Poetry « Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

Love Song by Rainer Maria Rilke

May 14, 2012

Rodin — The Eve. Edward Steichen, 1907
My Master,
… I wrote you from Haseldorf that in September I shall be in Paris to prepare myself for the book consecrated to your work. But what I have not yet told you is that for me, for my work (the work of a writer or rather of a poet), it will be a great event to come near you. Your art is such (I have felt it for a long time) that it knows how to give bread and gold to painters, to poets, to sculptors: to all artists who go their way of suffering, desiring nothing but that ray of eternity which is the supreme goal of the creative life.
Images from A Year with Rilke
http://yearwithrilke.blogspot.com/2011/02/love-song.html

Writer and poet, Rilke was considered one of the greatest lyric poets of modern Germany. He created the “object poem” as an attempt to describe with utmost clarity physical objects, the “silence of their concentrated reality.” He became famous with such works as Duineser Elegien and Die Sonette an Orpheus . They both appeared in 1923. After these books, Rilke had published his major works, believing that he had done his best as a writer.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague as the son of Josef Rilke, a railway official and the former Sophie Entz. A crucial fact in Rilke’s life was that his mother called him Sophia. She forced him to wear girl’s clothes until he was aged five – thus compensating for the earlier loss of a baby daughter. Rilke’s parents separated when he was nine. His militarily inclined Father sent him at ten yesrs old to the military academies of St. Pölten and Mahrisch-Weisskirchenn. At the military academy Rilke did not enjoy his stay, and was sent to a business school in Linz. He also worked in his uncle’s law firm. Rilke continued his studies at the universities of Prague, Munich, and Berlin.

As a poet Rilke made his debut at the age of nineteen with Leben und Lieder (1894), written in the conventional style of Heinrich Heine. In Munich he met the Russian intellectual Lou Andreas-Salome, an older woman, who influenced him deeply. In Florence, where he spent some months in 1898, Rilke wrote: “… I felt at first so confused that I could scarcely separate my impressions, and thought I was drowning in the breaking waves of some foreign splendor.”

With Lou Andreas-Salome and her husband Rilke travelled in Russia in 1899, visiting among others Leo Tolstoy . Rilke was deeply impressed by what he learned of Russian mysticism. During this period he started to write The Book of Hours: The Book of Monastic Life , which appeared in 1905. He spent some time in Italy, Sweden, and Denmark, and joined an artists’ colony at Worpswede in 1903. In his letters to a young would-be poet, which he wrote from 1903 to 1908, Rilke explained, that “nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.” (in Letters to a Young Poet, 1929 )

In 1901 Rilke married the young sculptress, Klara Westhoff, one of Auguste Rodin’s pupils. They had a daughter, Ruth, but marriage lasted only one year. During this period Rilke composed in rhymed, metered verse, the second part of The Book of Hours . The work expressed his spiritual yearning. After Rilke had separated from Klara, he settled in Paris to write a book about Rodin and to work for his secretary (1905-06).

In the Spring of 1906 the overworked poet left Rodin abruptly. Rilke revised Das Buch der Bilder and published it in an enlarged edition. He also wrote The Tale of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke , which became a great popular success. During his Paris years Rilke developed a new style of lyrical poetry. After Neue Gedighte (1907-08, New Poems) he wrote a notebook named Die Aufzechnungen des Malte Laurdis Brigge (1910), his most important prose work. It took the form of a series of semiautobiographical spiritual confessions but written by a Danish expatriate in Paris.

Rilke kept silent as a poet for twelve years before writing Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus , which are concerned with “the identity of terror and bliss” and “the oneness of life and death”. Duino Elegies was born in two bursts of inspiration separated by ten years. According to a story, Rilke heard in the wind the first lines of his elegies when he was walking on the rocks above the sea – “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?“

Rilke visited his friend Princess Marie von Thurnun Taxis in 1910 at Duino, her remote castle on the coast of the Adriatic, and returned again next year. There he started to compose the poems, but the work did proceed easily. After serving in the army, Rilke was afraid that he would never be able to finish it but finally in 1922 he completed Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) in a chateau in Muzot, Switzerland. He also wrote an addition, the Sonnets to Orpheus , which was a memorial for the young daughter of a friend.

In the philosophical poems Rilke meditated on time and eternity, life and death, art versus ordinary things. The tone was melancholic. Rilke believed in the coexistence of the material and spiritual realms, but human beings were for him only spectators of life, grasping its beauties momentarily only to lose them again. With the power of creativity an artist can try to build a bridge between two worlds, although the task is almost too great for a man. The work influenced deeply such poets as Sidney Keyes, Stephen Spender, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, and W.H. Auden, who had Rilkean angels appear in the collection In Times of War (1939).

In 1913 Rilke returned to Paris, but he was forced to return to Germany because of the First World War. Duino Castle was bombarded to ruins and Rilke’s personal property was confiscated in France. He served in the Austrian army and found another patron, Werner Reinhart, who owned the Castle Muzot at Valais. After 1919 he lived in Switzerland, occupied by his work and roses in his little garden. For time to time he went to Paris for a few months or to Italy. Rilke’s companion during his last years was the artist Baladine (Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro), whose son, Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), become also an artist. Rilke wrote a foreword to a book illustrated by Balthus’s drawings of cats. Rilke died on December 29, in 1926.
From poemhunter.com

**********************************************

Love Song by Rainer Maria Rilke

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

***************************************

I don’t know if Rilke was Catholic or not but this is such a powerful image of how divine love touches us as a musician holds the strings of an instrument and plays a melody from two strings. I guess if you are an atheist you have to reject the whole thing as nonsense but what a loss not to experience the overwhelming sense of a love that touches the divine.

I hope this is the kind of love you have found, Stella. God bless you.

Posted in Art Commentary, Poetry, Ranier Maria Rilke | Tagged Love Song by Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke bio | Leave a Comment »

Mythopoeia — J.R.R. Tolkien

May 7, 2012

In his masterful essay “On Fairy Stories,” J. R.R. Tolkien describes the vital role played by these tales in the cultures of the world. They contain rich spiritual knowledge. The sun may be green and the fish may fly through the air, but however fantastical the imagined world, there is retained in it a faithfulness to the moral order of the actual universe. The metaphors found in the literary characters are not so much random chimeras as they are reflections of our own invisible world, the supernatural.

Whether in dreams or conscious imagination, the powers of the mind (and one must see here the powers of the human spirit) are engaged in what Tolkien calls “sub-creation”. By this he means that man, reflecting his divine Creator, is endowed with gifts to incarnate invisible realities in forms that make them understandable.

For example, magic has been used traditionally in fairy stories to give a visible form to the invisible spiritual powers. But a crucial distinction must be made between the use of “good magic” and “bad magic” as they appear in fairy stories, because for us in the real world, there is no such thing as good magic, only prayer, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and abandonment to divine providence. “Good magic” in traditional fairy stories represents these very realities, symbolizing the intervention of God in the lives of good men put to the test. It is actually a metaphor for grace and miracle, the suspension of natural law through an act of spiritual authority culminating in a reinforced moral order.

Bad magic in traditional stories represents the evil power that the wicked use in order to grasp at what does not rightly belong to them — whether worldly power, wealth, or even love. It is also a metaphor for the intervention of the enemies of God the evil spirits, in the lives of wicked men. As Saint Paul says, “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual host of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).
Michael D. O’Brien, Just a Fairy Story

The following poem Tolkien wrote on a fateful evening following a long discussion with his friend C.S Lewis. Another view of it here. Benedict XVI on the One True Myth here.

********************************************************

To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though “breathed through silver”
PHILOMYTHUS TO MISOMYTHUS

You look at trees and label them just so,
(for trees are `trees’, and growing is `to grow’);
you walk the earth and tread with solemn pace
one of the many minor globes of Space:
a star’s a star, some matter in a ball
compelled to courses mathematical
amid the regimented, cold, Inane,
where destined atoms are each moment slain.

At bidding of a Will, to which we bend
(and must), but only dimly apprehend,
great processes march on, as Time unrolls
from dark beginnings to uncertain goals;
and as on page o’erwitten without clue,
with script and limning packed of various hue,
and endless multitude of forms appear,
some grim, some frail, some beautiful, some queer,
each alien, except as kin from one
remote Origo, gnat, man, stone, and sun.
God made the petreous rocks, the arboreal trees,
tellurian earth, and stellar stars, and these
homuncular men, who walk upon the ground
with nerves that tingle touched by light and sound.
The movements of the sea, the wind in boughs,
green grass, the large slow oddity of cows,
thunder and lightning, birds that wheel and cry,
slime crawling up from mud to live and die,
these each are duly registered and print
the brain’s contortions with a separate dint.

Yet trees and not `trees’, until so named and seen -
and never were so named, till those had been
who speech’s involuted breath unfurled,
faint echo and dim picture of the world,
but neither record nor a photograph,
being divination, judgment, and a laugh,
response of those that felt astir within
by deep monition movements that were kin
to life and death of trees, of beasts, of stars:
free captives undermining shadowy bars,
digging the foreknown from experience
and panning the vein of spirit out of sense.
Great powers they slowly brought out of themselves,
and looking backward they beheld the Elves
that wrought on cunning forges in the mind,
and light and dark on secret looms entwined.

He sees no stars who does not see them first
of living silver made that sudden burst
to flame like flowers beneath the ancient song,
whose very echo after-music long
has since pursued. There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth.

The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship one he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.

Yes! `wish-fulfillment dreams’ we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream,
or some things fair and others ugly deem ?
All wishes are not idle, not in vain
fulfillment we devise – for pain is pain,
not for itself to be desired, but ill;
or else to strive or to subdue the will
alike were graceless; and of Evil this
alone is dreadly certain: Evil is.

Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate,
that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate;
that seek no parley, and in guarded room,
through small and bare, upon a clumsy loom
weave rissues gilded by the far-off day
hoped and believed in under Shadow’s sway.

Blessed are the men of Noah’s race that build
their little arks, though frail and poorly filled,
and steer through winds contrary towards a wraith,
a rumor of a harbor guessed by faith.

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme
of things nor found within record time.
It is not they that have forgot the Night,
or bid us flee to organized delight,
in lotus-isles of economic bliss
forswearing souls to gain a Circe-kiss
(and counterfeit at that, machine-produced,
bogus seduction of the twice-seduced).

Such isles they saw afar, and ones more fair,
and those that hear them yet may yet beware.
They have seen Death and ultimate defeat,
and yet they would not in despair retreat,
but oft to victory have turned the lyre
and kindled hearts with legendary fire,
illuminating Now and dark Hath-been
with light of suns as yet by no man seen.

I would that I might with the minstrels sing
and stir the unseen with a throbbing string.
I would be with the mariners of the deep
that cut their slender planks on mountains steep
and voyage upon a vague and wandering quest,
for some have passed beyond the fabled West.
I would with the beleaguered fools be told,
that keep an inner fastness where their gold,
impure and scanty, yet they loyally bring
to mint in image blurred of distant king,
or in fantastic banners weave the sheen
heraldic emblems of a lord unseen.

I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends -
if by God’s mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker’s art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden scepter down.

In Paradise perchance the eye may stray
from gazing upon everlasting Day
to see the day-illumined, and renew
from mirrored truth the likeness of the True.
Then looking on the Blessed Land ’twill see
that all is as it is, and yet may free:
Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys,
garden not gardener, children not their toys.

Evil it will not see, for evil lies
not in God’s picture but in crooked eyes,
not in the source but in the tuneless voice.
In Paradise they look no more awry;
and though they make anew, they make no lie.
Be sure they still will make, not been dead,
and poets shall have flames upon their head,
and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:
there each shall choose for ever from the All.

Posted in J.R.R. Tolkien, Poetry, Understanding Mythopoeia | Tagged fairy stories, good magic vs. bad magic, mythopoeia | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selection From Charles Peguy’s The Portal of the Mystery of Hope

April 30, 2012

“As a literature teacher, I’m marking the Easter season in one way I know how: assigning books that are suited to the season. This week we’re reading that lyrical, enormously uplifting work of Charles Péguy, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope. A gifted poet, Péguy lived among the poor, defended the innocent Dreyfus, embraced and then saw through socialism, and finally was led by his love for St. Joan of Arc to renew his childhood faith before he died in one of the very first battles of World War I. But in his 40 years he penned some of the greatest Catholic books of the 20th century, and this is one of them. It focuses on what Péguy calls the most neglected theological virtue: “the little girl, Hope.” His earthy, mystical lyrics depict Hope as a playful, energetic, eight- or nine-year-old child, beside whom Faith and Charity are weary middle-aged moms, who draw the energy to keep on moving from the innocent glee of the girl who tugs them forward by the hand.”
John Zmirak in Crisis Magazine

“Péguy, who was certainly not a theologian given to compartmentalizing, had brought his insights, once achieved, to completion in a breakthrough to a comprehensive theology of hope — by means of patient contemplation of the one reality that is at once natural and supernatural, by an unceasing process of approfondissement and assimilation. And this theology of hope makes its presence felt today, gently but irresistibly, by a structural shift in the whole theological edifice…

So the whole of Péguy’s art and theology flow more and more towards prayer without one ever being able to say precisely whether this prayer is dialogue or a monologue on God’s part. It is a dialogue with God but one which is constantly developing into a monologue of God the Father, addressed without distinction to his Son, to the men he has created and to himself. It is a form of “theology as Trinitarian conversation,” never realized prior to Péguy, which could only be risked by a poet using a simple and popular style of utterance that avoids any show of sublimity and yet does not for a moment degenerate into “mateyness” and false familiarity. Only faith in the Holy Spirit can allow God to speak in such a way.”
Hans Urs von Balthasar

**************************************************************************

Look at the little one, says God, how she marches.
She would skip rope in the procession
She marches, she moves ahead by skipping a rope, for a bet.
She’s so happy
(Alone among them all)
And she’s so sure that she’ll never get tired.

Children walk exactly like little puppies.
(Moreover, they play like puppies too)
When a puppy goes for a walk with his masters
He comes and he goes. He comes back, he leaves again. He goes ahead, he returns.
He makes the trip twenty times.
Covers twenty times the distance.
It’s because as a matter of fact he’s not going somewhere.
His masters are the ones who are going somewhere.
He’s not going anywhere at all.

What he’s interested in is precisely making the trip.
Likewise with children.
When you make a trip with your children,
When you run an errand
Or when you go to Mass or to Vespers with your children,
Or to say the rosary
Or between Mass and Vespers when you take a walk with your children.
They trot along in front of you like little puppies.
They run ahead, they lag behind.
They come and they go. They play around.
They jump, They make the trip twenty times.
It’s because as a matter of fact they’re not going somewhere.
They’re not interested in going somewhere.
They’re not going anywhere at all.

The grown-ups are the ones who are going somewhere
The grown-ups, Faith, Charity.
The parents are the ones who are going somewhere.
To Mass, to Vespers, to say the rosary.
To the river, to the forest.
To the fields, to the woods, to work.
Who do their best, who strain themselves in order to get somewhere
Or even to go somewhere to go for a walk.

But the children are only interested in making the trip.
To come and to go and to jump. To wear out the road with their legs
Never to have enough of it. And to feel their legs growing.
They drink up the road. They thirst for the road. They never have enough of it
They’re stronger than the road. They’re stronger than fatigue.
They never have enough of it (just like hope). They run faster than the road.
They don’t go, they don’t run in order to get there. They get there in order to run. They get there in order to go. Just like hope. They don’t spare their steps. The idea doesn’t even occur to them
To spare anything at all.

It’s the grown-ups who are sparing as they’re forced to be. But the child Hope
Never spares anything
It’s the parents who are sparing. Unhappy virtue, alas, that they should have to make a virtue of it.
They’re forced to. As strong as my daughter Faith is,
Solid as a rock, she’s forced to be sparing.
As ardent as my daughter Charity is,
Burning like a fine wood fire
That warms the poor man by the fireplace
The poor man and the child and the starving man,
She’s forced to be sparing.
Only the child Hope
Is she alone who never spares anything.

She doesn’t spare her steps, the little devil, she doesn’t spare ours.
Just as she doesn’t spare the flowers and the leaves in the grand Processions,
And the roses of France and the beautiful Lilies of France
With the undrooping collars,
So in the little, in the long procession, in the hard procession of life she doesn’t spare anything
Neither her steps nor ours.
In the ordinary, in the gray, in the common procession
(Because it’s not every day that you have Corpus Christi.)

She doesn’t spare her steps, and since she treats us like herself
She doesn’t spare ours either.
She doesn’t spare herself; and likewise, she doesn’t spare others either.
She makes us start the same thing over twenty times.
She makes us return twenty times to the same place.
Which is generally a place of disappointment
(Earthly disappointment.)

It doesn’t matter to her. She’s like a child. She is a child.
It doesn’t matter to her to take the grown-ups for a ride.”
Earthly wisdom is none of her business.
She doesn’t calculate like we do.
She calculates, or rather she doesn’t calculate, she counts (without noticing) like a child.
Like someone who has her whole life in front of her.

It doesn’t matter to her to take us for a ride.
She believes, she expects us to be like her.
She doesn’t spare our sufferings. And our trials. She thinks
That we have our whole lives ahead of us.
How she deceives herself. How right she is
For don’t we indeed have our whole Life ahead of us.
The only one that matters. Our whole Eternal life.

And doesn’t the old man have as much life ahead of him as the baby in tin’ crib.
If not more. Because for the baby in the crib the eternal Life,
The only one that matters, is hidden by this miserable life
That he has in front of him. First. It’s in front. By this miserable life on earth.
He has to endure, he has to go through this whole miserable life on earth
Before he can get to, before he can reach, before he can attain the Life
Which is the only life that matters. The old man is lucky.
He has wisely left behind this miserable life
Which had hidden the eternal Life from him
And now he is free. He has put behind him what was before.

He sees clearly. He’s full of life. There’s no longer anything between him and life.
He’s standing on the edge of the light.
He’s on the shore itself. He’s at the limit. He’s on the brink of etenial life.
We are right in saying that old men are wise.
Just as the child is right to think
That we are like her.
That we have our whole life ahead of us.
That we have it as much as she does. That it matters for her
To make us make the trip twenty times.
She’s right. What matters
(And to make us return twenty times to the same place
Which is generally a place of disappointment
Of earthly disappointment) what matters
Is not to go here or there, is not to go someplace
To arrive someplace
Some earthly place.

What matters is to go, always to go, and (on the contrary) not to arrive.
What matters is to go simply in the simple procession of ordinary days,
The great procession toward salvation. The days pass in procession
And we pass in procession through the days. What’s important
Is the going. To keep going. That’s what matters. And how you go.
It’s the road you travel. It’s the traveling itself.
And how you do it.

You make twenty times the same trip on earth.
To come to an end twenty times.
And twenty times you end up, you come to, you attain
With difficulty, with much effort, with much straining,
Painfully
The point of disappointment.
Of earthly disappointment.

And you say: This little Hope has tricked me again.
I never should’ve trusted her. It’s the twentieth time that she’s tricked me.
Earthly wisdom is not her strong point.
I will never believe her again. (You will believe her again, you will always believe her).
I’ll never get taken in again. — Fools that you are.
What does it matter the place you wanted to go to.
Where you thought you were going.

Come on now; you’re not children, you know perfectly well
That the place you were going to would be a disappointment.
An Earthly disappointment. It was already disappointing beforehand. So why did you want to go there. Because you understand very well the game of this little Hope.

Why do you always follow this child of disappointment.
Why do you get yourself involved in this little one’s game.
All the time, and the twentieth time more firstly than the first.
Why do you go along of your own accord.
All the time, and the twentieth time more readily than the first.

It’s because in your heart you know very well what she is.
And what she does. And that she fools us.
Twenty times.
Because she is the only one who does not fool us.
And does not disappoint us

Twenty times
All through life
Because she is the only one who does not disappoint us
For Life.

And it’s thus that she is the only one who does not disappoint us. Because those twenty times that she makes us take the same trip
On earth, according to human wisdom, those are twenty times of increasing difficulty
Of repetition, of the same thing
Twenty times in vain, right on top of each other
Because they all went by the same road
To the same place, because it was the same route.

But for God’s wisdom
Nothing is ever nothing. All is new. All is other.
All is different.
In God’s sight nothing repeats itself.
Those twenty times that she made us take the same trip to get to the same point
Of futility

From the human perspective it’s the same point, the same trip, the same twenty times.
But that’s the deception.
That’s the false calculation and the false reckoning.
Being the human reckoning.

And this is why it doesn’t disappoint: Those twenty times are not the same. If those twenty times are twenty times of trial(s) and if the route is a path to sanctity
Then along the same path the second time doubles the first
And the third time triples it and the twentieth time multiplies it twenty fold.
What does it matter to arrive here or there, and always at the same place
Which is a place of (earthly) disappointment.
What matters is the path, and which path you take, and what you do on it
How you take it.
It’s the trip alone that matters.

If the path is a path to sanctity
In God’s sight, a path of trials
He who takes it twice is twice as holy
In God’s sight, and he who takes it three times
Is three times as holy, and he who takes it
Twenty times, twenty times more holy. That’s how God reckons.
That’s how God sees things.

The same path is not the same the second time around.
Every day you say, all your days are alike
On earth all days are the same.
Departing from the same mornings they convey you to the same evenings.
But they do not lead you to the same eternal evenings.
Every day, you say, looks the same — Yes, every earthly day.
But have no fear, my children, they do not at all look like
The last day, which is different from every other.

Every day, you say, repeats itself. — No, they are added
To the eternal treasury of days.
The bread of each day to that of the day before.
The suffering of each day
(Even though it repeats the suffering of the day before)
Is added to the eternal treasury of sorrows

The prayer of each day
(Even though it repeats the prayer of the day before)
Is added to the eternal treasury of prayers. of each day
(Even though it repeats the merit of the day before)
Is added to the eternal treasury of merits.
On earth everything repeats itself. In the same matter.
But in heaven everything counts
And everything increases. The grace of each day
(Even though it repeats the grace of the day before)
Is added to the eternal treasury of graces. And it’s for this that the young

Hope
Alone doesn’t spare anything.

Posted in Charles Péguy, Poetry | Tagged Charles Péguy, Péguy's art and theology, Prayer, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope | Leave a Comment »

On Philip Larkin’s High Windows by Anthony Esolen

April 5, 2012

Philip Arthur Larkin, (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), but he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, articles gathered together in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), book cover above, and he edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). He was the recipient of many honors, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of poet laureate in 1984, following the death of John Betjeman.

Kudos to Esolen for his reading of Philip Larkin. If you wish to read more of his essays, more under the category listing on the right. I’ve adapted the following for readability and emphasis. From Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Good to view the article in original form. Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and Ironies of Faith. He has translated Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

*************************************

The sexual revolution puts forth a vision of paradise in which we rig up some nifty devices to guarantee infertility, consider neither holiness nor virtue, and believe in the blessings of no one and nowhere and nothing.

The recent controversy over whether a church, or indeed a single individual, may be compelled to purchase health insurance that provides free coverage for contraception, abortifacient drugs, and sterilization suggests that Americans may yet reconsider the wisdom of what has made the controversy possible in the first place. That is the sexual revolution.

I find it instructive here to glance backward before that revolution, to a poem that celebrates its arrival, and that in fact presents to us several of the crucial elements or motifs of the current controversy: contraception, the Church, a certain vision of freedom, and a supposed maturation beyond the need for the strictures of the past. The poem is “High Windows,” by Philip Larkin. It is, technically and rhetorically, a brilliant work. It is also fundamentally dishonest and self-contradictory, from beginning to end. Here it is in full:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives –
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Paradise — a perfect garden of delights, with young people rutting and hallooing down the slide to happiness without end. And yet this vision of carefree nature rests upon a strange submission to technology, and a depersonalization of human love.

Consider that opening sentence. The “couple of kids” are evidently not free, no matter what Larkin may say, and no matter the casual obscenity that surprises us out of careful thought. For the girl in question must ingest the artificial estrogen, or must insert a blocking device into her body. Why must she do so? Precisely because neither she nor he intends the natural result of their engaging in a reproductive act. But in what way is this an expression of being free of care? They must take great care beforehand, so that they may pretend that they need not care while engaging in intercourse. They are not ready for a child, but they do what makes for children, and hope that none will come.

Thus they are not naked to one another, as an innocent Adam and Eve in Eden. They disrobe, but they hide. They push to the side all “bonds” and “gestures,” conveniently vague. That is, they refuse to be free with themselves, each one giving wholly to the other. The bond of marriage that sets a couple truly free, that gives a man and a woman the confidence to devote themselves forever to their mutual good and that of their children, is simply dispensed with. It is relegated to irrelevance, like “an outdated combine harvester.”

But that analogy, startling and effective though it may be, is downright strange. Larkin uses it to suggest something ungainly and absurd, but his ironical contempt seems to have prevented him from noticing a contradiction. For there is nothing inherently silly about a combine harvester. It is a tool for reaping the goods of the earth. It does its work quite well, and only becomes “outdated” when a new combine harvester is invented that will do that same work better. The work of a harvester depends upon fertility. The work performed by the “bonds and gestures” of marriage is also oriented toward fertility, like the free and glorious fertility of a beautiful garden — a paradise.

But in this poem the whole idea of reaping a good harvest is replaced by reliance upon pills and a diaphragm. It is therefore an artificial and sterile paradise, dependent upon tools that bring to pass a willed infertility. What’s the use of a harvester, when there is no life?

But that state of affairs will be “the life,” as Larkin imagines a wishful hedonist saying to himself forty years back. That life is defined largely in negative terms. There will be no God; meaning that there will be no felt presence of God, no pangs of conscience as regards sex, no virtue to aspire to, no duties to fulfill, and no sins to confess and to expiate.

One might also add that there will be no sense of holiness; no sacred promise to devote one’s life to one’s spouse; no victory over the importunacy of the flesh; no shielding the sexes from abusing one another. This will be like going “down the long slide.” There will, apparently, be no broken hearts, no one cajoled into saying with the body what is not held in the mind, no children living without a father, no visits to the abortuary, nothing but living “like free bloody birds.”

Which brings us to another contradiction. When we think of birds leaving the earth behind and soaring where they will, we naturally think of freedom. But birds in flight are doing what they do by nature. So too, when mating season comes they join to beget and raise offspring. Even if Larkin meant the word “birds” only as a colloquialism for “lucky stiffs,” or something of the sort, his hidden contempt for nature has gotten the better of him.

The couple of kids he sees are not at all free in the sense of being unrestrained (for they must engage in complicated evasions), or in the sense of being generous (for they withhold their fertility from one another). Nor are they at all like the birds. Instead they desire exactly the opposite of what the birds in mating season desire. They do not want chicks. They want nothing.

So we arrive at the end of the poem, when Larkin presents us with the “religious” experience of someone whose pocket of prophylactics protects him from needing the priest. He has removed human love from the chapel of marriage. But now he wishes to place it back in a chapel of his own. He wants to bless it with the clarity and the “sun-comprehending” of “high windows,” like those of a great church. What is here? There are no stories to behold in the windows; they are colorless. There is nothing beyond the windows either, nothing but “the deep blue air,” the endless nowhere of the sky.

We will all enter paradise, then, when we scoff at nature, rig up some nifty devices to guarantee infertility, consider neither holiness nor virtue, and believe in the blessings of no one and nowhere and nothing. To quote Milton’s Belial, that must end us, that must be our cure.

Where is that promised paradise of no one and nowhere and nothing, Mr. Larkin? Visit a prison, and ask the men in the cell blocks to recount their sexual histories, and those of their mothers and fathers. Visit a hospital, and see the faces of women who have determined to violate their inmost natures as the givers of life. Visit a neighborhood — if you can find one; for your paradise has placed transience and infidelity at the heart of the most intimate of human relations. You with your quaint erudite use of obscenity! The streets of your nation and the sullen youth who roam them make you look like a monocled Edwardian with a taste for French novels.

And this is the world we must protect, even at the cost of our Constitution and our civil liberties?

Posted in Anthony Esolen, Poetry | Tagged High Windows, Philip Larkin, transience and infidelity | 2 Comments »

Ballad On The Gospel “In The Beginning Was The Word” — St. John of the Cross

April 2, 2012

In the beginning abided
The Word, and in God he dwelled;
In Him was his happiness
Eternally held.
It was called the beginning,
This same Word which was God:
He dwelled in the beginning,
Himself unbegotten.
He was that same beginning,
Thus he himself had none;
There was born of this beginning
The Word we call Son.
He always has conceived him
And so conceives him always,
Always giving him His substance
Which always has been his.
And so the Son’s great glory
From the Father had arisen;
All his Glory then the Father
Possessed within the Son.
Each dwelled within the other
As Lover and Beloved dwell,
And the self-same love that joined them
Resided there as well
With the one as with the other
In worth and in degree:
Three persons, one Beloved,
Together they were three.
A single love dwelled in them all,
One Lover all provided:
And the Lover is the Loved One
In whom they each resided.
For the Being all three possessed
To each alone belonged,
And what belonged to this one Being
By each one was beloved.
This Being was each single one
And they were tied by this alone
In an inexpressible union
For which no name is known.
For it was infinite, the love
Which wrought their unity.
And this is called their essence,
The single love possessed by three;
And the more love grows to oneness
The more it is increased.

The Communication of the Three Persons

From that unbounded, mighty love
Between the two arisen,
Words of deep content and joy
The Father uttered to the Son;
Words of such profound delight
That no one comprehended;
The Son alone possessed their joy,
For him they were intended.
But what is fathomed of their sense
Was spoken in this way:
My Son, nothing brings content to me
Beyond your company.
And if anything content me
In you do I desire it;
By him who most resembles you
Am I most satisfied.
And who resembles you in nothing
Nothing in me will he find;
By you alone have I been pleased,
O life of my own life.
You are Light of my Light,
My wisdom and my knowledge,
The form and figure of my substance,
In whom I am well pleased.
My Son, unto the one who loves you,
Of myself shall I give freely,
And place in him the self-same love
That I possess for you,
Because he also loves the one
Whom I have loved so dearly.

III

The Creation

My Son, it is my wish to give you
A bride for you to love,
Who through your worth will well
deserve
To live as our companion,
And eat her bread at our table.
The bread on which I fare;
That she may know in such a Son
The wealth of good I bear;
And she will join with me in praising
Your grace and glowing splendour.
I am deeply grateful, Father,
The Son said in reply,
And to the bride you give me
I will add my clarity.
That with its light my Father’s worth
By her may be perceived,
And how this nature I possess
Was from His own received.
And I shall hold her in my arms,
To burn there in your love,
And she will glorify your goodness
In eternal celebration.

So let it be done, the Father said,
For so your love deserves;
And this sentence that He uttered
Was the making of the world:
Creating in surpassing wisdom
A palace for the Bride,
Which into two apartments,
High and low, he did divide.
And of an infinite variety
The lower He composed,
But beautiful the one on high
With rare and precious stones.
That the Bride may know the Bridegroom
Whom she possessed in love,
He stationed choirs of angels
in the hierarchy above.
But to the chamber down below
Human nature He assigned,
For being in its composition
A somewhat lesser kind.
And through their nature and their station
He chose so to divide,
They were all the single body
Of one beloved Bride.
For by the love of one sole Bridegroom
They formed a single Bride;
Those above possessed their Spouse
In fullness of delight;
Those below in expectation
With faith that he inspired
Through saying that by Him, one day,
They would be magnified.
And that the lowness of their nature
He would raise up and exalt.
In such a way that no one then
Could scorn it or find fault.
For He would make himself like them
And resemble them in all,
He would walk with them in friendship
And among them he would dwell,
And God would then be man
And man then be God would be;
In their dealings He would mingle,
He would eat and drink as they,
And at their side unceasingly
He Himself would stay,
Until this age that now prevails
Is closed and passed away.
When in eternal harmony
They would rejoice as one
For of the bride whom He possessed
He was the head and the crown.
To her He would unite and join
The members of the just;
They formed the body of the Bride
Whom He would gather up
Tenderly into His arms,
There give to her His love;
And thus would bear her to the Father,
United into one.
Where she would joy with that same joy
Possessed by God Himself;
For as the Father and the Son
And He who issues from them
All live within each other,
So also would the Bride;
Absorbed, immersed within her God
She would live His very life.

And this happy expectation
Coming to them from on high
Made the dullness of their labours
Seem easier to bear.
But the length of endless waiting
And the heightening desire
For possession of the Bridegroom
Made them constantly despair.
And so with supplications,
With sighs of grief and pain,
With tears and lamentations,
They begged Him night and day
That to give them His companionship
He would at least decide,
Some said: ‘If only this great joy
Could happen in my time!’
“O Lord, have done,” said others,
“Send Him whom you decreed.”
Others: “O if you broke those Heavens
Open so that I could see
You descend before my eyes,
Then I would cease my weeping.
O clouds above, send down your rain,
The dry land is beseeching,
And bring fertility to earth -
But thorns has she produced -
Set her budding with that blossom
Through which she will bear fruit!’
Others said: ‘O fortunate is he
Who lives at such a time,
With worth enough to look upon
Our God with his own eyes,
And touch Him with his hands,
And share His company,
And rejoice in the Sacred Mysteries
Which He will then decree.’

With these and other prayers
A span of time ran by;
But in later years the fervor
Strengthened and rose high.
It was then that aged Simeon,
With longing set aflame,
Entreated God to spare his life
And let him see that day.
And so the Holy Spirit
To the good old man replied
And gave his word in promise
That he should never die
Until he saw the very Life,
Descend from above,
And would take in his own hands
That self-same living God,
And would hold him in his arms,
And clasp Him to himself.

VII

Continuing the Incarnation

Now that the season had arrived
Appointed long ago
For the ransom of the Bride, who served
Beneath the yoke,
According to the ancient law
Which Moses laid upon her,
The Father moved with tender love
To this effect then spoke:
My Son, you see now that your Bride
In your image has been formed,
And where she most resembles you,
You both are in accord.
But she differs through the flesh,
Not found in your pure soul;
There is, for love’s perfection,
A law of love to know:
That the lover takes on likeness
To the loved one of his heart,
And the closer the resemblance
The greater the delight.
And this delight within your Bride
Would greatly be increased,
If the flesh she is endowed with
She saw you also shared.
My will is yours and yours alone,
The Son to him replied,
The sovereign glory I possess
Is that your will be mine.
So I accord with you, my Father,
In everything you say.
Your loving kindness will be seen
More clearly in this way.
Your mightiness and wisdom
And justice will be shown.
I shall go and tell the world
And make the tidings known
Of your graciousness and beauty
And of your sovereign throne.
I shall go and seek my Bride,
And I myself shall bear
The weariness and the hardship
That submerge her life in care.
And so that she may have life
I shall die for her sake,
And to you again restore her,
Lifted from the lake.

VIII

Then he summoned an archangel;
Saint Gabriel came,
And He sent him to a maiden,
Mary was her name,
Whose consent and acquiescence
Gave the mystery its birth;
It was the Trinity that clothed
With flesh the Living Word.
Though the three had worked the wonder
It was wrought in but this one,
And the incarnated Word
Was left in Mary’s womb.
And He who had a father only
Now possessed a mother,
Though not of man was He conceived
Bur unlike any other.
And deep within her body
His life of flesh began:
For this reason He is called
The Son of God and Man.

The Birth of Christ
Now that the time of His birth
Had finally come
He emerged from His chamber
Like a newly wed groom,
His arms embraced closely
The Bride He brought in,
Whom the radiant mother
Laid down in a crib,
Among some of the creatures
There at that season
Men singing songs
And angels in anthem
Rejoiced in the nuptials -
Such a pair were allies -
But God in the manger
Whimpered and cried.
These were the jewels
The bride brought in marriage,
The mother in wonder
To witness such change:
Man’s grieving in God
And the gladness in man,
Which to either before
Had been so unknown.

Translation: Lynda Nicholson, Cambridge University Press, 1973

Posted in Poetry, St. John of the Cross | 1 Comment »

Three By Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)

February 20, 2012

Stanley Kunitz

Stanley Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard, then worked as a reporter and editor. After military service, he taught at Bennington College, The New School, and Columbia University, among other institutions. His poetry books include Intellectual Things (1930), Passport to the War (1944), Selected Poems, 1928-1958 (1958, Pulitzer Prize), The Testing-Tree (1971), The Terrible Threshold: Selected Poems, 1940-70 (1974), The Coat without a Seam: Sixty Poems, 1930-1972 (1974), The Lincoln Relics (1978), The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems (1983), Next-to-Last Things (1985), Passing Through (1995, National Rook Award), and The Collected Poems (2000). Among his honors were Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Lenore Marshall Award, the Bollingen Prize, the National Medal of Arts, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Frost Medal. Stanley Kunitz served as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1974 to 1976 and as U.S. poet laureate in 2000 and 2001. He died in New York City.

Father and Son

Now in the suburbs and the falling light
I followed him, and now down sandy road
Whiter than bone-dust, through the sweet
Curdle of fields, where the plums
Dropped with their load of ripeness, one by one.
Mile after mile I followed, with skimming feet,
After the secret master of my blood,
Him, steeped in the odor of ponds, whose indomitable love
Kept me in chains. Strode years; stretched into bird;
Raced through the sleeping country where I was young,
The silence unrolling before me as I came,
The night nailed like an orange to my brow.

How should I tell him my fable and the fears,
How bridge the chasm in a casual tone,
Saying, “The house, the stucco one you built,
We lost. Sister married and went from home,
And nothing comes back, it’s strange, from where she goes.
I lived on a hill that had too many rooms:
Light we could make, but not enough of warmth,
And when the light failed, I climbed under the hill.
The papers are delivered every day;
I am alone and never shed a tear.”

At the water’s edge, where the smothering ferns lifted
Their arms, “Father!” I cried, “Return! You know
The way. I’ll wipe the mudstains from your clothers
No trace, I promise, will remain. Instruct
Your son, whirling between two wars,
In the Gemara of your gentleness,
For I would be a child to those who mourn
And brother to the foundlings of the field
And friend of innocence and all bright eyes.
O teach me how to work and keep me kind.”

Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me
The white ignorant hollow of his face.

The Portrait

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love.
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,

I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Posted in Poetry | Tagged Father and Son, Stanley Kunitz, The Portrait, Touch Me | Leave a Comment »

Our Christmas Posts

December 24, 2011

If you have a couple of minutes, listen to Fr. Barron retell Luke’s story:

http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2009/12/25/christmas-with-fr-robert-barron/

And steal this Christmas prayer and use it sometime Christmas Day:

http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/12/25/god-of-love-father-of-all/

Merry Christmas 2012!

Posted in Fr. Robert Barron, Poetry, Prayer | Leave a Comment »

Three by Anne Sexton

December 23, 2011

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1928. She attended Garland Junior College in Boston and worked briefly as a fashion model and high school teacher before joining Boston University’s creative writing faculty in 1970. Her poetry books include To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), All My Pretty Ones (1962), Live or Die (1966, Pulitzer Prize), Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1972), The Death Notebooks (1974), and The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975). Among her honors were the 1967 Shelley Memorial Award, the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Much of Anne Sexton’s poetry is autobiographical and concentrates on her deeply personal feelings, especially anguish. In particular, many of her poems record her battles with mental illness. She spent many years in psychoanalysis, including several long stays in mental hospitals. As she told Beatrice Berg, her writing began, in fact, as therapy: “My analyst told me to write between our sessions about what I was feeling and thinking and dreaming.” Her analyst, impressed by her work, encouraged her to keep writing, and then, she told Berg, she saw (on television) “I. A. Richards [a poet and literary critic] describing the form of a sonnet and I thought maybe I could do that. Oh, I was turned on. I wrote two or three a day for about a year.” Eventually, Sexton’s poems about her psychiatric struggles were gathered in To Bedlam and Part Way Back which recounts, as James Dickey wrote, the experiences “of madness and near-madness, of the pathetic, well-meaning, necessarily tentative and perilous attempts at cure, and of the patient’s slow coming back into the human associations and responsibilities which the old, previous self still demands.”
Selected From Sexton’s bio on The Poetry Foundation.org

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

The Abortion

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

Just as the earth puckered its mouth,
each bud puffing out from its knot,
I changed my shoes, and then drove south.

Up past the Blue Mountains, where
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly,
wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair,

its roads sunken in like a gray washboard;
where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly,
a dark socket from which the coal has poured,

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

the grass as bristly and stout as chives,
and me wondering when the ground would break,
and me wondering how anything fragile survives;

up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man,
not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all ..
he took the fullness that love began.

Returning north, even the sky grew thin
like a high window looking nowhere.
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

Yes, woman, such logic will lead
to loss without death.
Or say what you meant,
you coward … this baby that I bleed.

Wanting to Die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don’t always die,
but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue! –
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

“On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with poet Maxine Kumin to revise galleys for Sexton’s manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975. On returning home she put on her mother’s old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

In an interview over a year before her death, she explained she had written the first drafts of The Awful Rowing Toward God in twenty days with “two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital.” She went on to say that she would not allow the poems to be published before her death. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery & Crematory in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.”
Wikipedia Entry

Posted in Poetry | Tagged Anne Sexton, Her Kind, The Abortion, Wanting to Die | Leave a Comment »

The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe – Fr. Aidan Nichols on Gerard Manley Hopkins II

August 31, 2011

The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing’s life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many ways
Of her who not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—
Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
This one work has to do—
Let all God’s glory through,
God’s glory which would go
Through her and from her flow
Off, and no way but so.

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.

If I have understood,
She holds high motherhood
Towards all our ghostly good
And plays in grace her part
About man’s beating heart,
Laying, like air’s fine flood,
The deathdance in his blood;
Yet no part but what will
Be Christ our Saviour still.
Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.

Again, look overhead
How air is azurèd;
O how! nay do but stand
Where you can lift your hand
Skywards: rich, rich it laps
Round the four fingergaps.
Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it: this blue heaven
The seven or seven times seven
Hued sunbeam will transmit
Perfect, not alter it.
Or if there does some soft,
On things aloof, aloft,
Bloom breathe, that one breath more
Earth is the fairer for.
Whereas did air not make
This bath of blue and slake
His fire, the sun would shake,
A blear and blinding ball
With blackness bound, and all
The thick stars round him roll
Flashing like flecks of coal,
Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt,
In grimy vasty vault.

So God was god of old:
A mother came to mould
Those limbs like ours which are
What must make our daystar
Much dearer to mankind;
Whose glory bare would blind
Or less would win man’s mind.
Through her we may see him
Made sweeter, not made dim,
And her hand leaves his light
Sifted to suit our sight.

Be thou then, O thou dear
Mother, my atmosphere;
My happier world, wherein
To wend and meet no sin;
Above me, round me lie
Fronting my froward eye
With sweet and scarless sky;
Stir in my ears, speak there
Of God’s love, O live air,
Of patience, penance, prayer:
World-mothering air, air wild,
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child.

Just the point at which to introduce the comparison with Mary: Hopkins characterizes this other mother by two features of her role as Catholic Christianity sees it. The first is her divine motherhood, by which she became the Theotokos or God-bearer, giving welcome in “womb and breast” to the “infinity” of the person of God the Word, now become what the medievals called Verbum abbreviatum, the “abbreviated Word”, inasmuch as his divine hypostasis, from the moment of the Annunciation onward, acts as the personalizing subject of an instance of human nature.

Thus is the Godhead of the Son “dwindled to infancy” in the Christ-child — without, for all that, suffering the loss of those divine attributes which make him the foundation of the universe and of the moral law. The role of our Lady at the Annunciation is so essential to Incarnation robustly conceived that it already justifies, in classical Christian vocabulary, the exalted language of channel of divine grace, which, in point of theological fact, Hopkins will use for her under a second distinct heading.

Drawing on a doctrinal tradition, which has never (yet) attained dogmatic status, he affirms that she “mothers each new grace / That now does reach our race”. The inclusion of the words “each new” here goes beyond what Mary’s divine motherhood by itself could lead us to say; it is a confession of Mary’s “sub-mediation” of the grace of Christ to individuals here and now. Were we in any doubt on the matter, Hopkins himself dispels it for us in a sermon:

Now holiness God promotes by giving grace; the grace he gives not direct but as if stooping and drawing it from her vessel, taking it down from her storehouse and cupboard. It is in some way laid up in her.
The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)

So “Mary Immaculate” — a title which had surged in popularity through the ex cathedra definition of the all-holiness of the Mother of God in 1854, delighting those who followed the via Scoti, “Scotus’ way” — is “Merely a woman” and yet her “presence” and “power” is “great as no goddess’s / Was deemed, dreamed”.

This is a deliberately uncomfortable paradox, and Hopkins is positively willing us to ask whether he has not mired himself in contradiction. Can Mary of Nazareth, someone whose being is altogether finite (as the being of the Word incarnate is not), have so divine a role without calling into question her finitude or God’s infinitude or both? Hopkins resolves the issue by reimagining this role as that of a pane of glass which has no more — and no less — to do that letting the Light shine through it. She “This one work has to do — / Let all God’s glory through”, and even this is feasible only by the divine antecedent will and covenant: “God’s glory which would go / Through her and from her flow / Off, and no way but so”. St Bernard, a major articulator of this tradition, remarks simply in his sermons: “It is God’s will that we should receive all graces through Mary”. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermo VII de Aguaeductu.

The following lines (35 to 45) develop one of the loveliest titles for Mary in Latin devotion: Mater misericordiae, the “Mother of mercy”. Hopkins finds a functional identification between Mary and mercy: We are “wound / With mercy round and round” just as we are by air, and that is because we are also so wound by the “wild web, wondrous robe” of Mary as it “Mantles the guilty globe”.

There are two implications. First, the mercy which is first and foremost an attribute of God, both in Himself and in the saving economy whereby the Holy Trinity reaches out to us, is more palpably itself — that is, so far as human experience is concerned — when God wills that mercy to be mediated by Mary.

Human beings respond more fully to the mercy of God when they receive it from the hands of a mother. Hopkins as believer experiences the Mother of the Lord not merely as an occasional dispenser of divine mercy but as that very mercy: “more than almoner, / The sweet alms’ self is her”. (Of course that must be understood in terms of the interrelation of finite and infinite discussed above.) The second implication can be stated more shortly, as Hopkins himself states it: “men are meant to share / Her life”. It is an appeal to Christians who benefit from Mary’s attention to make some effort consciously to reciprocate.

In lines 46 to 72 Hopkins restates the problem of a confession of the Blessed Virgin’s universal mediation and develops, this time at more length, an explicitly Christological attempt to solve it. First, he reiterates the omnicompetence of Mary’s gracious sub-mediation: “She holds high motherhood / Towards all our ghostly good” (emphasis added). It is her “part” to “lay” — allay, or lay low — concupiscence, man’s potentially fatal trend, even after baptismal regeneration, toward evil, the “deathdance in his blood”. This is the heart of what the ascetic tradition calls holy warfare, and nothing could be more pertinent to our final salvation. So, once again, how can a mere creature receive this role? Hopkins proposes an answer in terms of the mystery of Jesus Christ, the one and only (non-subordinated) “Mediator between God and men” (1 Timothy 2:5).

Any “part” Mary has consists, in one or another way, in disposing us to be the “place” where Jesus Christ comes to be in us. She has no part that will not be “Christ our Savior still”. He continues to take on — mysterically — substantial life in the faithful, as once he did biologically in the womb of her who is, in the words of ancient litany, the “Faith of all the faithful”, the mother of all believers. Hopkins cries out with wonder — “O marvelous!” — at this truth of mystical theology, namely that Christ makes of his members “New Nazareths”, “New Bethlems”.

And he finds here the key to the puzzle of Mary’s universal task in our regard. Her role is precisely to “conceive / Him, morning, noon and eve” in us. And this explains how her mediation is both utterly comprehensive and yet altogether without derogation from the mediation of Christ. Hopkins emphasizes that this is no abstruse theory, since it concerns the ultimate issue in practical reason: my personal raising to nobility of stature. What is at stake is “New self and nobler me”. In his essay “On Personality, Grace and Freewill”, Hopkins called the divine action in sanctifying a person and bringing him to the condition of deification “a lifting him from one self to another self, which is a most marvelous display of divine power”.[The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)] God appropriately does this through Christ by way of Mary, since the unique Mediator is “Both God’s and Mary’s Son”.

Hopkins would hardly be Hopkins if, thinking about air and its translucence, he did not look up at the sky. And so he bids the reader, “look overhead / How air is azured”. On a fine day, the air above us is shot through with blue, “sapphire-shot”, but that can hardly be said to “stain” light, to detract from its purity. Well, so it is with the grace of God when it comes to men through the hands of our blessed Lady. So far from distorting the real relations of God, man, and the redeemed creation, this Marian impregnation enables them to stand out with greater distinctness. “The glass-blue days are those / When every color glows”. And he adds that “this blue heaven / The seven or seven times seven / Hued sunbeam will transmit / Perfect, not alter it”. Hopkins had worked out this aspect of the controlling analogy of the poem in a sermon given at Leigh in 1879:

St Bernard’s saying, All grace given through Mary: this is a mystery. Like blue sky, which for all its richness of color does not stain the sunlight, though smoke and red clouds do, so God’s graces come to us unchanged but all through her. Moreover she gladdens the Catholic’s heaven and when she is brightest so is the sun her Son.
Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. C. Devlin, SJ (Oxford 1959)

As Hopkins declares in the poetic version of this claim, if some change in the light conditions on earth does have an effect in terms of “Bloom breathe” — encouraging the opening of buds into blossom, then that “one breath more / Earth is the fairer for”.

Without that translucent yet protecting atmosphere, by contrast, our earth would be unlivable, such as we can assume planets of thin atmosphere too close to their own suns to be. In an extraordinary disruption of tone, producing an infernal effect worthy of Milton (lines 94 to 102), Hopkins imagines how, if air did not “slake” the sun’s “fire”, the heavens would be transmogrified into a “grimy vasty vault”, the centre of the solar system a “blear and blinding ball / With blackness bound”.

And lest we miss the point he rubs it in. That is how men would look at deity were it not for the Incarnation: “So God was god of old”. The “limbs like ours”, which the humanized Word developed from the body of the Virgin, are what endear the dreadful God of the cosmic spaces to us. Were his glory — his majestic radiance — shown us “bare”, either it would “blind” our minds or at least “less would win” them. The interposing hand of Mary, through which the glory shown in Christ is showered down on us “leaves his light / Sifted to suit our sight”.

The poem ends with a personal appeal from the poet to the Mother of Christ to be with effect for him what he by his words has declared her to be in principle for everyone.

Posted in Fr. Aidan Nichols, G. K. Chesterton, Mary, Poetry | Tagged "Both God's and Mary's Son", "New self and nobler me", Bernard of Clairvaux, divine motherhood, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Mary Immaculate, Mary's "sub-mediation" of the grace of Christ, Mater misericordiae, sub-mediation, The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe, Verbum abbreviatum | Leave a Comment »

“The Children” from Visions of Christ by Ranier Maria Rilke

May 30, 2011

Let The Children Come Unto Me by Fritz von Uhde

“The Children” by Ranier Maria Rilke

There stood
amid the children of the neighborhood
a rnan. His garment was of modest wear,
and bright as home was his redeemer’s-hair.
And just as on a day in early spring
the blossoms, suddenly awakened, stare,
so had the children gathered, marveling
at him, whom none of the adults would dare to name.
But he is well-known to the young,
who crowd the gateway of the city’s poor.

One of the swarm — a pale one — murmurs: “You’re
the Mercy for whose sake my mother wrung
her hands.” The words are tender on her tongue:
Your home is in the sunset — am I right?..
there, where the mountain-peaks are proud and bright.
To you the tree-tops nod; to you are sung
the windsongs; and you visit — like a friend –
good children in their dreams.” At this they bend
like birches, all of them — the dark, the blonde –
before his smile — and the adults are stunned.
Unto his blessing, as if home were there,
come children scurrying from everywhere,
and all are listening. The word he brings
spreads over them the whiteness of its wings:
“Is there among you one who meditates
how hastily the soundless hours lead you,
how day by day and night by night they speed you
through thousand doorways and through thousand
And all the hinges move just as they need to, [gates?
and all the doors fall softly into place;
your conscience and your comrade I remain,
although the journey ripens past my reign.
I am not life, and life is what you're after;
the darkness is your portion -- I illume;
'Renounce!' I cry -- but you are lured by laughter;
you crave good fortune, and -- my voice is doom."
He ceased. The grownups listened from afar.
Then, sighing, he continued. "When we are
balked at the border, don't abandon me.
You'll be too young to take me where you go;
but as you travel, turn back once to see:
perhaps in a poor place where flowers grow,
or in the tender smile of her who's been
a long time yearning, or perhaps within
an expectation: I am Memory,
and Childhood. Go -- but as you seek strange lands,
turn back to offer me one final glance
already dipped in life from which the new
and never-prayed-to God holds out his hands.
Go on, then. There's a world awaiting you."
They hear, in haste, the promise he speaks;
warmer and warmer grow their cheeks:
"Shall we be pounding at the doors?!"
cries out a wild one in the throng
cries out and anxiously implores:
"Through forest and flood, come speed us along!
And is the greatest door, the last,
soon to be passed?"

Thus, for the future the Master has vowed,
the eyes of that youngster boldly ignite;
and he blooms in the midday light.
But one, of that hushed and hearkening crowd,
lifts himself now, one child alone;
dishevelled and wilted his hair, wind-blown,
as over a helmet's rage still flies
proudly the torn prize.
The voice of this one flutters and begs:
"You!" He anxiously clasps his legs
with poor, starved hands: "You never
warned us, You never said
it would end forever!
Let the ungrateful gallop ahead
to years that the swiftest cannot recover --
I am different, different from these!"
And in a convulsion he clasps his knees.--
The lips of the radiant one, they quiver,
and he bends toward the weeping lad:
"Does mother give you games and food?"
Then into his lap sobs the boy:
"I'm too old for a toy."
"Does she bring you broth, fresh-brewed,
mornings when you wake?"
The lad has begun to quake:
"Too poor; I go unfed."
"Don't her kisses make
your cheeks sometimes turn red?"
Then he confesses: "Mother
has been a long time dead."…
And the bright one's lips are unsteady
as leaves in autumn weather:
''Then you've been out in life already,
and now we can stay here together."

In the summer of 1897, Rainer wrote "Die Kinder.” '"The Children," a poem in which adoring youngsters, and adults in the periphery, crowd around the radiant iconographical figure of Christ, seeking his blessings. His sermon, however, contains some sobering paradigms:

I am not life, and life is what you're after;
the darkness is your portion -- I illume;
'Renounce!' I cry -- but you are lured by laughter;
you crave good fortune, and -- my voice is doom."

Rilke is touched by the simple faith of sheltered children but is aware that it will have to give way, as it did for him, when confronting life. Childhood illusions obviously serve up to a point in the natural development of the individual; beyond that point, Rilke seems to imply, each person must seek for himself the meaning of life and death. The way of Christ may not be the way for all men in that Christ's lonely mission was a despairing one even for himself.

Rilke's Christ is inspired by Matthew's portrayal which glows with affection for children: "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me; for such is the Kingdom of heaven." Those who seek Christ, says Rilke, can find him metaphorically in scenes of child -- in a mother's smile, a moment of expectancy. In that sense can the following statement of Rilke's Christ be understood: "I am Memory and Childhood."

The theme of Christ and the children lends itself to pathos and tenderness rendered by the infinitely soft alliterations and gliding rhymes in the dreamlike lines.

Some of Rilke's poetic pictorializations of Christ scenes were inspired by and adapted from the paintings of the once well-known artist Fritz von Uhde (1848-1911). Today, Uhde's prolific and largely representational output seems passe. In one of Uhde's devotional portraits, Christ graphically illuminates the darkness and represents light as does the figure in Rilke's "The Children."

In Munich Rilke sporadically attended lectures on art history at the university. Yet his taste in art developed strongly only after he met Rodin, felt the impact of Cezanne and Picasso, and turned his attention from subject to form. Rilke was fascinated by the Christ themes in Uhde's work. Uhde went the gamut from realism, imitational baroque devotionalism, to impressionism -- sometimes expressing his own vision of life and sometimes acceding to public tastes.

Some of Uhde's Christ paintings departed from the tradition of pictorial splendor by bringing Christ close to contemporary surroundings, especially to the peasant folk, and by giving him simple dress descriptive of no single period. Undoubtedly, Uhde found precedent in the humanization of Biblical figures by Rubens and the stress on moral expression rather than physical beauty by Rembrandt. Greater than his finished and smoothed-out paintings, his sketches show Uhde to have been a painter who could have transcended his time had he the will and self-confidence that makes of art an absolute mission. Rilke thought that the best of Uhde's work was that in which children played a role and in which Uhde indirectly captured the Christ figure of love and faith and refuge as reflected in their eyes.

Rilke's deeply subjective description of Uhde's Christ picture called Let the Children Come unto Me holds particular interest because it shows the mood and portraiture which Rilke attempted in his poem "The Children:"

In "Let The Children Come Unto Me," it was the concern of the painter to give the wishes and dreams of these children a common focal point, to create a pair of rich and kind hands stretched out toward the hesitant questions and search of these helpless hands, lips which can give consolation and answer to the thousand boundless and bold questions of children, and to create an eye which is radiant enough to become a homeland to those who come out of the dark. He wanted to make the children a gift of a father without the worries, agedness, or anger of a father; in short, to fulfill the deepest and most mysterious longings of their tiny, awakening souls.'

Rilke prefers the Uhde paintings in which the onlookers reveal by their emotions the presence of Christ, to those in which Christ and the onlookers are grouped conventionally. Unfortunately Uhde was pliable when attacked by philistine demands for conventional renderings so that when his painting of the Holy Night (1888) was castigated for allegedly showing in his Madonna "the features of a prostitute who has brought her child into the world in a dive," he promptly beautified Mary's face, tidied up her surroundings, and added symbolical iconographic devices. Similar concessions were made when the influential Munich gallery, the Pinakothek, offered to purchase Uhde's painting "The Ascension of Christ" (1897) provided that he accent the Christ figure and its ascent. Rilke published a biting article about the stipulation, noting that Uhde's earlier redeeemer was "in no way acquainted with all the finesses of flight techniques. "

Rilke also mentioned in the article that he had visited Uhde's studio in November 1896 and that he had seen the preliminary painting—a superbly dynamic rendering on gray canvas with turbulent charcoal strokes and vast space over the heads of the crowd. The phenomenon of belief and its power attracted Rilke; apparently Uhde's preliminary sketch spoke to him in those terms:

Imagine if you will a group of people -- not of peasants and not of the educated but simply of people: the elderly, men, maiden, and women. And, imagine this group to be forcibly drawn together, united and commonly enthralled by one sensation. In fine shading on all the faces is the effect of something great and incredible: wonderment in the women, in the maiden: glorification in the children, trust . . . And then in their hands -- in that of the elderly, doubt; fear in those of men and women, longing in the hands of maiden; and the hands of children half-unconsciously imitate the gesture of the wondrous one…

Rilke scorned the officially sanctioned ascension which Uhde agreed to paint by touching up and changing his original work: "it proves that basically he no longer sees Christ very clearly." In the new version, the painter dissociates himself from the crowd and gives it the conventional "Jesus" rather than Christ, "the redeemer who humanly and modestly was on solid ground" in earlier Uhde paintings.
Siegfried Mandel, Visions of Christ

A little Jungian synchronicity at work as I sat down one day last week with my friend Priscilla to watch the film Seraphine. “A well done period piece and art history filled with fascinating historical detail and brilliantly acted by Yolande Moreau as Séraphine Louis, a poor French peasant, and Modern Primitive, self-taught, naïve, folk artist. Séraphine is the true story of a woman who was ecstatically inspired to paint her angels demanded it. Born in 1864, she walked a life-long fine line between divine inspiration and madness, and ended her life alone and penniless in an asylum in 1942. Séraphine is discovered in 1912 by German art collector Wilhelm Uhde, who provides patronage and begins to get her work into exhibitions, until he is forced to leave France in 1914 due to war between Germany and France.

Uhde returns in 1927 and continues his patronage of the artist, who becomes quite successful for a short period of time (though completely unable to handle either the money or the fame, which, at least as depicted in the film, may have contributed to destabilizing her rather delicate mental balance) before she ultimately has a psychotic break in 1932, and spends the last decade of her life hospitalized and deprived of her painting (mercifully, this decade is mostly absent from the film.) This is not a particularly happy story, but it is a fascinating one, told with direct simplicity and wealth of detail. And Yolanda Moreau is totally mesmerizing.” [From a Netflick’s review]

Posted in Poetry, Ranier Maria Rilke | Tagged Ranier Maria Rilke, Séraphine Louis, The Children, Visions of Christ, Wilhelm Uhde | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

Love Song by Rainer Maria Rilke

Mythopoeia — J.R.R. Tolkien

Reading Selection From Charles Peguy’s The Portal of the Mystery of Hope

On Philip Larkin’s High Windows by Anthony Esolen

Ballad On The Gospel “In The Beginning Was The Word” — St. John of the Cross

Three By Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)

Our Christmas Posts

Three by Anne Sexton

The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe – Fr. Aidan Nichols on Gerard Manley Hopkins II

“The Children” from Visions of Christ by Ranier Maria Rilke

Pages

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

Blog Stats

Top Posts

Subscribe

Archives

Recently Featured Books

Follow “Paying Attention To The Sky”