scoil chois claí

That's one Gaelic name for the Irish Hedge Schools of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Raised on Song and Story by Alice Gunther is a keeper post, and I was thinking about blogging it, but my daughter Clare saved me the trouble. Her post said it better than I would have. By coincidence, Liam was just telling me about a conversation he recently had with another member of an American Celtic family, and her memories were much the same as Liam's and Clare's. Different family, different experiences, but something of the same heritage.

Reading Little House in the Big Woods, I was struck anew by how much Laura Ingalls was raised on "song and story" and how rich her life was in lore in spite of the fact that they had only two books in their cabin -- the Bible and a big green book on Natural History.

Songs and stories and lore provide something irreplaceable in a family -- a unique, individual reception of the best things of the past.

I was just reading with Kieron the section in George Washington and His World where it talks about Poland and its revolutionary heroes of the 18th century. When I was reading about Pope John Paul II's youthful days in Poland, a country overrun first by Germans and then by the Soviet Union, it struck me how clear the young Karol Wojtyla and some of his young compatriots were in recognizing that culture -- song, story and in their case drama -- is a remedy for and resistance against the absolutist encroachments of modern governments.

But more proximately, "song and story" build memories and family solidarity. And they impart a rich texture to daily life. And children are naturally receptive to that form of learning from their earliest days... even the youngest members of the family partake. As Alice says, these things become part of who they are.

a good poem, a good friend

Another article on the value of storing beautiful words in one's mind, not just on one's bookshelves. I think it transcends right-wing though, or at least, ought to. HT: Running River Latin School.

As anyone who loves poetry will testify, when you learn a good poem, you make a good friend. You have a voice that will pop up in your head, whenever you want it, and say something beautiful and consoling and true. A poem can keep you going when you are driving on a lonely motorway, or when you are trapped on some freezing ledge in the Alps, or when you are engaged in any kind of arduous and repetitive physical activity, and need to keep concentration. When some disaster overwhelms you, or when you are feeling unusually cheerful – or when you are experiencing any human feeling whatever – it is amazing how often some line or phrase will swim to the surface and help to articulate your emotions, to intensify them or to console.

That is why it is so sad that children are no longer learning poetry off by heart, and doubly sad because poetry is the one art form in which the English are unsurpassed. .... no other nation has ever produced so much high-quality poetry – mainly, I think, because of the language itself.

With half a million words (more than double either French or German), and being an extraordinary confluence of Romance and Teutonic streams, English is uniquely rich in metrical possibilities, in puns, and above all in rhyme. It is the ingenious rhyming and the scanning that makes the poetry stick in the mind, and the tragedy is that these disciplines have been dismissed, over the past few decades, as a bourgeois irrelevance. Children are no longer asked to write stuff that rhymes or scans, and even if they were they would find it tricky, since they no longer have the stock of metrical forms in their heads...

Poetry and Love

On my classical list this link was shared: For the Love of Poetry.

I will never forget my father reciting long passages of poetry with evident delight. I was somewhat jealous because his schooling had included memorization of poetry and my schooling was more of the Gradgrind sort:

"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else."

Inspired by my father's example, I did memorize a few poems, but I suppose the major stock I have in my memory is from some of the beautiful prayers I learned as a Catholic convert, as well as many scriptures that have soaked into my heart through a whole lifetime. The words made a framework. They come to mind when I need them.

I like the point the article on poetry makes:

Is rote memorization of poetry such a valuable enterprise? Holt urges us all to learn a few lines a day. He extols the joys and benefits of poetry rendered out loud: So much of the sense becomes clear as you hear the rhythms, there's a physical pleasure in it, and your memory muscles get a workout, thereby postponing senility. But the truth is, one of poetry's great consolations is the theater of the moment when it first meant something to you. The image of that moment in your life fixes that poem in your mind for the rest of your days.

Think of when you first heard "Across The Universe" by the Beatles or David Bowie's "Ground Control to Major Tom." It's a similar process. And even if you can't remember the exact moment, you remember the mood they induced and the way they illuminated your physical surroundings, the time of life you inhabited. That's the way one absorbs music or poetry or even great ideas organically. Then years later, you recall the person you were when the neural receptors first took on that sudden expansion. That's the most effective, most true, mnemonic device, and it doesn't come again. As Wordsworth wrote, "There was a time when meadow, grove and stream/The earth and every common sight/To me did seem/Apparell'd in celestial light." Nothing like this happens if you sit down to learn the Beatles discography with a deliberate acquisitive purpose later in life.

I'm all for learning poetry by rote. Holt and I both underwent the experience first in our school years--he in the U.S., and I in Britain. That's the right age to memorize, prematurely, as if laying down fine bottles of wine for a later time. At that age you absorb the lines without grasping the meaning because you haven't yet lived or felt the feelings in the poems. I.... But generally speaking, memorizing and reciting out loud opened a space in the consciousness, a kind of foreshadowing that soon found its counterpart in reality.

I like the idea that even an adult can memorize a few lines a day. There is a man called Eldon Quick who visits my oldest son's college every year or so. He started memorizing the Iliad about a quarter century ago in an attempt to improve his memory. He now has several books completely memorized and as a former actor, recites them for audiences.

Over at Real Learning the subject came up of how prisoners of war relied on memorized poetry and scripture to ennoble their plight. In accounts of Vietnam prisoners, it was mentioned that those prisoners who had a mental storehouse of poems and songs were counted as treasure. James Stockdale, Ross Perot's VP pick, wrote:

“The person who came into this experiment with reams of already memorized poetry was the bearer of great gifts.”

Here's some ideas for memorizing poetry; here's a post by Cindy at Dominion Family about memorizing poems as a family; and here's a page called For the Love of Poetry that has some definitions of poetry. I am linking to it particularly because I like this line:

I like the implication that there is a latency in poetry which only manifests itself when "a certain kind of attention" is turned upon it.

Haikus from Last Year

Remember when everyone was doing haikus? Amy's still writing them, and she's still my favorite Catholic mommy haiku-er (some word!). But I found these ones I wrote back then.




-------------------------------

"Two babies flying!"
They leap from youth bed to king
Thrill of transition.

---------------------------------

Our trifling sorrows --
We bear each others' burdens
Pierced with common swords.

--------------------------------

"What's a control freak?"
Not you. Your Highland pride is
Stress- and touch-point, though.
-------------------------

Poetry Friday -- Scottish Battle Songs

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

Welcome to your gory bed

Or to victorie!

Now's the day, and now's the hour:

See the front o' battle lour,

See approach proud Edward's power

Chains and slaverie!

Wha will be a traitor knave?

Wha can fill a coward's grave?

Wha sae base as be a slave?

Let him turn, and fleel

Wha for Scotland's King and Law

Freedom's sword will strongly draw,

Freeman stand, or freeman fa',

Let him follow me!

By Oppression's woes and pains,

By your sons in servile chains,

We will drain our dearest veins

But they shall be free!

Robert Burns Traditional Scottish Songs

Aidan loves to bellow out this one:

Sound the Pibroch

Sound the pibroch loud and high,
From John O'Groats to the Isle o' Skye!
Let a' the Clans their slogan cry
And rise and follow Charlie!

Chorus
Tha tighin fodham, fodham, fodham
Tha tighin fodham, fodham, fodham
Tha tighin fodham, fodham, fodham
To rise and follow Charlie!

And see a small devoted band,
By dark Loch Shiel have ta'en their stand
And proudly vow with heart and hand,
To fight for Royal Charlie!

Chorus

Frae eery hill and every glen,
Are gatherin' fast the loyal men;
They grasp their dirks and shout again,
"Hurrah! for Royal Charlie!"

Chorus

On dark Culloden's field of gore
Hark! hark! they shout, "Claymore! Claymore!"
They bravely fight, what can they more?
They die for Royal Charlie!

Chorus

No more we'll see such deeds again,
Deserted is each Highland glen,
And lonely cairns are o'er the men,
Who fought and died for Charlie!

Chorus

The White Rose blossoms forth again,
Deep in sheltered Highland glens;
And soon we'll hear the cry we ken
Tae rise! And fight for Charlie!

In this spirit check out Freedom! at the Latin-Centered Curriculum. And follow this link to William Wallace.

Out of the Depths

Another quote from Oscar Wilde's De Profundis. This seems to me to be a remarkable description of suffering and depression, especially the wheel image. By the way, you will note that De Profundis is the Latin for Psalm 130, which begins "Out of the depths I cry to You/O Lord, hear my voice!"

. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn, or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass in the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more.

He talks about his temptation to, first, commit suicide, and then to wear his gloom like a purple robe swept around him. Finally he resolved that it was better to keep a cheerful countenance when his friends came to visit him, and try to communicate his real joy in their presence. But the difficulty of the task, moment by moment, is immense.

Far off, like a perfect pearl, one can see the city of God. It is so wonderful that it seems as if a child could reach it in a summer's day. And so a child could. But with me and such as me it is different. One can realise a thing in a single moment, but one loses it in the long hours that follow with leaden feet. It is so difficult to keep 'heights that the soul is competent to gain.' We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time; and how slowly time goes with us who lie in prison I need not tell again, nor of the weariness and despair that creep back into one's cell, and into the cell of one's heart, with such strange insistence that one has, as it were, to garnish and sweep one's house for their coming, as for an unwelcome guest, or a bitter master, or a slave whose slave it is one's chance or choice to be.

And, though at present my friends may find it a hard thing to believe, it is true none the less, that for them living in freedom and idleness and comfort it is more easy to learn the lessons of humility than it is for me, who begin the day by going down on my knees and washing the floor of my cell. For prison life with its endless privations and restrictions makes one rebellious. The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one's heart - hearts are made to be broken - but that it turns one's heart to stone. One sometimes feels that it is only with a front of brass and a lip of scorn that one can get through the day at all. And he who is in a state of rebellion cannot receive grace, to use the phrase of which the Church is so fond - so rightly fond, I dare say - for in life as in art the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and shuts out the airs of heaven.

What he says there about the heart of stone and the broken heart is echoed in The Ballad of Reading Gaol:

And thus we rust Life's iron chain
Degraded and alone:
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God's eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone.

And every human heart that breaks,
In prison-cell or yard,
Is as that broken box that gave
Its treasure to the Lord,
And filled the unclean leper's house
With the scent of costliest nard.

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

And he of the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes,
Waits for the holy hands that took
The Thief to Paradise;
And a broken and a contrite heart
The Lord will not despise.

Non sum dignus

To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.
Is that time dead?lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?

Helas, Oscar Wilde

An article on The Long Conversion of Oscar Wilde begins with this:

"I am not a Catholic; I am simply a violent Papist."

This article, The Vatican Goes Wilde, tells more about the context for this aphorism.

A few months before his death Wilde had travelled to Rome. On Holy Saturday he went to tea at the Hotel de l'Europe and there a man he did not know suddenly came up to him and asked if he would like to see Pope Leo XIII the next day. Wilde, ever the joker, bowed his head and, borrowing a phrase from the Mass, said "Non sum dignus [I am not worthy]". But the man produced a ticket. On Easter Day, Wilde appeared in the front row among the pilgrims at the Vatican and received a blessing from the Pope.

For five months the Irishman had been suffering from a terrible rash - perhaps, biographers have speculated, the late effects of syphilis, eating bad mussels, an allergic reaction to his hair dye or vitamin deficiency dermatitis from overuse of alcohol (he was on a litre of brandy a day, plus copious amounts of absinthe). Whatever, the rash vanished.

Wilde later wrote: "When I saw the old white Pontiff, successor of the Apostles and Father of Christendom pass, carried high above the throng, and in passing turn and bless me where I knelt, I felt my sickness of body and soul fall from me like a worn garment, and I was made whole." But still he hesitated. "My position is curious," he epigrammatised, "I am not a Catholic: I am simply a violent Papist."

Like everyone, I had known that Oscar Wilde was convicted in a public trial and went to gaol, but I had not known that it was the Marquess of Queensberry who actually had brought him to court after Wilde sued him unsuccessfully for libel. Queensberry was the one who codified the rules for boxing.

Whatever his prowess in the boxing ring, the athletic Marquess was clearly no match for Wilde in a war of words, so Wilde (against good advice) decided to bring an action for libel against him. Wilde had at the time two hit plays running in London. He had everything to lose — and he lost it. Why, then, did he take the Marquess to court?

Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol after seeing a man hung for murdering his wife:

The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.

Chesterton once wrote:

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.

Of course, he was referring to the "Oscar Wilde" with the +TM mark, the flamboyantly amoral aesthete, not the interior individual. And he was making a point about gratitude and what true appreciation for beauty requires of the person, not proposing a pay-for-goods transaction. On another occasion, GKC made a distinction between the public figure of Wilde and the real thinker and man and artist behind the persona.

About Oscar Wilde, as about other wits, Disraeli or Bernard Shaw, men wage a war of words, some calling him a great artist and others a mere charlatan. But this controversy misses the really extraordinary thing about Wilde: the thing that appears rather in the plays than the poems. He was a great artist. He also was really a charlatan. I mean by a charlatan one sufficiently dignified to despise the tricks that he employs.

and later:

One might go through his swift and sparkling plays with a red and blue pencil marking two kinds of epigrams; the real epigram which he wrote to please his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote to thrill the very tamest part of our tame civilization. This is what I mean by saying that he was strictly a charlatan - among other things. He descended below himself to be on top of others. He became purposely stupider than Oscar Wilde that he might seem cleverer than the nearest curate.

Last summer, Clare and Liam and I did an impromptu reading of a scene in Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest. We had so much fun reading the parts together. I was Jack, if you want to know. But I did notice the red-pencil versus blue-pencil sorts of clevernesses. As a family, we seem to find ourselves amused even by his merely facile turns of phrase, which seem to me to be a restless impatience with conventionality, like a boy who has to ask the teacher difficult questions just to annoy her and cause a stir. You can sympathize a bit even while you get irritated by the wasted time and effort. You can sense the desire to turn things over and pull them apart in order to get at the real things behind them.

I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.

I think one of the best things about Wilde as a person and probably as an artist is that he probably knew as well as anyone the difference between his charlatan side and his truthful side. That's probably one of the best things that could be said of anyone, actually.

From his De Profundis:

It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

He also wrote:

Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their Gnomic aphorisms, 'Even the Gods cannot alter the past.' Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing he could do.

Poetry and-- Pandemonium & Paradise

An absolutely wonderful farewell post from Cindy at Dominion Family --I will sure miss her online presence, as her blog is the first one I ever read and still one of my favorites! God bless you and keep you, Cindy!

She writes:

In the end, it was not the evil things on the Internet, not even the arguments and negativity, but rather the good things that bogged me down. So many, many good things. Pictures of decorated houses, libraries, recipes, book suggestions (this alone has been enough to almost drown me), crafts, knitting, aprons, sewing, frugality, weather, poetry, audio files, friends, homeschooling suggestions, music and the ideas, the wonderful, wonderful ideas.....

I would love to write another story about that beautiful evil Pandora. In my story, she would release a box full of a million good things leaving restraint in the box.

So the last message of this blog is what it has always been. Less is better. Little things done daily are better than grand plans. Give your children lots of tiny moments. When they approach the computer turn your chair around and look them in the eye and if you find more in their eyes than on the screen get up and take them on a nature walk or read a book to them. Pandemonium will still be there when you return.

That is a really good message, and one that I am pondering as Lent begins this coming Wednesday.

Pope Pius XI says in Divini Illius Magistri:

"(they)perhaps would have found the necessary, had they not gone in search of the superfluous."

He is talking about education but perhaps some of it applies to how I use my own time too. I have been thinking about that a lot recently.

Anyway, for this Lent I'm trying to cut back on internet time, and that means blogging too. I'm not resolving to cut down to zero but I am cutting back. I am thinking about Cindy's words about giving my children lots of tiny moments. I want to do more of that during this time off preparation for Easter.

The other thing I am giving up is afternoon naps. Oh, the awfulness of that! 3 pm and 3 am have to be the most dreadful hours of the day. I suppose that it is a breath of Good Friday every day. I thought maybe I could use that blank horrible time in the afternoon, when all I want to do is doze a bit, to ...well, to think about all the people who would like to get enough sleep but can't right now, or who have too much time on their hands and not enough resources to fill it; and so on. You probably know who you are. I know that a couple of you in the former category read my blog sometimes, probably to help overcome that insomnia -- : - )

Whereto with speedy words th' Arch-fiend reply'd.
Fall'n Cherube, to be weak is miserable
Doing or Suffering: but of this be sure,
To do ought good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
As being the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist. If then his Providence
out of our evil seek to bring forth good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil.
Paradise Lost

Truth and Transformation

Some etymology that I have been reflecting upon:

First, etymology itself -- from etymos, truth, and logos, word. How beautiful! JRR Tolkien was very interested in etymologies, He was a philologist, and that word Philology means something like "one who loves and studies words."

Now, culture -- root is cultura, stemming from colere, to cultivate. The word is very close in origin to the word for worship, as Josef Pieper points out.

This one is in my mind because of Amy's post at Epiphany Springs on Mother Culture. She raises questions I have often pondered upon but have not come to a conclusion about even with a box of chocolates in the offing. But that "cultivating" aspect of the word makes me think.... cultivating involves growth and this is not the same as just relaxing and sitting back. In fact, it is almost the opposite.

So then as to worship. That one originates from the Anglo Saxon word "worth" or "value" or dignity or price... the corresponding Latin word is ""cultus". Hmm.... that is interesting!

Then, here is a tricky one -- obedience. It is very often misunderstood, because our society is set up as individualistic and obedience is thought of as the compelled behavior of an inferior. But when I was reading the Catholic Catechism I found that the etymology is from "audire" meaning to hear or hearken to. Here is Proverbs 22:17, in the same vein:

Incline thy ear, and hear the words of the wise: and apply thy heart to my knowledge.

In this respect, it can be the highest of human acts. There is something intrinsic to me, in that connection between listening -- hearkening -- and "logos" -- word, or reason. You have to listen in order to hear words. And the obedience bit is where one's will comes in; will implies voluntariness, as Charlotte Mason says:

let him (the child) know what a noble thing it is to be able to make himself do, in a minute, and brightly, the very thing he would rather not do.

And what about Epiphany? The word comes from a Greek one meaning "manifestation". We just celebrated the feast of Epiphany of course.

The Wise Men or Magi who brought gifts to the infant Jesus were the first Gentiles to acknowledge Jesus as "King" and so were the first to "show" or "reveal" Jesus to a wider world as the incarnate Christ. This act of worship by the Magi, which corresponded to Simeon’s blessing that this child Jesus would be "a light for revelation to the Gentiles" (Luke 2:32), was one of the first indications that Jesus came for all people, of all nations, of all races, and that the work of God in the world would not be limited to only a few.

In a story, it is the moment when a truth is revealed and a character reaches a turning point, and you know everything is changed -- he or she can never be the same again.

What does all this have in common? Well, isn't it obvious -- it is all about word origins : ). But there is a bit more to it than that, I believe. Gilbert Meilander wrote about Josef Pieper's main concerns in these words:

Pieper emphasizes the close connection between moral and intellectual virtue. Our minds do not–contrary to many views currently popular–create truth. Rather, they must be conformed to the truth of things given in creation. And such conformity is possible only as the moral virtues become deeply embedded in our character, a slow and halting process. We have, he writes on one occasion, "lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity." That is, in order to know the truth we must become persons of a certain sort. The full transformation of character that we need will, in fact, finally require the virtues of faith, hope, and love. And this transformation will not necessarily–perhaps not often–be experienced by us as easy or painless. Hence the transformation of self that we must–by God’s grace–undergo "perhaps resembles passing through something akin to dying."

Will you believe that I did not find that quote until just now when I was looking for something else? But it ties together those word origins very nicely. I am talking about transformation and realization. It is so easy to stay within one's comfort zone.

I have just finished Auralia's Colors, a very interesting book that I got from the library. It is in the style of Patricia McKillip, with that feeling of intense dreaming that you get from one of her stories, but with a bit of Tolkien and Lewis as well. I came across the book from the author's site by way of Iambic Admonit's review of the Golden Compass movie. It is about a baby found in a monster's footprint. That pulled me in right away.

The author of the book, Jeffrey Overstreet has a quote on his blog --The Truth must dazzle gradually-- from Emily Dickinson's poem:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Poetry Friday: Serenade at the Villa

Oh, my poor neglected blog! How long it has been since I typed regularly here!

I was going to post Eugene Field's poem Little Boy Blue for Poetry Friday today -- and then I found that Nissa had already posted the very same poem on the very same day. Anyway, that gave me an excuse to browse through her nice blog, Simple Gifts.

So for Poetry Friday:

Serenade at the Villa -- by Robert Browning---

THAT was I, you heard last night,
When there rose no moon at all,
Nor, to pierce the strained and tight
Tent of heaven, a planet small:
Life was dead and so was light.

II.

Not a twinkle from the fly,
Not a glimmer from the worm;
When the crickets stopped their cry,
When the owls forbore a term,
You heard music; that was I.

III.

Earth turned in her sleep with pain,
Sultrily suspired for proof:
In at heaven and out again,
Lightning!—where it broke the roof,
Bloodlike, some few drops of rain.

IV.

What they could my words expressed,
O my love, my all, my one!
Singing helped the verses best,
And when singing’s best was done,
To my lute I left the rest.

V.

So wore night; the East was gray,
White the broad-faced hemlock-flowers:
There would be another day;
Ere its first of heavy hours
Found me, I had passed away.

VI.

What became of all the hopes,
Words and song and lute as well?
Say, this struck you—“When life gropes
Feebly for the path where fell
Light last on the evening slopes,

VII.

“One friend in that path shall be,
To secure my step from wrong;
One to count night day for me,
Patient through the watches long,
Serving most with none to see.”

VIII.

Never say—as something bodes—
“So, the worst has yet a worse!
When life halts ’neath double loads,
Better the taskmaster’s curse
Than such music on the roads!

IX.

“When no moon succeeds the sun,
Nor can pierce the midnight’s tent
Any star, the smallest one,
While some drops, where lightning rent,
Show the final storm begun—

X.

“When the fire-fly hides its spot,
When the garden-voices fail
In the darkness thick and hot,—
Shall another voice avail,
That shape be where these are not?

XI.

“Has some plague a longer lease,
Proffering its help uncouth?
Can’t one even die in peace?
As one shuts one’s eyes on youth,
Is that face the last one sees?”

XII.

Oh how dark your villa was,
Windows fast and obdurate!
How the garden grudged me grass
Where I stood—the iron gate
Ground its teeth to let me pass!

Poetry Friday: October Winds (Or a Ballad, anyway)

The October winds lament around
the castle of Dromore.
Yet peace is in her lofty halls,
my loving treasure store.
Though autumn leaves may droop and die,
a bud of spring are you.

Chorus:
Sing hush-a-bye loo, la loo, lo-lan,
Sing hush-a-bye loo-la-loo.

Bring no ill-wind to hinder us,
my helpless babe and me,
Dread spirits of the Blackwater,
Clan Owen's wild banshee,
And Holy Mary pitying us
in heaven for grace does sue.

Chorus:
Sing hush-a-bye loo, la loo, lo-lan,
Sing hush-a-bye loo-la-loo.


Take time to thrive, my ray of hope,
in the garden of Dromore,
Take heed, young eaglet, till thy wings
are feathered fit to soar.
A little rest and then the world
is full of work to do.

Chorus:
Sing hush-a-bye loo, la loo, lo-lan,
Sing hush-a-bye loo-la-loo.

Poetry Friday: They Also Serve...

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

I found this line in one of my old day timers. From the date, I'd guess I was probably in the hospital with Aidan at the time. Anyway, here's the whole thing -- it is by John Milton:

On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

And that one Talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest He returning chide,

"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need

Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,

And post o'er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait."

Poetry Friday: Broken Love

I started this yesterday, but got called away, so Poetry Friday is a day late.

Here is a stanza by William Blake, which I first read in a book by Charles Williams called All Hallows Eve:

`And throughout all Eternity
I forgive you, you forgive me.
As our dear Redeemer said:
"This the Wine, and this the Bread."'

The whole poem is called Broken Love and though I've read it over and over, I can't figure out what it means. Still, it's that strangeness that makes you feel that if you just turned around quickly enough, the thing you glimpsed out of the corner of your eye would be seen clearly if only for an instant. I imagine that this is the territory he tried to depict.

Further, it seems that the world you glimpse out of the corner of your eye isn't exactly the world you actually live in.... it's just a bit out of kilter, a bit fey. I get that same feeling from reading George MacDonald's Phantastes, and from Charles Williams.

Wordsworth said of Blake:

There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott."

There is a bit more about William Blake here. This is the beginning of the poem:

MY Spectre around me night and day
Like a wild beast guards my way;
My Emanation far within
Weeps incessantly for my sin.

‘A fathomless and boundless deep,
There we wander, there we weep;
On the hungry craving wind
My Spectre follows thee behind.

‘He scents thy footsteps in the snow
Wheresoever thou dost go,
Thro’ the wintry hail and rain.
When wilt thou return again?

Reminds me a bit of Wuthering Heights, too.

But there's something resonant about that "I forgive you, you forgive me" ..... something that sums up a quality of the wounded yet enduring element in human love, that partakes of the divine.

Poetry Friday

And behold while I sang... but O Thou who didst grant me that day,
And before it not seldom hast granted thy help to essay,
Carry on and complete an adventure,---my shield and my sword
In that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was my word,---
Still be with me, who then at the summit of human endeavour
And scaling the highest, man's thought could, gazed hopeless as ever
On the new stretch of heaven above me---till, mighty to save,
Just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance---God's throne from man's grave!
Let me tell out my tale to its ending---my voice to my heart
Which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night I took part,
As this morning I gather the fragments, alone with my sheep,
And still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep!
For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves
The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron retrieves
Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine.

Robert Browning, Saul

It is Impossible to Say Just What I Mean

Goodbye, Poetry Month!

To usher out the month --
-- Love Song of Alfred Prufrock is one of my favorite poems of all time. I was just rereading it in the car today. My husband needed a root canal so I coming with him so I could drive him back (it is a 50 mile trip).

The poem is too long to paste on here in its entirety. My father loved this part and used to declaim it often:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

He also liked this one:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

So when I read Prufrock in college I felt I already knew the poem a bit from this childhood association. I have read the poem many times since then; each time getting something different out of it. Even the ellipses and pauses speak, elegiacally.

Today I particularly noticed this part -- I didn't remember when I quoted Eliot in my post about Hamlet that he actually mentions Hamlet in this poem:

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
. . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

The Wine-Dark Sea has a quote from an article about TS Eliot (the whole thing is here) :

Think of the world as divided between things easily labelled and things just barely describable. Civilians work with the easily labelled things, but when something just barely describable confronts us, we call in the language marines: poets. But then, out beyond that, there’s Eliot and the type of poetry he represents. It’s another step beyond. It agrees that special tactics need to be applied to the nearly-unspeakable. Eliot argued that, given the way the twentieth century was turning out, “it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it appears at present, must be difficult.” Why?

Because in a complex world, “the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.”

Gilbert --- & Sullivan, and Chesterton!

This Gilbert and Sullivan ditty has been running through my head all day thanks to my kids:

I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse

With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotepotenuse

It goes on, and on!


The students at my oldest son's college just put on an in-college production of Pirates of Penzance last week. We didn't get to see it, but my ds said someone was filming... so we are hoping that we will get to see the DVD version at least. My daughter got to see a couple of the rehearsals when she was visiting there last month.

I thought maybe Chesterton would have had something to say about Gilbert and Sullivan, and indeed, I found this Introduction to a critical appreciation of the Savoy Opera pair. A quote:

And then the odd thing happened that was like a lucky coincidence in a farce or a magic gift in a fairy tale. As it stood, his satire was really much too intelligent to be intelligible. It is doubtful whether by itself it would ever have been completely popular. Something came to his aid which is much more popular than the love of satire: the profound and popular love of song. A genius in another school of art crossed his path and co-operated in his work; giving wings to his words, and sending them soaring into the sky. Perhaps no other musician except Sullivan would have done it in exactly the right way; would have been in exactly the right degree frivolous and exactly the right degree fastidious. A certain fine unreality had to hang over all the fantasies; there was nothing rowdy, there was nothing in the special sense even rousing about such song, as there is in a serious, patriotic, or revolutionary song, or even drinking song. Everything must be seen in a magic mirror, a little more delicately distorted than the mirror of Shalott; there must be no looking out directly upon passing events. The satiric figures were typical but not topical. All that precise degree of levity and distance from reality seemed to be expressed, as nothing else could express it, in the very notes of the music; almost, one might say, in the note of the laughter that followed it. And it may be that in the remote future that laughter will still be heard, when all the voices of that age are silent.

Imagination and Joy

Exaggeration

We overstate the ills of life, and take
Imagination (given us to bring down
The choirs of singing angels overshone
By God's clear glory) down our earth to rake
The dismal snows instead, flake following flake,
To cover all the corn; we walk upon
The shadow of hills across a level thrown,
And pant like climbers: near the alder brake
We sigh so loud, the nightingale within
Refuses to sing loud, as else she would.
O brothers, let us leave the shame and sin
Of taking vainly, in a plaintive mood,
The holy name of Grief! - holy herein
That by the grief of One came all our good.

--Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Amyable mentions in her new blog that there is a Carnival of Joy being hosted by Angela at Three Plus Two. I thought this poem fits in a bit with the idea of finding joy.

Here are a couple of earlier posts from this blog about joy:
When the Rain Falls
Joy Is Something You Decide to Do

April is for Poetry

My Learning Goal for this month will be about Poetry. This was an easy call, since April seems to be National Poetry Month. HT: Mental Multivitamin.

This one will be fun!

Robert Southwell: Rhythms of Life

My oldest son and I discovered Robert Southwell when my son was reading about him in high school. In Saint Robert Southwell -- Jesuit Saint by Fr John Hardon, it says that his feast day is February 21. One of his most famous poems is said to have been used by Shakespeare in MacBeth.

I found this letter written by Southwell to his friend Thomas Howard, who apparently was executed in 1572; Southwell was executed in 1595 after much misuse and torture, for being a Catholic priest in the Elizabethan reign. It was in the book Living Water; the style is so beautiful. It was written in 1591.

There is in this world a continual interchange of pleasing and affecting accidents, still keeping their succession of time, and overtaking each other in their several courses. No picture can be all drawn of the brightest colours, nor a harmony consorted only of trebles; shadows are needful in expressing of proportions, and the bass is a principal part in perfect music: the condition of our exile here alloweth no unmingled joy; our whole life is tempered between sweet and sour, and we must all look for a mixture of both. The wise so wist, prepared both for the better and the worse; accepting the one, if it come, with liking, and bearing the other without impatience, being so much masters of every turn of fortune, that none shall work them to excess. The dwarf groweth not on the highest hill, nor doth the tall man lose his height in the lowest valley. And as a base mind, though most at ease, will be dejected, so a resolute virtue is most impregnable in the deepest distress.

They evermore most perfectly enjoy their comforts, who least fear their contraries; for a desire to enjoy carrieth with it a fear to lose, and both desire and fear are enemies to quiet possession, making men less owners of God's benefits, than tenants at His will. The cause of our troubles is, that our misfortunes happen, either to unwitting or unwilling minds. Foresight preventeth the one, necessity the other; for he taketh away the smart of the present evils that attendeth their coming, and is not dismayed by any cross, that is armed against all.

Where necessity worketh without our consent, the effect should never greatly afflict us; grief being bootless where it cannot help; needless where there was no fault. God casteth the dice, and giveth us our chance; the most that we can do is to take the point that the cast will afford us, not grudging so much that it is no better, as comforting ourselves that it is no worse. If men were to lay all their evils together, to be afterwards divided by equal portions amonst them, most men would rather take what they brought than stand to the division; yet such is the partial judgement of self-love, that every man judgeth his self-misery too great, fearing he shall find some circumstance to increase it and make it intolerable: thus by thought he aggravates the evil.

When Moses threw his rod from him it became a serpent, ready to sting, and affrighted him so much as to make him fly; but being quietly taken up, it was a rod again, serviceable for his use and no way hurtful. The cross of Christ and the rod of every tribulation, seemeth to threaten stinging and terror to those who shun and eschew it, but they that mildly take it up and embrace it with patience may say with David, thy rod and thy staff have been my comfort. In this, affliction resembleth the crocodile; fly, it pursueth and frighteth; follow, it flieth and feareth; a shame to the constant, a tyrant to the timorous.

Hold not your eyes always upon your hardest haps; there are fairer parts in your body than scars. Let God strip you to the skin, yea to the soul, so He stay with you Himself: let His reproach be your honour, His poverty your riches, and He is lieu of all other friends. Think Him enough for this world that must be your possession for a whole eternity.

When I was looking on the web I found Maureen Wittman's website with a unit on Robert Southwell. ... and also some timeline forms and advice; in PDF form. What I was looking for was the published unit study on Robert Southwell and his times which my son used in high school, but I can't seem to find a link to that online.