Hopkins On Krakatoa « Hooting Yard

Hopkins On Krakatoa « Hooting Yard
Excerpt:
...Gerard Manley Hopkins’ reportage on the remarkable “Krakatoa sunsets” of 1883.

For Keats' Sake!: Exiles and the real Hopkins

For Keats' Sake!: Exiles and the real Hopkins
Excerpt:
...scattered lines...Chrysoprase...

Goin' Home

Fountain of Elias: Roy Campbell and St. John of the Cross

Fountain of Elias: Roy Campbell and St. John of the Cross
Excerpt:   Deo Gratias!
How the South African poet saved the letters of Our Holy Father St. John from being destroyed in the Spanish Civil War.
It was March 1936. A series of anti-clerical riots swept through Toledo. Churches were burned and priests and monks were attacked in the streets. During these disturbances several Carmelite monks, disguised in lay clothes, sought shelter in the home of the South African poet, Roy Campbell, who had moved to the city with his wife, Mary, and their two young daughters in the previous year. Four months later, on July 21, republican forces advanced on the city. Under cover of darkness, the Carmelite monks once again called on the Campbells. This time, however, they were not seeking refuge for themselves but for their priceless archives, which included the personal papers of St John of the Cross. Campbell agreed to take possession of these precious archives and that night a heavy trunk of ancient documents was delivered secretly from the Carmelite library to the hallway of the Campbells’ house......

As for the story of the man who saved the original letters of St John of the Cross, it could be said that Spain and the Catholic Church are indebted to him for his role in preserving a priceless part of their inheritance. As for Campbell, he was equally indebted to Spain, describing it as “a country to which I owe everything, as having saved my soul”....

St. Rita of Cascia||Pope John Paul II: A Life of Heroic Humility and Obedience - 20 May 2000

Pope John Paul II: A Life of Heroic Humility and Obedience - 20 May 2000
Excerpt: from his papal address:
Live as witnesses to a hope that never disappoints

4. The saint of Cascia belongs to the great host of Christian women who "have had a signifiant impact on the life of the Church as well as of society" (Apostolic Letter Mulieris dignitatem, n. 27). Rita well interpreted the "feminine genius" by living it intensely in both physical and spiritual motherhood.

On the sixth centenary of her birth I recalled that her lesson "is concentrated on these typical elements of spirituality: the offer of forgiveness and the acceptance of suffering, not through a form of passive resignation ... but through the strength of that love for Christ who, precisely in the episode of his being crowned, suffered, along with other humiliations, an atrocious parody of his kingship" (Insegnamenti V/I [1982], 874).

Dear brothers and sisters, the worldwide devotion to St Rita is symbolized by the rose. It is to be hoped that the life of everyone devoted to her will be like the rose picked in the garden of Roccaporena the winter before the saint's death. That is, let it be a life sustained by passionate love for the Lord Jesus; a life capable of responding to suffering and to thorns with forgiveness and the total gift of self, in order to spread everywhere the good odour of Christ (cf. 2 Cor 2:15) through a consistently lived proclamation of the Gospel. Dear devoted pilgrims, Rita offers her rose to each of you: in receiving it spiritually strive to live as witnesses to a hope that never disappoints and as missionaries of a life that conquers death.

 

Quick – hurry to the Carmelite Monastery « A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

Quick – hurry to the Carmelite Monastery « A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics
Excerpt:
f you do, you can catch the vows being made by Sister Maria Guadalupe of the Infant Jesus of Prague!  11 am!  I wish I could go!
Monday, May 21st at 11:00 A.M.Mass at the Carmelite Monastery 600 Flowers, Dallas 75211
Sister Maria Guadalupe of the Infant Jesus of Prague will be “Rendering her Vows” to the Superior of this Carmel, Reverend Mother Juanita Marie. Sister Maria Guadalupe has transferred to the Dallas Carmel. There will be a reception after Mass.

Dymphna's Road: Pray for our priests

Dymphna's Road: Pray for our priests
Excerpt:

Pray for our priests

Blessed Jerzy

Father Vera

'to the testimony'||'to the love'|| 'to the pain||

The Levite and the Holocaust

Each one of us is lovingly, uniquely crafted by God to hold the radiant gift of love and serve it up;  William Blake said: We are put in the world for but a little while to learn to bear the beams of love.

In 1938, with the outbreak of violence that would come to be known as Kristallnacht, American Orthodox rabbi Menachem HaKohen Risikoff wrote about the central role he saw for Priests and Levites in terms of Jewish and world responses, in worship, liturgy, and teshuva, repentance. In הכהנים והלוים HaKohanim vHaLeviim(1940), The Priests and the Levites, he stressed that members of these groups exist in the realm between history (below) and redemption (above), and must act in a unique way to help move others to prayer and action, and help bring an end to suffering. He wrote, "Today, we also are living through a time of flood, Not of water, but of a bright fire, which burns and turns Jewish life into ruin. We are now drowning in a flood of blood...Through the Kohanim and Levi'im help will come to all Israel."^[10]     [Wikipedia: Holocaust Theology]

A picture in my mind comes suddenly from the movie Escape from Sobibor, the Nazi death camp.  Once the shooting began the prisoners ran towards the front gate.  As some of them began to fall dead, running men would suddenly stop and rocking back in forth would begin chanting the Kadesh for their dead.  They too would suddenly drop.  I have never forgotten that image of priesthood.

"Where is God? Where is He?"

Filled with spirit of prayer and thrilled with passion,
Hailed a God more merciful than Time.

Ah, less mighty, less than Time prevailing,
Shrunk, expelled, make nothing at his nod,
Less than clouds across the sea-line sailing,
Lies he, stricken by his master's rod.
"Where is man?" the cloister murmurs wailing;
Back the mute shrine thunders — "Where is God?"     ~Swineburne

And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is He? Here He is — He is hanging here on this gallows..." That night the soup tasted of corpses.~Elie Wiesel, Memoirs

---

Wiesel's witness as survivor is twofold. There is a witness he must bear, certainly, to the non-Jew, the "executioner." But, as well, he must witness to the Jew, the "victim." In each case the testimony pricks the conscience.

Mainly, my position in the Jewish community is really the position of a witness from within and a defender from without. This goes, of course, along with my ideas about the duties and the privileges of a storyteller — of a writer. From the inside, from within the community, I am critical. If Jews are criticized or attacked from the outside, then I try to defend them. What I try to do (it's very hard) is to reconcile the two attitudes: not to be too strong, too sharp, too critical when I am inside and not to be a liar on the outside.

… When evils of such magnitude are occurring, no one is completely innocent — and Wiesel has taken it upon himself to witness in such a way that our guilt can never sink into unconscious forgetfulness.

But Wiesel is more than a bearer of testimony. He is an artist — a storyteller, a writer. True to his Hasidic roots, he believes in the power of the tale… are "not novels but pages of testimony"… the "spiritual archivist of the”….family…for very profound reasons.

…Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: "I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient.

God made man because he loves stories.

(150) "What would man be without his capacity to remember? Memory is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. What does it mean to remember? It is to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading and to call upon the future to illuminate it. It is to revive fragments of existence, to rescue lost beings, to cast harsh light on places and events, to drive back the sands that cover the surface of things, to combat oblivion and to reject death."   

In the Kabbalah, there is the story of shvirat hakelim, "the breaking of the vessels.”

The writer must write as witness.

We are witnesses in the cruelest and strongest sense of the word. And we cannot stop. We must speak. This is what I am trying to do in my writing. I don't believe the aim of literature is to entertain, to distract, to amuse. It used to be. I don't believe in it anymore.

When asked what it means to be a writer today, Wiesel has consistently said that it means to correct injustices, to alleviate suffering, to create hope. Precisely for this reason, the witness/storyteller/writer's work is disheartening. It so rarely accomplishes what it must accomplish.

Wiesel's role as witness so thoroughly governs his role as writer that he must continue to write whether his testimony meets with any response or not.

One must write out of one's own experience, out of one's own identity. One must cater to no one; one must remain truthful. If one is read, it's good; if one is not read, it's too bad. But that should not influence the writer. [23]

And, most important, the witness' work as writer demands that he write as a moral man. The literary artist can no longer be excused if he writes one way and lives another. Life and story must blend in ethical harmony. The writer is bound in a moral commitment by the very tale he tells. The making and reading of literature is no frivolous business.

True writers want to tell the story simply because they believe they can do something with it — their lives are not fruitless and are not spent in vain. True listeners want to listen to stories to enrich their own lives and to understand them.

Actually, I believe that today literature has changed its purpose and its dimension. Once upon a time it was possible to write l'art pour l'art, art for art's sake. People were looking only for beauty. Now we know that beauty without an ethical dimension cannot exist. We have seen what they did with culture in Germany during the war; what they called culture did not have any ethical purpose or motivation. I believe in the ethical thrust, in the ethical function, in the human adventure in science or in culture or in writing. [24]

The witness begins with his testimony.   ~Elie Wiesel, Memoirs

Poetry: A Privileged Means

In Dickinson, poetry becomes a privileged means for telling the truth about trauma and, therefore, for integrating traumatic experience into the self. Or to put it in the words of Wallace Stevens, poetry is "a violence from within that protects us from violence from without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality."^xi

“It happens that over time, even the most beautiful bowl, even the most finely tuned satellite dish get mucky. We get coated, as it were, with our own personal history, fears and beliefs, especially negative ones.  Our personal stories, our opinions about things, our staunch positions, also serve to coat over the message we are here to transmit.  All of this is totally normal, but, ultimately our personal overlay can occlude our purpose, and then, as Abraham Joshua Heschel said, we become messengers who have forgotten  their message. ”

  It is the extensive sympathy of the human heart…

To Prove Him With Hard Questions…

And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions. And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones: and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart. --I Kings 10.1-3

"To prove him with hard questions" : answerability in Hopkins' writings.(Gerard Manley Hopkins)(Critical Essay)   ~Lesley Higgins, Victorian Poetry

     Some interrogatives are forensic, designed to elicit afresh a pre-confirmed truth; others function as "a forestall of the thing" someone else will ask.4 Some effect a dialectical process that leads to further insight; others betray a "fretty" doubt, abjectly seeking an "answering voice"[5] that never replies… A critic such as Robert Lowell could consider the interrogative habit as a substantial part of Hopkins' "dramatic" writing; Rachel Salmon could cite its contribution to the "eccentricity, even the rambunctiousness, of Hopkins's language."[7] I would suggest that question s reconfirm in his writings the materiality of language, drawing "attention to its physical features"[8] and reminding us that meaning is made through the graphic dimensions of the text (a visual / cognitive experience) and its physical I sensuous dimensions, both oral and aural. Questions are acts of summoning and, in Hopkins' terms, bidding: "I mean the art or virtue of saying everything right to or at the hearer, interesting him, holding him in the attitude of correspondent or addressed or at least concerned, making it everywhere an act of intercourse-and of discarding everything that does not bid, does not tell."[9] The letter to Robert Bridges just quoted refers to bidding as "such a fugitive thing" (Letters I, p. 160).

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe

That all in the end shall be well,

But first of all, remember,

So the Sacred Books foretell,

The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense

If today were that moment of silence…W.H. Auden, Under Sirius

Sacred Grounding

When we decide to read a poem (it is an act of the will), it is like entering sacred ground where the Holy can happen. When we read poetry, we create our own oratory of the heart and mind where both the poet and the reader engage in holy dialogue.'  ~ Robert Waldron's essay on Jessica Powers

In the final analysis, spirituality contains two essential ingredients, relationship and revelation. Spirituality is about God's decision to establish a relationship with humankind through creation, covenant and, for us as Christians, through the paschal mystery - the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Through the gift of the Holy Spirit we are all called to holiness and to intimacy with God and union among ourselves. To understand the nature of friendship, its intimacy, duties and commitment is to understand the essence of spirituality.
This article first appeared as "The Spirituality of Jessica Powers, " by Rev. Robert Morneau, D.D., Spiritual Life, Vol 36, No 3, Fall 1990, pp. 150-161.

Melchizedek

The name Melchizedek means King of Righteousness. Genesis 14:18; ‘Melchizedek, King of Salem (Jerusalem) brought out bread and wine…

  A year ago a small picture of a French country table caught my eye at the thrift store.  It is a picture that I have received as a gift from God; and, as such, I have continued to study its meanings.  To finally understand ‘the wine seal’ on the wall is a relief.  The ‘gifts’ of ‘bread and wine’ were ‘given’ from the ‘beginning’ of God choosing to be in ‘covenant’.  It brings to mind a song I once heard: “God and man at table have sat down…” is all I remember.  The discovery of the picture and now learning more about the gifts from Melchizedek have solidified my understanding about the gift of ‘haecceitas’ of don Scotus and Hopkins.  They were both ‘priests after the order of Melchizedek.’

Returning to the Ripple

     ...My tryst with Hopkins is much different even from its beginnings.  I had only written several poems two of which were ‘brutal’ to me at the time.  The first remains unfinished inside me.  Of the second I remember only its final line.  After my own ‘burning’ of my writings and paintings in the trash bin my writing became merely copying parts of what I was reading into a personal diary-journal.

                      "O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
                        Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
                        May who ne'er hung there.”

                       ~ Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ; No Worst, There is None

     The original impetus was not the poem itself but its appearance after a tragedy, much as the sinking of the Deutschland was for Hopkins.  A divine spark of an eagle and the comforting mantle of a friend planted me squarely upon the ‘North Face’.  From those cold polar heights through the broiling mists I too have witnessed the…”“The Wreck of the Deutschland,” “like a great dragon,” he wrote, “folded in the gate to forbid all entrance.”

---

The Interrupted Concert

                            By Federico García Lorca   Translated By W. S. Merwin

                                           The frozen sleepy pause

                                           of the half moon

                                           has broken the harmony

                                           of the deep night.

*Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.*  Henry Van Dyke
I can have dreams? Really?  Me?  I am trying desperately to listen, to keep my mind focused...Instead, I feel a ripple in the underwater; a crocodile entering a swamp or some mysterious creature waiting to destroy.  The image....morning sunlight touching the dew drops glistening on petals of marigolds and roses...withou a dream we have nothing.  ~Ruth

…to say, “but this is how the world is”.   ~ Jennie Erdal, ‘What’s the big idea?’

Skopeji

…As Fike suggests, perhaps the term inscape is a cognate of the Greek verb skopein (to look attentively) or the noun skopos (that upon which one fixes his or her look). ⁷⁰  In any case, the essential point is that Hopkins’ use of inscape implies many of the elements of Ruskinian aesthetics…

…Or seven tied by the rope on the Alps; four go headlong, then the fifth, as strong as Samson, checks them and the two behind do not even feel the strain’).⁶  Did ‘the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?’  Hopkins fancies that the cry of the tall nun may have alerted the other passengers to the reality of their situation (stanza 31), for their time of suffering is, in fact, the moment of their inevitable confrontation with God….he builds on that fancy…~Inspirations Unbidden, Chapter 4, ‘The Cavernous Dark’

   Does that fact negate the importance or the beauty of the writings of such poets as Lorca?   Personally, I do not think so.  We are called to a higher taskmaster than that as artists.  The beauty of a diamond is that it does contain many unfolding facets as it 'reflects' light. Reason and truth however cannot be petulantly discarded for they remain the necessary discipline and banner of all true 'creativity'---that which can continue to give 'hope' and 'life'.

Returning to the ‘Ripple’

   We live in the ‘age of the enchantress’ which has been unfolding for centuries.  More recently I have discovered that many ‘artists’ continue a fatalistic dance with this enchantress.  Many of the English poets such as the Brontë sisters openly admit to a type of ‘channeling.’  Many of the 19^th C. ‘artists’ were in attendance at spiritualist, theosophical salons. 

   It is pronounced in the surrealists.  Lorca confronted it in his study of ‘duende’.  Many of the Spanish artists have continued along this path.  While it continues to morph through its Medusa-like tentacles its source is the enchantress.  While Lorca and his companions followed it as ‘avant-garde’ surrealism, Roberto Bolaño restyles it as ‘magical realism’.  Its ‘amorphous’ shapes and its siren songs bring about many human ecstasies that often elude discernment as Odysseus knew.  The key focus is the 'source'.

  These false ecstatic experiences are antithetical to the work of the Holy Spirit as he continues His work of and in creation.  Duende, however,  is not ‘haecceitas’.  

==============

My topic is Hopkins and contemplation. It is a word we are hearing more and more as we enter the new millennium, but few of us are able to define it. Hopkins himself did so admirably, as we will see.

Contemplation contains a Metaphor of Seeing

First, instead of a definition, I would like to offer a paradigm experience of contemplation, that of Isaiah of Jerusalem, sometimes called First Isaiah: "In the year of King Uzziah's death, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne; his train filled the sanctuary" (Is. 6:1). Not only does Isaiah see the Lord, but he is literally dumb-founded, that is, mute before the vision, managing only to hear the Seraphim stammer out the phrase, "Holy, holy, holy, is Yahweh Sabaoth. Heaven and earth are filled with His glory."

Because contemplation contains a metaphor of seeing, Isaiah's vision is paradigmatic. He sees first into the sacred space of the temple, and then into the whole world filled with God's "glory". If the first moment of this experience, the Temple vision, is the more mystical one, the second moment, the glory of God filling the world, is the more incarnational. Isaiah experiences God both as utterly holy, "set apart", and at the same time hears the angels proclaim that God's kabod or shining presence fills the whole world, streaming out of and beyond the Temple. If contemplation is seeing that the sacred space of the temple is everywhere, the true contemplative, like Isaiah, moves this experience out of the temple, so that the temple becomes the template of the holy in our midst, the sacred that is right in front of us. At the moment of God's greatest transcendence, Isaiah hears of immanence.

Contemplation is the Legacy of Everyone

Being truly contemplative is being able to say like Jacob, "Truly Yahweh is in this place and I did not know! . . This is nothing less than the abode of God, and the gate of heaven" (Gen. 28: 16-17). If the spirituality of our time has learned anything, it is that this vision is not reserved for a Temple elite, that contemplation is the legacy of everyone. The paradox is that the holiness or "set apartness" of God fills up the world, and is to be encountered in the everyday; God's transcendence is immanent.

Contemplaton and Purification

But Isaiah is so overcome by his unworthiness before this vision that one of the seraphim must purify his unclean lips with a live coal. So the second element of the contemplative experience is purification, letting the "unclean" speech of ordinary thought and language be burned away so that one can be a true prophet, a "spokesperson for God." Finally, as the third element or moment of contemplative experience, Isaiah is commissioned; he is sent to the people to ask them to "listen and listen, but never understand" and to "look and look, but never perceive"  (Is. 6: 9).

Contemplation: Seeing the Sacred in the Ordinary

I find something of all three of these elements of Isaiah's contemplative experience in the life and poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins: seeing the sacred in the ordinary, being struck dumb and purified (even to the point of a seven-year silence), and being given the frustrated mission to get others to "look and listen", even if they cannot understand. Hopkins's experience was the contemplative experience of seeing the world's holiness, even in its ordinariness, peculiarity, and irregularity--its "piedness". "The world is charged with the grandeur of God"; "Glory be to God for dappled things." Hopkins was a contemplative, that is, seeking and seeing God, the Holy, in the world and in humans, in all of his life, no matter how opaque or complex or how troubled it became. Even when he came to Ireland, I do not believe he ever stopped being the contemplative he was when finding God's glory filling the whole world in his Welsh years. Only, as the darkness increased, the challenge to that contemplation was greater. Finally, Hopkins took up the prophetic mission in the same way Isaiah did: he shared the vision, often, sadly, like Isaiah, to those who, like his few readers, would listen and listen and not understand, look and look and not perceive….   ~ Maria Lichtman Beroea College, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Contemplative Hero’

A Mother's Love

"The Virgin Compared to the Air"

I say we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air; the same
Is Mary. . . .
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence.

…

. He describes her as a maternal figure who "came to mould (Christ's) limbs like ours" (lines 104-5) as well as stating that "her hand leaves his light/ sifted to suit our sight" (lines 112-13).

Worldmothering air, air wild
Wound with thee, in thee isled,
Fold home, fast fold thy child." [lines 124-26]

~Catherine Hay, Mother's love — How Maternal projection is used to explore spirituality in the poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins and Charles Algernon Swinburne

………………….

During his lifetime, Hopkins published few poems. It was only through the efforts of Robert Bridges that his works were seen. Despite Hopkins burning all his poems on entering the Jesuit novitiate, he had already sent some to Bridges who, with a few other friends, was one of the few people to see many of them for some years. After Hopkins's death they were distributed to a wider audience, mostly fellow poets, and in 1918 Bridges, by then poet laureate, published a collected edition.

Notable collections of Hopkins's manuscripts and publications are in Campion Hall, Oxford; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Foley Library at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.

Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit: Cardinal Jean Daniélou, S.J. "A False Interpretation Of Vatican II"

Good Jesuit, Bad Jesuit: Cardinal Jean Daniélou, S.J. "A False Interpretation Of Vatican II"
Excerpt:

Cardinal Jean Daniélou, S.J.

Mimì Santoni, the prostitute, saw Jesuit Cardinal Jean Danielou fall to his knees with his face on the floor before he breathed his last. And to her "it was a good death, for a cardinal." He had gone to bring her money to pay for a lawyer capable of getting her husband out of prison. It was the last of his works of charity carried out in secret, on behalf of despised persons in need of help and forgiveness. The Jesuits conducted exhaustive investigations to discover the truth. They ascertained his innocence.
...The rupture between Daniélou and his other Jesuit confreres in Paris and the rest of France was in effect the true origin of the neglect that fell upon this great theologian and cardinal.  A rupture that preceded his death by at least two years.  Since 1972, in fact, Daniélou had no longer been living in the residence of "Etudes," the leading cultural magazine of the French Jesuits, where he had lived for decades. He had moved to a convent of sisters, the Daughters of the Heart of Mary.  The clash had been precipitated by an interview with Daniélou on Vatican Radio in which he harshly criticized the "decadence" that was devastating so many men's and women's religious orders, because of "a false interpretation of Vatican II."
In 1974, the year of Daniélou's death, Ribes positioned "Etudes" in open disobedience with respect to the teaching of the encyclical "Humanae Vitae" on contraception. And he collaborated with other "progressive" theologians – including the Dominicans Jacques Pohier and Bernard Quelquejeu – in the drafting of the law that in that same year introduced unrestricted abortion in France, with Simone Veil as health minister, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing as president, and Jacques Chirac as prime minister. The following year, 1975, Father Ribes left the helm of "Etudes." And afterward Ribes abandoned the Society of Jesus, and then the Catholic Church...

'Creation Is A Symphony of the Holy Spirit'

`A Strain of Music from a Straw'

Excerpt:   

Pope Benedict XVI has inscribed Hildegard of Bingen (1089-1179) in “the catalogue of saints.” St. Hildegard was an enormously accomplished woman, a German Benedictine mystic and abbess who wrote books of theology, botany and medicine, as well as letters, poems and liturgical songs, and invented her own alphabet and language, Lingua Ignota . She wrote at least seventy musical compositions, including the earliest surviving morality play, Ordo Virtutum. In Great Christian Thinkers: From the Early Church through the Middle Ages (Fortress Press, 2011), the Pope writes:

“For her, the entire creation is a symphony of the Holy Spirit, who is in himself joy and jubilation.”

Hildegard judged herself merely a channel for divine music rather than its composer.....

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Spring

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Spring
Excerpt:
...............
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Queen of the May

A Poem A Day from the George Hail Library ~ Selected by Maria Horvath: Queen of the May
Excerpt:
Since medieval times, in many cultures, the month of May has been devoted to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

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

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

asks the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it....

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Prophet & Exile||GodSpy.com

GodSpy.com
Excerpt:
He was a small, pale, intelligent man beloved for his wit and eccentricities. He had taken an impressive double first at Oxford in Classics, an honor that might have led to a sterling academic career, but his conversion to Catholicism, inspired and encouraged by the famous English convert, John Henry Newman, came at a time when 'crossing the Tiber' was tantamount to treason.