The Ragged Wood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Flight in the Desert

by Brother Antoninus

The last settlement scraggled out with a barbed wire fence
And fell from sight. They crossed coyote country:
Mesquite, sage, the bunchgrass knotted in patches;
And there the prairie dog yapped in the valley;
And on the high plateau the short-armed badger
Delved his clay. But beyond that the desert,
Raw, unslakable, its perjured dominion wholly contained
In the sun's remorseless mandate, where the dim trail
Died ahead in the watery horizon: God knows where.

And there the failures: skull of the ox,
Where the animal terror trembled on in the hollowed eyes;
The catastrophic wheel, split, sandbedded;
And the sad jawbone of a horse. These the denials
Of the retributive tribes, fiercer than pestilence,
Whose scrupulous realm this was.

Only the burro took no notice: the forefoot
Placed with the nice particularity of one
To who the evil of the day is wholly sufficient.
Even the jocular ears marked time,
But they, the man and the anxious woman,
Who stared pinch-eyed into the settling sun,
They went forward into its denseness
All apprehensive, and would many a time have turned
But for what they carried. That brought them on,
In the gritty blanket they bore the world's great risk,
And knew it; and kept it covered, near to the blind heart,
That hugs in a bad hour its sweetest need,
Possessed against the drawn night
That comes now, over the dead arroyos,
Cold and acrid and black.

This was the first of his goings forth into the wilderness of the world.
There was much to follow: much of portent, much of dread.
But what was so meek then and so mere, so slight and strengthless,
(Too tender, almost, to be touched)--what they nervously guarded
Guarded them. As we, each day, from the lifted chalice,
That strengthless Bread the mildest tongue subsumes,
To be taken out in the blantant kingdom,
Where Herod sweats, and his deft henchmen
Riffle the tabloids--that keeps us.

Over the campfire the desert moon
Slivers the west, too chaste and cleanly
To mean hard luck. The man rattles the skillet
To take the raw edge of the silence;
The woman lifts up her heart; the Infant
Knuckles the generous breast, and feeds.

* * *

This is kind of a long poem to do a very complete commentary of. I found it in my mother's prayer book, and despite its modern style it appeals to me. (I don't know who Brother Antoninus is, I'm afraid.)

Setting the Flight into the Desert in a desert which seems straight out of the American Southwest seems incongruous, but it makes the biblical event seem much easier to understand. This is what desert means to us; it's not a vague idea of wilderness but a dry, abandoned, rather frightening place.

The phrase "God knows where" at the end of the first stanza is striking. God knows where the road ends if no one else does.

And of course the paradox of the Child whom they guarded guarding them . . . not a new idea, but it's never old. It's a nice parallel between that and the Eucharist, how we carry Christ forth into the dangerous world, "the blatant kingdom."

The last bit is homey and familiar, as Joseph cooks over the fire and tries to make noise because it's too quiet, and Mary nurses baby Jesus.

The entire poem tries to make the biblical story real and practical to the modern mind without compromising any of the eternal meaning -- and, in my opinion, succeeds very well.

Fire in the Earth

by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

It is done.
Once again the Fire has penetrated the earth
Not with the sudden crash of thunderbolt,
riving the mountain tops:
does the Master break down doors to enter his own home?
Without earthquak.e, or thunderclap:
the flame has lit up the whole world from within.
All things individually and collectively
are penetrated and flooded by it,
from the inmost core of the tiniest atom
to the mighty sweep of the most universal laws of being:
so naturally has it flooded every element, every energy,
every connecting link in the unity of our cosmos,
that one might suppose the cosmos to have burst spontaneously into flame.

* * *

I have heard of Teilhard de Chardin, but I never read anything of his before this poem. I like it: it seems to convey the paradox between the extreme subtlety of Christ's coming -- silently in a manger where He might have come in the loudest thunder -- and the vast extent that the universe has been silently changed.

To all my fellow bloggers: "a very merry Christmas, and many may you see!"

(Internet cookie to whoever names that quote.)

A Defence of Blogging

I never did a fisk before, but this letter to the editor I read in the last National Catholic Register seemed to demand a response. This woman replied to an article about gossipping in the blogosphere with a long rant about blogging in general. She actually does give reasons for what she thinks -- but I still think she's wrong.

My first objection to blogging has to do with the cult of the individual. Just what is it that makes every blogger, Catholics included, feel that their views are worthy of public display? Why the need to broadcast to "whomever" the way I feel about something? Or addictively check to see how others have responded to my comments, or the comments of others? Why this need to elicit, from strangers, a response to my feelings?

My second objection is the weirdness of the virtual relationships among bloggers. Bloggers act as though they are buddies who really know each other, who have actual involvement in one another's lives. I think this "virtual community" is an illusion at best, dangerous at worst.

The blogosphere isn't a real community. It invites the dangerous high of abandoning our real families, those in our real lives who are waiting for us to get the heck off the computer and find time for them. The people in our real lives are waiting for us to come to dinner, read us a story, give us a kiss, hear about our day, empty the trash.

How different is the fleeting, stimulating, anonymous interaction -- focused on our refined areas of interest and stripped of real-life pressures and stresses -- from using por.nography? Not much.

Jennifer Heath
Greenfield, Massachusetts

Okay, first off, let me try and see if this might apply to things other than blogging. Let's try seminar-style classes. We have a lot of those at college, after all. But let's imagine this is a large public college, where the people don't live together and don't know each other all that well. Here we go.

My first objection to seminars has to do with the cult of the individual. Just what is it that makes every student, Catholics included, feel that their views are worthy of public display? Why the need to broadcast to the whole class the way I feel about something? Or listen to see how others respond to my comments? Why this need to elicit, from people who I don't know well, a response to my feelings?

My second objection is the weirdness of relationships among among students. They act as though they are buddies who really know each other, but really, they're in an artificial environment. They haven't even visited each other at home.

College isn't a real community. It invites the dangerous high of abandoning our real families, those who are waiting for us to come home from staying late after class and find time for them.

How different is the fleeting, stimulating interaction -- focused on our refined areas of interest and stripped of real-life pressures and stresses -- from having an affair? Not much.

It works, I think. If you start from the premise that having conversations with people who are not close friends and family about our "refined areas of interest" is wrong, then college seminars are wrong too. So are conversations about work with work buddies. These people have never seen you wake up in the morning, have never sat beside you at Mass, have never made you take out the trash, so how can you really be friends? And if you're not "real" friends, how can you presume to talk to these people?

Answer to Objection 1. I really don't think it's a "cult of the individual" when individuals want to express their individual ideas. It's the same as when one old gentleman in a pub puts his feet on the table and says, "You know what I think of that politician?" Once he's finished, he wants to hear what the other men have to say about his idea. If they think he's a moron, he wants to hear it so he can refine his ideas. This is what people do. We do it all the time, and it's not a new, modern idea either. It's the same, I would put forth, as a woman writing to a newspaper to put in her two cents about what the newspaper said. Why does she think her views are worthy of public display? Probably because she realizes the public is no different from herself: ordinary people who read the paper and are looking for what people think on these issues. And I simply do not see any moral or logical difference between a newspaper that is in print and a blog that is on a computer: if either is an arena to share your thoughts, it doesn't really matter what the medium is.

Answer to Objection 2. The "it's just weird" argument. I don't find this one carries much weight. Bloggers do know they don't have much actual involvement in people's lives. We just accept that it's a different kind of relationship than the kind we have with our family and close friends. It's an intellectual relationship, the kind you have with an author when you read a book of theirs and feel you know them. You write to the author saying whether you agree or disagree with what they said, and if they write you back, you have a relationship. It's a long-distance relationship, and of course they don't know you like your mother does, but that doesn't mean it's completely not worth your while to write to this person. You and this author are exchanging ideas, which helps both of you think.

Answer to Objection 3. "The blogosphere isn't a real community." Depends on what you mean by "real," doesn't it? I hold that ideas are real, and sharing real ideas makes a real community. It's a different kind than the community of people you talk with in person, of course, but no one's denying that. I still think a community of ideas is worthwhile. It's not a new idea to have communities of "men of letters" who read each other's work and write letters to each other. The fact that the internet now makes it available to more of us than before doesn't change much.

Answer to Objection 4. "It is a fleeting, stimulating, anonymous interaction, focused on our refined areas of interest and stripped of real-life pressures and stresses, so it's just like por.nography." I could see that's how a housewife might feel, stuck with the baby and the cooking while her husband is discussing lofty subjects with his friends off somewhere. To her, he might as well be having an affair. But isn't it because she's a little jealous, and she'd rather he were discussing things with her? I certainly think no one should neglect the home folks just because they'd rather have intellectual conversations with people who don't ask them to take out the trash. But I do think both the intellectual conversations and the trash have their proper place. Studying philosophy or poetry may seem like pretty useless things in the "real world." But it's only when you dedicate the time to them to unpack the kernel of deep truth within the subject that you can bring that kernel and make it bear fruit in your daily life.

Sometimes you can focus on your refined areas of interest, and sometimes you have to focus on real-life pressures and stresses. But to demand that all of every person's time must be spent "eating dinner, reading a story, emptying the trash" is a bit much. One's primary duty is to his family, of course. But can't he take a half hour every day to think about "higher things" which he can bring to his family later, enriching everyone? That's the point, you know.

If anyone is blogging just for a sense of self-satisfaction that someone else is reading what they wrote and thinking, "Wow, what a smart person that is," they're wasting their time. But if they're trying to refine their ideas through submitting them to the eyes of others, they're forming themselves. And if they're refusing to hide the light that is their thoughts and their ideas under a bushel basket, but instead sharing them with other people to enrich their lives too, they're doing an act of charity as well.

N.B. Blogging can be addictive. I think every blogger knows this, because you can hop from one blog to another, trying to keep up with everything people have to say. The sheer volume is just too much, and so you're just going to have to stop before you've read it all. A reasonable and self-controlled person will stop with plenty of time to take care of what needs to be. If those around us are complaining that we're always sunk into the computer, we have to listen and consider: are we spending more time on blogging and less on the most important things than we should? It is a danger of which we must all be aware.