caesar's sun fell out of the sky
And whoso hearkened right
Could only hear the plunging
Of the nations in the night.

* * *

In the river island of Athelney,
With the river running past,
In colours of such simple creed
All things sprang at him, sun and weed,
Till the grass grew to be grass indeed
And the tree was a tree at last.

Fearfully plain the flowers grew,
Like the child's book to read,
Or like a friend's face seen in a glass;
He looked; and there Our Lady was,
She stood and stroked the tall live grass
As a man strokes his steed.

Her face was like an open word
When brave men speak and choose,
The very colours of her coat
Were better than good news.

She spoke not, nor turned not,
Nor any sign she cast,
Only she stood up straight and free,
Between the flowers in Athelney,
And the river running past.

One dim ancestral jewel hung
On his ruined armour grey,
He rent and cast it at her feet:
Where, after centuries, with slow feet,
Men came from hall and school and street
And found it where it lay.

"Mother of God," the wanderer said,
"I am but a common king,
Nor will I ask what saints may ask,
To see a secret thing.

"The gates of heaven are fearful gates
Worse than the gates of hell;
Not I would break the splendours barred
Or seek to know the thing they guard,
Which is too good to tell.

"But for this earth most pitiful,
This little land I know,
If that which is for ever is,
Or if our hearts shall break with bliss,
Seeing the stranger go?

"When our last bow is broken, Queen,
And our last javelin cast,
Under some sad, green evening sky,
Holding a ruined cross on high,
Under warm westland grass to lie,
Shall we come home at last?"

And a voice came human but high up,
Like a cottage climbed among
The clouds; or a serf of hut and croft
That sits by his hovel fire as oft,
But hears on his old bare roof aloft
A belfry burst in song.

"The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
We do not guard our gain,
The heaviest hind may easily
Come silently and suddenly
Upon me in a lane.

"And any little maid that walks
In good thoughts apart,
May break the guard of the Three Kings
And see the dear and dreadful things
I hid within my heart.

"The meanest man in grey fields gone
Behind the set of sun,
Heareth between star and other star,
Through the door of the darkness fallen ajar,
The council, eldest of things that are,
The talk of the Three in One.

"The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
We do not guard our gold,
Men may uproot where worlds begin,
Or read the name of the nameless sin;
But if he fail or if he win
To no good man is told.

"The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark.

"The men of the East may search the scrolls
For sure fates and fame,
But the men that drink the blood of God
Go singing to their shame.

"The wise men know what wicked things
Are written on the sky,
They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings,
Hearing the heavy purple wings,
Where the forgotten seraph kings
Still plot how God shall die.

"The wise men know all evil things
Under the twisted trees,
Where the perverse in pleasure pine
And men are weary of green wine
And sick of crimson seas.

"But you and all the kind of Christ
Are ignorant and brave,
And you have wars you hardly win
And souls you hardly save.

"I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

"Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?"

* * *

And slowly his hands and thoughtfully
Fell from the lifted lyre,
And the owls moaned from the mighty trees
Till Alfred caught it to his knees
And smote it as in ire.

He heaved the head of the harp on high
And swept the framework barred,
And his stroke had all the rattle and spark
Of horses flying hard.

"When God put man in a garden
He girt him with a sword,
And sent him forth a free knight
That might betray his lord;

"He brake Him and betrayed Him,
And fast and far he fell,
Till you and I may stretch our necks
And burn our beards in hell.

"But though I lie on the floor of the world,
With the seven sins for rods,
I would rather fall with Adam
Than rise with all your gods.

"What have the strong gods given?
Where have the glad gods led?
When Guthrum sits on a hero's throne
And asks if he is dead?

"Sirs, I am but a nameless man,
A rhymester without home,
Yet since I come of the Wessex clay
And carry the cross of Rome,

"I will even answer the mighty earl
That asked of Wessex men
Why they be meek and monkish folk,
And bow to the White Lord's broken yoke;
What sign have we save blood and smoke?
Here is my answer then.

"That on you is fallen the shadow,
And not upon the Name;
That though we scatter and though we fly,
And you hang over us like the sky,
You are more tired of victory,
Than we are tired of shame.

"That though you hunt the Christian man
Like a hare on the hill-side,
The hare has still more heart to run
Than you have heart to ride.

"That though all lances split on you,
All swords be heaved in vain,
We have more lust again to lose
Than you to win again.

"Your lord sits high in the saddle,
A broken-hearted king,
But our king Alfred, lost from fame,
Fallen among foes or bonds of shame,
In I know not what mean trade or name,
Has still some song to sing;

"Our monks go robed in rain and snow,
But the heart of flame therein,
But you go clothed in feasts and flames,
When all is ice within;

"Nor shall all iron dooms make dumb
Men wondering ceaselessly,
If it be not better to fast for joy
Than feast for misery.

"Nor monkish order only
Slides down, as field to fen,
All things achieved and chosen pass,
As the White Horse fades in the grass,
No work of Christian men.

"Ere the sad gods that made your gods
Saw their sad sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale,
That you have left to darken and fail,
Was cut out of the grass.

"Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things.

"For our God hath blessed creation,
Calling it good. I know
What spirit with whom you blindly band
Hath blessed destruction with his hand;
Yet by God's death the stars shall stand
And the small apples grow."

* * *

And when the last arrow
Was fitted and was flown,
When the broken shield hung on the breast,
And the hopeless lance was laid in rest,
And the hopeless horn blown,

The King looked up, and what he saw
Was a great light like death,
For Our Lady stood on the standards rent,
As lonely and as innocent
As when between white walls she went
And the lilies of Nazareth.

One instant in a still light
He saw Our Lady then,
Her dress was soft as western sky,
And she was a queen most womanly--
But she was a queen of men.

Over the iron forest
He saw Our Lady stand,
Her eyes were sad withouten art,
And seven swords were in her heart--
But one was in her hand.

Then the last charge went blindly,
And all too lost for fear:
The Danes closed round, a roaring ring,
And twenty clubs rose o'er the King,
Four Danes hewed at him, halloing,
And Ogier of the Stone and Sling
Drove at him with a spear.

But the Danes were wild with laughter,
And the great spear swung wide,
The point stuck to a straggling tree,
And either host cried suddenly,
As Alfred leapt aside.

Short time had shaggy Ogier
To pull his lance in line--
He knew King Alfred's axe on high,
He heard it rushing through the sky,

He cowered beneath it with a cry--
It split him to the spine:
And Alfred sprang over him dead,
And blew the battle sign.

Then bursting all and blasting
Came Christendom like death,
Kicked of such catapults of will,
The staves shiver, the barrels spill,
The waggons waver and crash and kill
The waggoners beneath.

Barriers go backwards, banners rend,
Great shields groan like a gong--
Horses like horns of nightmare
Neigh horribly and long.

Horses ramp high and rock and boil
And break their golden reins,
And slide on carnage clamorously,
Down where the bitter blood doth lie,
Where Ogier went on foot to die,
In the old way of the Danes.

"The high tide!" King Alfred cried.
"The high tide and the turn!
As a tide turns on the tall grey seas,
See how they waver in the trees,
How stray their spears, how knock their knees,
How wild their watchfires burn!

"The Mother of God goes over them,
Walking on wind and flame,
And the storm-cloud drifts from city and dale,
And the White Horse stamps in the White Horse Vale,
And we all shall yet drink Christian ale
In the village of our name.

"The Mother of God goes over them,
On dreadful cherubs borne;
And the psalm is roaring above the rune,
And the Cross goes over the sun and moon,
Endeth the battle of Ethandune
With the blowing of a horn."

* * *

Last week, a few days before the March for Life, I found myself surrounded by a number of my friends, sitting and talking about the pro-life movement. It seems so discouraging these days, that everything we pushed so hard to achieve is being swept away like so many leaves.

In the midst of this my friend Sean stood up. He walked purposefully to the bookshelf and came back with a small, worn book. He opened it and began. It was The Ballad of the White Horse, and it fit perfectly with our own situation. Night is thrice night over us ... and yet, do we have faith without a hope?

So we took turns, reading the parts that inspired us, and this is pretty much what we came up with. I will leave you with the words of another ballad, The Battle of Maldon:

Hige sceal þe heardra, heorteþe cenre,
mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlađ.

The mind must be tougher, heart the bolder,
resolve must be greater, as our strength becomes less.

Bright Star! would I were steadfast as thou art

2009-01-08T23:24:00.002-05:00

by John Keats

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

* * *

I'm starting a series on sonnets today, in the hopes I will post a little more frequently if I have a theme. Also, I have plans for sonnets in the future ... but for now, just take a look at the form. Notice especially the "volta," or turn, where I left a space. This is de rigeur for Italian sonnets. The octave, the first eight lines, presents the subject, and the sestet, the last six, presents a contrast, conflict, or change. Here the contrast is between the pure steadfastness of the star (this purity emphasized by words like "Eremite" (hermit), "priestlike," and "ablution"), and the more fleshly steadfastness the speaker wants to practice. No lone splendor for him! He prefers his lady's bosom -- yet there is a kind of purity in faithfulness as well. Purity is not solely based on the rejection of earthly pleasures, but on utter faithfulness in those called to enjoy them.

I am not quite sure Keats had the same ideas on faithfulness as I. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. I also don't much like a man saying he's going to "swoon to death" -- it's a bit much! But he was a Romantic, and they do it all the time. (Say they will, not actually do it!)

Altogether, I like this poem. It continues Keats' habit, which I discovered in "The Eve of St. Agnes," of using the repetition of words similar in meaning to emphasize a point. Here it is purity. At the beginning of "Eve of St. Agnes," it is cold. Look it up and see what I mean!

Gloria in Profundis

2008-12-16T21:42:00.000-05:00

by G.K. Chesterton

There has fallen on earth for a token
A god too great for the sky.
He has burst out of all things and broken
The bounds of eternity:
Into time and the terminal land
He has strayed like a thief or a lover,
For the wine of the world brims over,
Its splendour is spilt on the sand.

Who is proud when the heavens are humble,
Who mounts if the mountains fall,
If the fixed stars topple and tumble
And a deluge of love drowns all-
Who rears up his head for a crown,
Who holds up his will for a warrant,
Who strives with the starry torrent,
When all that is good goes down?

For in dread of such falling and failing
The fallen angels fell
Inverted in insolence, scaling
The hanging mountain of hell:
But unmeasured of plummet and rod
Too deep for their sight to scan,
Outrushing the fall of man
Is the height of the fall of God.

Glory to God in the Lowest
The spout of the stars in spate-
Where thunderbolt thinks to be slowest
And the lightning fears to be late:
As men dive for sunken gem
Pursuing, we hunt and hound it,
The fallen star has found it
In the cavern of Bethlehem.

* * *

I was going to blog on this poem, and then I found that the Blog of the American Chesterton Society had done it already. So I'll just say a few words about it, and then let you go over there and see what they have to say.

I think the key to this topsy-turvey poem is the second stanza. The problem is, the second stanza is mostly composed of questions, and we tend to read poetry wanting answers. I think the answer to these rhetorical questions is something along the lines of "Nobody good!" If God, who is highest, now makes Himself lowest, who would exalt themselves? Well, the third stanza answers, "The bad angels." And not just them, either--bad people, too. If God has shown us what it is to be highest--falling down lowest--than all of our attempts to climb to the heights are resulting in the worst kind of fall: a fall where we imagine ourselves to be on a lofty mountain, which turns out to be Hell. Reminds me of Paradise Lost.

I think my favorite line is, "He has strayed like a thief or a lover." Both thieves and lovers might sneak around, but for different purposes. God has gone where He does not "belong," but out of love.

Okay, now you can go over and read the ACS blog. There are some good comments; I wrote one. But I forgot one, which is my thought as to what first gave Chesterton the idea of wine spilt on sand: simply that the colors look good together. Remember the last patriot in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, who took an advertisement for mustard and put some blood on it, because red and yellow were the colors of his country? Chesterton always loved the heraldry inherent in that kind of combination. Just a thought -- though I could be wrong, and I must say I do usually frown on the mind-reading of poets by their critics.

Nuptial Blessing

2008-12-14T01:18:00.003-05:00

Let us pray. -- O God, who by Thy mighty power hast made all things out of nothing: and who, having established the first beginnings of the world, didst in the woman provide for the man, made after the likeness of God, a helpmate to be so inseparably bound to him, that Thou didst give to her body its beginning from his body--thus teaching us, that it should never be lawful to sever that which it had pleased Thee to form out of one substance: O God, who by so excellent a mystery consecrated the union between man and wife, as in this nuptial bond to prefigure the sacred union of Christ with His Church; O God, by whom woman is joined to man, and this primal partnership is enriched with a blessing, such as alone of blessings was not withdrawn either in the punishment of sin, or in the sentence of the Deluge: do Thou graciously look down upon this Thy handmaid, who, about to be joined in wedlock, seeketh the guarantee of Thy protection.

May this be to her a yoke of love and peace! May she, faithful and chaste, be wedded in Christ, and ever be an imitator of the holy women! May she please her husband, as did Rachel; be prudent, as was Rebecca; long-lived and faithful, like Sara! Let not the author of evil usurp the least share in any of her actions! May she live on, knit closely to the Faith and to the Commandments! Bound to one husband, may she fly all illicit connections! May she protect her weakness by the vigor of discipline! May she be sedate in her behavior, respected for her modesty, versed in heavenly doctrine! May she be fruitful in offspring: be approved and innocent: and to attain to the heavenly realms and to the rest of the Blessed! And may both she and her husband see their children's children, even to the third and fourth generations, and attain a happy old age! Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.

* * *

Is there anything to add to this? This is the blessing that will be said at our wedding. I could not ask for a blessing that begs God for more of what I already ask of Him.

Rorate Coeli

2008-12-07T21:46:00.004-05:00

Rorate coeli desuper,
et nubes pluant justum.

Ne irascaris Domine,
ne ultra memineris iniquitatis.
Ecce civitas sancti facta est deserta,
Sion deserta facta est,
Jerusalem desolata est,
domus santificationis tuae
et gloriae tuae,
ubi laudaverunt te patres nostri.

Peccavimus,
et facti sumus tamquam immundus nos,
et cecidimus quasi folium universi:
et iniquitates nostrae quasi ventus abstulerunt nos:
abscondisti faciem tuam a nobis,
et allisisti nos in manu iniquitatis nostrae.

Vide Domine afflictionem populi tui,
et mitte quem missurus es:
emitte Agnum dominatorem terrae,
de Petra deserti ad montem filiae Sion:
ut auferat ipse iugum captivitatis nostrae.

Consolamini, consolamini,
popule meus,
cito veniet salus tua.
Quare maerore consumeris,
quia innovavit te dolor?
Salvabo te, noli timere,
ego enim sum Dominus Deus tuus,
sanctus Israel, redemptor tuus.

* * *

Drop down dew of heaven from above,
let the clouds rain down the just one.

Do not be angry, Lord,
nor remember further our iniquity.
Behold the holy city has become deserted,
Zion has become deserted,
Jerusalem is desolate,
the home of your sanctification
and your glory,
where our fathers praised you.

We have sinned,
and we have become as if unclean,
and we have fallen like all the leaves,
and our iniquities, like the wind, have borne us away;
you have hidden your face from us,
and have crushed us in the hand of our iniquity.

See, Lord, the affliction of your people,
and send the one who is to be sent:
send forth the Lamb, master of the earth,
from the deserted Rock to the mount of the daughters of Zion:
that he himself may remove the yoke of our captivity.

Be comforted, be comforted,
my people,
swiftly comes your salvation.
Why are you consumed by grief,
because sorrow has altered you?
I will save you, do not fear,
for I am the Lord your God,
holy Israel, your redeemer.

* * *

This is the chant we used to sing when I was in boarding school during the novena before Christmas. A recording of it can be found on YouTube here. I have to say that I think we sounded much better when we sang it. You have to understand how chant works to do it right.

The translation is my own, though I don't care who borrows it. To me, the important thing is that these things are done properly, as they almost never are. I even found a mistranslation in the Adoremus Hymnal the other day!

I have never found anything that puts into words the longing of Advent better than this chant. During this time, we do not just wait for Christmas for ourselves. No, we unite ourselves with the longing of the generations. From the promise Adam and Eve received, that the serpent would be crushed by the seed of the woman, until Christ was finally born, all creation labored in darkness, bound in their sin. There was no solution to their guilt, for no one could take their sins from them. The Law, when it came, was too weighty for them to fulfill, yet there was no other way by which they could keep from wrongdoing. Imagine what your life would be with no confession. That one sin you did years ago, or that little pesky one you can't kick the habit of, would be on your conscience for the rest of your life.

The people crying out in this prophecy understand this. They feel the weight of their sin keenly on their shoulders. They know there is only one who can save them, and this is the very one who, by rights, should be unforgivably angry with them. Yet, though afraid, they are not too afraid to run to him for help. It is like the line in Prince Caspian (which I was reading today):

*

"And now, where is this little Dwarf, this famous swordsman and archer, who doesn't believe in lions? Come here, Son of Earth, come HERE!" and the last word was no longer the hint of a roar but almost the real thing.

"Wraiths and wreckage," gasped Trumpkin the ghost of a voice. The children, who knew Aslan well enough to see that he liked the Dwarf very much, were not disturbed; but it was quite another thing for Trumpkin who had never seen a lion before, let alone this Lion. He did the only sensible thing he could have done; that is, instead of bolting, he tottered towards Aslan.

*

No matter how afraid they were, not knowing that God liked them very much, knew enough to totter toward Him. Knowing what we do, we must never fail to do the same, especially now during Advent. Perhaps we have been living, at least in some little way, as the pagans who do not know God. But now that it is Advent, we must act as the Israelites did: wait for the Lord with courage; be stoutheared and wait for the Lord. He comes with power to save us, power that no sin can stand up against. That is what Christmas is for -- for us to "buy into" His original coming, every year, because we fall away a little every year, and must bring ourselves back.

Shine, Perishing Republic

2008-11-29T16:11:00.003-05:00

by Robinson Jeffers

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste, haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught -- they say -- God, when he walked on earth.

* * *

A few years ago, I would have considered this poem much too pessimistic. But now? I definitely am not placing my hope in America. It will succeed or it will fail, but our kingdom is not of this world.

No matter what happens in this world, "corruption is never compulsory." Even when they try to force us, there is always somewhere we can run. If they deny us that, there is always martyrdom. No one can force you to sin.

Hopefully it won't get that bad. But if it does, there is a kind of hope in this poem -- no matter how bad it gets, no one can make us join in the corruption.

Robinson Jeffers died in 1962. So he missed a lot of what we realize as the "perishing" of our nation. I guess he could see the beginnings of it, even from where he was.

Finally, Cento Winners

2008-11-20T19:39:00.003-05:00

This contest has been the hardest to judge so far, of all the contests I've done. Who knew it would be this difficult? But such a fierce beauty can be drawn from a careful selection and condensation of the words of others. More than one of these poems made me catch my breath -- feeling, in Emily Dickenson's phrase, as though the top of my head had been taken off. Well done, everyone.

First Place

In Evening Air
by Dylan, from Roethke

Under a southern wind,
Hidden in my own heart,
My lady laughs, delighting in what is.

A suddenness of trees
Turned by revolving air:
You will find no comfort here.
All waters waver, and all fires fail.

The dark heart of some ancient thing
And the sheen of ravens:
Flutter of wings and seeds quaking --
Such stretchings of the spirit make no sound
(I'm martyr to a motion not my own).

Once I transcended time
And came to a dark ravine --
Our small souls hid from their small agonies.

I receive! I have been received!
What speech abides?
How high is have?
The dew draws near
And loves the living ground.

What do they tell us, sound and silence?
The bushes and the stones danced on and on;
I walk as if my face would kiss the wind.

* * *

First place is just lovely. It suggests so much. That's the neat thing about centos -- they force you to suggest rather than say. I only wish I knew more of the source poems. I'll have to seek them out. That last line, especially -- it's pure gold.

This describes, by the way, pretty exactly what I felt the day I was engaged. I walked as if my face would kiss the wind.

* * *

Second Place

Nazareth
by Enbrethiliel, from Chesterton

A child sits in a sunny place
Pure as white lilies in a watery space
Laughing everlastingly
The joy without a cause
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free
Between us and the sea

Though earth be filled with waters dark
Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes!
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen
Surely, friends, I might have guessed
God made the sun to crown his head
The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee
Aflame with faith, and free

* * *

Ah, she knew I was a sucker for Chesterton. But she picked the lines so carefully, it's like a long, sweet laugh that Chesterton might laugh on Christmas morning. You have to breathe Chesterton to condense him so well.

* * *

Third Place

The Return
by Meredith, from Hopkins

I will appear, looking such charity,
It will flame out like shining from shook foil.
Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where springs not fail.
Or ancient mounds that cover bones
Spring, that but now were shut
To the stars, lovely-asunder.

I did say yes
With the sea-romp over the wreck,
And find the uncreated light.
And I have asked to be
Lower than death and the dark,
An ark for the listener, for the lingerer,
For him who ever thought with love of me.

* * *

Again, another poet I can't resist. Is it Christ that speaks now? I do believe it is ... and how clever, to turn the words around from a human speaker to Christ! Who, of course, asked to be lower, so that he might come down to those who love him. This is what a cento ought to be -- a rearranging of the original words to mean something quite new.

* * *

Honorable Mentions

The Penguin Book of the Sonnet
by Dylan

Our spirits grew as we went side by side
Listening to Schubert, grievous and sublime.
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
And signified the sureness of the soul.

I had forgot wide fields and clear brown streams;
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill
To give us comfort through the lonely dark
Calm night, the everlasting and the same.

Fair as the moon and joyful as the light,
Your hands lay open in the long fresh grass.
I marked with flowers the minutes of my day:

One little noise of life remained -- I heard
The very shadow of an insect's wing
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine.

* * *

Mmm ... Dylan seems to be a master of this form. I really, really like his centos. The subject here reminds me of Donne's "The Ecstasy," while being less over-the-top and more real, grounded in the visible (which, of course, is always a hint to the invisible).

* * *

Mercy
by David S.

Be adored among men,
O loving Pelican, O Jesus Lord!
Wring thy rebel, dogged in den;
Unclean I am, but cleanse me in Thy Blood!

But oh, I've a wish in my soul, dear love,
Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue,
That I might wash free of my sins, dear love;
Father and fondler of heart, thou hast wrung.

By the pool that I see in my dreams, dear love,
There, motionless and happy in my pain,
(And the pool, it is silvery bright, dear love,
Of which a single drop, for sinners spilt,
Can purge the whole world from all its guilt)
There will I sing my sad, perpetual strain.

There will I sing my absent Lord and Love -
O wisest love! That flesh and blood! -
That sooner I may rise, and go above -
Numquam draco sit mihi dux
Crux semper sit mihi lux -
O loving wisdom of our God!

* * *

More Hopkins, hooray! But also some great saints. Saints should never be left out, when it comes to making poetry. They know what they're doing. I think my favorite touch in this poem is how the pool turns out to be a pool of Christ's blood. A little surprise, and a thrilling one.

From "Maud"

2008-10-17T21:51:00.002-05:00

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Go not, happy day,
From the shining fields,
Go not, happy day,
Till the maiden yields.
Rosy is the West,
Rosy is the South,
Roses are her cheeks,
And a rose her mouth.
When the happy Yes
Falters from her lips,
Pass and blush the news
Over glowing ships;
Over blowing seas,
Over seas at rest,
Pass the happy news,
Blush it thro' the West;
Till the red man dance
By his red cedar-tree,
And the red man's babe
Leap, beyond the sea.
Blush from West to East,
Blush from East to West,
Till the West is East,
Blush it thro' the West.
Rosy is the West,
Rosy is the South,
Roses are her cheeks,
And a rose her mouth.

. . .

I have led her home, my love, my only friend.
There is none like her, none.
And never yet so warmly ran my blood
And sweetly, on and on
Calming itself to the long-wish'd-for end,
Full to the banks, close on the promised good.

* * *

Well, I know it's been a long time since I've posted, but maybe this will serve as my excuse: I just got engaged.

John, who's been blogging from a number of locations since before I began (Fiddleback Fever, This Red Rock, Poor Man's Bible), has been my good friend for a long time, and more than a friend for a good while too. But now it's official, and we're going to be getting married. Who would have known, when I was putting up mopey love poetry at the beginning of this blog, certain John was never going to like me back, that we would reach this day? But we have. It's been a wonderful journey up to this point, and I fully expect it to get even better.

Pray for both of us, Gentle Reader, and keep reading poetry. It keeps your soul healthy, and helps you listen to it, so that when it tells you what it wants, you hear.

My soul has been saying, "Marry John." So I'm listening!

P.S. I have not forgotten the cento contest! I'm working on it!

Cento Contest

2008-08-18T10:53:00.002-05:00

All right, this is it: the next contest. I hope more people submit to this one. It's a little difficult, but be brave: once you manage to write one at all, it's likely to sound really good. I know mine did.

A cento is a poem made entirely of lines from other poems. The name comes from the Latin word meaning a cloak made out of patches. The cento differs from found poetry in that every line is taken from another poem, instead of just any borrowed material.

Virgilian centos were popular in the Middle Ages, when poets would use lines from Virgil to write about religious themes. You can follow this tradition, if you like, by limiting yourself to a single poet (e.g. a Shakespearean cento) or maybe some other group of poems--only Romantic poems, or only poems posted on this blog (and that's a lot!). Or just do any poem, which will of course give you more freedom.

In the modern age, there is a hearkening-back to this poetic form in the allusion-rich poetry of Eliot and Pound. The Waste Land is filled with lines of other poems, sometimes slightly changed and sometimes borrowed wholesale. I find it gives a serious, eternal tone to the poetry. That's what got me trying to write centos, with some success.

The rules are as follows:

1. Don't use chunks bigger than two lines long. This ought to be your own poem. The original rules for a Virgilian cento allowed for no more than one line at a time, so I'm being a little generous.

2. Regular meter is not necessary, and neither is rhyme, but you might try for these and see what happens. A rhyme now and then can be pretty neat, and if you borrow lines that are all iambic pentameter, for example, you'll automatically have meter.

3. You can change the tense of verbs, or the person of pronouns, but don't make any large changes to the lines of poetry you borrow.

4. It can be any length. Preferably not an epic, though--I do have to read all these!

Try not to be too intimidated by the new form, but let yourself play with it. Pick a subject, find lines of poetry that suggest that subject, and arrange them different ways until it sounds right. And don't be afraid to submit something that isn't perfect. No poem is, and it's better to put yourself out there and try.

I'll leave my own cento in the comment box, when I've polished it a little. Leave your own submissions there. You can also email them to enchiridion1 at yahoo dot com.

And the winner is ...

2008-08-11T16:09:00.000-05:00

A Confidence
by Meredith

Because of you my eyes are always wet -
I never loved so vehemently before.
You perfect chevalier with hair of jet,
Just thinking of you fells me to the floor!
I know you're sweet and smart and witty for
I read you daily on the Internet.
And so I pine upon this Hither Shore:
How can I love you when we've never met?

A date, they say, could all my dreams upset -
You might find talking to me quite a chore.
Or you could light a sordid cigarette,
Or accidentally walk into a door.
I might turn fickle like Queen Eleanor,
Offered a corner-office or a coronet.
But saving humiliations so galore -
How can I love you when we've never met?

I'll have to reinvent the alphabet
To write the world how madly I adore,
Or cry it from a heathen minaret,
Or cast a spell on Glastonbury Tor.
Between us there's a thousand miles and more,
And colloquies too filmy to forget.
Yet here's my heart. It's beautiful and poor.
How can I love you when we've never met?

Envoi:
Prince of the heart's desire (in Grecian lore)
Whom Psyche loved unseen without regret,
Grant me some day to see him, I implore;
How can I love him when we've never met?

* * *

I received a number of submissions, but this one really did carry it away in terms of clever turns of phrase as well as earnestness. The idea--loving someone from afar--is an old one, with the Internet adding a new twist. There are a few plays on this blend of old and new: "a corner-office or a coronet," for example. And, as Meredith loves to do, there's plenty of allusion, which I tend to like.

Yes, it's a good poem. But all the poems I received were so good I feel this contest a job well done. Good poems were written--that was my goal. In fact, it's such a success I think I'll try another contest very soon . . . but it'll be something a little different. Even the veteran poets might have a hard time with it, but amateurs might get a leg up with it. I certainly found this form a big help in getting me to write. But it'll be a surprise--I'll announce it next time!

La Figlia Che Piange

2008-08-05T12:01:00.000-05:00

by T. S. Eliot

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body is has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we should both understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

Sonnets from the Portuguese--XXXV

2008-07-31T15:36:00.003-05:00

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange
And be all to me? Shall I never miss
Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss
That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange,
When I look up, to drop on a new range
Of walls and floors, another home than this?
Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is
Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change
That's hardest. If to conquer love, has tried,
To conquer grief, tries more, as all things prove,
For grief indeed is love and grief beside.
Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.
Yet love me--wilt thou? Open thy heart wide,
And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.

* * *

I just finished the letters of the Brownings today. Elizabeth Barrett wrote to her future husband, Robert Browning, every day, and sometimes twice. Her life was a sad one before her marriage: her father refused to allow his daughters to marry, and her own ill health kept her in her room almost constantly. When Robert was, after much pleading, allowed to meet her, he wrote her a letter declaring his love. She destroyed the letter and urged him never to speak to her of love again. But after a long correspondence, she finally did accept his love.

In this poem, she speaks of her fear of leaving her home and family to marry Robert. This was a very real fear--when she ran away from home to Italy with Robert, her father cast her off completely, returning her letters unopened.

Here Elizabeth expresses her hope that Robert will fill the empty place in her heart from her family. Since her mother, to whom she was close, had died some years before, she feels much of what she would have possessed in home-life is already gone. She hopes grief will be easier to conquer than love has been--since, try as she might, she has not been able to drive away love. Grief, however, may well be passing.

I am tempted to go on strike until I get more ballades--but I won't. I'll just warn you that time is running out on that contest!

Ballade Contest

2008-07-07T17:30:00.001-05:00

All right, here it is: the long-awaited ballade contest. Now is the time to let your entries come pouring in--or to scratch your head and hope for inspiration.

I'm posting some examples of the ballade form, written by Chesterton and Belloc, in another post. That should give you an idea of what ballades are all about. But here are the basic characteristics.

1. The rhyme form is ababbcbC ababbcbC ababbcbC bcbC. That is, three stanzas of eight lines, and one of four. The final capital C stands for the refrain. Rhyme is continuous throughout the poem--all a's rhyme throughout, and all b's--fourteen b rhymes altogether! So pick an easy-to-rhyme word to end your second line. "Orange" simply will not do.

2. The refrain: this is a catchy little bit to end each stanza. It has to sound the same in each line--but you may change the punctuation, swap in a homonym here or there--just so long as they sound the same.

3. The Envoi. This is the final four line stanza. Chesterton, Belloc, and company would address this to the prince. As we have none, do as you will, but please address it to somebody. You can just say "Prince" and let us guess who you mean, throw in the President, or address it to your mother. But the Envoi is meant to be a sending-forth or farewell stanza--as Byron's introduction to Don Juan:

"Go, little book, from this my solitude;
I cast thee on the water: go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
The world will find thee after many days."
When Southey's read, and Wordsworth understood,
I can't help putting in my claim to praise--
The first four rhymes are Southey's, every line:
For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine.

So, send your poem out to somebody. It could be me. I don't care.

4. On some study, it looks like iambic pentameter is the thing for ballades. If another foot suits you, that's fine with me, but pick a solid medium-length line. For examples of what I mean by iambic pentameter, see the sample ballades. Or just say, "ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM." Or read some Shakespeare aloud. You'll be able to hear it.

5. Any subject will do.

Just leave it in the comment box or email it to enchiridion1 at yahoo dot com. I'm looking forward to the submissions--if I get any. Be brave and try one! They're easier than they look.

Two ballades

2008-07-07T17:28:00.000-05:00

"A Ballade Of Suicide"

by G.K. Chesterton

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours - on the wall -
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me.... After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

To-morrow is the time I get my pay -
My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall -
I see a little cloud all pink and grey -
Perhaps the Rector's mother will not call -
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way -
I never read the works of Juvenal -
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

The world will have another washing day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H. G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;
Rationalists are growing rational -
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray,
So secret that the very sky seems small -
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

(ENVOI)
Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall -
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

Untitled ballade

by Hilaire Belloc

I like to read myself to sleep in Bed,
A thing that every honest man has done
At one time or another, it is said,
But not as something in the usual run;
Now from ten years old to forty one
Have never missed a night: and what I need
To buck me up is Gilbert Chesterton,
(The only man I regularly read).

The Illustrated London News is wed
To letter press as stodgy as a bun,
The Daily News might just as well be dead,
The 'Idler' has a tawdry kind of fun,
The 'Speaker' is a sort of Sally Lunn,
The World' is like a small unpleasant weed;
I take them all because of Chesterton,
(The only man I regularly read).

The memories of the Duke of Beachy Head,
The memoirs of Lord Hildebrand (his son)
Are things I could have written on my head,
So are the memories of the Comte de Mun,
And as for novels written by the ton,
I'd burn the bloody lot! I know the Breed!
And get me back to be with Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

(ENVOI)
Prince, have you read a book called "Thoughts upon
The Ethos of the Athanasian Creed"?
No matter - it is not by Chesterton
(The only man I regularly read).

Sea Fever

2008-06-28T15:16:00.003-05:00

by John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

* * *

Many apologies for the long hiatus in blogging. I'm undergoing a big transition between college life, which ended this spring, and the life of a teacher, which starts in the fall. And I'm spending the transition time trying to write a novel ... so you can see how a few things got put on hold for awhile ... Anyway, I'm sorry and here's something to start us up again.

I love this poem and have been meaning to post it for a long time. It sounds a little Tolkienesque, though it probably came before Tolkien. (I don't actually know a thing about John Masefield; does anyone else?) I suppose Masefield had the same Anglo-Saxon inspirations as Tolkien did. I can really see the roots of this poem in the Old English poem "The Seafarer"--how the sea calls you out on it (although this poem leaves out the miserable, cold, exiled imagery of the older poem). I also notice the Anglo-Saxon rhythms and kennings like "gull's way" and "whale's way." The stressed syllables at the end of many lines ("white sail's shaking") make for a very pleasant and stirring rhythm.

I'm planning another poem-writing contest soon, one more difficult than before. If any of you are up to writing a longer poem in a strict form, break out your quill pens and check back within the next week.

A Marriage Song

2008-05-16T18:44:00.002-05:00

by G.K. Chesterton

Why should we reck of hours that rend
While we two ride together?
The heavens rent from end to end
Would be but windy weather,
The strong stars shaken down in spate
Would be a shower of spring,
And we should list the trump of fate
And hear a linnet sing.

We break the line with stroke and luck,
The arrows run like rain,
If you be struck, or I be struck,
There's one to strike again.
If you befriend, or I befriend,
The strength is in us twain,
And good things end and bad things end,
And you and I remain.

Why should we reck of ill or well
While we two ride together?
The fires that over Sodom fell
Would be but sultry weather.
Beyond all ends to all men given
Our race is far and fell,
We shall but wash our feet in heaven.
And warm our hands in hell.

Battles unborn and vast shall view
Our faltered standards stream,
New friends shall come and frenzies new,
New troubles toil and teem;
New friends shall pass and still renew
One truth that does not seem,
That I am I, and you are you,
And Death a morning dream.

Why should we reck of scorn or praise
While we two ride together?
The icy air of godless days
Shall be but wintry weather.
If hell were highest, if the heaven
Were blue with devils blue,
I should have guessed that all was even.
If I had dreamed of you.

Little I reck of empty prides,
Of creeds more cold than clay;
To nobler ends and longer rides,
My lady rides to-day.
To swing our swords and take our sides
In that all-ending fray
When stars fall down and darkness hides.
When God shall turn to bay.

Why should we reck of grin and groan
While we two ride together?
The triple thunders of the throne
Would be but stormy weather.
For us the last great fight shall roar,
Upon the ultimate plains,
And we shall turn and tell once more
Our love in English lanes.

* * *

This may well be my favorite Chesterton poem, and that's saying a lot. It's almost a warlike love poem. Or a loving brave poem. I guess the theme is what I would call "teamwork." Gilbert and Frances were a team: "the strength is in us twain." And so they were able to back one another up in tight places.

Too often we think of love as an idle, romantic thing; something that's nice but completely optional. Really, it's essential, and I don't mean just essential to the species. Of course some people have to have children, but if you don't have any you won't die. Without love, though, a part of the soul begins to wither. We are not creatures created for a vacuum. It is not good for man to be alone.

Chesterton said in The Man Who Was Thursday that two is not twice one, it is a thousand times more than one. (Or something like that.) Mr. Syme, in that book, was alone and terrified at his loneliness. Once he had a single companion, he stopped being terrified and started being able to think, to plan the next step. That's the idea Chesterton is conveying in his poem here. Marriage is not something people do out of a romantic interest. Instead, it is the highest kind of spear-friendship--like the comitatus of the Anglo-Saxons. The kind of friendship where you put your back against your friend and hold your sword out to the enemy. Alone, you had no chance. With one single other person you can count on completely, you are invulnerable. It doesn't matter what anyone else does, so long as you have your one friend who is still completely loyal.

To Chesterton, the babblings of modern creeds and the fires of the end of the world alike have no terror for him, "while we two ride together." He and his lady will face out the worst the world has to offer, and at the end they will be unchanged, still able to turn again and tell their love in English lanes.

I think all married people should think of their love this way. Marriage is a curious thing, a "four-footed creature," where there is one common goal and a pair of inseparable people who will fight together for that goal. Two people, in a house like an embattled castle, braving out the terrors of the world, seeking out allies, changing what they can, all the while depending on one another absolutely. This is not just "romantic" in the same sense that knighthood, at its best, was not just romantic. A good knight was a grim-faced individual who had something which needed to be done, and did it. The armor, the titles, the pennants, were all just trappings. It's a tragedy when the trappings come to be confused with the reality. The real romance of knights, as of the romance of married people, comes from the real virtues: courage, loyalty, dedication even when unnoticed and unthanked.

Someday I'd better write a much longer post about romance and knights. Until then, reread this poem a few times and think about every line. It really is worth it.

Lucasta Replies to Lovelace

2008-05-05T09:16:00.002-05:00

by G. K. Chesterton

Tell me not, friend, you are unkind,
If ink and books laid by,
You turn up in a uniform
Looking all smart and spry.

I thought your books one horrid smudge,
Your books one pile of trash,
And with less fear of smear embrace
A sword, a belt, a sash.

Yet this inconstancy forgive,
Though gold lace I adore,
I could not love the lace so much
Loved I not Lovelace more.

* * *

There's Chesterton for you. But there's a nice touch at the end: Lucasta doesn't love Lovelace because of his uniform; she loves the uniform because Lovelace is inside it.

Song: To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

2008-04-29T14:59:00.004-05:00

by Richard Lovelace

Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind,
To war and arms I fly.

True; a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.

* * *

I've heard some objections to this poem. Some people say the last two lines are totally wrong--how could anyone love honor more than a real person? I say it depends on your definition of honor. If Lovelace just means he wants to be honored by others, than he is wrong to think that way. But if he means doing the honorable thing, he's absolutely right. Because how could he presume to offer himself to Lucasta if he wasn't willing to do his duty first? He wouldn't be worthy of her unless he was.

Chesterton's reply to this poem next ...

Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

2008-04-09T15:33:00.003-05:00

by A. E. Housman

CHORUS: O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My object in inquiring is to know.
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much.

ALCMAEON: I journeyed hither a Boetian road.
CHORUS: Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?
ALCMAEON: Plying with speed my partnership of legs.
CHORUS: Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
ALCMAEON: Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.
CHORUS: To learn your name would not displease me much.
ALCMAEON: Not all that men desire do they obtain.
CHORUS: Might I then hear at what thy presence shoots.
ALCMAEON: A shepherd's questioned mouth informed me that--
CHORUS: What? for I know not yet what you will say.
ALCMAEON: Nor will you ever, if you interrupt.
CHORUS: Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.
ALCMAEON: This house was Eriphyle's, no one else's.
CHORUS: Nor did he shame his throat with shameful lies.
ALCMAEON: May I then enter, passing through the door?
CHORUS: Go chase into the house a lucky foot.
And, O my son, be, on the one hand, good,
And do not, on the other hand, be bad;
For that is much the safest plan.
ALCMAEON: I go into the house with heels and speed.

CHORUS

Strophe
In speculation
I would not willingly acquire a name
For ill-digested thought;
But after pondering much
To this conclusion I at last have come: LIFE IS UNCERTAIN.
This truth I have written deep
In my reflective midriff
On tablets not of wax,
Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there,
For many reasons: LIFE, I say, IS NOT
A STRANGER TO UNCERTAINTY.
Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This fact did I discover,
Nor did the Delphine tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingunuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.

Antistrophe
Why should I mention
The Inachean daughter, loved of Zeus?
Her whom of old the gods,
More provident than kind,
Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
A gift not asked for,
And sent her forth to learn
The unfamiliar science
Of how to chew the cud.
She therefore, all about the Argive fields,
Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,
Nor did they disagree with her.
But yet, howe'er nutritious, such repasts I do not hanker after:
Never may Cypris for her seat select
My dappled liver!
Why should I mention Io? Why indeed?
I have no notion why.

Epode
But now does my boding heart,
Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
A strain not meet for the dance.
Yes even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes
(The right, nor omit I the left)
Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many sphipwrecks of cows.
I therefore in a Cissian strain lament:
And to the rapid
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.

ERIPHYLE (within): O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
CHORUS: I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
ERIPHYLE: He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.
CHORUS: I would not be reputed rash, but yet I doubt if all be gay within the house.
ERIPHYLE: O! O! another stroke! that makes the third.
He stabs me to the heart against my wish.
CHORUS: If that be so, thy state of health is poor;
But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

* * *

Maybe it's because I've been translating too much Eurpides and Sophocles lately, but this parody really tickles me. The long periphrastic ways of speaking (such as "Plying with speed my partnership of legs"), the random reflections on truths of life and unrelated myth, the unrealism of people shouting out that they're being killed, and the litotes of lines like "He splits my skull, not in a friendly way," are all common in Greek tragedy. Sometimes the effort of pulling the story out of Greek and into English dulls one's sense of humor, but sometimes a line just cracks me up. Here, all the funniest parts are mushed together in one brief snippet. I just love it.

Design

2008-04-09T14:22:00.002-05:00

by Robert Frost

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right.
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small.

* * *

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted. Chances are people aren't even bothering to check anymore ... it's just that my thesis, and even more, student teaching, have kept me tremendously busy.

This poem is a counterexample to the idea that Frost's poetry is too optimistic and facile. In fact, many of his poems are deeply pessimistic. His happy nature poems have been the most popular, but they were far from all he wrote.

Here, Frost ponders the "co-incidence" of these three white things, a flower, a moth, and a spider. Can it really be coincidence? If it is design, that suggests a darker side to the one who designs it--for there is nothing uplifting about a spider feeding on its prey. Or does design really govern little things like this?

My answer is simply that design does govern even tiny things--like that line in the Silmarillion about those who consider only the vastness of the works of the Valar and not their fineness: to be truly great, an intelligence has to reach not only the vast, whirling stars but also each tiny speck of dust. But it is not the task of "design" (we can start saying God, here, I guess--we all know that's what it means, right?) to make sure things are always "uplifting." The mystery of sin in the world is a part of all this, of course. God's task in so much of creation is simply keeping us from completely destroying ourselves. It is our sin (I think--in a mysterious way) that taught the spider to eat the moth. But knowing that the spider needed this food, God really did guide the moth to its web. And in a larger design, God guided Frost to the same flower to ponder His design, that Frost's poem might inspire me to write this blog post today and maybe start someone thinking about the nature of evil and the goodness of God.

Makes you feel kind of small, doesn't it? But at the same time, very greatly cared for.

Check this out ...

2008-02-29T15:36:00.001-05:00

Please read this article: it was covered by some friends at Christendom and is a very important battle for life ....

Fr. Gallagher

The Indifferent

2008-02-23T13:29:00.002-05:00

by John Donne

I can love both fair and brown;
Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays;
Her who loves loneness best, and her who masks and plays;
Her whom the country form'd, and whom the town;
Her who believes, and her who tries;
Her who still weeps with spongy eyes,
And her who is dry cork, and never cries.
I can love her, and her, and you, and you;
I can love any, so she be not true.

Will no other vice content you?
Will it not serve your turn to do as did your mothers?
Or have you all old vices spent, and now would find out others?
Or doth a fear that men are true torment you?
O we are not, be not you so;
Let me—and do you—twenty know;
Rob me, but bind me not, and let me go.
Must I, who came to travel thorough you,
Grow your fix'd subject, because you are true?

Venus heard me sigh this song;
And by love's sweetest part, variety, she swore,
She heard not this till now; and that it should be so no more.
She went, examined, and return'd ere long,
And said, "Alas ! some two or three
Poor heretics in love there be,
Which think to stablish dangerous constancy.
But I have told them, 'Since you will be true,
You shall be true to them who're false to you.' "

* * *

Quite a different take on fidelity, isn't it? "Don't be faithful to me, because I sure won't be faithful to you." I wrote my Donne paper on this poem, because it just tickled me. I wonder if Donne didn't mean exactly that? They say he wrote his love poems mainly for his friends at law school, not for real women. I could see them chuckling over this one.

Holy Sonnet IV

2008-02-10T15:08:00.000-05:00

by John Donne

O, my black soul, now thou art summoned
By sickness, Death's herald and champion;
Thou'rt like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
Treason, and durst not turn to whence he's fled;
Or like a thief, which till death's doom be read,
Wisheth himself deliver'd from prison,
But damn'd and haled to execution,
Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned.
Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack;
But who shall give thee that grace to begin?
O, make thyself with holy mourning black,
And red with blushing, as thou art with sin;
Or wash thee in Christ's blood, which hath this might,
That being red, it dyes red souls to white.

* * *

Quick translation from Metaphysical-speak: I'm sick; it's time for me to die now. Just as a convicted prisoner, led to execution, wishes himself back in prison, so I wish I did not have to die and face my judgment. I'd better repent now, because I know Christ will forgive me.

Sorry about the hurried posting ... between thesis, and student teaching, and everything else, I hardly know where I am anymore. I'll try to do a more thorough post another day.

It might be a good day...

2008-02-06T19:57:00.000-05:00

To reread Ash-Wednesday.

The Winner--

2008-02-02T19:56:00.000-05:00

if you hadn't noticed, is Maureen. Here's her poem one more time.

And in that hour
The trees of Eden all burst into flower.

And on that night,
The angel's flaming sword glowed candle-bright.

They miss us there,
Await the homecoming of Adam's heir.

Their blooms won't fade
Till earth and heaven are at last remade.

And on that day,
Through Paradise's walls will come a Way.

* * *

I happen to really love this poem. It's short, it's sweet, but it's so beautiful. Starting at "the hour" of the incarnation, but looking forward to "that day" when Christ comes again.

Thanks and congratulations, Maureen.

Chess Master at Christmas

2008-01-31T18:18:00.000-05:00

...a pattern can stretch for ever and still be a small pattern. They see a chess-board white on black, and if the universe is paved with it, it is still white on black.-- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy CW1:225

Sometimes the philosopher paints the disc all black and calls himself a pessimist; sometimes he paints it all white and calls himself an optimist; sometimes he divides it exactly into halves of black and white and calls himself a dualist ... None of them could understand a thing that began to draw the proportions just as if they were real proportions, disposed in the living fashion which the mathematical draughtsman would call disproportionate. Like the first artist in the cave, it revealed to incredulous eyes the suggestion of a new purpose in what looked like a wildly crooked pattern; he seemed only to be distorting his diagram, when he began for the first time in all the ages to trace the lines of a form and of a Face.-- G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man CW2:268, emphasis added

The Board
In four axes bound, with four corners square
Four pillars fixed, the boardmen unaware
Of bounds which Board-Source once did hack
The freedom gift of white and black.

The Pawns
Slaved into lines, arranged for war
Pawns against power: hate, death, gore
The ordered bounds of black and white
Turned to disorder in futile fight.

The Queen
From Board-Beyond a message came
(All games, all boards, shall tell her fame)
Pawn to the pawnless, in devotion
Humility has found promotion.

The Queen (again)
She travels far, in haste
Crossing pieceless waste
Finds another, older queen
With a leaping piece unseen.

The Knight
The knight beside the queen in doubt
Considers: should she be put out?
Beyond the Board begotten his spouse
Takes her rightly into his house.

The Knight (again)
A dark piece counting on taxation
To starting square directs the nation
The knight in stern obedience
A free cave finds 'midst piece-filled tents.

The King
The Queen stands, arrayed in gold,
In midnight peace, in winter cold:
The Knight stands too, on guard devoted:
The King, so pawnlike, so demoted.

The King (again)
Immobile piece in peace enwrapped
Between the Knight and Queen entrapped
Who played with stars beyond the Board
Takes lowest place, despised, abhorred.

The Pawns
Above the Board a great light stormed
The watchful pawns were then informed
The King in pawnlike garb they see:
The Highest made like you and me!

The Rooks
That very light the Board illumed
The pieces sleep, alas, emtombed
Yet rooks alert to that new light
Awoke and traversed through the night.

The Dark Powers
The dark side, whining-screaming/cursing
Heard the rook-quest, far traversing;
Sent forth dark troops to snuff the Dawn
To slay this deadly babe-king Pawn.

The Knight
The bold Knight woke then from a dream:
"That dark king's planning up a scheme
-Take thou thy Queen and baby King,
Guard them, them to safety bring."

The King
The rescued king in safety grew
For decades three. But His court knew.
Then out among the pieces went...
Clear, then His path, make straight the bent!

The Pawns
En passant He, among the pawns
Consorted for a thousand dawns
Told of life beyond the Board...
This servant-King was not ignored.

The Dark Powers
Aligned, not allied, the dark powers
Cringing in their palace towers:
"Pawn-power makes the whole Board quake!"
Sought this regal pawn to take.

The Bishop
The bishop by the king-pawn's side
Longed to satisfy his pride
With darkness, lo! a plan he laid:
The bishop hath his King betrayed!

The Gambit
In garden while his teammates slept
The pawn king prayed and sighed and wept...
The Mover's Will be not forsaken:
Must the king himself be taken?

The Sacrifice
The board's four corners wildly quake
The Dark Side moves, the King to take
His blood poured out, his whole life gone
Sacrificed for worst and smallest pawn.

((pause))

The King Returns
The Dark Side captured this king/pawn
The Board broke open at the dawn...
The King, no piece but Owner of the Board
The Dark-defeater, ever hence be He adored.
Amen. Alleluia.
=====
Note:"hack" (first verse) - the Hebrew "bara" is the verb used to indicateGod's power of creation; it has the human sense of "hack, "throw off,chop off". (See Jaki's Genesis One and other texts)

* * *

Dr. Thursday submitted this for my poem contest. It was too long for the limits I'd placed, so I asked his permission to post it as a regular poem. I like it because it deals with the old story in a new way--new enough, hopefully, for us to see the Incarnation for what it is. Why is it so hard for us to do this?

Finalists for Christmas poem contest

2008-01-23T21:48:00.000-05:00

All right, I've finally managed to narrow it down. Not an easy job. Choosing the winner would be even harder, so I'm leaving that to you, my Gentle Readers. We have an earnest, modern verse (though ordered, as you can see, by anaphora--that's the matching beginnings), a satirical poem in a strict meter, a brief "nonce form" poem (that's one that's in a form only used for this specific poem, as opposed to a "received" form like a sonnet or ballade) with a minimalist touch that suggests more, and a triolet--always a favorite with me. All have some original thought, a nice turn of phrase or two, some neat images, and/or a touching moment. So there's no bad choice: just pick your favorite in the poll I've set up on my sidebar. If it doesn't work for you, you can go ahead and post your vote in the comment box. Please vote only once for your top favorite; I think picking your first three choices would be too complicated for Blogger and me to keep up with.

"Upon Hearing the Gloria, December 25th, 12:15 am"
by Ibid

Just needed to clear my head,
Just walked out side for a second,
Just walked down the street,
Just walked for a while, sniffing the air.
I wanted to find a reason for all this,
I wanted to see what it was all about.
I wanted to open my eyes and see all
I wanted from the night.It was a silent night alright,
It was quieter than I've ever seen before.
It was an even quieter church. Strangely,
It was open later than normal.
I wanted to go back and get in bed.
I wanted to know why I was out so late.
I wanted to turn and go home, but
I wanted to go inside.
Just stepped through the door,
Just noticed the stillness of the Church
Just heard the intonation, and then
Just fell in love.

"Humbug"
by John

Where is the meaning in bustle and shopping,
Where is the blessing in material greed,
The shoving, the running, the mindless store-hopping,
For all that we want in disdain of our need?

The radio stations play 'seasonal' rock,
With Frosty and Rudolph on loop;
"The big man is coming, so hang up your sock,"
And those awful chipmunks want their hoola-hoop.

Students come home for three weeks of break
Just to slowly watch parents go mad.
The cards and the wrapping, wreath and fruitcake,
And the lights must be "in" with the fad.

The kids sit in the corner with video games,
Glad to be far from their book,
While parents obsessed with tagging and names
Will grace them with nary a look.

The tree must have lights and not lean to the right,
Garland and ribbons will fly!
"I love this whole season, it's merry and bright
(one week more and I think I would die)."

It's the holiday season, and here's your receipt!
Twelve more items to fill your collection.
If there's holly on the door and snow in the street
Then our day will have reached its perfection.

Oh, little do they know of love!
They run so hard while life goes by,
For weeks they crowd and push and shove
While He is born who came to die.

Untitled
by Maureen

And in that hour
The trees of Eden all burst into flower.

And on that night,
The angel's flaming sword glowed candle-bright.

They miss us there,
Await the homecoming of Adam's heir.

Their blooms won't fade
Till earth and heaven are at last remade.

And on that day,
Through Paradise's walls will come a Way.

Triolet
by Dr. Thursday

Christmas for us in Christendom has become one thing, and in one sense even a simple thing. But like all the truths of that tradition, it is in another sense a very complex thing. Its unique note is the simultaneous striking of many notes; of humility, of gaiety, of gratitude, of mystical fear, but also of vigilance and of drama. It is not only an occasion for the peacemakers any more than for the merry-makers; it is not only a Hindu peace conference any more than it is only a Scandinavian winter feast. There is something defiant in it also; something that makes the abrupt bells at midnight sound like the great guns of a battle that has just been won.
(GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:312)

The bells ring out at midnight,
Like a battle that's been won!
The Word leaped down to join the fight...
The bells ring out at midnight
The Darkness cannot grasp the Light
And God-the-Word is Mary's son...
The bells ring out at midnight,
Like a battle that's been won!

In the Orient

2008-01-08T14:06:00.000-05:00

by St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus

In the Orient a star appeared
And we follow its mysterious course.
Blessed star, its brightness discloses to us
That the King of Heaven is born on earth.

Heaven protects us,
And our procession
Follows the brilliant star,
Braving rain and snow!...

Let each one get ready...
The star is coming to rest!...
Let the celebrating begin,
Let us adore the Child!...

* * *

Christmas isn't over yet--we still have at least till the Baptism of the Lord! Right now I'm thinking about Epiphany, about those magi who left their homes and traveled a long journey with no knowledge that there was only a humble dwelling and a poor child at the other end. Yet in the divine scheme of things, gold, frankincense, and myrrh don't seem out of place in the poor home of the Holy Family. The Child made everything right.

Christmas Poem Contest

2007-12-26T18:07:00.000-05:00

I'm afraid every year I get a little less excited about Christmas. It used to be pure magic to me, especially when I was very small, and once I was older it was the one time I could stop worrying about things and just be happy like I had been when I was little. Nowadays it's hard not to let it be just another day.

This year, though, I think it's been good. After all the bluster had passed by and the presents were unwrapped and the boys had gone to bed complete with visions of sugarplums, I stayed up late to clean up. Around two I decided I'd done all I was going to (this is not that impressive: my dad hadn't even gone ot bed till 12:30). So I turned out all the lights but the Christmas tree and sat looking at the tree and the creche, thinking about Christmas and the immense difference the Incarnation makes. I started to think about how my life needs to be changed by this. And so, by the time I went to bed, I felt that Christmas really had been worthwhile, that it had made a difference.

Still, I know that the whole Christmas season is still before us; there is still time to remember Christ; there is still time to change. I wanted to take the season to give an opportunity for us to rediscover Christmas through poetry. That is to say, I want to have a Christmas poem contest.

Here are the rules:

1. The poem must be written by you.

2. The poem must be about Christmas. It can be about the Incarnation itself, about the shepherds, the Magi, whatever, but it has to be Christmasy, and the real meaning of Christmas too. No Jingle Bells. Gathering together as a family stuff is okay, though. That is part of Christmas, although not the most important part.

3. It doesn't have to be written specifically for the contest. Any Christmas poems will do, no matter how long ago you wrote them.

4. Try to keep it to about 20 lines or less.

5. Each person can submit up to 3 poems, but please no more.

6. The winning poems will be posted on my blog with a link to your blog or website if you have one.

Any form is acceptable, although I warn you I'm biased toward formal verse. However, I have liked free verse in the past, provided it's actually good and not just random. The poems can be funny, serious, deep, whatever. I'll judge them as being good at what they are, not as being more entertaining or more spiritual.

You can email me your submissions at enchirdion1 at yahoo dot com, or leave them in the comment box. If you have other Christmas poems, not written by you but which you think I should post, please email them to me: I'm looking for some.

I hope this contest will help get both our creative and our spiritual juices flowing, and the finished poems will inspire us to think about Christmas more deeply. Let the contest begin!

Last Year's Triolet Contest

Christmas formal

2007-12-21T16:54:00.000-05:00

Christmas formal was a great time this year. I'm always iffy about formals because sometimes they're lots of fun and sometimes you feel like you got all dressed up for nothing. This year I had a wonderful time, despite a lot of unexpected excitement at the end.

My roommate and I at the beginning of the dance. Unfortunately we both look a bit frozen and shiny, but that's life and photography.

Mother of God

2007-12-19T01:30:00.000-05:00

by W.B. Yeats

The threefold terro.r of love; a fallen flare
Through the hollow of an ear;
Wings beating about the room;
The terro.r of all terro.rs that I bore
The Heavens in my womb.

Had I not found content among the shows
Every common woman knows,
Chimney corner, garden walk,
Or rocky cistern where we tread the clothes
And gather all the talk?

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,
This fallen star my milk sustains,
This love that makes my heart's bloo.d stop
Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones
And bids my hair stand up?

* * *

Who knew Yeats could write poems about Mary? On the one hand, it's not how most of us think of her: we mostly picture her calm and sedate, not afraid, and not chatting as she does her laundry. But on the other, wasn't she more like us than unlike, even though she had no sin? St. Luke tells us she was troubled at the angel's greeting.

Our Lady was said to have conceived through the ear, because it was her ear that heard the greeting of the angel. I'm not sure what the "threefold of love" is: probably the love of the the Father for His daughter, the Son for His mother, and the Holy Ghost for His spouse.

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

2007-12-13T10:53:00.000-05:00

by Ernest Dowson

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for thelips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee Cynara! in my fashion.

* * *

Another one by Ernest Dowson. Some people might object to this poem on moral grounds. I don't: I think it makes perfectly clear how unsatisfying is the wild life the speaker is living. Sure, the pros.titute, the dancing, and the wine are pleasant, and yet we see how impossible it is that the speaker could find peace within these things.

The attitude of the poem is one common in the modern age. People seek madder music, stronger wine, more satisfaction of their desires, and we imagine that they enjoy it. Yet often they are only doing these things to run away from their inner emptiness. We can see how little it works. What the speaker really wants are the "lilies," the pure innocence, of his love; the roses of pleasure will not satisfy.

The title means, "I am not how I was under the reign of the good Cynara." It's a quote from one of Horace's odes.

New Look

2007-12-12T14:54:00.000-05:00

Every once in awhile, I get sick and tired of my blog. Rather than give it up, I thought I'd give it a shot in the arm by changing up the template. I've wanted to change to the new templates for awhile, but I just couldn't make it look the same without being able to go in and tinker with the html. So I decided to change the look entirely, to something a bit more updated and less common.

What do you think? I saved the old template, so I can always change it back. You can vote in the poll on the sidebar. (I can't help that the text is so light. :P)

Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration

2007-12-11T14:29:00.000-05:00

by Ernest Dowson

Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,
These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray:
And it is one with them when evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of day.

These heed not time; their nights and days they make
Into a long returning rosary,
Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ's sake;
Meekness and vigilance and chastity.

A vowed patrol, in silent companies,
Life-long they keep before the living Christ.
In the dim church, their prayers and penances
Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed.

Outside, the world is wild and passionate;
Man's weary laughter and his sick despair
Entreat at their impenetrable gate:
They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.

They saw the glory of the world displayed;
They saw the bitter of it, and the sweet;
They knew the roses of the world should fade,
And be trod under by the hurrying feet.

Therefore they rather put away desire,
And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary
And veiled their heads and put on coarse attire:
Because their comeliness was vanity.

And there they rest; they have serene insight
Of the illuminating dawn to be:
Mary's sweet Star dispels for them the night,
The proper darkness of humanity.

Calm, sad, secure; with faces worn and mild:
Surely their choice of vigil is the best?
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;
But there, beside the altar, there is rest.

* * *

I'm coming to like Ernest Dowson. His most famous poem is probably "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae," from which is taken the title of Gone with the Wind. He was a friend of Yeats and rather wild, though he eventually converted to Catholicism. More of his poems can be found here.

I think a wild person like Dowson is the ideal person to appreciate the nuns' choice. He knew how brief were the roses of this present life, and craved the peace and security the nuns had in God.

She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep

2007-12-09T20:10:00.000-05:00

by Robert Graves

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.

* * *

I thought of this poem the other day, as it began to snow. It's so short, yet so carefully done, that I don't know if I could catch all the special things it does. The rhythm of the two very short lines to vary longer lines, the repetition of the falling of the snow, and the imagery of the earth growing beneath the snow ... it all adds up to a very striking poem.

As to what it means ... I was asked who the girl is telling her love to. I'll tell you: I don't know. Perhaps she is alone as she sleeps, murmuring to herself. I rather think so, considering the snow. It could symbolize difficult times for her. On the other hand, the snow could just symbolize her sleep, like the winter sleep of the earth.

The Wreck: Stanzas 11-12

2007-12-07T11:48:00.000-05:00

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

II

“Some find me a sword, some
The flange and the rail; flame,
Fang, or flood” goes Death on drum,
And storms bugle his fame.
But wé dream we are rooted in earth – Dust!
Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same,
Wave with the meadow, forget that there must
The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.

The words of Death begin the second half of the poem. Indeed, there will be much death in this section. All must come to die, each by different routes. The sword, the flame, fang, and flood are obvious. A flange is an overhanging rim or piece—perhaps the reference is to falling off a ledge where the rim did not hold? I can’t be certain . . . it was probably chosen more for alliteration than clarity. In any event, storms are one way people die, and the howling of the mighty winds speak of death.

Yet we don’t imagine death will come for us. We’re so sure of our securities and plans—yet all these things are dust. Think of the landowner who built bigger barns for himself, sure this would bring him security, and that very night his soul was required of them. All is dust. The suddenness of that word reminds us of the suddenness of it.

Flesh falls within sight of us—see how often we are aware of those we know dying. Nowadays death is so often sterile; we don’t see it with our own eyes, and yet we know it happens. We read on the news of people who walked out of their front doors in the morning, confident in the security of their lives, and met their death the same day unawares. Yet having heard this, we are not moved to think of our own death. We know we are made of the same mortal material, and yet we tend to forget that death will come to us too.

The metaphor of farming fits the stanza well: think of the book of Isaiah: “All flesh is grass, and all the glory thereof as the flower of the field.” So when the scythe and the plowshare come to us, bitter as they are, it should not be a surprise. A limited growing season was in our nature to begin with.

On Saturday sailed from Bremen,
American-outward-bound,
Take settler and seamen, take men with women,
Two hundred souls in the round—
O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing
The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned;
Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing
Not vault them, the millions of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?

Finally we get down to the actual story of the Deutschland. It sailed out on Saturday from Bremen for America. On board were passengers as well as sailors, women as well as men—two hundred altogether. After that brief bit of fact, Hopkins returns to mysticism, considering the fate of those who died.

The fifth line used to confuse me: I thought it was saying that the Father didn’t know the goal was a shoal. Now I’m pretty certain it was the two hundred souls who, not being “under thy feathers,” i.e. within the heart of God, could not guess what their journey would come to. A fourth of those on board were fated to drown. Doom, by the way, means both fate and judgment—the dooms of a king were his judgments, often his punishments. So when we hear that these people were doomed to drown, we need not think of a faceless fate, but simply of the fact that God had decided this would be the moment of their death.

God chose for them to die—does that mean they are beyond His mercy? No, the wide bay of God’s goodness, His “millions of rounds of” infinite mercy had room for them, even them, who seemed to have been rejected by God in the manner of their death. After all, who could be blamed but God for the storm? Think of Turnbull’s accusation of God in Chesterton’s The Ball and the Cross:

"A man died yesterday in Ealing. You murdered him. A girl had the toothache in Croydon. You gave it her. Fifty sailors were drowned off Selsey Bill. You scuttled their ship. What have you got to say for yourself, eh?"

This is a major point—perhaps the major point—of the poem. It has been answered in stanza six and it will be continued to be answered throughout the poem. The partial answer this stanza offers is that God is not allowing their death to damn them when they die—He has mercy saved for them as well.

(Reeve means to gather, especially to bring together the gathers of a dress, but I suppose it works for gathering souls as well.)

Introduction

The Wreck: Stanzas 9-10

2007-12-05T22:58:00.000-05:00

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

[Continued after a long forgetfulness, in preparation for Deutschland Day, which is Friday.]

Be adored among men,
God, three numberèd form;
Wring thy rebel, dogged in den
Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm.
Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue;
Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;
Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung;
Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

The speaker then addresses God with a passive command, to “be adored.” Not only is he wishing that God might be adored, but he is asking God to make Himself adored by men. He asks God to continue what He is already doing: finding ways to bring man’s rebellion to conversion and worship of Him. The Trinity is referred to (“three numbered form”) first here, and will later be mentioned near the end of the poem.

The rebellious soul needs to be caught and “wrung,” as Hopkins says, a rather violent image. But we can liken it to Donne’s “batter my heart”—the soul needs a harsh chastisement in for its sins in order to be healed, and in its wisest moments is not afraid to ask for this. Pain is better than the misery of solitary rebellion. “Dogged in den” reminds me of “The Hound of Heaven.” The soul is chased into its den by a dogged pursuer—God. The speaker asks that this rebellious soul—his own and others—be finally caught and made to surrender by the force of the storm. The theme of the storm as a mode of conversion has been mentioned before and will be again.

The thought of punishment to subdue the soul is not a pleasant one, but the converse side of repentance follows immediately. Christ is unspeakably sweet; His blows are merciful. The paradoxes of His goodness and apparent harshness are balanced with the phrases which follow: “lighting and love,” “winter and warm,” and the mention of how God is a father to the heart He has punished and is most merciful in His “dark descending,” His chastisements.

With an anvil-ding,
And with fire in him forge thy will
Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring
Through him, melt him but master him still:
Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul,
Or as Austin, with a lingering out sweet skill,
Make mercy in all of us, out of us all
Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.

This stanza summarizes the many routes to conversion. Some convert through suffering, like a piece of metal on a forge, purified through fire. Some convert slowly and sweetly, yet nonetheless coming to submission. Some, like St. Paul, convert once and at a crash; some, like Augustine, take years—yet the “lingering-out” sweetness of his conversion is an interesting touch, as though God was savoring each step He was teaching Augustine to walk. All must come to experience Christ’s mercy, and all must acknowledge Him as Lord. Different ways are taken by each, but Christ must be adored by all. Notice the imperative—the speaker urges God to assert His mastery and lead sinners to adore Him.

Introduction

Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau

2007-11-24T14:23:00.000-05:00

by William Blake

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau:
Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a Gem,
Reflected in the beam divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking Eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And the Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

* * *

Typical Blake: doesn't care about atoms or photons, but cares very much about spiritual things. That's a good thing, so far as it goes--though I might add that caring about atoms doesn't preclude caring about scripture. Like any good Chestertonian, I care about both.

I've been reading Derrida, lately, and the poem is apt for him too: he really is throwing sand into the wind. The man makes no sense to me at all. Unfortunately, I've got to make sense, 6-8 pages of sense, out of him by next Friday.

Eres tu

2007-11-17T15:58:00.000-05:00

by Juan Carlos Calderón

Como una promesa, eres tú, eres tú,
Como una mañana de verano,
Como una sonrisa, eres tú, eres tú,
Así, así, eres tú.

Toda mi esperanza, eres tú, eres tú,
Como lluvia fresca en mis manos,
Como fuerte brisa, eres tú, eres tú,
Así, así, eres tú.

Como mi poema, eres tú, eres tú,
Como una guitarra en la noche,
Todo mi horizonte eres tú, eres tú,
Así, así, eres tú.

Eres tú como el agua de mi fuente,
Eres tú el fuego de mi hogar.
Eres tú como el fuego de mi hoguera,
Eres tú el trigo de mi pan.

* * *

You are like a promise
Like a summer morning,
You are like a sunrise,
That's the way you are.

You are all my hope,
Like a fresh rain in my hands
You are like a strong breeze,
That's the way you are.

You are like my poem,
Like a guitar in the night,
You are all my horizon,
That's the way you are.

You are like the water of my fountain,
You are the fire of my hearth.
You are like the flame of my pyre,
You are the wheat of my bread.

* * *

I don't usually post songs, but this one, by the Basque band Mocedades, is one of my favorites and worth the trouble of translating. I think it is still beautiful, even without the music (which, by the way, is wonderful). Unfortunately it doesn't translate all that well, so if you can piece out the Spanish, you'll get more out of it even if you don't know the language well.

What is so special about it is the imagery. Each image could be the inspiration for a sonnet. Think, for example, about what it means to call someone your horizon, or the fire of your hearth. My favorite might be the "strong breeze"-- how a person can just blow through your life, but not like a damaging wind, but a spring or autumn breeze--strong, but not biting.

Her Praise

2007-11-07T17:23:00.000-05:00

by William Butler Yeats

She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.
I have gone about the house, gone up and down
As a man does who has published a new book,
Or a young girl dressed out in her new gown,
And though I have turned the talk by hook or crook
Until her praise should be the uppermost theme,
A woman spoke of some new tale she had read,
A man confusedly in a half dream
As though some other name ran in his head.
She is foremost of those that I would hear praised.
I will talk no more of books or the long war
But walk by the dry thorn until I have found
Some beggar sheltering from the wind, and there
Manage the talk until her name come round.
If there be rags enough he will know her name
And be well pleased remembering it, for in the old days,
Though she had young men's praise and old men's blame,
Among the poor both old and young gave her praise.

* * *

Sorry it's been so long since I last posted! I've been working very hard lately on my book. If it's good, I guess you all will get the benefit of it eventually. If not--well, you've been very kind not to complain.

I just got a biography of Maud Gonne, the woman Yeats loved and admired. She seems to have been quite a woman--Yeats was far from her only admirer. As he points out, many have blamed her, and yet her goodness to the poor led to their unadulterated praise. She worked tirelessly to help evicted Irish tenants keep their land, and when this proved impossible, she helped provide for somewhere for them to live. She was not even Irish herself, but English, and at least at first she was still Anglican. But it seems that she could not turn away from such obvious need.

This poem is a twist on a common experience: when we're proud of something, we try to lead the conversation around and get ourselves a little (well-deserved) praise. But Yeats is far more proud of Maud than he is of himself. All he wants is to hear her praised, and not hear people wasting their time talking of other things "as if some other name ran in their heads." No, he wants them to think only of her--as he does.

Sympathy

2007-10-15T18:21:00.000-05:00

I have suffered many blows,
I have felt sorrow, yes, and fear,
I have been crushed by mortal pain
And somehow smiled through my tears;

And then you came, immortal soul,
Bright-winged, and gloriously wise;
I see you force your smile for me
Beneath your tor.tured, smouldering eyes;

And I know pain, as never before,
I cannot laugh, or smile, or sing;
I can but weep my bootless tears
To see my angel suffering.

* * *

I wrote this for a friend and mentor of mine several years ago, thinking about how sympathy can sometimes be a harder load than personal suffering. (My friend would probably be startled at being referred to as an "angel." I guess that's just how I think of my friends -- of course, I don't mean anyone's literally an angel or even perfect, just that I consider them to be messengers of God to me.)

Now those who have been asking for my poetry must be content, because this little piece is scraping the barrel on poetry written in the last several years that I can bear to post at all.

An Old Woman of the Roads

2007-10-09T18:31:00.000-05:00

by Padraic Colum

Oh, to have a little house!
To own the hearth and stool and all!
The heaped-up sods upon the fire,
The pile of turf against the wall!

To have a clock with weights and chains
And pendulum swinging up and down!
A dresser filled with shining delph,
Speckled and white and blue and brown!

I could be busy all the day
Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor,
And fixing on their shelf again
My white and blue and speckled store!

I could be quiet there at night
Beside the fire and by myself,
Sure of a bed, and loth to leave
The ticking clock and shining delph!

Och! by I'm weary of mist and dark,
And roads where there's never a house or bush,
And tired I am of bog and road
And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

And I am praying to God on high,
And I am praying Him night and day,
For a little house--a house of my own--
Out of the wind's and the rain's way.

* * *

For my part, I am weary of my college dorm. The thing I want most when I graduate is a place of my own. I don't understand people who don't want to move out. As for me, I lie awake nights dreaming out a little apartment, or maybe a small house for when I can afford one.

I just got this new anthology of Catholic poetry and am so excited. Maybe the poems I pull out of it will make up for my recent deliquency. (I blame the Venerable Bede for it. I've been translating him all week.)

The love of a home is not specifically Catholic, yet it's something Catholics have always held dear. Maybe it's because the Church believes in private property. Chesterton would have something to say about that, I'm sure. But also, a house means a home, and a home suggests a family to live in it. It means warmth, stability, hospitality, and so many other things. The joy of being able to open one's door to a friend or a stranger is one you can't have without a place of your own. A home is a gateway to a plethora of virtues.

(Delph, by the way, is a kind of Dutch earthenware.)

Lepanto

2007-10-07T21:39:00.000-05:00

by G.K. Chesterton

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be,
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes,
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,—
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea,
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed—
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign—
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.

Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

* * *

Happy Lepanto Day!

Patience

2007-09-19T14:42:00.000-05:00

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray,
But bid for, Patience is! Patience who asks
Wants war, wants wounds; weary his times, his tasks;
To do without, take tosses, and obey.
Rare patience roots in these, and, these away,
Nowhere. Natural heart's ivy, Patience masks
Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks
Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.

We hear our hearts grate on themselves: it kills
To bruise them dearer. Yet the rebellious wills
Of us we do bid God bend to him even so.
And where is he who more and more distils
Delicious kindness? -- He is patient. Patience fills
His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.

* * *

Have you ever prayed for patience? It's that scary thing everyone wants and no one wants to pray for. Because when you do, God always sends you just those things that try the little patience you've got. If patience isn't found in suffering, it's found "nowhere." I like the image of patience as ivy, growing over the ruins of what we wanted and making them more beautiful.

It kills us to ask for more suffering than we already have, but since we long God to bend our wills to him, we ask for it all the same. And God, of course, is patient; a good thing too, considering how much we try His patience.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

2007-09-17T09:07:00.000-05:00

by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

* * *

On Saturday night, Imelda Franklin Bogue, a Christendom alumna, sang a song made from this poem. I thought of it at the time as applying to Christ, but I suppose it could apply to anyone one loved. When we have so little to give, and our heart desires to give only the best, what can we give but our dreams? In the end these may be more precious than the "cloths of heaven."

An Attempt at Unrhymed Verse

2007-09-14T10:27:00.000-05:00

by Wendy Cope

People tell you all the time,
Poems do not have to rhyme.
It's often better if they don't
And I'm determined this one won't.

Oh dear.

Never mind, I'll start again.
Busy, busy with my pen...cil.
I can do it if I try--
Easy, peasy, pudding and gherkins.

Writing verse is so much fun,
Cheering as the summer weather,
Makes you feel alert and bright,
'Specially when you get it more or
less the way you want it.

* * *

Thanks to Meredith for introducing me to Wendy Cope. She cracks me up.

Busy times

2007-09-10T18:12:00.000-05:00

This is to convey my apologies for my infrequent blogging. I've been horribly busy lately. This week, I have so much to do:

1. Attend 18 hours of class: six classes in all, three of which are in a dead language (2 Latin, 1 Greek).

2. Study for a Greek test on Wednesday.

3. Write about 4 pages for creative writing class, due Wednesday.

4. Interview a professor for the school paper.

5. Review Waking Rose for the school paper. I guess I'll post that here too.

6. Choir Monday, Friday, and Sunday.

7. Call home.

8. Begin researching for English Novel paper.

9. Read texts for Lit Crit paper.

10. Colloquium Latine -- Latin conversation over lunch, Monday and Friday.

11. I'm trying to write a novel. Maybe this one will be a "keeper." The past ones haven't been.

12. Normal amounts of daily reading for English courses, translation for Classics courses.

13. And of course, my social life. Luckily that gets less complicated every year. (Although I hope it's because my friends and I are maturing, and not just because I have less friends.)

So, if I don't blog much this week, you'll understand why. I'm usually not an exceptionally busy student, except for crunch times. I usually have taken a course load well within my capacities, and I don't often have much extracurricular business. Currently, though, I'm taking about one more class than I feel comfortable with, although I'm not sure which class is the extra one, and I'm trying to get more involved in things on campus now that I'm a senior. I think I can handle it -- just not easily. No more goofing around. No more wasting time. And no more hours spiralling down the bottomless drain of the internet! I'll try to blog once or twice a week, but I can't promise anything too long or complicated. Hopkins is still in the works ... but on hold at the moment. We'll see what I can manage. Anyway, I hope to see you all here throughout the semester, as we try to keep poetry as a moment of peace in our stressful lives.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

2007-09-03T09:40:00.000-05:00

by W.B. Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

* * *

I've always been intrigued by the old story of the fleeing faerie lady who drives a mortal man to search for her all his life. (Another example is Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci.") And the last couplet has always sent shivers down my spine.

Saying the Angelus While Driving in the City by Night

2007-08-29T07:54:00.000-05:00

The angel declared in the silence
On the world's stony face,
The buildings were silent and listened,
All hail, full of grace.

The travellers paused in the highways
When her answer was heard:
Tell Him His handmaid's desire
Is one with thy word.

And the Word became flesh
In a world full of stone
And dwelt among us
Who had been so alone,

And now these are living stones and streetlights
The roads are exchanged
For rivers of light, full of blessing,
The world has been changed.

It may be the world's stony spirit
Will be flesh again.
Thy grace for the cross and the glory
Pour forth, we beseech Thee. Amen.

The Wreck: Stanzas 6-8

2007-08-08T20:34:00.000-05:00

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Not out of his bliss
Springs the stress felt,
Not first from heaven (and few know this)
Swings the stroke dealt;
Stroke and a stress that storms and stars deliver,
That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt,
(But it rides time like riding a river,
And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss):

This section begins to discuss suffering. Considering all the references later on to the storm’s actions serving God, it would seem that God Himself sent the storm which sank the Deutschland. Hopkins rejects this view, however. The storm did not come from heaven, not from God, but from nature. Since God created nature, though, doesn’t that mean he causes the storm too? It seems that way, but Hopkins still holds, without yet explaining it, that God does not cause evil. The Catholic perspective is that God never wills evil, but he allows evil for the sake of greater good: man’s free will, for example. In cases where nature itself seems to be causing the evil, the case is more difficult, though. I tend to think that original sin did such damage to creation that it causes many “natural” things that God never intended in the original plan of the universe.

The sixth and seventh lines of the stanza are rather obscure to me. I would think the guilt would be flushed—in the sense of the blushings of an awakened conscience—and not hushed. Maybe Hopkins is referring to the mystery of redemptive suffering. A guilty soul welcomes the stroke of suffering in the hope that it will help purge away sin.

In the last line, we see the effect of suffering: it shakes the faith even of the faithful, while the faithless go astray in searching for explanations.

It dates from a day
Of his going in Galilee,
Soft-lain grave of a womb-life grey,
Manger, maiden’s knee;
The dense and driven Passion, and frightful sweat,
Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be;
Though felt before, though in high flood yet,
What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay,

Is out with it! Oh,
We lash with the best or worst
Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe
Will, mouthed to flesh-burst,
Gush! Flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet,
Brim, in a flash, full! Hither then, last or first,
To the hero of Calvary, Christ’s, feet;
Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it – men go.

The origin of the stroke of the storm is not dated to the first sin, but to Christ’s life on earth. The connection, I suppose, is that Christ suffered, and therefore it is fitting for us to suffer even though Christ’s death did not cause our suffering.

Christ’s life in the womb is already referred to as a grave. This connects to the difficulty I’ve always had with T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi,” when birth is so like death. I can somewhat understand it, though, by realizing what the Incarnation must have been to the Eternal God. What was infinite became finite, what was immortal became mortal—is this not a kind of death? By the first moment of Christ’s conception, He had already set His foot on a road He knew would end in death.

The “discharge” of the Passion—a strange term, but I think it must refer to the blood and water pouring out of Christ’s side. His heart, as yet, was still unknown: though some had felt its love before, and though the love still pours forth today, the telling moment was when His heart burst. The image is of a hunted creature “hard at bay,” turning to use its last weapon. Christ’s weapon is His love, not completely let loose in His death until the moment evil had apparently most triumphed.

So much for His heart. What about ours? We “lash with the best or worst / Word last.” What does this mean? I think it refers to the moment of our death: how we become our best or worst at our last moment. Christ’s heart spilled forth itself in His death; we also pour our ourselves in our death, and whatever we contain within us is revealed at its best—or worst. “Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.”

A sloe is a fruit, something like a plum I believe, which has been kept in lush leaves till its moment of ripeness. When the mouth bites it and it bursts, its juice gushes forth, sour or sweet, revealing the true nature of the fruit. Sometimes a beautiful fruit is sour within. In the same way our being pours out at the moment of our death, revealing us as a good or bad fruit. In a flash we fill up the measure of all we have ever been. I imagine a cup that Christ holds out to catch our soul, and we instantly fill it up at that moment with all the good or bad we contain within ourselves.

There is a command, then: come to Christ’s feet, Christ the “hero of Calvary,” by His death. Traditionally a hero would die fighting—but we know that on a spiritual level, Christ was fighting at the moment of His death, not with swords but with His love and mercy. We must come to Christ now, whether we are at the beginning of our lives or the end, because at any moment, unwilled and unwarned, our death may come.

Introduction

The Wreck: Stanza 3-5

2007-08-06T18:42:00.000-05:00

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The frown of his face
Before me, the horror of hell
Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?
I whirled out wings that spell
And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.
My heart, but you were dove-winged, I can tell,
Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,
To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.

The frown of whose face? I'm inclined to say God the Father. Hopkins fears the justice of a judging God, yet feels himself pinioned between the just God who must condemn him for his sins and hell which seems open to receive him. His choice is to fly to the “Host,” the sacrifice, which is Christ. His heart is like a bird, both a dove and a bird of prey. He flashes from the flame to the flame—perhaps from the flame of hell to the flame of Christ’s love. Towering from the grace to the grace suggests that he moves from the grace of the Father, of the Old Covenant, to the grace to the New Covenant offered by the Son; having lost the first grace of adoption, he looks for the grace of redemption.

I am soft sift
In an hourglass, at the wall
Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,
As it crowds and it combs to the fall;
I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane,
But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall
Flanks or fells of the voel, a vein
Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

This difficult stanza deals with many metaphors. “Soft sift in an hourglass” suggests the speaker’s limitation: he is not eternal, but constantly sliding toward destruction. The well is another image. Water in a well has the appearance of stability, still within like a pane of glass, but in reality the cause of its stability is that it is constantly fed by rivers from higher up. “Flanks or fells of the voel,” means “sides of the mountain”—voel is a Welsh word for a mountain. “Roped with,” in Hopkins’ usual imagery, suggests a mountainside scored with “ropes” of river. “Vein” also gives the same image, while continuing to remind us of the river’s action in feeding the well. In the same way, the gift of Christ’s grace feeds the soul, keeping something which is inherently temporal, sliding toward oblivion, instead stable and possessing something of eternity.

The readers can imagine the streams of water twisting like silver' ropes down the rocks of the high hill, and then entering into the veins of the lower rocks to replace what is drawn out of the well. (Kimiko Hotta, in this article.)

I kiss my hand
To the stars, lovely-asunder
Starlight, wafting him out of it, and
Glow, glory in thunder,
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west;
Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed,
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.

This stanza introduces us to Hopkins’ idea of instress. It’s a difficult notion to understand, considering that the poet never defined it, but it had to do with giving close attention to created things in order to understand their inner essence, or inscape.

Hopkins kisses his hand to the stars, not only because they are lovely (lovely-asunder is a beautiful phrase; it suggests the broken light of stars), but because they seem to breathe out the presence of God. This is not only the idea that creation suggests God or makes the speaker think of Him, but an acute awareness of God’s real presence in creation.

Christ is under the splendor of the world, but that isn’t enough for Hopkins. Instead, he must actually look for Him, giving the presence of God appropriate emphasis and attention. This is so that he can speak to God when he finds Him and offer his prayer of praise for every work of God he understands.

Introduction

The Wreck: Stanza 1-2

2007-08-04T14:18:00.000-05:00

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Thou mastering me,
God! giver of breath and bread,
World’s strand, sway of the sea,
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

The “invocation of the muse” of this poem addresses God, of course, Hopkins' inspiration for this poem. Hopkins uses the Anglo-Saxon word “master,” a verb made from a noun, which leads to a more dynamic expression than either “Thou, my master” or “Thou ruling me” -- it combines the sense of the verb and of the noun.

God is the provider of life, as well as of the world's shores and the ocean. The phrases in line 3 seem to be floating, but they are actually objects of “giver of,” along with “breath and bread.” The “strand,” the beach or coastline, and the “sway” (both in its sense of motion and of dominion) of the sea are given to men. The beginning focuses on the ocean to foreshadow its later importance. God is also the Lord of living and dead—both of which will appear in this poem. The moment of transition from one to the other ends up being quite important later.

The account of God's creation of the speaker is written with images of craftsmanship: this is not a God who simply wills the being of man, but who takes care and builds man—-just as He does in the creation account in Genesis, making man out of the clay of the earth. “After it almost unmade” is unclear; it might be a reference to some sickness or danger Hopkins had suffered, although I believe his severe health troubles began much later. In any event, the line shows God's dominion over the speaker, since He made him and can unmake him as easily but chooses to spare him. The sense of “dread” is not one of servile fear, but simply of reverence, as in the phrase used to a king: “my dread lord.” God's actions are worthy of dread, since He can do anything to make or mar us, but that does not mean that we are afraid of Him—-one of the mysteries of the faith. The speaker feels the touch of God—-a frightening thing, but he does not shrink back but instead feels God's touching finger, using God's primary action for his own following action of experiencing Him.

I did say yes
O at lightning and lashed rod,
Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
Thy terror, O Christ, O God,
Thou knowst the walls, altar and hour and night,
And the swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod
Hard down with a horror of height,
And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

This next stanza is more difficult: it may refer to actual events of which we are unaware. Perhaps the speaker is projecting himself upon the shipwreck, as though he were there, in that lightning. Whatever the case may be, the speaker affirms his acceptance of God's actions—-he said yes to them and repeats his yes. He “confesses”--an important word when taken in a spiritual sense: think of the “confessors,” those saints who proclaimed their faith, especially in a time of persecution, but who were not martyred. Hopkins realizes that he is a confessor. The grace of martyrdom is not given him, but he never ceases confessing God. Especially he confesses the “terror” of God—his ultimate, fearable power.

Yet God understands the fear the speaker has, and knows about those things that have troubled him. God knows how the speaker's heart swooned in the face of the suffering He sent him. This stanza almost makes God seem cruel and merciless, treading a heart hard down, and yet taken with the rest of the poem, it can't really be understood that way. The speaker simply affirms his sufferings and acknowledges that God knows them. The last line is mysterious: I tend to think of the midriff of the ship, stressed to breaking point, but I really couldn't say.

(Lashed rod, a commentator suggests, may be a reference to the fasces of the Roman consuls: a bundle of an axe and rods, to show the consuls’ power to punish. Lightning, as well as being present in the wreck, is also a symbol of God’s violent power: “Thou art lightning and love.” The speaker "says yes" in the face of these frightening symbols of God's power because he trusts God despite his fear.)

Introduction

The Wreck of the Deutschland

2007-08-04T13:58:00.000-05:00

All right, I'm finally going to begin posting this. It's a project I've been working on for awhile: the attempt to annotate Hopkins' The Wreck of the Deutschland, to the point that more people might actually make sense of it.

First, it might be a good idea to read the poem, although I will post each stanza as I explain it.

I'd really like feedback on this project, because I'm hoping to improve and expand it with time. If anything I write is unclear, if I left anything unexplained, or if you disagree with my explanations, please tell me!

Stanzas 1-2
Stanzas 3-5
Stanzas 6-8
Stanzas 9-10
Stanzas 11-12

Parting at Morn

2007-07-25T18:36:00.000-05:00

by Robert Browning

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim--
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me.

* * *

This is the sequel to last week's poem. I never paid much attention to it until I read it in The Virginian (by Owen Wister -- the only Western book I have ever read, but I like it). Here is the Virginian's reaction to the poem. It helps to know that "him" in the poem refers to the sun, and the speaker is the man.

* * *

"That is very, very true," murmured the Virginian, dropping his eyes from the 's intent ones.

"Had they quarrelled?" she inquired.

"Oh, no!"

"But?"

"I reckon he loved her very much."

"Then you're sure they hadn't quarrelled?"

"Dead sure, ma'am. He would come back afteh he had played some more of the game."

"The game?"

"Life, ma'am. Whatever he was a-doin' in the world of men. That's a bedrock piece, ma'am!"

* * *

The Virginian is right, of course. Lovers leaving one another doesn't mean they are angry, or that all is not well. Sometimes life just takes them apart for awhile -- but if their love is true, this will only bring them closer. Love doesn't keep the man in the poem from living his life -- it gives him a reason for living it fully.

Meeting at Night

2007-07-20T08:12:00.000-05:00

by Robert Browning

The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

* * *

Such wonderful description. "Startled little waves" is a neat personification there. And "quench its speed i' the slushy sand" is a slushy-sounding line for sure.

I'll put the sequel to this poem, "Parting at Morn," later.

Disturbing

2007-07-15T19:04:00.000-05:00

I'd heard people talk about this, but had never read an official news article ...

Contracepting the Environment

For people (like me) who don't like following all the links, this is an article about the effects of contraceptives on the environment. They're entering streams through sewage (which, though well-filtered, misses things like hormones, antibiotics, and steroids) and doing weird things to the fish. For example, in the study mentioned, they found a disproportionate number of female fish to male fish, and many mutant "intersex" fish.

A study in New Jersey discovered hormones and other medications in municipal tap water supplies throughout the state. No one knows what they might do to people, but I might venture a guess that if people are anything like fish, it might be very bad indeed.

The New Colossus

2007-07-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

* * *

She's talking about the Statue of Liberty -- the famous sign to immigrants that they are welcome, no matter how much like "wretched refuse" they may seem in their current condition. The poor, illiterate immigrants who arrived to Ellis Island as little as a hundred years ago, often not even speaking English, have had children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren who would give reality to their dreams: this is a land of opportunity, and their descendants have proved it by their success.

I posted it because it seems very relevant to the current immigration debate. I know this is a poetry blog and not a politics blog -- because I understand poetry much better than politics -- but I'd still like to hear people's ideas on the subject. I have some opinions, but they're not very well-formed because I lack good information about both sides. I'm hoping people from every side of the issue will comment here and we can have some fruitful discussion on the subject -- not to take down other people's ideas, but to exchange thoughts.

What do you say? Are you for more open borders, or less? How is new immigration to be regulated? Is the good of the country opposed to the good of those who wish to come to it, and if so, whose needs come first?

Motu Proprio

2007-07-07T11:50:00.000-05:00

I hate to consider myself a trend-follower, but the fact is, every blogger in the world has something to say about the Motu Proprio. I'd be lax not to have something to say too.

But this is all I really have to say: it's online, so read it yourself. (Courtesy of Rorate Coeli.)

The document comes into effect September 14, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross.

In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"

2007-06-27T16:39:00.000-05:00

by Thomas Hardy

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

* * *

It's wartime right now -- though it's easy, sadly enough, to forget about it. The war is so far away and it only affects a few of us.

I still don't know how I feel about the war. On the one hand, war is always an evil. On the other hand, sometimes it's a necessary evil. I do wonder: is this war really worth what we're pouring into it? On the one hand, we couldn't exactly go in to destroy a dictator and then left Iraq in turmoil. On the other hand, is the region getting the least bit closer to stability? The whole thing tends to just upset me, especially when I see many people in my generation -- even people I know -- suffering through separation from those they love because of this war. Mostly, I'm just looking forward to it being over.

My anthology (The Top 500 Poems, edited by William Harmon) tells me that the title for this poem comes from Jeremiah, referring to God's judgment against Babylon, and that it was written during World War I. If it weren't for the simple, unchanginng realities of our lives, the tragedies of war might be too much to bear -- especially for those caught in the heart of one.

E Tenebris

2007-06-25T13:48:00.000-05:00

by Oscar Wilde

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God's throne should stand.
"He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name
From morn to noon on Carmel's smitten height."
Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.

* * *

The title of this poem means "Out of (the) Darkness." Oscar Wilde is one of the most famous (or infamous) literary converts, livng a life of dissolution and sin before converting near the end of his life to the Catholic Church.

The poem conveys in many sharp images what it is like to live in sin. This serves as an excellent counter for those who glorify sin as freedom or pleasure: there is really no happiness in it. A sinful soul is full of darkness, and in the end it comes to realize its own misery.

Another voice enters the poem, mocking the speaker with the idea that Christ does not hear him, as Baal did not hear his prophets when Elijah set up his contest with them on Mount Carmel. But the speaker rejects this voice, expressing that he will see "before the night" (perhaps symbolizing death) a Savior who will redeem him.

The Song of Right and Wrong

2007-06-07T16:39:00.000-05:00

by G.K. Chesterton

Feast on wine or fast on water
And your honour shall stand sure,
God Almighty's son and daughter
He the valiant, she the pure;
If an angel out of heaven
Brings you other things to drink,
Thank him for his kind attentions,
Go and pour them down the sink.

Tea is like the East he grows in,
A great yellow Mandarin
With urbanity of manner
And unconsciousness of sin;
All the women, like a harem,
At his pig-tail troop along;
And, like all the East he grows in,
He is Poison when he's strong.

Tea, although an Oriental,
Is a gentleman at least;
Cocoa is a cad and coward,
Cocoa is a vulgar beast,
Cocoa is a dull, disloyal,
Lying, crawling cad and clown,
And may very well be grateful
To the fool that takes him down.

As for all the windy waters,
They were rained like tempests down
When good drink had been dishonoured
By the tipplers of the town;
When red wine had brought red ruin
And the death-dance of our times,
Heaven sent us Soda Water
As a torment for our crimes.

* * *

For once, I disagree with Chesterton. I am quite fond of cocoa. But I back him about "windy waters:" I really don't like fizzy stuff--fizzy water especially.

I'm posting this poem in honour of the fact that I am now 21 and legal to do most things -- although I think renting a car and being president are still beyond me. But being the legal drinking age is not very meaningful to me. I bought alcoholic drinks when I was in Rome, and besides, I am not very fond of them. I'm more of a water, tea, and cocoa person. Oh well.

Still, I do not disapprove of drinking. I disapprove highly of drunkenness: it seems perfect foolishness to me for people to go out and "get wasted," on purpose, until the next morning they can't even remember whether they had a good time or not. To me a good time is one where your wits are all about you, but you're in good company so that you're not ashamed to cut loose a bit. A little wine or beer won't harm this balance, but a lot very likely will.

Besides, as Chesterton points out, drunkenness dishonours good drink. The reason people tend to be Puritanical about it is because others are busy being Bacchanalian about it. All things in moderation, and we might avoid these two kinds of madness.

Hopkins' Catholic Genius

2007-06-04T13:50:00.000-05:00

This is the term paper I wrote for my poetics class about Hopkins' masterwork, The Wreck of the Deutschland. It isn't the usual style of what I write for this blog, but I thought it would do for an introduction to the poem, which I'm planning to do a series of posts on soon. The assignment was to choose one poet, tell about his life, and explain his work in light of a single masterpiece. The full text of the poem, complete with line numbers, may be found here.

* * *

Gerard Manley Hopkins was a poet unlike any other. His peculiarities fall into several different categories. There is the fact of his priesthood within the Catholic Church—rare if not unique among English poets. Then there is his highly unusual system of prosody, involving sprung rhythm and frequent alliteration. In his stylistic innovation, he became a forerunner of modern experimentalism. Finally, there is his rich, meditative spirituality. All of these facets are exemplified within his first major poem and his life’s masterpiece, The Wreck of the Deutschland.

Hopkins was born in 1844 to middle-class Anglican parents. He was a sensitive, reserved young man, eager for friendship but rarely finding companions with whom he shared the level of sympathy he wished. When he was eight, his parents sent him to a good boarding school, where he quickly rose to academic excellence. His high achievement eventually earned him a scholarship to Oxford.

While at Oxford, he met a number of groups with different religious beliefs within the Church of England. Finding himself drawn to a more conservative, ritualist perspective, he began associating with the most High Church Anglicans at Oxford. Slowly his beliefs became more and more High Church, until he finally found they could have no true home outside the Catholic Church. Cardinal John Henry Newman, who had converted a generation before, counseled him in his decision. He entered the Church on October 12, 1866.

Although fully in accord with his spiritual desires, Hopkins’ conversion was still not easy. His parents were strongly opposed, and considered him to be abandoning them. Their disapproval pained him: “I have been up at Oxford just long enough to have heard fr. my father and mother in return for my letter announcing my conversion. Their answers are terrible: I cannot read them twice.” [1] For a sensitive young man, this was very difficult, but it did not change his mind about converting.

Very shortly after his conversion he reached the determination to become a Catholic priest. It seems to have been his intention previously to take orders within the Anglican church, and with his conversion he soon began considering different religious orders. After considering the Benedictines and Cardinal Newman’s order, the Oratorians, he decided on the Jesuits. Newman approved, writing, “I think it is the very thing for you. . . . Don’t call ‘the Jesuit discipline hard’, it will bring you to heaven. The Benedictines would not have suited you.” [2]

Hopkins wrote a fair amount of poetry before his conversion, although none of it earned much acclaim. His poems sound like any average Victorian poetry: they are technically well done but unoriginal. Before his entrance into the seminary, however, he destroyed his existing poems (although copies of most remained, either in print or in the possession of friends) and wrote no more for seven years:

What I had written I burnt before I became a Jesuit and resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless it were by the wish of my superiors; so for seven years I wrote nothing but two or three little presentation pieces which occasion called for. But when in the winter of ’75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realized on paper. [3]

This new poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, will be examined in detail later. It is enough now to say that the poem was the first ever written in Hopkins’ characteristic style, using sprung rhythm, meditative rather than linear order, and a Catholic sensibility. After this, Hopkins began to write poetry again regularly, although he had little time to dedicate to it.

After his ordination, Hopkins worked as a parish priest, and sometimes as a teacher, for the rest of his life. Still, he produced many poems describing nature, spiritual realities, and often his own state of mind. Among the last category are his “terrible” or “dark sonnets,” poems expressing desolation and spiritual anguish. Some critics believe these to be an expression of Hopkins’ loss of faith. However, as Austin Warren writes,

The “terrible sonnets” are not revelations of atheist face beneath Catholic mask. They are the cries of a pious soul undergoing vastation, spiritual dryness, feeling abandoned by God and unprofitable to self or Him. The images evoked are those of Jacob wrestling with the angel, the veiled God; of Job, believing in God but puzzled by the gap between piety and prosperity; of the prophet Jeremiah, from whom Hopkins quotes the epigraph over No. 50: “Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: Yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?” [4]

The Catholic Church has always possessed an understanding of the role of spiritual darkness. It is not despair, but an acceptance of the reality of spiritual suffering even in a holy life. In Hopkins’ dark sonnets, he always refuses to give in to despair, despite his apparent temptation.

Hopkins suffered from many physical troubles and sickness, and he died of typhoid at the age of 45 in 1889. His obituary in the Jesuit paper reads, “On the eighth day of June, the vigil of Pentecost, weakened by a fever, he rested. May he rest in peace. He had a most subtle mind, which too quickly wore out the fragile strength of his body.” [5] His final words, to belie the depression of his later years, were simply, “I am so happy, I am so happy, I am so happy.” [6] His life contained many spiritual sufferings, and yet he had the joy that his love of life and his Catholic faith gave him.

Hopkins died with none of his later poems published. His poetry was too unusual for his time, apparently, and for this reason his friend Robert Bridges, entrusted with his poems, did not print them until 1918, almost 30 years after Hopkins’ death. Even then they were little appreciated:

The book itself sold slowly. There were 750 copies printed in the first edition in 1918. Of these, 50 copies were given away; 180 sold the first year; 240 the second, then about 30 copies a year were sold until 1927, when the demand began to pick up slightly. The initial 750 copies were finally exhausted in 1928, ten years after they came off the press. [7]

Only two years later, a second edition was printed. Suddenly the critical opinion that had formerly been completely against Hopkins turned and began to praise him: “Lines quoted in 1919 as errors in taste and style are printed once more in 1931 as examples of excellent verse.” [8] The modern period of poetry had begun, and now Hopkins’ strangeness ceased to be a disadvantage. Soon his poetry had become an inspiration to the experimenters of the modern age, as well as being appreciated as good verse in its own right.

Hopkins’ first great poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, however, still presents a puzzle to many readers. Despite its apparent difficulty, it holds in kernel form all the genius for which Hopkins is acclaimed. First, it introduces Hopkins’ new rhythmic style, sprung rhythm, with all the alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme this rhythm includes. Second, and perhaps most difficult for a new reader, it uses Hopkins’ non-linear, more meditative system of thought. Third, it presents a spiritual meditation on the themes which infuse all of Hopkins’ later poems.

Sprung rhythm is difficult to write, especially according to Hopkins’ complex plans for composing the best musical effects, but the concept is actually quite simple. Instead of counting metrical feet, the poet uses a fixed number of stresses per line along with any number of unstressed syllables. This means that any kind of foot may follow any other, and even two bare stresses may follow one another without any intervening weak syllables. Sprung rhythm leads to a less regular meter, but it often results in much more dramatic rhythms than traditional scansion.

Hopkins defended sprung rhythm on the basis that it was more forceful:

Why do I employ sprung rhythm at all? Because it is the nearest to the rhythm of prose, that is the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms, combining, as it seems to me, opposite and, one wd. have thought, incompatible excellences, markedness of rhythm—that is rhythm’s self—and naturalness of expression—for why, if it is forcible in prose to say “lashed : rod”, am I obliged to weaken this in verse, which ought to be stronger, not weaker, into “láshed birch-ród” or something? [9]

Hopkins adds that his verse is “less to be read than heard,” and this is the reason for insisting on a less regular and more dramatic style. When used with Hopkins’ painstaking care, it leaves room for exciting sound effects impossible in accentual-syllabic verse.

The Wreck of the Deutschland is Hopkins’ first serious effort at sprung verse, yet he already uses it skillfully. The first stanza gives a good example:

Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World’s strand, sway of the sea;
Lord of living and dead;
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. [10]

Each line of Hopkins’ fixed stanzaic form has a set number of stressed syllables: 2, 3 or 4, 4, 3, 5, 5, 4, 6. This can count as the number of feet, but the types of feet are mixed. The first stressed syllable, “Thou,” is used alone, followed by the word “mastering,” one stress followed by two unstressed syllables, and then “me,” another solitary stress. Two stressed syllables can be used next to one another without weakening either, as in “World’s strand.” The effect is to make the reader slow down and emphasize both syllables equally.

Along with his use of sprung rhythm follow a number of natural sound effects, including alliteration and internal rhyme. Hopkins’ alliteration can be difficult to read, for example the line “Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver” (45). However, the very denseness of the repetition of the alliterating sounds makes for dramatic effects. The same can be said for Hopkins’ frequent use of internal rhyme. These rhymes are not spaced half a line apart, as is common in English verse, but packed close together: “Blue-beating and hoary-glow height, or night, still higher” puts the two rhyming words only one unstressed syllable apart. (205)

After this consideration of Hopkins’ stylistic singularities, the next step is to interpret The Wreck of the Deutschland as a whole. As has been said earlier, the poem was written at the hint of Hopkins’ rector as a memorial for five Franciscan nuns who died in a shipwreck. The leader of the nuns, an especially tall woman, was reported by eyewitnesses to have cried repeatedly, “O Christ, Christ, come quickly!” [11] Hopkins was deeply affected by the story, and broke his seven years of poetic silence to write an elegy for the nuns.

The poem’s structure is not at all linear. This troubles many readers who expect a simple story or a straightforward thought. Instead, the poem progresses like a meditation: first, a reflection on the glory and power of God, then to the story of the shipwreck, followed by a meditation on the meaning of the nun’s cry to Christ, and ending with more praise of God and a prayer for the conversion of England. [12] The overriding theme of the meditation is the question of suffering: given the glory of God, how is the Christian to understand suffering? There is no one, simple answer, but throughout the poem Hopkins gives many explanations, from why suffering exists to the ways the tall nun uses her own suffering to bring greater glory to God.

The first section of the poem (the first ten stanzas) has no mention of the shipwreck; instead, it focuses on the praise of God. Already, however, there are hints of the theme of suffering:

Not out of his bliss
Springs the stress felt
Nor first from heaven (and few know this)
Swings the stroke dealt
Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver. (41-5)

The storm which later in the poem destroys the Deutschland and kills the nuns, Hopkins claims, is not of God’s specific sending. This is an example of the allowance of suffering: God allows suffering, but He does not will evil of itself. Hopkins also points out the trial to faith that suffering can be: “Here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss” (48).

Following this stanza is one on Christ’s passion. The mystery of suffering begins here, the poem explains, without making the connection completely clear. Then it moves on to the mystery of death and the particular judgment: men must die and go to their reward, whether good or bad, whether they are ready or not: “Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it—men go” (64). Immediately after this warning, the poem returns to praising God, His chastisement and His comfort:

Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm;
Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:
Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then. (70-2)

This is followed by a stanza about conversion: some, like Paul, are converted in an instant, and some slowly. The speaker prays God to convert all men and “be adored” (80).

The second section encompasses the remainder of the poem. After one stanza about the inevitability of death, the story of the shipwreck begins. The basic facts are described, but throughout the narrative are interspersed short sections of commentary on the tragedy. For example, after the mention that the passengers aboard the ship could not guess their future fate, Hopkins asks, “Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing / Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?” (95-6)

Several stanzas follow, painting a bleak word-picture of the shipwreck. Hope is dying for those on board, and lives are “washing away” (119). But in the middle of the crisis, the tall nun begins her cry:

Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,
The woman’s wailing, the crying of child without check—
Till a lioness arose breasting the babble,
A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told. (133-6)

The nun is not simply crying out for her own sake: through the words she utters to Christ, she becomes a prophetess. The theme of the witness she makes to her fellow-sufferers is repeated later in the poem.

For some time, the actual words the nun speaks are not revealed. The next stanza seems to be the question the nun addresses to her own heart, wondering why it must “make words break from me here all alone” (139). The cry she makes does not spring from her intellect, but directly from her heart, so that even she is uncertain of why she speaks. Amid her own tears, she asks her heart, “What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own?” (144) Her cry seems joyful or at least hopeful, but her position is still desolate.

Again there is a mention of the effect of her words on the others: one of the nun’s companions speaks, reminding her of “a master, her master and mine!” (146) The tall nun “rears herself to divine / Ears,” directing her words to Christ, but all the men aboard the ship also hear her call. (150-1)

Following this dramatic moment is what seems a digression, but in the non-linear structure of the poem it is simply a further meditation, reflecting on the nuns’ past and the symbolism it has. The nuns are from Germany, and Deutschland (Germany) is the name of their ship. Germany is also the home of Protestantism. Hopkins points out that St. Gertrude and Martin Luther belong to the same town, and Cain and Abel have the same mother. Is it then surprising that the Protestant revolt and the missionary spirit of the Franciscan nuns come from the same place?

The nuns were exiled from Germany and could find no home in England; to the world their fate was an accursed one. To Christ, though, they are martyrs:

Thou art above, thou Orion of light;
Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth,
Thou martyr-master: in thy sight
Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers—sweet heaven was astrew in them. (165-8)

To the world, the death of the good seems an evil, but to Christ, this moment of the death of his faithful spouses is a bridal, the moment at which they will be brought to their reward.

Next, Hopkins explores the symbolism of the number of nuns. Five is the number of Christ’s wounds, the “cipher of suffering Christ” (170). The suffering given to the nuns cannot be unfair, since Christ has allowed the same to be done to Him. Nothing is higher than Christ’s sacrifice, so, it is implied, there is nothing shameful that the nuns are allowed to join in the same sacrifice. St. Francis is also mentioned, for he also was allowed to share in the sufferings of Christ through the stigmata. He is enjoined to be glad that his daughters are allowed this special grace of death for Christ.

The point of view of the poem shifts now to Hopkins himself. He was indoors and resting while the nuns were “the prey of the gales” (188). Finally the substance of the tall nun’s cry is revealed: “O Christ, Christ, come quickly” (191). Her cry reaches everywhere: the waves, the falling snow, and the crowd.
Now the meaning of her cry is examined:

The majesty! what did she mean?
Breathe, arch and original Breath.
Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been?
Breathe, body of lovely Death.
They were else-minded then, altogether, the men
Woke thee with a We are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth.
Or is it that she cried for the crown then,
The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen? (193-200)

Was she just glad to be suffering like Christ, unlike the apostles who could not trust Christ when the storm arose and He was asleep? Or did she want the suffering to be over and her crown won, as soon as possible? The next stanza continues questioning: what might be her heart’s desire—the passing of the storm, revealing the clear sky above? No, the poem answers. She is not asking for an end to her suffering, nor simply meditating on the Passion as she might do in a quiet moment of prayer. It is something else, not yet revealed.

Then there appears a vision in the speaker’s imagination, Christ coming as she begged of Him, ready to “cure the extremity where he had cast her,” relieve the suffering He had allowed her to experience (222). Now the speaker praises the nun for being able to interpret the sufferings she is undergoing and realize their meaning, acting in the role of Simon Peter, who could declare Christ as the Son of God. The nun knows that God has sent her sufferings and will cure them: she has a certain faith in Him. The speaker imagines the feast in heaven when the nun arrives. She has acted in the role of Mary, a stainless woman who, by speaking a word, is able in some sense to give Christ being.

For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done;
But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain,
Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright. (238-40)

The vision of Christ that has appeared, it seems, in the hearts of those who heard the nun’s cry, and therefore she has brought Him to being within them.

All the explanation of suffering is sufficient, then, for the nun. Her suffering is comforted by her triumph. But, the poet asks, what about the others aboard the ship? They are “comfortless” and “unconfessed,” and here one can still question the providence of God to send them to their death as well (244). There is an answer for this too. The nun’s call can act as a call to conversion for them:

The breast of the
Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and
Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee? (246-8)

For the unconfessed souls too, the shipwreck is an instrument of salvation. When the unbelievers hear the nun’s cry, they have the chance to repent before their death. Even this seemingly evil thing, the tempest, is a servant of God and brings Him souls.

The poem concludes with several stanzas more of praise: God’s mastership of the ocean, His mercy for the eleventh-hour penitent, and the kindess of His coming. Finally there is a prayer to the nun, now a new saint in heaven. Since she has died on the shores of England, the speaker prays she may intercede for the return of Christ to England:

Our King back, Oh, upon English souls!
Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,
More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,
Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,
Our heart’s charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s
Lord. (276-80)

Christ is the end of the poem as He is the beginning. As John Picks writes,

For its meaning is Christ: it is the story of the Passion and Redemption working themselves out in the lives of men; it tells how Christ, “the martyr-master”, calls the souls of men to Him. . . . So completely does it affirm the Way of the Cross that it is no wonder that the poet cries out, “here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss.” [13]

This is a poem about suffering, but it is a hopeful poem, one in which suffering fits perfectly within the larger view of redemption.

The Wreck of the Deutschland, as Hopkins’ first mature poem, contains the seeds of everything he wrote later. In fact, it seems almost the culmination of his work, even though it was written first. It contains the prosodic experimentation apparent in all his mature work. Passages in the poem also show an intense attention to nature, to its “inscape,” as Hopkins would say. The word “inscape” is a philosophical term Hopkins used, defined by Austin Warren:

An “inscape” is any kind of formed or focused view, any pattern discerned in the natural world. Being so central a word in his vocabulary and motif in his mental life, it moves through some range of meaning: from sense-perceived pattern to inner form. The prefix seems to imply a contrary, an outer-scape—as if to say that an “inscape” is not mechanically or inertly present, but requires personal action, attention, a seeing and seeing into. [14]

In the descriptions of nature in the poem, Hopkins emphasizes the need to “instress,” or fully comprehend the inscape of, nature.

Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder,
His mystery must be instressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand. (38-40)

Instress is, in a sense, the finding-out of God behind things, along with finding out the things’ true form.

Because of this emphasis on inscape, instress, and praise of God through nature, The Wreck can be likened to Hopkins’ nature poems, like “God’s Grandeur” and “Pied Beauty.” It also contains the same meditative elements as Hopkins’ more strictly religious poems, like “Felix Randal” and “The Bugler’s First Communion.” Finally, in its exploration of suffering without despair, it holds the seeds of the “dark sonnets,” like “Thou Art Indeed Just” and “Carrion Comfort.”

Besides its role as summation of Hopkins’ other poems, The Wreck can be seen as an explanation of Hopkins’ own life. He experienced much physical and mental anguish in his life, but all of it managed to bring him to a fuller conversion and trust in God. He was able to come through the darkness he experienced to end his life with the words, “I am so happy.” These words are not unlike the tall nun’s cry of “O Christ, Christ, come quickly”: they express love and trust even in the face of terrible suffering.

Hopkins was truly a poet in a class of his own. His originality was not, like some other innovative poets, a striving after novelty in itself, much less after poetic fame. Instead, he was a lover of God’s beauty above all, and wanted to mirror that beauty in his verse. Because of this, his Catholicism helped rather than hindered his originality: he knew exactly how broad the truth was, so that he could exercise his freedom within it without wandering outside it. As a result, Hopkins, long after his death, has come into a fame he never expected as a great innovator, lover of beauty, and Catholic poet.

________

1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, quoted in Robert Bernard Martin, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991), 148.

2. John Henry Cardinal Newman, quoted in Martin, 175-6.

3. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in Peter Washington, ed., Gerard Manley Hopkins, Everyman’s Library (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 144.

4. Austin Warren, “Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889),” The Kenyon Critics, Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Makers of Modern Literature (Norfolk, CT: New Direction Books, 1945), 12.

5. Register of the English Province, quoted in Martin, 415.

6. Gerard Manley Hopkins, quoted in John Pick, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest and Poet, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 155.

7. Todd K. Bender, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Classical Background and Critical Reception of His Work (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), 10.

8. Ibid., 12.

9. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in Washington, 138-9.

10. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland, in Peter Milward and Raymond Schoder, eds., Readings of “The Wreck”: Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of G. M. Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1976), page 2, lines 1-8. All citations of The Wreck of the Deutschland will be from this edition and henceforth will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number.

11. Paul L. Mariani, “O Christ, Christ, Come Quickly! Lexical Plenitude and Primal Cry at the Heart of The Wreck,” in Milward and Schoder, 33.

12. Bender, 83-4.

13. Picks, 41.

14. Warren, 77.

Days

2007-05-30T19:02:00.000-05:00

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic days,
Muffled and dumb, like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and faggots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleached garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

* * *

Oh, if only each of us would actually use the time that is given us! We forget our "morning dreams" and just grab something from our day, but not always the thing we woke up thinking we could gain. But when the day stands before us offering so much, we're foolish not to take at least some of the treasures it offers. If not kingdoms, maybe something greater: salvation. So often we wake up thinking of how good we'll be on a new day, and by noon we're already so caught up in life we don't bother to take the blessings and opportunities for grace the day is offering.

Among the things I haven't used my days for: posting on this blog. Bad me. I'm back home and on my slow dial-up connection; that's my excuse. But I'll try to be a bit more frequent all the same.

News:
1. For anyone who was praying for my Lyme disease test, it came back negative. Praise God!

2. I'm looking for a job. I hope I can find one before half my summer's gone!

3. I heard I had a poem published in Gilbert magazine. I haven't seen it myself. I hope it's good, because I can't even remember exactly how the thing went by the time I submitted it!

The Child is Father to the Man

2007-04-17T18:17:00.000-05:00

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

‘The child is father to the man.’
How can he be? The words are wild.
Suck any sense from that who can:
‘The child is father to the man.’
No; what the poet did write ran,
‘The man is father to the child.’
‘The child is father to the man!’
How can he be? The words are wild.

* * *

Who would've known? Hopkins wrote a triolet too!

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

2007-04-17T13:58:00.000-05:00

by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

* * *

This poem always makes me draw in a long, slow breath, let it out again, and go about my day a little more peaceful than I was before. I think having a dream like this is very healthy, because even if you can't get up and go when you'd like to, there's something about carrying the sound of lake water with you in the heart's core -- even while walking along a busy roadway. It's carrying a little peace with you wherever you go.

On a different note, this blog recently got its first 10,000 hits. When I started out about two years ago, I hoped Enchiridion would be a way to add a little poetry to people's lives and maybe have some nice discussions about poems. Looking back, I think it really turned out that way, and I'm very glad I decided to start it. Of course, I'm not the one making the hits and comments happen -- you are, for visiting my blog and sharing your thoughts in my comment box. Thanks everyone, and a happy Easter season to all of you.

Fatherly Advice to Newlyweds

2007-04-10T20:32:00.000-05:00

Dr. Brian J. Kopp

My advice to the Newlywed?
While you're young, use your head!
Have a baby...
Have a few!
I don't mean one,
or even two.
What about four?
How about eight?
(Making babies is really great!)

Don't worry about braces,
or college, or clothes.
Their every need
God already knows.
Then when you're old,
in time of need,
with no more clamoring mouths to feed,
look to your children
that you (and God) made,
to be your joy,
comfort, and aid.

Your babies today
are your greatest treasure.
You will receive
in the amount you measure.
God's greatest gift
to husband and wife?
A newborn baby.
An eternal life!

* * *

from Amazing Grace for Fathers

(The writer's only attempt at poetry, written on a napkin at a wedding reception.)

Today I did my presentation for apologetics class. It's half my grade, so I was pretty nervous. The topic was a defense against abuses of Natural Family Planning. It's surprising how controversial a topic that really is, even here at Christendom.

I was mainly arguing against the attitude of people who think everyone ought to be using NFP. But I am also concerned about people using it for trifling reasons.

The main point for me is that having children is a Good Thing. And as the poem above says, God can be trusted to work out the details.

Quiz

2007-04-04T08:16:00.000-05:00

Which Church Father are you?

You’re St. Justin Martyr!

You have a positive and hopeful attitude toward the world. You think that nature, history, and even the pagan philosophers were often guided by God in preparation for the Advent of the Christ. You find “seeds of the Word” in unexpected places. You’re patient and willing to explain the faith to unbelievers.

Find out which Church Father you are at The Way of the Fathers!

I think that's about right. I always try and look for truth wherever I can find it -- like in poetry, for example.

But it's one of the great sorrows of my life that I don't know many "unbelievers." Although I guess it's better that those rare, wonderful souls who don't know the word but are ripe for hearing it are entrusted to people who know a little bit more than I do.

My Last Duchess

2007-03-29T20:28:00.000-05:00

by Robert Browning

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Frà Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myselfthey turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Frà Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
Over my Lady's wrist too much," or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat": such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace — all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men, — good! but thanked
Somehow — I know not how — as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech — (which I have not) — to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark" — and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,--
E'en then would be some stooping, and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

* * *

We read this dramatic monologue in poetics class the other day. The speaker is the Duke of Ferrara, a famous Renaissance noble suspected of poisoning his first wife, who was quite young.

The more deeply you examine the poem, the more the Duke condemns himself out of his own mouth. That's the appeal of a dramatic monologue, but in this one especially -- it makes me want to yell, "You jerk! She was too good for you!" before I remind myself that it's only a poem.

I think "if they durst" is the first sign of the Duke's character. He's a rather fearsome individual, and rather particular about who looks at his pictures. A few lines down we find he was terribly jealous about that first wife of his. He begrudges anyone else even a smile or blush from her. And what is his real problem with her? She's too happy, too easily pleased. He could have had an impossible-to-please wife, but as it is, the very pleasantness and sweetness of her temper is his grudge against her. The fact that she is happy is not enough for him -- she must be made happy by him, and only him.

Not only that, but he considers himself so far superior to her that it would be a stooping even to tell her what it was he minded about her. Even if she consented instantly to his reproof and changed her ways, it still isn't good enough -- he feels he shouldn't have to ask. She ought to just know what he wants and do it.

"And then all smiles stopped together." Was her spirit crushed at his displeasure with her? Or did he do away with her? We don't know, but again it's repeated that she looks as if she were alive. One might imagine he likes her better this way: no one can open the curtain in front of her portrait but him -- she smiles just the same, but now only for him.

The very next thing we realize who he's talking to -- an envoy come to arrange for his second marriage! Perhaps he's really put his foot in his mouth, talking as he has, but he's clearly too proud to realize he's given himself away as a scoundrel. He really doesn't think he's done anything wrong. The next marriage is clearly because of money, we can all see, even though he claims it's the daughter's "fair self."

At the last three lines there's what seems a random comment, but it's a reflection on the rest of the poem. He sees his wife the way he sees the statue: first, as something to be tamed, and second, as a collection piece. Love is clearly beyond his comprehension.

I wish I could say there were no men in real life like this! But it's far more common than it should be for a man to try to mold the woman in his life into his own image, using her to serve his pride instead of loving her for herself. True love has to be much different -- and that's what Browning is saying. Without ever saying a word from his own point of view, he leads us to draw a very clear moral from someone else's life.

Kubla Khan

2007-03-08T17:09:00.000-05:00

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossom'd many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reach'd the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she play'd,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me,
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

* * *

I've got a paper due soon in Poetics class, a poem analysis of one of the poems we were assigned in class. I was thinking I could do this poem. The trouble is, I don't know what to say about it. Of course, everyone knows that it was composed on an opium trip. That doesn't seem to me to be the point, though. I don't know what it is I like so much about it -- maybe the imagery, maybe the meter, and maybe it's just the all-pervasive sense of mystery. We finish the poem still unsure what it's about -- and yet, the way Coleridge has led me to wonder and speculate what it is about leaves me with prickles when I put the poem down. I want to know how he gives me that feeling, and I guess that's why I want to write about this poem.

I hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew.

The Ragged Wood

2007-02-28T09:14:00.000-05:00

by William Butler Yeats

O hurry where by water among the trees
The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh,
When they have but looked upon their images -
Would none had ever loved but you and I!

Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed
Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,
When the sun looked out of his golden hood? -
O that none ever loved but you and I!

O hurry to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry -
O my share of the world, O yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.

* * *

I don't have time to say much about this poem. At first I thought it was rather selfish to wish that none had ever loved but the two of them. But the last stanza, when it says that no one has ever loved but them, shows something else. This is a poem for the times when the lovers can withdraw from the world and be only with each other. She is his "share of the world" -- the rest of the world is not necessary during these special times.

Lent

2007-02-21T18:37:00.000-05:00

by George Herbert

Welcome dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authority,
But is composed of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now:
Give to your Mother, what you would allow
To every Corporation.

* * *

It 's true, we cannot reach Christ's fortieth day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
Is better than to rest:
We cannot reach our Savior's purity;
Yet are bid, Be holy ev'n as he.
In both let 's do our best.

Who goes in the way which Christ has gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one
Who travels the by-ways:
Perhaps my God, though he be far before,
May turn, and take me by the hand, and more
May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast
As may our faults control:
That ev'ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlor; banqueting the poor,
And among those his soul.

* * *

I am not a good faster at all. I would rather do almost any sacrifice than fast. Yet this poem helps me remember that fasting is about banqueting my poor soul. I'm afraid my body tends to get way more attention, just because my stomach growls while my soul sits quietly waiting for me to feed it. Somehow going without food makes me feel more in control of "brother Ass," my body, and more inclined to prayer.

I wish you all a happy and holy Lent, the boot camp of all the year. May we come out of it leaner, stronger, and closer to God.

Lucy

2007-02-14T20:54:00.000-05:00

by William Wordsworth

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem'd a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

* * *

For St. Valentine's Day. Here at Christendom it's been a tad disappointing, so I guess that's why I did a sad poem.

It just reminds me of the way we take people for granted until they're gone. We always imagine the other person will always be there when we want them, but before we know it, they're gone, and we wonder if we were there for them as much as we should have been. I'm not sure that's exactly what Wordsworth meant, but it's certainly a truth: if we knew the hour of our friends' departing, we might have held them more dearly to our hearts.

No Second Troy

2007-02-08T13:10:00.000-05:00

by William Butler Yeats

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

* * *

Taking the Poetry and Poetics course at Christendom (a lovely course; I don't know why people complain about having to take it) is getting me to read a lot more good poetry -- and also to understand what's so great about it.

This poem is almost a sonnet, but not quite: it's only 12 lines, three quatrains each rhyming abab. But Yeats keeps out of the curse that haunts any modern who tries to write in a form -- the curse of sounding stilted and archaic. He doesn't mix up any natural sentence orders, and his use of enjambment contributes to the natural tone of the poem. But the tone isn't casual, either -- it's a noble uplifting of contemporary speech, which is what poetry, in my opinion, does at its best. Phrases like "beauty like a tightened bow," "high and solitary and most stern," give an almost epic sound to the poem. It makes me want to see this woman, who even in "an age like this" possesses an ancient beauty like Helen of Troy.

I started out not liking Yeats at all, but this poem, among a few others I've read in the past year or two, is doing its best to convert me. I will at least admit that Yeats sometimes produced masterpieces.

From St. Agnes' Eve

2007-02-05T19:31:00.000-05:00

by John Keats

St. Agnes' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

His prayer he saith, this patient, holy man;
Then takes his lamp, and riseth from his knees,
And back returneth, meagre, barefoot, wan,
Along the chapel aisle by slow degrees:
The sculptur’d dead, on each side, seem to freeze,
Emprison’d in black, purgatorial rails:
Knights, ladies, praying in dumb orat’ries,
He passeth by; and his weak spirit fails
To think how they may ache in icy hoods and mails.

Northward he turneth through a little door,
And scarce three steps, ere Music’s golden tongue
Flatter’d to tears this aged man and poor;
But no—already had his deathbell rung;
The joys of all his life were said and sung:
His was harsh penance on St. Agnes’ Eve:
Another way he went, and soon among
Rough ashes sat he for his soul’s reprieve,
And all night kept awake, for sinners’ sake to grieve.

* * *

It is so cold here today. The highs were supposed to be in the single digits. I don't know if it really got that high or not; my internal thermometer breaks down at these temperatures. All I know is that it wasn't this cold back home . . .

But take a look at the first stanza of this poem especially. The first six lines each have at least one word implying cold. Doesn't it make you feel cold just to read it? Keats is a master of descriptive language.

As well as of other things. This stanza form, borrowed from Spencer, is perfect for narrative poetry, laying down each stanza softly with an extra-long line. Between the imagery and the prosodic mastery, Keats hardly needs to have a meaning to his poems -- but of course he has one all the same.

Reuben Bright

2007-01-31T08:57:00.000-05:00

by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby all the night
And made the women cry to see him cry.

And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

* * *

Sorry it's been so long since my last post -- it's hard to get back into the rhythm of things at school after so long away.

We read this poem in American literature class. I like it, because it deals with a kind of snobbery very common these days: the sort of snobbery where educated people think that they have more feelings than blue-collar types. A butcher seems a brutish person to us intellectual highbrows, the poet suggests. But what's the truth? He's as sensitive to loss as the rest of us, despite his gory job and the practical things (paying the funeral workers) that he has to think of. He is an honest man making an honest living, and has as tender a heart, if not more, than any well-educated poetry enthusiast.

Gifts

2007-01-07T16:33:00.000-05:00

by Juliana Horatia Ewing

You ask me what since we must part
You shall bring back to me.
Bring back a pure and faithful heart
As true as mine to thee.

You talk of gems from foreign lands,
Of treasure, spoil, and prize.
Ah love! I shall not search your hands
But look into your eyes.

* * *

I found this poem in a new anthology. The poet lived in the nineteenth century. I like its simplicity: simple form -- nothing unusual; simple message. It reflects that material things aren't that important; love is everything. If one has that, he wants for nothing else; and if he lacks that, nothing else will be any comfort.