Gerard Manley Hopkins Conference returns to Regis March 23-25

Events begin at 6 p.m. Friday with light soup and conversation at Regis’ Main Hall, Room 333. Actor Richard Austin will deliver a performance of Hopkins’ poetry at 7:30 p.m.

Paper presentations begin at 8:15 a.m. Saturday in the same room.

Sophia University’s Fr. Peter Milward, S.J., who endured Japan’s massive earthquake, will speak “On the Silences of Newman and Hopkins” at 11 a.m. that day. (Unless his travel arrangements have been affected.)

The Hopkins Memorial Mass will take place in Regis’ chapel at 4:45 p.m.

Sunday presentations will also begin at 8:15 a.m.

Victoria McCabe (contact information) should have more detailed information for those who wish to know more.

Horror: Electronic Arts makes video game 'inspired by' Dante's Inferno

The first person who said "there is no such thing as bad publicity" likely was an incompetent PR man trying to spin his way out of some mess he made.

One such ridiculous mess comes from Electronic Arts, which funded fake Christian protests of its Dante's Inferno game. The protesters "passed out amateurish material and held signs bearing slogans such as 'Trade in Your PlayStation for a PrayStation,' 'Hell is not a Game' and 'EA = Electronic Anti-Christ.'"

The game's development team even tweeted the dull protest as if unaware of its origins. Speculating on whether the team was in on the act adds the faintest spice to the plain mush of the marketers' failed sensationalism.

Delicate connoisseurs of Western culture are advised to avoid descriptions of the video game's "interpretation" of Dante.

Dante’s epic placed his beloved Beatrice in Paradise. The EA game, in a vile act of cultural vandalism, makes its Dante character rescue Beatrice’s soul from Lucifer.

To make reparation, a reading from La Vita Nuova is in order:

Beatrice has gone to the highest Heaven,

to the realm where the angels have peace,

and stays with them, and has left you ladies:

no quality of coldness took her,

or of heat, as it is with others,

but it was only her great gentleness:

since light from her humility

pierced the skies with so much virtue,

that it made the Eternal Lord marvel,

so that a sweet desire

moved him to claim such greeting:

and called her from the heights to come to him,

since he saw our harmful life

was not worthy of such a gentle one.

Speaking of this life's unworthiness: the Inferno video game character uses a cross as a weapon.

There is more vengeful fun to be had in comparing EA's gassy pop culture burp with its supposed inspiration. The playful CNA article continues:

"We've tried to faithfully recreate the geography of hell as he wrote about it," the game’s executive producer Jonathan Knight told USA Today.

Dante Alighieri’s “Inferno” depicts various circles of hell in which sinners are punished according to their defining sins.

Dante placed the fraudulent and the sowers of discord in the penultimate Eighth Circle.

In the Divine Comedy the Inferno is followed by the “Purgatorio,” a poetic exploration of purgatory, and then by the “Paradiso,” Dante’s depiction of the blessed in heaven.

He closes the “Paradiso” by exalting God as “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”

EA has not announced any sequels to its game.

Next Gerard Manley Hopkins Conference: March 2009

After a hiatus of one year, the Denver Hopkins Conference returns to Regis University this March 27 – 29.

The conference schedule is here while More information here, while the poet's collected works are reproduced here.

His vivid "Pied Beauty" is a favorite I've committed to memory:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Illiterate Poetry

Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.”
Twilight of the Books

This suggests a thought exercise: shun abstractions in one's descriptions of color and use metaphorical descriptions to the point of abuse.

The article, which theorizes how a visual culture differs from a literate one, also touches on the work of Walter Ong, SJ.

Another provocative excerpt:

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to "think memorable thoughts," whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There's no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in "enthusiastic description of physical violence." Since there's no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past's inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

Writers could react to this conclusion in a fit of Romanticist primitivism and aim to swamp cool reason with the most tempestuous of imagery. A more productive reaction would be to create a synthesis between the poetic and the analytic, a synthesis that could survive YouTube-ification.

Shakespeare meets Neuroscience

I took this hypothesis—about grammatical or linear shapes and their mapping onto shapes inside the brain—to a scientist, Professor Neil Roberts who heads MARIARC (the Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre) at the University of Liverpool. In particular I mentioned to him the linguistic phenomenon in Shakespeare which is known as "functional shift" or "word class conversion". It refers to the way that Shakespeare will often use one part of speech—a noun or an adjective, say—to serve as another, often a verb, shifting its grammatical nature with minimal alteration to its shape. Thus in "Lear" for example, Edgar comparing himself to the king: "He childed as I fathered" (nouns shifted to verbs); in "Troilus and Cressida", "Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages" (noun converted to adjective); "Othello", "To lip a wanton in a secure couch/And to suppose her chaste!"' (noun "lip" to verb; adjective "wanton" to noun).

From The Shakespeared Brain, an exploration of the neurological effects of the Bard's functional shifting.

The author, English professor Philip Davis, wanders into speculative territory:

"When the brain is asked to work at more complex meanings, the localization gives way to the movement between the two static locations.

Then the brain is working at a higher level of evolution, at an emergent consciousness paradoxically undetermined by the structures it still works from."

The scientific rigor of this statement is doubtful. It will certainly annoy anti-dualists. However, if his speculation proves reasonable, it will locate meaning in the relation of things. The relational interplay of areas of the brain prefigures the relational interplay of persons. This suggests The nuptial meaning of the mind.

Tryfon Tolides makes it big

Oh dear.

The author of the laughably bad mouse poem chosen for praise by America magazine now has published a collection of his poetry. The soporific title? An Almost Pure Empty Walking.

Mencius Moldbug at Unqualified Reservations writes the necessary critique. Mencius, too, finds the vacuity of Tolides remarkable. He connects Tolides to Universalism of the Unitarian variety, depicting him as a vehicle for Bobo aspiration like NPR or Starbucks coffee.

He informs us that Tolides has benefited considerably from his teacher, Mary Karr. Ms. Karr generously awarded her own student the first place in the National Poetry Series.

Incest creates poetic abnormalities. Who knew?

Echoing Dr. Frankenstein's rapturous description of the monster he created, Mary Karr endorses her student's poetry:

"Tryfon Tolides has followed the territory set out in his native Greece by C. P. Cavafy and later followed (in geography and sensibility) by Jack Gilbert. But Tolides trades the darkness of those poets for a more illuminated grandeur. Tolides is the shaman of epiphany. He makes for his reader keen and particular moments of revelation seized from his fierce and fleshly occupancy on the planet. In the wide-eyed consolation these poems offer up, the starlight they emit, he conjures Tomas Tranströmer and other poets of profound spiritual power. At a time when the planet is in flames, he gives being human a good name."

It's alive!

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Scotism, and Radical Orthodoxy

Months late, I have rediscovered my notes from a presentation at Regis University's Gerard Manley Hopkins Conference. Loren Wilkinson of Regent College discussed the poet's theological inspiration, John Duns Scotus, and the ignominy heaped upon him by the school of contemporary theology known as Radical Orthodoxy.

Believing themselves to be working for the restoration of neo-Platonism, Radical Orthodox theorists are committed to the metaphysics of participation in the divine. For them, the Great Chain of Being transcendently connects and binds every thing. This renders secularism metaphysically impossible. The school's anti-secular attacks often exploit secularism's ambiguous and often disingenuous disavowals of its substantive philosophical bases.

While some writers like Richard Weaver locate the original philosophical faults of secular modernity in the work of nominalists like William of Ockham, it seems the Radically Orthodox have chosen the thought of the Doctor Subtilis, Blessed John Duns Scotus, for their bête noir. Scotus held, among other things, that the Incarnation was necessary for all eternity, and that the human intellectual faculty is subject to the primacy of the will. He prized particularity, "this-ness" moreso than universals.

According to Wilkinson, it is this particularism which earns Scotus the ire of Radical Orthodoxy. His theology, they claim, collapses even God into particularity, God becomes just one more being among others, but a being still infinite in difference from other beings. This opens the secular gulf between creature and creator.

However, the key consideration is how God becomes "just one more being among others." What this can describe is nothing less than the scandalous particularity of the Incarnation. When Paul preached of Christ's death and resurrection on Mars Hill, the pagan neo-Platonists in the audience scoffed precisely because of their hostility to the fleshy incarnate. Scotus' belief in the inevitability of the Incarnation ties a knot in the Great Chain of Being. As Wilkinson comments:

Ward goes on to refer to Scotus' conviction "that God elected to create in order to be both a creature and God at once." Thus in all creation only "the incarnate one" "participates" in God. Through Christ humans are invited into that participation--and through humans, the rest of creation. But the "window on eternity" thus provided is not Platonic participation; it is the Incarnation.

It is the Incarnation that sparks Hopkins' poetic imagination and makes his poetry at once both Christocentric and radically humanistic:

...the incompleteness of the creature is completed by God in only one instance, "man", that is, individual human beings, and there full humanity is perceived not through some participation by which reality is suspended from "the transcendent". It is completed instead by Christ, presenting redeemed humanity "to the Father." It is only through Christ, and Christ "playing" in humanity that creation "participates" in the divine. [...] Creation becomes itself not when it participates in God, but when it participates in the human, through perception, appreciation, and thankfulness. That thankfulness, expressed to God through humans in Christ, is the perfection of creation.

Scotus thus makes a poet-friendly theologian. His exaltation of the senses, his emphasis on particularity, and his belief in the primacy of the will seem positions ready-made for a poet keen on close observation of and revelry in the commonplace. Scotism has Hopkins, and Thomism has Dante. Whether Radical Orthodoxy can produce a great poet remains to be seen.

2007 Gerard Manley Hopkins Conference This Weekend

Regis University is again hosting her superb conference on the work of religious poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ. Details are not yet on-line, though some information is here.

The grass is withered, and the flower is fallen

W.H. Auden's one-hundredth birthday is today. The NY Sun writes a tribute to him.

By chance, I finally picked up Auden's Collected Poems yesterday. Doubtless the book was only in the ill-tended poetry section for his anniversary.

A selection fit for Ash Wednesday:

"O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

"In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

"In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day."
As I Walked Out One Evening, November 1937

Memento homo quia pulveris es et in pulverem reverteris!

The Ingrown Poetry Scene

What are the characteristics of a poetry-subculture publication? First, the one subject it addresses is current American literature (supplemented perhaps by a few translations of poets who have already been widely translated). Second, if it prints anything other than poetry, that is usually short fiction. Third, if it runs discursive prose, the essays and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. If it publishes an interview, the tone will be unabashedly reverent toward the author. For these journals critical prose exists not to provide a disinterested perspective on new books but to publicize them. Quite often there are manifest personal connections between the reviewers and the authors they discuss. If occasionally a negative review is published, it will be openly sectarian, rejecting an aesthetic that the magazine has already condemned. The unspoken editorial rule seems to be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all, mainly our friends and colleagues.
Dana Gioia, Can Poetry Matter?

Gioia also quotes Robert Bly:

We have an odd situation: although more bad poetry is being published now than ever before in American history, most of the reviews are positive. Critics say, "I never attack what is bad, all that will take care of itself," . . . but the country is full of young poets and readers who are confused by seeing mediocre poetry praised, or never attacked, and who end up doubting their own critical perceptions.

Calls to mind that stinker of an award-winning poem published in the Jesuits' America

A Night Among the Cowboy Poets

The National Western Stock Show is in town, and that means it's time for the Colorado Cowboy Poetry Gathering, now in its eighteenth season. Musicians and rhymesters from across the region gather to entertain locals and stock show exhibitors. Numerous men in the audience were dressed in plaid flannel shirts and blue jeans. I felt at home, for this is the standard "business casual" dress of my father, a Wyoming native.

Cowboy poetry and folk music are refreshingly free of those poisonous ironic poses beloved by certain Denverites disdainful of our cow town's past and present. The genre shuns the psychological self-absorption so common among those contemporary musicians and poets who inflict their unfulfilled and unremarkable longings upon their listeners. Cowboy poetry favors the tactile: dirt, skin, blood, and bones.

Possessing sentiment without being sentimentalist, its forays into emotion include the lamentation, the humorous, the humorous lamentation, and the embarrassingly humorous lamentation. For the Cowboy Poet the West is always lost, or being lost: the kids are moving away from the ranch, the cattle are dying, Geronimo's gone, and those damn city folk are moving in.

The Arvada Center's concerts feature five or six artists who perform two or three of their songs or poems. The Friday evening concert I attended did not start well. The first musician, an older man, was having a bad night, forgetting the lyrics to one of his songs. His musical bones clattered nervously as his memory failed, rescued at last by one of his fellow performers.

The night went up from there. Chuck Larsen regaled the crowd with a tale of a severely saddle-sore cowboy who chokes his pride and wears his wife's silk panties for relief. He also recited a poem memorializing Larsen's own "getting Saved," which involved the visit of a pastor and his spouse to an unchurched man and his proselytizing wife, and an accidental cowpie to the face of said wife during a medical examination of a bull.

Like I said, the style favors the tactile.

The poem itself is unavailable on-line, but here is a selection from another of Larsen's poems:

In performin' my Cowboy Poetry
I stick to Cowboy Gatherin's as a rule.
Until the Coffee House guru called,
Said it'd be movin', like really cool.

He said their crowd was reachin' out
In darkness, sufferin' cultural incontinence.
Asked if I'd come release a vision
Of the West, the Cowboy experience.

I showed up on the given night.
Listened to their first urban poet.
He sure had a way with words,
But when he was finished I didn't know it.

I started feelin' pretty outa place.
By the second act I was feelin' worse.
Why I even got to wishin'
I'd of written a little free verse.

On the musical side of the evening, the group Prickly Pair gave the finest performance of the night. One of their songs is environmentalist, in its way. The chorus runs:

We're all part of the big food chain,
the big food chain of life.
We eat things, and things eat us,
And it works out so nice.

We're all part of a great big stew
and someday we'll discover
We're born we live we die
and we're all food for one another.

I much prefer this song to The Lion King's reverent pean to pantheism "The Circle of Life."

The fiddler was wisecracking to his guitar-playing wife throughout their performance. While extolling the wonders of the food chain, he insisted that "vegetarian" is an old Indian word meaning "poor hunter." He also told of being asked if a bar and grill served vegetarians. His reply? "Of course! What do you think cows are?"

Prickly Pair's other songs included a song from the Australian range and a ballad of a girl and her doomed robber beau, sung with a beautiful Celtic warble. (The pair lately performed at Estes Park's Scottish/Irish Festival.) It seems the wife of the pair, Locke Hamilton, had a personal link with my family: she has a family connection to the T E Ranch near Cody, Wyoming, where my own great-grandfather and his brother once served as ranchhands for the legendary Buffalo Bill.

Skip Gorman, who has caught the attention of National Public Radio, rounded off the evening. He closed with the touching nineteenth-century ballad Utah Carroll, written for a wrangler killed while rescuing the traiboss' young daughter from a stampede.

So you ask me my kind friend
Why I am sad and still
And why my brow is darkened
Like the clouds upon the hill

Rein in your ponies closer
And I'll tell you all a tale
Of Utah Carroll, partner
And his last ride on the trail

In a grave without a headstone
Without a date or name
My partner lies there silent
In the land from which I came

Long ago we rode together
We'd ridden side by side
I loved him like a brother
And I wept when Utah died.

The evening was a reminder of a genre neglected by pop culture since the days of Gene Autry. It is welcome to know that Country/Western's better half is still getting along, following the well-worn trail of its talented trailblazers.

Were you there when they Marketed My Lord?

Were you there when they marketed my Lord?

by Kevin J. Jones
http://kevinjjones.blogspot.com

Were you there when they marketed my Lord?
Were you there when they marketed my Lord?
Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they marketed my Lord?

Were you there when they focus-grouped His Word?
Were you there when they focus-grouped His Word?
Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they focus-grouped His Word?

Were you there when they rewrote His True Life?
Were you there when they rewrote His True Life?
Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they rewrote His True Life?

Were you there when they mammonized His Birth?
Were you there when they mammonized His Birth?
Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they mammonized His Birth?

Were you there when they marketed my Lord?
Were you there when they marketed my Lord?
Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they marketed my Lord?

My accolades to the anonymous artists who wrote the original. I hope these new lyrics are not themselves a manifestation of the culture of irreverent relevance.

This has been percolating in my mind for some time, but the impious Hyundai commercial that changed "We wish you a Merry Christmas!" to "We wish you a happy Hyundais" prompted me to set it down. [Correction: It was actually Honda.]

I think it is quite applicable to pop-theology "The Real Historical Jesus" articles penned every Advent in Time and Newsweek to sell badly-written books by the Jesus Seminar.

Originally posted 11/28/05

The Donkey

When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.

-G.K. Chesterton, for Palm Sunday

In Praise of Purgatorio

For my lenten reading, I've finally overcome my stalling and continued Dante's Divine Comedy past the Inferno. I had pedantically wished to continue in the Durling billingual translation, but since he has been slow to produce the next two books I turned to Allen Mandlebaum's translation, which has its own charms.

The contrast between the end of the Inferno, the lowest circle of hell, and the hopefulness of the first glimpse of Purgatory is stunning. The Purgatorio is a poem "rising again from Hell's dead realm." Among Dante's first words of Canto I, we find signs that not death but life lies ahead:

"The gentle hue of oriental sapphire
In which the sky's serenity was steeped--
its aspect pure as far as the horizon--
brought back my joy in seeing just as soon
as I had left behind the air of death."

Hell is literally sheol, the abode of the dead, and Purgatory the place of those on their way to assured eternal life. As if speaking directly to my Coloradoan heart, Dante's guide Vergil describes the mountain of Purgatory as of such sort

"...that climbing it is hardest at the start;
but as we rise, the slope grows less unkind.
Therefore, when this slope seems to you so gentle
that climbing farther up will be as restful
as traveling downstream by boat, you will
be where this pathway ends, and there you can
expect to put your weariness to rest. (Canto IV)

These words impel the reader upword. This yearning for ascent towards heaven begat in me a powerful motivation for turning the next page just to see what comes next. Moreover, the Purgatorio acted as a truly Lenten reflection, provoking myself to self-examination and even minor penance. I am putting off the Paradiso until Easter to further increase my Lenten expectation.

---

I must remark on the topic of teaching Dante in a secular university, springboarding off a far more studied thinker:

"The type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges, in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguisitic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, one play of Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet, and as much else as is possible if one is to reach Sartre by the end of the semester."
-Alasdair MacIntyre, "Tradition and Translation," Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

Reading through the first two books, I've realized a pitfall of any education syllabus that includes Dante. The Inferno is almost always the only work of Dante assigned, so students will only get the Christian dystopia of a hopeless Hell. Even the Purgatorio doesn't portray the Christian ideal, but only those in the journey towards it. A reader won't encounter an encomium to true sanctity until the final book, the Paradiso. Thus, anyone in a "great books" course which tries to cram the whole Western canon into a semester will rarely encounter any depiction of a Biblical hero or Christian saint even if Dante is on the book list! A good instructor will point out this limitation, but will be ignored. As MacIntyre notes, Dante is abstracted and amputated. Worse, Heaven itself is excised by such cavalier treatment of the Christian epic.

"Lasciate ogni speranza, voi intrate", "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" is as much a motto of the modern university humanities department as it is for Dante's gates of Hell. I hope a purgation is on the horizon.

G.M. Hopkins Conference Coming Soon to Denver!

For any Denverites reading this, Regis University will soon host its annual Gerard Manley Hopkins Conference discussing the master poet and Jesuit priest. Thus saith the website:

The 2006 Hopkins International Conference will be held at Regis University, Denver, Colorado from March 24th to March 26th. Accommodation has been reserved at the Comfort Inn/Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver.

Peter Milward, SJ, of Sophia University, Japan will be a presenter, as will novelist Ron Hansen. Once again, Shakespearean actor Richard Austin will provide excellent recitations of Hopkins' poems, recorded copies of which are available for purchase on his website.

Last year excepted, I have been a regular attendee at the conference since its inception. Highly recommended.

[Also: with the exception of the banquet, all events are free and open to the public!]

Jesuits' Taste In Poetry Slightly Improves

The 2004 winner of America magazine's poetry contest was an unbelievably bad poem. The 2005 winner describes an imagined slave ship tossing its human cargo overboard. Its quality is improved, but still awkward. The Jesuit editors must have a taste for mediocre moralism.

The poem's unfortunate comparison of school buses with slave ships makes the theme break from strain. It recalls a ditty of mock-profundity I wrote in high school, its first line having appeared to me in a dream:

All Hail the Mighty School Bus,
That fiendish yellow beast
Which carts away childhood
Like bandits in the night.

Yet some congratulation is due to John Hodgen, who has surpassed the admittedly low standard of Tryphon Tolides.

We Dissect to Give Life

And the suspense is over. Because we have stopped reading this poem. There’s nothing about it in the first lines or the second or the third to gain our confidence that the organizing intelligence behind it is either organized or intelligent.
Joan Houlihan, Three Invitations to a Far Reading

The essay is a welcome dissection of bad poetry. In many ways, such poet manques aspire to be something like Richard Dawkins' blind watchmaker in their unguidedness, but fall short even of the appearance of design which Dawkins admits as an end-result. Their poems are as opaque and inscrutable as any other chaotic impulse. The reasons for their being published are the deepest mysteries whose purposes shall not be revealed until the Apocalypse itself.

Gaudete, Gaudete! Christus est Natus!

Merry Christmas, especially where prohibited by law!

Here is an Epiphany poem a bit early for Christmas, but good enough for me:

THE WISE MEN

by G.K. Chesterton

Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all the labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
And we know all things but truth.

We have gone round and round the hill
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And serve the made gods, naming still
The furies the Eumenides.

The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.

Go humbly…it has hailed and snowed…
With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the road,
That we may stray from it.

The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.

The Child that was ere worlds begun
(…We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone…)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.

The house from which the heavens are fed,
The old strange house that is our own,
Where trick of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
And Honour is as hard as stone.

Go humbly, humble are the skies,
And low and large and fierce the Star;
So very near the Manger lies
That we may travel far.

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain.
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
For God Himself is born again,
And we are little children walking
Through the snow and rain.

Another Lament...

A Lament for Our Lady's Shrine at Walsingham

"In the wrackes of Walsingam
Whom should I chuse
But the Queene of Walsingam
To be guide to my muse?

Then thou Prince of Walsingam
Grant me to frame
Bitter plaintes to rewe thy wronge
Bitter wo for thy name.

Bitter was it oh to see
The seely sheepe
Murdered by the raveninge wolves
While the sheephards did sleep.

Bitter was it oh to vewe
The sacred vyne
While the gardiners plaied all close
Rooted up by the swine.

Bitter, bitter oh to behould
The grasse to growe
Where the walls of Walsingam
So stately did shewe.

Such were the works of Walsingam
While shee did stand
Such are the wrackes as now do shewe
Of that so holy land.

Levell levell with the ground
The towres doe lye
Which with their golden, glitteringe tops
Pearsed once to the skye.

Where weare gates no gates are nowe,
The waies unknowen,
Where the press of peares did passe
While her fame far was blowen.

Oules do scrike where the sweetest himnes
Lately weer songe,
Toades and serpents hold their dennes
Wher the palmers did thronge.

Weepe, weepe O Walsingam,
Whose dayes are nightes,
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deeds to dispites.

Sinne is wher our Ladie sate,
Heaven turned is to hell,
Satham sittes wher our Lord did swaye,
Walsingam, oh farewell ! "

-Anon. 16th Century Recusant

This poem was published in Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars, an excellent account of the English Reformation

A Lamentation for Constantinople

The Last Mass in Hagia Sophia

Anonymous Song of Lamentation
for the Fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Translated by Richard Stoneman


God rings the bells, earth rings the bells, the sky itself is ringing,
The Holy Wisdom, the great church, is ringing out the message,
Four hundred sounding boards sound out, and two and sixty bells,
For every bell there is a priest, for every priest a deacon.
To the left the emperor is singing, to the right the patriarch,
And all the columns tremble with the thunder of the chant.
And as the emperor began the hymns to the Cherubim,
A voice came down to them from the sky, from the archangel’s mouth:
Cease the Cherubic hymn, and let the sacred objects bow;
Priests, take the holy things away, extinguish all the candles:
God’s Will has made our city now into a Turkish city.
But send a message to the West, and let them send three ships:
The first to take the cross, the second to remove the Gospel,
The third, the finest shall rescue for us our holy altar.
Lest it all to those dogs, and they defile it and dishonour it.
The Holy Virgin was distressed, the very icons wept.
Be calm, beloved lady, be calm and do not weep for them.
Though years, though centuries shall pass, they shall be yours again.

via Basia Me, Catholica Sum