Poetry for Autumn from Hopkins and Keats

Spring and Fall
to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins

Christopher J. Scalia offered a reflection on John Keats' poem to Autumn in The Wall Street Journal last week:

. . . Every September I read John Keats’s “To Autumn.” That tradition has special significance this season, the ode’s 200th anniversary.

I’ve loved “To Autumn” since I first read it in college. I was entranced then, as now, by the way in which the poem captures this season’s fleeting beauty. From its famous opening line (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”) to the quiet music of its final image (“gathering swallows twitter in the skies”), it evokes the delicate abundance of these weeks. Keats’s writing affects me the way the season itself does: I wish the poem would last longer even as I know its power lies in its brevity.

He compares the poem's brevity to the brevity not only of Keats's life, but of his creative period in 1819 when he wrote "To Autumn" and other great odes:

But 1819 would be his last year of writing poetry. The following February, Keats coughed up some blood. He knew what that meant. He wrote to a friend, “That drop of blood is my death-warrant;—I must die.” Keats moved to Rome in the hope that the climate would mitigate his tuberculosis. He died there in February 1821.

Keats had asked to have his headstone inscribed, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” An epitaph full of beauty—but, as 200 years have shown, not truth. The seasons turn, yet Keats reminds me still that fleeting splendor has a captivating power of its own.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Mark and I took these pictures during our November 2015 trip to the Ozarks. He loved the beauty of fall colors. Today is the anniversary of his birth in 1956. Like John Keats, last year he knew that he must die; he said he would not live to see this birthday anniversary. He felt "the soft-dying day". 

Hopkins Praises Purcell

Henry Purcell died on November 21, 1695. Naxos, which has a CD of The Best of Purcell, sums 
up his achievement here:

Henry Purcell was one of the greatest English composers, flourishing in the period that followed the restoration of the monarchy after the Puritan Commonwealth period. He spent much of his short life in the service of the Chapel Royal as a composer, organist and singer. With considerable gifts as a composer, he wrote extensively for the stage (particularly in a hybrid musico-dramatic form of the time), for the church, and for popular entertainment. He was a master of English word-setting and of contemporary compositional techniques for instruments and voices. He died in 1695, a year after composing funeral music for Queen Mary.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ praised Purcell in verse:

The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man’s mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally. 

HAVE, fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear 
To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell, 
An age is now since passed, since parted; with the reversal 
Of the outward sentence low lays him, listed to a heresy, here. 

Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear, 
Or love or pity or all that sweet notes not his might nursle: 
It is the forgèd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal 
Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear. 

Let him Oh! with his air of angels then lift me, lay me! only I’ll 
Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to his pelted plumage under 
Wings: so some great stormfowl, whenever he has walked his while 

The thunder-purple seabeach plumèd purple-of-thunder, 
If a wuthering of his palmy snow-pinions scatter a colossal smile 
Off him, but meaning motion fans fresh our wits with wonder.

Hear a sample of Purcell's Music for Queen Mary's Funeral here.

A Prayerful Poetic Retreat with Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

The Jesuits in Britain have posted this ten-part reflection on Gerard Manley Hopkins' life and poetry as a "Pray As You Go" retreat. One of their biographical postings on Hopkins notes that "It was during his time in the rural tranquility of St Beuno's that he found most encouragement and inspiration for the poetry for which he is now famous."

More on St. Beuno's in rural north Wales:

St Beuno's College was built in 1848 as a place for Jesuits to study theology. Up to this time prospective Jesuit priests studied in Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, but the increasing numbers put a strain on the old buildings. So in 1846, the then Provincial Superior of the British Jesuits, Fr Randal Lythgoe, when visiting the Jesuit parish in Holywell travelled to see some farm land that the Society of Jesus owned near Tremeirchion and immediately decided that this should be the site for his new ‘theologate’. In early Victorian days when epidemics of typhoid and cholera regularly swept cities, the country air of North Wales was considered a healthy place to prepare the young men to go into the new industrial towns and cities to serve in schools and parishes.

The architect was Joseph Aloysius Hansom, of Hansom Cab fames. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit poet who studied at St Beuno's College from 1874-7, described the building in a letter to his father: "It is built of limestone, decent outside, skimping within, Gothic like Lancing College done worse".

Hopkins was certainly inspired to begin to write a play about St. Winifrede's Well. St. Winifrede was St. Beuno's niece, and her Holy Well survived the English Reformation, remaining a site of pilgrimage. Blessed Edward Oldcorne visited the Holy Well and was cured of throat cancer, and James II and his queen Mary Beatrice of Modena visited the well hoping to conceive and safely deliver a male child. More about St. Beuno here. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins, RIP

Why did Gerard Manley Hopkins die? This blog posts an article with various recent attempts at diagnosis passed on reports of his symptoms and the course of his last illness in May and June, 1889:

It is also an undoubted fact, as noted earlier, that Hopkins suffered from generally poor health, and would have had a low level of resistance to infection. possibility; perhaps Hopkins' illness was not typhoid fever. There is some persuasive evidence for this notion. Writing in The Lancet in 1997, Dr. Kenneth Flegel of The Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal examined the known details of Hopkins' final illness, and considered them in conjunction with the fact that Hopkins had suffered intermittently throughout his life from diarrhoea, fatigue and eye pain. He came to the conclusion that these conditions, allied to the absence of such typical symptoms of typhoid as headache and fever, indicated that Hopkins' illness was not typhoid fever, but Crohn's disease. This article led to a response from a group of doctors at St. Thomas' Hospital, London, who put forward a case for coeliac disease. The one point on which they all agreed was that they would never be sure where the truth lay - and neither are we. We do know that his condition was deteriorating. Peritonitis was diagnosed on about 04 June, and his parents were summoned from England by telegram. He was initially reluctant to have them come, not wishing them to see him so ill, but, after they had visited, he expressed his happiness at having them there. He gradually declined, and received absolution and the Blessing of the Sick on the morning of Saturday 08 June. He died at 1.30 in the afternoon. In the Roman Catholic faith, the rituals surrounding death are important. The death of a member of a religious community is a significant event in the life of that community; it is their opportunity to show their respect for their colleague, and to send him on his final journey with due solemnity. The funeral arrangements for Fr. Hopkins were put in place, and news of his death was sent to his family in England. They were shocked by the news, not having realised how ill he was. His brother Everard expressed his grief "that I could not see him once more". He was persuaded by his brother Arthur not to attend the funeral. "Perhaps", he said, "it is best for us to remember his sweet and beautiful face as we always knew it - not worn with sickness". Hopkins' death was reported in The Catholic Times, The Freeman's Journal and The Irish Times newspapers. The death notice in the Irish Times of Monday 10 June read as follows: HOPKINS - June 8, at University College, the Rev. Gerard Hopkins, SJ, Fellow of the Royal University. High Mass and Office at St. Francis Xavier's, Upper Gardiner street, on tomorrow (Tuesday) at 11 o'clock, funeral to Glasnevin immediately afterwards. On reading this notice, I was struck by how sparse and matter-of-fact it was; unlike modern death notices, it made no mention of his family or religious confreres.

Hopkins' last words on June 8, 1889 were, "I am so happy, I am so happy. I loved my life."

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon. May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace!

The Handsome Heart 

at a Gracious Answer

‘BUT tell me, child, your choice; what shall I buy
You?’—‘Father, what you buy me I like best.’
With the sweetest air that said, still plied and pressed,
He swung to his first poised purport of reply.

What the heart is! which, like carriers let fly—
Doff darkness, homing nature knows the rest—
To its own fine function, wild and self-instressed,
Falls light as ten years long taught how to and why.

Mannerly-hearted! more than handsome face—
Beauty’s bearing or muse of mounting vein,
All, in this case, bathed in high hallowing grace…

Of heaven what boon to buy you, boy, or gain
Not granted?—Only … O on that path you pace
Run all your race, O brace sterner that strain!

St. Robert Southwell's Influence

Next month, from St. Augustine's Press: Southwell's Sphere: The Influence of England's Secret Poet by Dr. Gary Bouchard:

Once feared by Queen Elizabeth I and admired by William Shakespeare, Robert Southwell, s.j. (1561–1595), clings today to a thinning canonical presence in English literature among a sphere of other writers incongruously called the metaphysical poets. Southwell’s Sphere lifts this sixteenth century Jesuit priest and prolific writer from the obscurity in which he too often resides and places him instead at the center of a sphere of English poets upon whom his life and works exerted an observable influence. As he weaved his religious content into the familiar loom of Elizabethan form and style, this young missionary priest was seeking not just to catechize those whom he regarded as the faithful and the fallen, but to intentionally reform the verse of his native England. Remarkably, during his brief six-year mission, he actually managed in many respects to do so. Surviving for six years by successfully navigating and fostering a complicated underground Catholic network in and around London before being captured, tortured and imprisoned, Southwell was brought to trial and executed at Tyburn at age 33. He therefore never knew most of the “skillfuller wits” that he called upon to direct their poetic skills to the service of God. And like the marks upon his tortured body, the poetic marks of influence that his work left upon individual writers of this era were in many cases deliberately concealed. Southwell’s Sphere seeks to rediscover those marks and offer the reader a renewed appreciation for this subverted and subverting literary force in Early Modern England. In individual explicative chapters this book examines works by six poets whose verse may be appreciated differently in light of Robert Southwell’s life and work. The author makes the case that Southwell’s works, posthumously and prolifically published, instructed William Alabaster, provoked Edmund Spenser, prompted George Herbert, haunted John Donne, inspired Richard Crashaw and — two and a half centuries later — consoled Gerard Manley Hopkins, s.j. With the exception of Spenser, all of these poets were, like Southwell, ordained ministers. The particular personal, political and religious complexities of each of their lives notwithstanding, what they most shared in common with Southwell was their priestly vocation, their talent as English poets and the inevitable and inextricable joining of these two activities in their lives. While it would have made little sense for any of these poets to acknowledge Southwell as a poetic peer, each of them authored important verse that can best be appreciated within the sphere of this improbably successful and influential English poet.

Professor Bouchard wrote about Southwell and his legacy in the July/August 2014 St. Austin Review and he will be speaking later this month at the Catholic Literature Conference in New Hampshire:

“Hanged, Drawn, Quartered and Published: Robert Southwell and the Reformation of English Poetry”

Dr. Gary Bouchard - Dr. Bouchard is a professor in the English Department of Saint Anselm College, Manchester, NH. Since 1987, he has served the College in a variety of capacities, including a five-year term as the College’s Executive Vice-President from 1998 to 2003. He currently serves as secretary of the Executive Board of New Hampshire Catholic Charities, as a trustee of Catholic Medical Center, and on boards at Bishop Brady High School and The Villa Augustina. Dr. Bouchard specializes in Early Modern lyric and narrative poetry. His book Southwell’s Sphere: The Influence of England’s Secret Poet (due out in January 2016) [sic?] discusses Southwell’s influence on seventeenth-century poets.

A poem by St. Robert Southwell, "Look Home"--could it have influenced John Donne?

Retired thoughts enjoy their own delights,
As beauty doth in self-beholding eye ;
Man's mind a mirror is of heavenly sights,
A brief wherein all marvels summed lie,
Of fairest forms and sweetest shapes the store,
Most graceful all, yet thought may grace them more.

The mind a creature is, yet can create,
To nature's patterns adding higher skill ;
Of finest works with better could the state
If force of wit had equal power of will.
Device of man in working hath no end,
What thought can think, another thought can mend.

Man's soul of endless beauty image is,
Drawn by the work of endless skill and might ;
This skillful might gave many sparks of bliss
And, to discern this bliss, a native light ;
To frame God's image as his worths required
His might, his skill, his word and will conspired.

All that he had his image should present,
All that it should present it could afford,
To that he could afford his will was bent,
His will was followed with performing word.
Let this suffice, by this conceive the rest,
He should, he could, he would, he did, the best. 

Duns Scotus on the Sinlessness of Mary; Hopkins on Scotus

Today in the Catholic Church we are celebrating the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a Holy Day of Obligation. My husband and I will attend Mass in the Extraordinary Form at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Wichita, Kansas tonight at 7:00 p.m.

Of course the connection between England and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, that the Mary the Mother of God was conceived in her mother's womb without the stain of Original Sin, is Blessed Duns Scotus, the 13th/14th century Franciscan (who was born in Scotland, taught at Oxford and Cambridge, and in France, and was quite international). He defended her sinlessless while in Paris, as Gerard Manley Hopkins references in the last line of his poem "Duns Scotus's Oxford":

TOWERY city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers;

Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural rural keeping—folk, flocks, and flowers.

Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;

Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;
Who fired France for Mary without spot.

The Subtle Doctor developed the theological explanation used by Pope Pius IX in the Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus, that "We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful."

BTW, when Hopkins says to Scotus as he "who of all men most sways my spirits to peace" he is referencing his study of Scotus's "Haecceity" or "thisness"--those qualities that make something a particular thing, while still arguing that things have a common nature. (That is: Scotus is not a nominalist like Occam; he is a universalist.)

The Wreck of the Deutschland: A Kulturkampf Anniversary

Today is St. Nicholas' Day--but it is also the anniversary of the Wreck of the Deutschland on December 6, 1875--and I wrote about that naval disaster in the context of the Kulturkampf in Germany for OSV's The Catholic Answer Magazine in this year's November/December issue:

and five Franciscan nuns drowned that night, caught in the perfect storm of the Prussian Kulturkampf instituted by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

They had left their convent in Salzkotten, Westphalia, embarking on a voyage to New York and thence to Wheaton, Ill., from the port at Bremerhaven, because Bismarck’s government had passed the Congregation Law of 1875, abolishing religious orders. The Catholic convert and poet Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a narrative poem titled “The Wreck of the Deutschland” commemorating the Franciscans’ deaths (not published until 1918), and the Franciscan Sisters of Wheaton, Ill., honor them every year on the anniversary of their deaths in the cemetery of St. Patrick’s Church in Leytonshire, where four of the five were buried.

Prussian State vs. Catholic Church

Why were these teaching sisters on their way to the United States? Why was Bismarck’s government passing laws restricting Catholic religious orders and other aspects of Catholic life in Prussia through the program of Kulturkampf? The German word Kulturkampf is translated in English as “culture struggle.” The answers to those questions provide us greater insight into the relationship between Church and state and the issues of religious freedom, as well as the struggle Catholics faced in 19th-century Germany.

Otto von Bismarck had served in various state offices in the German Empire, culminating in the office of chancellor from 1871 to 1890 after he led the effort to unify the empire under Prussian control. After the First Vatican Council defined the doctrine concerning infallibility of the pope in matters of faith and morals, Bismarck and his anti-Catholic political allies feared the loyalty and the power of Catholics in mostly Lutheran Germany. Bismarck thought that Protestant Prussia faced a culture war and was under attack by Catholics — a Kulturkampf.

Read the rest here.

The five sisters who perished this night were:

Sr M. Henrica Fassbänder
Sr M. Barbara Hültenschmidt
Sr M. Norberta Reinkober
Sr M. Brigitta Damhorst
Sr M. Aurea Badziura

More information about their mission here.

A Teaser for November/December

I know it's just the first of October, but I noticed the cover for the November/December issue of OSV's The Catholic Answer Magazine and saw the headline in the lower right corner: "What was the Kulturkampf?" I attempt to answer that question in this forthcoming article on Bismarck's German Culture Wars! I even work in references to Blessed John Henry Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins! Can't wait to see it in print (but I have to, of course). I'll post it when the issue becomes available on line.

A Trip to New York Every Month (or every other)?!

If I could, I would go for the October, November, January, and March sessions. Julia Yost, presenting "Anglo-Catholic Modernism: Writing Religious Beauty in the Modern Era" is a PhD candidate at Yale University in English. She wrote about Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ in First Things earlier this year, exploring the supposed inverse relationship between his priestly vocation and his poetry:

Hope, of course, is totally crosswise with the critical consensus on Hopkins. Among academic critics, it is an article of faith that there is not “One Hopkins,” but rather two: There is Hopkins the Poet, and there is Hopkins the Priest. Hopkins the Poet (of whom academic critics, pace Hope, cannot get enough) wrote Hopkins’s Nature Sonnets of the 1870s. Hopkins the Priest (who they wish had never been born) wrote Hopkins’s so-called Terrible Sonnets of 1884 and following.

The Nature Sonnets are full of the quirky, technicolor “Hopkinsian” vision, hymning “all things counter, original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled.” They are quirky to the point of self-parody, perhaps, but commonly celebrated as a major literary achievement, an eruption of Modernist poetics fifty years early.

Whereas the Terrible Sonnets, written during the miserable five years in Dublin that would kill him at forty-five (open sewers, typhoid), are done in black-and-white. They warn starkly of “two flocks, two folds—black, white; right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind / But these two.” Everybody is in one “flock” or the other, bound for heaven or for hell. Every action tends either to salvation or to damnation. (Hopkins was a Jesuit, back when that meant something.) These poems are less vibrant than the Nature Sonnets, less baroque, less original, less “Hopkinsian” in short.

So you can paint by numbers the common critical picture of Hopkins’s artistic decline. The more dogmatic, the less poetic. You can be a Poet or a Priest, orthodox or original, a dogmatist or an artist.

Now, of course these binaries are nonsense. Biographically speaking, Hopkins had been a Priest when he wrote the Nature Sonnets, and he was still a Poet when he wrote the Terrible Sonnets. Of course the Terrible Sonnets are less colorful than the earlier works—but they are no less poetic and original. Hopkins’s much-lamented dogmatism was what allowed him to discern divine design in unlikely places. This vision was the wellspring of his originality, and it was operating in Dublin as impressively as before—perhaps more so.

I would presume that Julia Yost will mention Hopkins in her January 17 lecture at the Catholic Artists Society lecture series.

A Tree that Inspired Tolkien

This is Oxfordshire reports some bad news for a tree that's said to have inspired Tolkien's creation of the Ents of Middle Earth. With the headline "The Ent is nigh for Tolkien tree" they note recent damage to the tree and the decision to cut it down: 

IT is said to have influenced the work of JRR Tolkien and inspired creatures in Lord of the Rings.

But now an iconic pinus negra – or black pine – is being felled in Oxford University’s Botanic Garden after two of its limbs fell off over the weekend.

Experts at Oxford City Council and the university have examined the 20-metre tall tree and decided it has to be cut down, but have not been able to determine what caused the limbs to fall off, damaging a wall.

Dr Alison Foster, acting director of the garden, said: “The black pine was a highlight of many people’s visits to the Botanic Garden and we are very sad to lose such an iconic tree.”

Tolkien, who was a fellow of Pembroke College and Merton College and is buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, was extremely fond of the tree and has been pictured sitting underneath it and standing beside it.

The article goes to explain how much Tolkien “hated the wanton destruction of trees for no reason . . ." Those scenes in The Lord of the Rings, both in the books and the films, when Saruman's Orcs destroy the forests of Isengard to create weapons (The Fellowship of the Ring) and then when the Ents discover what Saruman has done and march to besiege him and destroy Isengard (The Two Towers) certainly demonstrate Tolkien's feelings. [The image of Treebeard is from Wikipedia Commons, created by Tom Loback and used under a Creative Commons License: Attribution: I, TTThom.]

With those sentiments about trees, Tolkien agreed with the spirit of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "Binsey Poplars. felled 1879":

MY aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc únselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

Six Catholics Authors and Father Ian Ker

Dermot Quinn reviews The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845-1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, by Father Ian Ker (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), for The Imaginative Conservative:

Assembling a sestet of writers whose dates describe an arc between the Oxford Movement and the first stirrings of the Second Vatican Council, Ker explores a rare moment when Catholics seemed to dominate a world generally inhospitable to their moral and sacramental preoccupations. These writers are a varied bunch—so miscellaneous, in fact, that it is hard to imagine them together anywhere other than in a church, and a very broad church at that. As individuals complex and contradictory, as a group they seem so eccentric that even shared Catholicism strains to contain them.

In order of treatment, Father Ker’s revivalists are Cardinal Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. Allowing for taste and personal preference, it is an impressive roster. . . . 

This is a fine book, warmly recommended, full of sharp insight and telling quotation. The reader will not concur with every judgment (which is, indeed, one of the book’s pleasures) and one or two editorial errors creep in, but these niceties apart, it is a highly accomplished piece of work. Learned, witty, and humane, it will give much pleasure to specialist and generalist alike. . . .

They had an easy intimacy with mystery, these six, as all Catholics must have who take their church seriously. With Chesterton, for instance, the intimacy was with the mystery of goodness. With Greene, on the other hand, it was with the mystery of evil. Think of Chesterton’s insight in Orthodoxy that the task of the philosopher—of every person—is to be at once at home in the world yet utterly amazed by it. One must “somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.” “We do not fit into the world,” he said, but see, rather, “the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural.”

The same apprehension of the sheer gift and goodness of being, the strange loveliness of all creation, permeates the work of Hopkins, great poet of landscape and “inscape.” But think, too, of Greene, wrestling with malevolence and losing. His derelict characters reach their private Golgothas too broken even to hope for redemption, often refusing when freely offered it at the last. Greene in his own life came to resemble them, once for instance declining an invitation from Padre Pio (now a saint) because he knew such a meeting would require him to reform his life. He called his memoirs Ways of Escape. Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven should have reminded him there is no escape.

Yet in a more important sense the Church is not prison but liberation. It is the way of escape—from the cell of the self, from the solipsist nightmare, from the grubbiness of materialism, from the overwhelming fact, in every age, of sin and sorrow. For Hopkins, the church was a heaven-haven. For Belloc, it was freedom from “the isolation of the soul.” For Chesterton, it was salvation from being a child of his own time. For Waugh, it was “an island of order and sweetness in an ocean of rank barbarity.” For Newman, it was emergence from darkness to light. Without God, he wrote, “we are pent up within ourselves. We need a relief to our hearts…that they may not go on feeding upon themselves; we need to escape from ourselves to something beyond.” That “something beyond” is God. It is also, mysteriously, His Church on heaven and earth. Examining six of its members, Father Ker has written a splendid book.

Read the rest here.

Henry Purcell, RIP

Henry Purcell died on November 21, 1695. The wikipedia article on this great English Baroque composer includes some excerpts from his compositions, while this "Online Gallery" from the British Library features portraits and excerpts. Like the sixteenth composers Tallis and Byrd, Purcell lived through dynastic changes that effected changes in his music style and career.

This biography from The Purcell Society describes some of those changes:

During the 1680s, Purcell was frequently called upon to compose a large-scale ode or ‘welcome song’ to mark a special event in the royal calendar. In 1682, he was appointed as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and, in the following year, his first published collection appeared. This was the Sonnata's of III. Parts, for two violins, bass viol and continuo. His best-known composition, the dramatic entertainment Dido and Aeneas, was also written during the 1680s, though it is not certain when the first performance took place.

In 1689, William and Mary were crowned King and Queen, and there seem to have been fewer opportunities at court for composers than under their predecessors, Charles II and James II. Purcell turned to the theatre, writing four large-scale operatic works between 1690 and 1695, as well as incidental music for numerous plays. He continued to write court odes, however, including one each year between 1689 and 1694 to mark the birthday of Queen Mary. He also composed music for her state funeral, which took place in March 1695. Just a few months later, on 21 November 1695, Purcell himself died.

Since he wrote music both to celebrate her birthday and to commemorate her passing, this recording by the Choir of King's College Cambridge and the Academy of Ancient Music, conducted by Stephen Cleobury, looks like an interesting collection.

Gerard Manley Hopkins praised Purcell in verse:

The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell and praises him that, whereas other musicians have given utterance to the moods of man’s mind, he has, beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and species of man as created both in him and in all men generally.

HAVE, fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear
To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell,
An age is now since passed, since parted; with the reversal
Of the outward sentence low lays him, listed to a heresy, here.

Not mood in him nor meaning, proud fire or sacred fear,
Or love or pity or all that sweet notes not his might nursle:
It is the forgèd feature finds me; it is the rehearsal
Of own, of abrupt self there so thrusts on, so throngs the ear.

Let him Oh! with his air of angels then lift me, lay me! only I’ll
Have an eye to the sakes of him, quaint moonmarks, to his pelted plumage under
Wings: so some great stormfowl, whenever he has walked his while

The thunder-purple seabeach plumèd purple-of-thunder,
If a wuthering of his palmy snow-pinions scatter a colossal smile
Off him, but meaning motion fans fresh our wits with wonder.

For the First Day of Autumn: A Poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Spring and Fall

to a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Picture Copyright Mark U. Mann (2013): taken in the Tuilieries Gardens in Paris.

Sunday Mornings at Our House: Ireland on the Radio

We are up betimes at our house Sunday morning--except for the dogs, who go back to sleep--getting ready to attend 8:00 a.m. at the Church of St. Anthony of Padua. One highlight every Sunday is EWTN's Catholic Connection, with Kathy Kinnott broadcasting from Cork, Ireland--it's on at 6 a.m.

On Sunday, June 1 she had a really great episode on a publication distributed  in Ireland called Alive! and an interview with an English professor at Ave Maria University:

One of Ireland's most popular Catholic newspaper is the Alive! Kathy talks to founder and editor of Alive! Fr. Brian McKevitt, OP about the ups and downs of publishing a Catholic newspaper in an often hostile secular media environment. Part 2. The great British poets Gerard Manley Hopkins, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Blessed John Henry Newman were masters of the art of verse in their day. Kathy and her guest to Dr. (Michael) Raiger, assistant professor of literature, Ave Maria University Florida, talk about how the beauty and depths of their poetry are interwoven with the beauty of God and his creation.

Here's a blog post from Ave Maria University that gives excellent background to Dr. Raiger's in the interview:

Dr. Michael Raiger, Assistant Professor of Literature at the university, has devoted much of his academic career to recovering Coleridge’s Trinitarian thought. Embedded in the life of Coleridge was a stay in Malta, from 1804 to 1805, followed by a nine-month sojourn through Italy, including five weeks in the Vatican where he studied Catholic art and architecture during the Easter season of 1806. It is during his stay in Malta that Coleridge’s decade-long fling with Unitarianism (Coleridge’s father was an Anglican minister in the Devonshire village Ottery-St. Mary) ended with an acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity—we have the precise moment recorded in one of his notebooks, dated Feb. 12, 1805, 1:30 p.m., in which Coleridge wrote: “No Christ, No God…No Trinity, No God…Unitarianism in all its forms is Idolatry.” It is this seminal moment, argues Raiger, and the lengthy stay in the Sistine Chapel the following year, that informs Coleridge’s most important reflections on the relationship between art and aesthetics on the one hand, and religious sensibility and theological speculation on the other. The claim is a bold one, and goes against forty years of scholarship on Coleridge, which sees him as borrowing bits and pieces from German Idealism, mostly Kantian, in the construction of a rather esoteric and inconsistent defense of Christianity. To the end of countering this position, Dr. Raiger will travel to Malta in mid-November to deliver a paper entitled, “The Italian Influences on Coleridge’s Later Poetic Principles,” at the international conference “Encountering Malta: British Writers and the Mediterranean, 1760-1840.”  . . .

As a follow up to his discussion of poetry and Romanticism, here's one of Hopkins' "nature" poems, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire"--

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces. 

Hopkins' "Binsey Poplars" Manuscript

From Once I Was a Clever Boy, I see that the Bodleian Library has acquired the manuscript of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "Binsey Poplars". As the Bodleian Library website explains:

The Bodleian Libraries have acquired at auction a late autograph draft manuscript of the celebrated Gerard Manley Hopkins poem 'Binsey Poplars'. The last known major Hopkins manuscript to have been in private hands, ‘Binsey Poplars’ is the most significant Hopkins item to have come to the market in over forty years.
 
The acquisition was made possible by strong financial support from a number of individuals and funding bodies, including the Friends of the Bodleian, the Friends of the National Libraries and the V&A Purchase Grant Fund.
 
An Oxford alumnus, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) is regarded as one the Victorian era's greatest poets. Very few of his poems appeared during his lifetime, and he owes his posthumous reputation to his friend poet Robert Bridges, who edited a volume of his Poems that first appeared thirty years after his death in 1918. His revolutionary ‘difficult’ style, characterized by new rhythmic effects, influenced the work of Modernist and later writers.
 
'Binsey Poplars' was written in response to the felling of trees running alongside the Thames in Binsey, a village on the west side of the city of Oxford. Hopkins had been an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, and was a curate at St Aloysius Church in the city at the time he wrote the poem. The trees were replanted after the poem was first published in 1918 (the poem seems to anticipate the ravages of the Great War), and there was an outcry when they were felled again in 2004. The poem formed part of the successful campaign to replant the trees. The poem has a very particular local meaning but speaks to a much broader audience in its plaintive evocation of spiritual desolation through the destruction of nature.

MY aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being só slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc únselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

Happy Mother's Day! May as Mary's Month

The MAY Magnificat by Gerard Manley Hopkins

MAY is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season—

Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?

Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in every thing—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this:
Spring’s universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

Rogation Days Before the Feast of the Ascension

Like Ember Days, the Rogation Days were taken out of the Catholic Church calendar after the Second Vatican Council. In a sad way, both of these omissions reflect our separation or alienation from nature. I've heard a commercial for a radio station's severe weather coverage that asks, "Don't you think the weather has just gotten out of control?" Out of whose control? We certainly do not have control of the weather--and even listening to that station's severe weather coverage does nothing to control it! As this site reminds us, and these Rogation Days before the Solemnity of the Ascension of our Lord would remind us, we are definitely not in control:

"Rogation" comes from the Latin "rogare," which means "to ask," and "Rogation Days" are days during which we seek to ask God's mercy, appease His anger, avert His chastisements manifest through natural disasters, and ask for His blessings, particularly with regard to farming, gardening, and other agricultural pursuits. They are set aside to remind us how radically dependent we are on Mother Earth, and how prayer can help protect us from nature's often cruel ways.

It is quite easy, especially for modern city folk, to sentimentalize nature and to forget how powerful, even savage, she can be. Time is spent focusing only on her lovelier aspects -- the beauty of snow, the smell of cedar, the glories of flowers -- as during Embertides -- but in an instant, the veneer of civilization we've built to keep nature under control so we can enjoy her without suffering at her hand can be swept away. Ash and fire raining down from great volcanoes, waters bursting through levees, mountainous tidal waves destroying miles of coastland and entire villages, meteors hurling to earth, tornadoes and hurricanes sweeping away all in their paths, droughts, floods, fires that rampage through forests and towns, avalanches of rocks or snow, killer plagues, the very earth shaking off human life and opening up beneath our feet, cataclysmic events forming mountains and islands, animals that prey on humans, lightning strikes -- these, too, are a part of the natural world. And though nature seems random and fickle, all that happens is either by God's active or passive Will, and all throughout Scripture He uses the elements to warn, punish, humble, and instruct us: earth swallowing up the rebellious, power-mad sons of Eliab; wind destroying Job's house; fire raining down on Sodom and Gomorrha; water destroying everyone but Noe and his family (Numbers 16, Job 1, Genesis 19, Genesis 6). We need to be humble before and respectful of nature, and be aware not to take her for granted or overstep our limits. But we need to be most especially humble before her Creator, Who wills her existence and doings at each instant, whether actively or passively.

As this website notes, as individuals, we can keep these minor Rogation Days, the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before Ascension Thursday (except that we instead celebrate Ascension Sunday), by praying the Litany of Saints, exploring the boundaries of our parishes, blessing our own gardens, and praying for good weather, good harvests, and good stewardship of our natural resources--all the while remembering Who is really in control! As Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.