Waugh on Wodehouse

something to the effect that the Jeeves & Wooster novels "will release future generations from a captivity that may be more irksome than our own" ...

Hello all

Nothing much to report. It rains in Boston.

More later!

Heaven

The blue heaven, the wide heaven. The wild heaven, and the heaven of postcards. The rays of sun spilling forth from an evangelical heaven. Penelope's smile, Serena's slippers.

Heaven in the active valley, heaven on the passive mountaintops. Then there was Karen, and the girl that looked like Karen, her sister perhaps. Sixteen parcels of heaven. There was a robin who spoke to Robyn. A spacious heaven, a farmhouse heaven. And Cynthia's baseball cap. And energy, and winter, and purple petals, rose-petals, petals from the spotted lily. Heaven strewn like petals among the glossy magazines.

The frantic precision of commercial heaven. And the voice of beatitude, impinging upon our affairs, restoring prelapsarian purity. It is the first morning of the world, like a dazed flower breathing softly into the night.

Here we have heaven and an accidental psalm. Here we have heaven and October memories. The bumblebees, the lecture-hall, the celestial voice saying "Hey!" Behold, the abstract heaven of the fine arts gallery!

The heaven of laughter is a most acceptable heaven. The heaven of tears is a most acceptable heaven.

The heaven of poets with their particolored stanzas, their kinetic rhymes, their unassuming amphibrachs! And the heaven of painters, their symphonic colors composing a heaven, a polychromatic song, a hinting picture, an opus of heaven.

The heaven of silence and pine-trees. The heaven of starlight. The heaven of Kimberly, Tracy, Aisha, the heaven of peaceful names. The heaven of Kobayashi and his dewdrops, his autumn wind. The heaven of Forest Hills.  The heaven of Petrarch, of Laura, of the sonnets of centuries past.

Archbishop Sheen

God does not love us because we are valuable. We are valuable because God loves us.

[bibliographical information not at hand]

Memorandum

to a confrère

Accent grave on père.

Wooster

Bertram Wooster
via P. G. Wodehouse's Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves

Aberdeen terriers, possibly owing to their heavy eyebrows, always seem to look at you as if they were in the pulpit of the church of some particularly strict Scottish sect and you were a parishioner of dubious reputation sitting in the front row of the stalls.

Churchill

Winston Spencer Churchill
via Andrew Sullivan

I've taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.

Dante

Dante
Inferno, xxi, 139

ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta

News

Also from the Herald

Lutheran parish gathers and heals after poisonings and an apparent suicide.

Old Man

More on the Old Man

Campers heard a loud rumble. Story from the Boston Herald.

Psalm 70

Psalm 70. Deus, in adjutorium.

1928 BCP version :

HASTE thee, O God, to deliver me; * make haste to help me, O LORD.

2 Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul; * let them be turned backward and put to confusion that wish me evil.

3 Let them for their reward be soon brought to shame, * that cry over me, There! there!

4 But let all those that seek thee be joyful and glad in thee: * and let all such as delight in thy salvation say alway, The Lord be praised.

5 As for me, I am poor and in misery: * haste thee unto me, O God.

6 Thou art my helper, and my redeemer: * O LORD, make no long tarrying.

+ + + + + + +

King James Version :

1: Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O LORD.

2: Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward, and put to confusion, that desire my hurt.

3: Let them be turned back for a reward of their shame that say, Aha, aha.

4: Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: and let such as love thy salvation say continually, Let God be magnified.

5: But I am poor and needy: make haste unto me, O God: thou art my help and my deliverer; O LORD, make no tarrying.

Inferno test

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Fifth Level of Hell!

And that's just about all you need to know. After that quiz, I need a little heaven! See the George Herbert poem below.

George Herbert

Heaven
by George Herbert (1593-1633)

O Who will show me those delights on high?
      Echo.       I.
Thou Echo, thou art mortal, all men know.
      Echo.       No.
Wert thou not born among the trees and leaves?
      Echo.       Leaves.
And are there any leaves, that still abide?
      Echo.       Bide.
What leaves are they? impart the matter wholly.
      Echo.       Holy.
Are holy leaves the Echo then of blisse?
      Echo.       Yes.
Then tell me, what is that supreme delight?
      Echo.       Light.
Light to the minde: what shall the will enjoy?
      Echo.       Joy.
But are there cares and businesse with the pleasure?
      Echo.       Leisure.
Light, joy, and leisure; but shall they persever?
      Echo.       Ever.

As long as

As long as they don't replace him

with something called "The New Man of the Mountain."

Why is it

that we often hear people speak of a disconnect but we never hear them speak of a connect?

Old Man no more

Franconia, New Hampshire

The Old Man in the Mountain collapsed last night.

Story from the Union-Leader (LRR, just age and zip).

Vancouver

A few confessions ago, the confessor (an exuberant Italian septuagenarian, around whom it is impossible to be tristful) paraphrased to me the verse about Our Lord dying that we might have life & have it more abundantly, and about God wanting us to be happy, & caring for us, & wanting us never to lose the promise of joy in the midst of sorrows, etc. To myself, I said, "I'll take his word for it." He was obviously "telling the truth," because Fr V doesn't lie, but it was a truth that I've not really quite discovered yet. As if he were to tell me that summers are pleasantly cool in Vancouver, and rarely if ever sweltering. To continue with that : It's as if I've spent the last 11.5 years (back in the church) hearing about the weather in Vancouver, but never actually being IN Vancouver.

The Apostles' Creed

as given in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer
of the Episcopal Church

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord: Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary: Suffered under Pontius Pilate, Was crucified, dead, and buried: He descended into hell; The third day he rose again from the dead: He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty: From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost: The holy Catholic Church; The Communion of Saints: The Forgiveness of sins: The Resurrection of the body: And the Life everlasting. Amen.

A while ago

when the Curt Jester and his readers were taking a look at politically correct literary classics, did we overlook Charlotte Brontë's environmentalist classic Clean Eyre?

Splendor paternæ gloriæ

The hymn by St Ambrose. Am noting especially the lines :

Laeti bibamus sobriam
Ebrietatem Spiritus.

Haiku

Accounting for each
idle word ... the verse shocks us
into brief silence.

Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The May Magnificat at Bartleby.com

Bishop Sheen

Archbishop Fulton Sheen
from Treasure in Clay (Doubleday, 1980)

On a train trip from New York to Boston, I sat next to an Episcopalian clergyman. We began a friendly discussion on the validity of Anglican Orders. He contended he was a priest as much as I was, that he could offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and that he could forgive sins. He was well versed in history and in theology and our discussion proved to be so interesting that many passengers gathered around us to listen to the friendly debate. He got off the train at Providence. He advanced several steps, then turned around and, facing the audience which we both enjoyed, thought he would give me the last telling challenge by saying, "Remember, Bishop Sheen, I can do anything you can do." I just had time to answer : "No, you can't. I can kiss your wife, but you can't kiss mine."

op. cit., p. 300

Who's cooler?

Who's cooler?
Or are they equal? Or "haven't a clue ..."?

Pat Benatar or Debbie Harry?
Bruce Springsteen or John Mellencamp?
John Keats or Percy Bysshe Shelley?
Fr Benedict J. Groeschel or Fr Richard John Neuhaus?
Bishop Bruskewitz or Archbishop Chaput?
Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell?
Marlon Brando or Jack Lemmon?
Calvin Coolidge or Gerald Ford?
John Major or Tony Blair?
Wittgenstein or Husserl?
Brandy or J. Lo?
The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller's Day Off?
Audrey Hepburn or Katharine Hepburn?

Two? Too, too ... two!

The 2,222nd comment at dylanblogs (error503 and this one combined) belongs to William Luse.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen
from his autobiography Treasure in Clay

In the early days when I was on national radio, a man came into St. Patrick's Cathedral one Monday morning and, not recognizing me, said : "Father, I want to go to Confession. I commute from Westchester every day. I had three friends with me -- all Protestants. I became very angry and spoke most disparagingly and bitterly of that young priest that is on radio, Dr. Fulton Sheen. I just cannot stand him. He drives me crazy. I am afraid that I probably scandalized those men by the way I talked about a priest. So, will you hear my confession? I said : "My good man, I don't think you committed a serious sin. There are moments in my life when I share exactly the same opinion about Dr. Sheen that you do. Go to communion and reserve your confession for another day." He left very happily, saying : "It certainly is wonderful to meet a nice priest like you."

op. cit. (Doubleday & Company, 1980), p. 298

It is possible

that things at more last than star may begin to move at a slower pace. Today seems to have been comparatively normal by the standards of the last half-year, but I begin to think that maybe one or two posts a day here might be more fitting, as it will enable more time for other pursuits (both the enticingly creative and the urgently necessary) and more time for the mind to sit in silence.

I don't like to skip days, have days of zero posting, but on a couple of days in the immediate past I came quite close to keeping silence. It's possible, too, that I'm too much of a blogaholic to stay away for too long -- and should that in itself be taken as an indication that I should stay away for a while?

I've done this before -- pledged to reduce the frequency of bloggings, even attempted to force myself out of it altogether -- but that really didn't work. So this isn't a resignation, or even a firm resolve to cut back. Just a recognition of the possibility that things may begin to move a little slower.

Poem Beginning with a Line by Wallace Stevens

It is the word pejorative that hurts

and the word sibling
that makes us lisp and wince
and the word raspberry that puzzles us
with its absence of rasp
and the word secular which
pertains to centuries
as fleet as milliseconds
in eternity's view --
the word subtle,
a rogue with a sly, furtive glare --
the word vehicular, one
of Deborah's favorites, and the word blithe
like an embarrassing lick on the end
of a leash. And vehement
is spearmint-flavored, unlike government,
and tongues wag like tails
of the unforeseen.

It is the word bowdlerize
that bamboozles, confuses, and throws
us for a loop. It is the word
boycott wearing a two-horned
helmet like a post-modern
Viking. It is the word memento
which news-anchors mispronounce,
and the word Kennebunkport
over which Mom always stumbles.

Oblivious gets our goat if it's seen
without of. It is averse from
that goes about town
impeccably tailored.
Vouchsafe and deign collide
like clanging thuribles. Hallowed asks for
and receives three syllables.
It is the word silent
that rhymes with
listen.

It is the word barbarian
that causes us to flinch.
It is the word avuncular
that coughs and smokes a pipe.
It is the word hirsute that plays a flute.

It is the word unkempt that sounds
so participial! It is the word
inchoate, cold as March,
that makes us search for April's
burgeonings.

2003-2011

Weather in April

One day above 70 is mildly enticing, especially when dry and with a cooling breeze. A stretch of two days above 70 is purgatory : the sun begins to give us its lobster effect. Three days above 70? Well, fortunately, tomorrow the temperature will drop a bit.

How do I get through the summers? We are in the (to my mind) unpleasant six months of the year now. On April 26th each year, the average daily high in Boston goes above 60. Which means that a sane, moderate, sunny 59 is "below normal" on April 26th ... until October 25th, when the average daily high dips back to 59 again.

Too few nights during summer in the city drop appreciably below 55. Too few mornings are cool. So, from now until -- oh, somewhere between Columbus Day and Halloween -- expect complaints about the weather to be nearly quotidian.

I should have been born in the Hebrides.

The quiet virtuosity, casual preter-perfection, & seemingly insouciant dexterity of Theodore Roethke
or, How did he do it?

How did he come up with these lines which, while never raising their voices, reverberate in the memory with greater potency than the stentors? All of the following lines are from one poem, "A Walk in Late Summer" (Coll Po, p. 143) :

Bring me the meek, for I would know their ways;
I am a connoisseur of midnight eyes.

*

God's in that stone, or I am not a man!

*

A late rose ravages the casual eye,
A blaze of being on a central stem.
It lies upon us to undo the lie
Of living merely in the realm of time.

:: :: :: :: ::

And he has lines in other poems even quieter, and even more memorable than these (which at second glance are not without their flair and flash!). From the famous villanelle, "The Waking" : God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there; from "I Knew a Woman ... " : She moved in circles, and those circles moved.

I value the poetry of Dylan Thomas, of Hart Crane, of Wallace Stevens, for their daring and (one might say, without derogation) their obvious renovations of the pentameter, their risking a radical estrangement from lucidity in the service of avoiding the trite, the hackneyed, the second-hand. But if we want a lower-key renovation, an uninsistent splendor, a quieter virtuosity, an almost accidental panache, we could do worse than turn to the poet who wrote --

She turns, as if to go,
Half-bird, half-animal.
The wind dies on the hill.
Love's all. Love's all I know.

["Memory," p. 136]

How can one resist

a teaser that promises "Murder ... Vandalism ... Ted Nugent"?? I may have to read Kathryn Lively's Saints Preserve Us.

Dylan Thomas
from Selected Poems 1934-1952

Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo's month,
Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan's hill,
As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;
Time, in a folly's rider, like a county man
Over the vault of ridings with his hound at heel,
Drives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south.

Country, your sport is summer, and December's pools
By crane and water-tower by the seedy trees
Like this fifth month unskated, and the birds have flown;
Hold hard, my country children in the world of tales,
The greenwood dying as the deer fall in their tracks,
This first and steepled season, to the summer's game.

And now the horns of England, in the sound of shape,
Summon your snowy horsemen, and the four-stringed hill,
Over the sea-gut loudening, sets a rock alive;
Hurdles and guns and railings, as the boulders heave,
Crack like a spring in a vice, bone breaking April,
Spill the lank folly's hunter and the hard-held hope.

Down fall four padding weathers on the scarlet lands,
Stalking my children's faces with a tail of blood,
Time, in a rider rising, from the harnessed valley;
Hold hard, my country darlings, for a hawk descends,
Golden Glamorgan straightens, to the falling birds.
Your sport is summer as the spring runs angrily.

op. cit., p. 54 (New Directions, 2003)

Love changes everything

Reflection in the Saint Francis Chapel bulletin for 20th April (scroll down), by the chapel's director.

May is for Madeleine

My reading for the Marian month will be Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water : Reflections on Faith and Art, a borrowing from a kindlier than kindly soul!

Steven at Catholic Bookshelf

delivers an impassioned plea : We need Catholic writing. The latter of the April 27 posts.

Score

1.

These green dots raised like braille
Against the skin of sight
Are scores of newborn leaves
Delighting in the spring ...

2.

A score of green notes, glad and quick,
Sing from an April tree, "Awake!"

1996 by dylan

Dante
Paradiso, xxxi, 130-8
trans. dylan

And at that centre, with their wings outspread,
I saw thousands of celebrating angels
Each with his own degree of light and art.

Upon their merriment, at all their songs,
I saw loveliness smile, and there was joy
In the eyes and hearts of all the other saints.

Even if I had an aptitude of Speech
To match Imagination, I could hardly
Dare to begin to hint at such delight!

*

e a quel mezzo, con le penne sparte,
vid'io più di mille angeli festanti,
ciascun distinto di fulgore e d'arte.

Vidi a lor giochi quivi e a lor canti
ridere una bellezza, che letizia
era ne li occhi a tutti li altri santi;

e s'io avessi in dir tanta divizia
quanta ad imaginar, non ardirei
lo minimo tentar di sua delizia.

HBO decides

Oliver Stone's cinematic valentine to Fidel is ill-timed, what with a crackdown on Cuban dissidents. From this week's TV Guide.

Wallace Stevens

On her trip around the world, Nanzia Nunzio
Confronted Ozymandias. She went
Alone and like a vestal long-prepared.

I am the spouse. She took her necklace off
And laid it in the sand. As I am, I am
The spouse. She opened her stone-studded belt.

I am the spouse, divested of bright gold,
The spouse beyond emerald or amethyst,
Beyond the burning body that I bear.

I am the woman stripped more nakedly
Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible
Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse.

Speak to me that, which spoken, will array me
In its own only precious ornament.
Set on me the spirit's diamond coronal.

Clothe me entire in the final filament,
So that I tremble with such love so known
And myself am pious for your perfecting.

Then Ozymandias said the spouse, the bride
Is never naked. A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind.

A blessed Pascha

to all Orthodox readers of this weblog.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

Possibly upcoming

More Wallace Stevens. I am the spouse, divested of bright gold.

(See! There's more Wallace Stevens.)

Oh, if only !!
via Kathy the Carmelite


You are Pope John Paul II. You are a force to be
reckoned with.


Which Twentieth Century Pope Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

I'm probably more Montini than Wojtyla. But I think I know which two answers tipped me in favor of JP2.

Zorak's brilliant idea !!
given to us on Shakespeare Eve

Morrissey should cut a version of the Stones' "Mother's Little Helper."

A wee bit easier to imagine than Mick & the lads doing a remake of "The Last of the Famous International Playboys."

Alphabetizing the books

on several shelves. I shall return!

Three-word combinations
an exercise if you're mad crazy bored

Give me some interesting three-word phrases, that is to say : lines composed of three-word phrases, sentences, or sentence-fragments in the comment-box. Assuming the comment-box is working!

They can be :
Three odd words,
Three strange words,
Three plain words,
Nice, neat words --
Velvet and soft,
Or, loud, brash,
Sharp and shrieky.

They can be
Parcels of nonsense.

Closed bottle hatch.
Cringe from disaster.
Plate variety collapse.
Fragments of rubble.

Collage yesternight perplexity.
Deep dopes abashed.

Via
the Rat

The Washington Post's Lloyd Grove reports that an error crept into the closed-captioning of Tuesday's "World News Tonight" on ABC. According to the wayward caption, Alan Greenspan was "in the hospital for an enlarged prostitute." Greenspan's wife, Andrea Mitchell, tells Grove: "He should be so lucky."

Senator Santorum

On target, of course. And now, in target.

We're dealing with a cautious, judicious gentleman of indubitable intellectual ability. He was addressing his remarks to a specific law that would make consensual sex between any two adults legal throughout the land.

His critics, when they're not being obnoxious, are being baldly mendacious. They can shut up.

And hypocritical. Most of the gay folks we've been hearing from have been appalled by an alleged comparison of homosexuality to incest, one which never occurred -- but let that go. Why is it so disgraceful to have one's activities compared to those of incestuous persons?

-- Well, uhm, you see, because incest is wrong.

-- Wrong? You mean, as in illegal? As in, "it is the majoritarian view that incest is deeply unsavoury and not a good thing"?

-- No, silly, wrong, as in, well, uhm, if you press us to say so, as in morally wrong. Self-evidently, obviously wrong.

-- Morally? Really? Well, aren't you the folks who tell us all the time we can't legislate morality? By what criterion, therefore, do you say that incest is morally wrong?

-- Oh, come on ...

-- By what criterion do you say that incest is morally wrong?

-- Shut up. Go away!

And the foregoing, dear friends, is the tenor of our quotidian talk-show debates on morality. Except the progressives oft manage to stay calmer than the traditionalists, and can often win "the beauty contest" in the media.

Addendum : Andrew Sullivan on this matter, being calm, restrained, poised, unalarmist, temperate, measured, and not for a million years generating more heat than light : No war is worth fighting if our political leaders feel contempt for basic liberties at home.

On the Ampersand

Ampersand, thou bleak exuberance!
Proper scrupulosity, pert knot
Saucily conjoining burly terms,
Like piston & flange, like fish & chips :
Something of thy mopey joie de vivre
Starts to penetrate our foolish hearts,
Insolent & modest, brash & sly.
Bacchanalian austerities
Come a dime a dozen; thou art rare,
Both bawdy & chaste, both fierce & mild.
Is it so strange that we've been in thrall
To thy rigid brand of fecklessness,
Thy premeditated nonchalance
And thy chuckleheaded savoir faire?
O thou loutish chum, crestfallen clown,
Give me all thy dubious certitude,
All thy solemn slapstick, tristful mirth!
Sage & silly arbiter of bliss,
Dolorous ecstatic ampersand.


2002

And probably

nothing this morning either. Except this little post saying there'll be nothing this morning.

Thought of posting about Alan Arkin, how little his roles have changed over the years. In 1967's Wait Until Dark, he played a demented fiend, a truly evil character terrorizing the innocent. In the A&E series "100 Centre Street" in 2001, he played a liberal judge. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

Also : This blog is Garrigou-Lagrange-free! No theologians were harmed during the making of this blog.

Am more tired

than words can convey. And there is a bit of tedium ahead tomorrow, which should, please God, be over by noon. Am bushed, depleted, épuisé ... which means that I don't plan to post anything tonight ...

Which means that since I've announced that I won't post, I probably will post six or seven things before compline.

But actually, no.

Identity of nihil obstat revealed?
I may have second thoughts about keeping this one posted ...

Respect the comma!

Warning : Naughty language.

Queen of the USA?
A small "royalist party" names a candidate

Behold! Princess Madeleine of Sweden. Via Ad Orientem.

I wish life could be
Swedish royalty ...
I wish life could be
Swedish royalty ...

Wallace Stevens

How long and late the pheasant sleeps ...
The employer and employee contend,

Combat, compose their dull affair,
The bubbling sun will bubble up,

Spring sparkle and the cock-bird shriek.
The employer and employee will hear

And continue their affair. The shriek
Will rack the thickets. There is no place,

Here, for the lark fixed in the mind,
In the museum of the sky. The cock

Will claw sleep. Morning is not sun,
It is this posture of the nerves,

As if a blunted player clutched
The nuances of the blue guitar.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.

Thomas Merton, OCSO
from the journals, vol. 6, Learning to Love : Exploring Solitude and Freedom (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997)

[p. 184, January 10, 1967]

Cold. Grass in the dark slippery with hard frost. I went out into the latest dark (before dawn) to see my big bad friend Scorpio -- rising -- and there he was. First time I have seen him up there -- all the way to Antares and beyond -- this year. I have not been starwatching much lately.

*

[p. 188, January 24, 1967]

Last night -- moon almost full, behind scudding clouds. I walked in the warm dark wind. Lonely again for M. and troubled and wanting to write to her, wanting to hear from her, wanting to see her.

*

[p. 192, February 4, 1967]

Stay moderately informed -- and go on quietly doing my own job. People need me to be a contemplative and not a newspaper man.

Seamus Heaney
"Feeling into Words," from Preoccupations : Selected Prose (FSG, 1980)

[p. 52]

A poem always has elements of accident about it, which can be made the subject of inquest afterwards, but there is always a risk in conducting your own inquest : you might begin to believe the coroner in yourself rather that put your trust in the man in you who is capable of the accident.

*

[p. 54]

Yet in practice, you proceed by your own experience of what it is to write what you consider a successful poem. You survive in your own esteem not by the corroboration of theory but by the trust in certain moments of satisfaction which you know intuitively to be moments of extension. You are confirmed by the visitation of the last poem and threatened by the elusiveness of the next one, and the best moments are those when your mind seems to implode and words and images rush of their own accord into the vortex.

St Patrick becomes a Pharaoh?

Without my tinkering! What happened?

Oops! Now he's become something else ... with my tinkering !!

Lear
from King Lear, III, ii, 1-9

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike* flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!

*Also given as Smite by other sources.

Sonnet 116
by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

LET me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love ’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
    If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
    I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

Polonius
from Hamlet, II, ii, 92-111

My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief : your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.

GERTRUDE
More matter, with less art.

POLONIUS
Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
That he is mad, 'tis true : 'tis true 'tis pity;
And pity 'tis 'tis true : a foolish figure;
But farewell it, for I will use no art.
Mad let us grant him, then : and now remains
That we find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause:
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus.

Friar
Romeo and Juliet, II, iii, 1-30

The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And fleckèd darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day's path and Titan's fiery wheels:
Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,
The day to cheer and night's dank dew to dry,
I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers.
The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave that is her womb,
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find,
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some and yet all different.
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain'd from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometime 's by action dignified.
      [Enter Romeo.]
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposèd kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs -- grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

Bygone

Mishaps & Malaprops was the blocky blue blog. It was born in June, when the pollen count was high. It had an entry every other day, for much less than a month.

I wonder if I should bring it back, the blocky blue blog of a bygone June, with its malapertinence, like a misanthrope's concerto in the muggy sunrise, a sentimentalist's lilac among the triple-deckers, a whispered beginning to a chanson by Fauré in a land of harsh and strident English where terminal r's are routinely dropped.

We recorded : Structures of the tentative. Policies of the less than eager. Awkward fluency of the veteran fledglings. Mishaps and malaprops.

The radio speaks a pleasant jazz. It is 8:52, no, 8:53 of an April night as I think of yesteryear and its diminished splendors, its happy pastimes and its bright tristesse.

Am grateful

to John Derbyshire for reminding me of what I know : that decent character trumps good grammar, that the Left (not the Right) is the party of snobbery, that Garry Trudeau is a bore, that the president need not be a baccalaureate in a whole abecedarian list of ologies to execute his duties with ability, that Christians are people, too, even if they disdain the theory of evolution. Via O'Rama and at least one other blog.

Oddly, what I was hoping for!!
via Gregg the Obscure

I'm not as cool as Rick, as brave as Victor, as pretty as Ilsa ...

I chose not to copy the picture.

You are Captain Renault. "How extravagant of
you, throwing away women like that. Someday
they may be scarce."


Which Casablanca character are you?
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Encouragement from the Psalter

From Psalm 107. Confitemini Domino.

O GIVE thanks unto the LORD, for he is gracious, * and his mercy endureth for ever.

9 For he satisfieth the empty soul, * and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.

14 For he brought them out of darkness, and out of the shadow of death, * and brake their bonds in sunder.

20 He sent his word, and healed them; * and they were saved from their destruction.

29 For he maketh the storm to cease, * so that the waves thereof are still.

30 Then are they glad, because they are at rest; * and so he bringeth them unto the haven where they would be.

35 Again, he maketh the wilderness a standing water, * and water-springs of a dry ground.

36 And there he setteth the hungry, * that they may build them a city to dwell in;

37 That they may sow their land, and plant vineyards, * to yield them fruits of increase.

39 And again, when they are minished and brought low * through oppression, through any plague or trouble;

41 Yet helpeth he the poor out of misery, * and maketh him households like a flock of sheep.

43 Whoso is wise, will ponder these things; * and they shall understand the loving-kindness of the LORD.

Well I wonder

Graffito I saw recently, in neatly stencilled letters, on one of the rougher blocks of Newton Street. I'll replace the classic ineffable f-word with "flip" :

FLIP WAR
FLIP BUSH
FLIP RICH
WHITE MEN
FLIP ISRAELI
APARTHEID
FLIP WHACK
EMCEES
love, Tawhid

Well! Thank you for sharing! Have a nice day!

An Ars Poetica in Prose

The good poetry gets written when nobody's looking except a few close and trusted friends, alias angels, who urge all manner of antics, including revision -- including but not limited to : pentameter, ballad meter, surrealism, paradox, assonance, slang, archaism, dramatic monologues of drunken uncles, slant rhyme, sight rhyme, dactyls and spondees. Learn them all by the time you're sixteen and keep using them till you're a hundred and sixteen. Build up what works and take down what doesn't. What works? You decide. And don't be afraid to read things, lyrics and epics, epigrams and sonnets, dithyrambs and disasters, old and good, new and magnificent, middle-aged and dreadful, recently engendered and bewilderingly strange. The experimental, or the just plain mental. The ones who count syllables and the ones who don't. The ones who make sense and the ones who don't. The immediate, the plain, the expansive, the cramped, the dark, the intransigent. Easy and obscure. Fluent and recalcitrant. Difficult and lucid. Slow and steady. Don't fret about originality, because no one is original. It all comes from somewhere. From the three-way intersection of heaven and earth and your own mindsoul; from the quirks of the heart of the language itself. Live with one eye on back when and the other on eventually. Transfigure both past and future into now.

Urban Pastoral

And summer beckons, hectic streams of bliss :

Austere aesthetes, forsake your shelvish delvings.

Sun-glare and life-thrust, bees and fire-flowers,

Asphalt earth practices its warp and shimmer --

Language captures its prey, its lively prize :

Dangerous promise of her fierce black eyes.


2003

Notable quotation

In approaching these words I have employed both poetic license, and what I hope is a fair and honorable sense of play. I am well aware that I am at play in a minefield.

Kathleen Norris, from the preface to Amazing Grace : A Vocabulary of Faith (Riverhead Books, 1998), p. 3.

Reverent or trendy?
This observer says, the former

At another weblog, this cross from the Holy Name Cathedral of Chicago was proposed as a malapert example of a "Resurrection Crucifix." I disagree with the implied dispraise. I find it quite moving -- our Lord's agonies are not absent from the shape of the wood; this is not an effortless Resurrection, not a case of "he fell asleep and woke up, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed." I find the sculpture to be muscular, to be sinewed; it is as if the Christ is bursting through stone! This is a crucifix of force and of spiritual potency, I believe.

To those who would argue that our Lord's agonies should not be implicit, but explicit, I say : Consider the cross of San Damiano. Was it engendered by a deficit of reverence?

Some "resurrection crosses" are trite; the other weblog does provide examples which do not succeed in inspiring the observer. But I am not inclined to pass by the cross above with a quick, snippy quip; I am inclined to linger.

I've been somewhat over-emphatic, I fear. What are your opinions?

Catherine de Hueck Doherty

I realize more and more as I travel, as I keep vigil, as I pray, that what the world needs is not more projects, more apostolic works, more works of mercy, more social works, more community development programs. What it needs most today is communities of love, little islands flung everywhere by the hand of God so that men may, like St Thomas, touch the wounds love always makes.

From I Live On an Island (Ave Maria Press, 1979), p. 27.

Arial!
via Gregg the Obscure


Arial - You're pretty normal. That's certainly not
a bad thing, as a lot of people like you.


What Font Are You? (Standard Fonts)
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A scary moment
Thank God it wasn't worse

Wheelchair racer collides with girl who runs onto course. No serious injuries.

Cheruiyot's afire! My, my, my Zakharova!

Winners of the 2003 Boston Marathon : Robert Cheruiyot of Kenya & Svetlana Zakharova of Russia.

Or at least that's how the newspapers will report it. This is truly an event where the winners are everyone who finished, and even some who didn't but gave it their best shot.

Sorry if that seems silly. What's perhaps even siller : I cry over the marathon. It's awesome and inspiring and incredible.

Fred Reed

gives a mildly provocative (not dangerously provocative, despite his subtitle), sane, modest proposal about education -- and he reasons against those who say that we need not learn certain things. The rambunctiousness here gives way to an elegance of logic that we (I) find appealing.

Actually, his provocative idea is : should we resegregate public schools, along the lines of "schools interested in teaching the liberal arts, algebra, science, civilization" and "schools for those who really don't want to learn all that much other than the basics we need to survive"? He exhorts whoever's listening : Don't enstupidate the schools to which I send my daughters.

Death be not proud

John Donne

Death be not proud, though some have callèd thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

T S O'Rama

remembers a good priest, who left this life in the sure and certain hope of lasting life on Friday -- at age 50.

(Permalinks not working -- scroll to post headed "Death of a Good Priest.")

I have yet to read the newspaper articles that Mr O'Rama links to, but the personal recollections do convey some of this priest's exceptional grace.

Easter
by Eric Milner-White (1884-1963)

THOU ART RISEN, O LORD!
Let the gospel trumpets speak,
and the news as of holy fire,
burning and flaming and inextinguishable,
run to the ends of the earth.

THOU ART RISEN, O LORD!
Let all creation greet the good tidings
with jubilant shout;
for its redemption has come,
the long night is past, the Saviour lives!
and rides and reigns in triumph
now and unto the ages of ages.

THOU ART RISEN, O LORD!
Let the quiet Altar dazzle with light;
let us haste to thy Presence
wondering, incredulous for joy;
and partake of thy Risen Life.

THOU ART RISEN, MY LORD AND MY GOD!
Rise up, my heart, give thanks, rejoice!
And do thou, O Lord, deign to enter it
despite the shut doors.
Shew me thy hands and thy side,
that it is thou thyself.
Send me about thy business,
servant of the living King, the King of kings;
and hide my life in thine
for ever and ever.

From My God, My Glory : Aspirations, acts, and prayers on the desire for God, ed. Joyce Huggett (Triangle/SPCK, 1994), p. 69.

from A Primitive Like an Orb

The Rat recently blogged some Wallace Stevens, and so I figured I'd do the same. I searched for 45 minutes to come up with the perfect "lines chosen at random"! So here they are :

VII
The central poem is the poem of the whole,
The poem of the composition of the whole,
The composition of blue sea and of green,
Of blue light and of green, as lesser poems,
And the miraculous multiplex of lesser poems,
Not merely into a whole, but a poem of
The whole, the essential compact of the parts,
The roundness that pulls tight the final ring

VIII
And that which in an altitude would soar,
A vis, a principle or, it may be
The meditation of a principle,
Or else an inherent order active to be
Itself, a nature to its natives all
Beneficence, a repose, utmost repose,
The muscles of a magnet aptly felt,
A giant on the horizon, glistening,

IX
And in bright excellence adorned, crested
With every prodigal, familiar fire,
And unfamiliar escapades : whirroos
And scintillant sizzlings such as children like,
Vested in the serious folds of majesty,
Moving around and behind, a following,
A source of trumpeting seraphs in the eye,
A source of pleasant outbursts on the ear.

The Easter Hymn of the Mother of God
from the Eastern Church

The angel cried aloud to her who was full of grace : Rejoice, O pure Maiden, and again I say, Rejoice; thy Son hath risen the third day from the tomb.

Shine, shine, thou new Jerusalem : for the glory of the Lord hath risen upon thee! Rejoice in the dance and exult, O Sion! And do thou, O Mother of God, most pure, delight in the Rising of thy Child!

lamentation and praise

a tiny psalm

i'm sick and sad
but there is balm

in gilead


1996

from Easter Sermon of St John Chrysostom
via St Benedict's Parish, Baltimore, mentioned by (attended by) Gerard

Let all then enter the joy of our Lord!

Both the first and the last and those who come after, enjoy your reward!

Rich and poor, dance with one another, sober and slothful, celebrate the day.

Those who have kept the fast and those who have not, rejoice today, for the table is richly spread.

Fare royally upon it -- the calf is a fatted one.

Let no one go away hungry.

All of you, enjoy the banquet of faith!

All enjoy the riches of his goodness.

Let no one cry over his poverty, for the universal Kingdom has appeared!

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again, for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death, for the death of our Savior has set us free.

He has destroyed it by enduring it.

He spoiled the power of hell when he descended thereto.

Isaiah foretold this when he cried, Death has been frustrated in meeting him below!

It is frustrated, for it is destroyed.

It is frustrated, for it is annihilated.

It is frustrated, for now it is made captive.

For it grabbed a body and discovered God.

It took earth and behold! it encountered heaven.

It took what was visible, and was overcome by what was invisible.

O Death, where is your sting?

O Death, where is your victory?

Christ is risen,
and the demons are cast down.

Christ is risen,
and life is set free.

Christ is risen,
and the tomb is emptied of the dead.

For Christ, having risen from the dead, is become the first-fruits of those who sleep.

To him be glory and power forever and ever!

Amen. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Alleluias from the Psalter!
Psalm 148, Revised Standard Version

1: Praise the LORD! Praise the LORD from the heavens, praise him in the heights!

2: Praise him, all his angels, praise him, all his host!

3: Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars!

4: Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens!

5: Let them praise the name of the LORD! For he commanded and they were created.

6: And he established them for ever and ever; he fixed their bounds which cannot be passed.

7: Praise the LORD from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps,

8: fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command!

9: Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars!

10: Beasts and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!

11: Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the earth!

12: Young men and maidens together, old men and children!

13: Let them praise the name of the LORD, for his name alone is exalted; his glory is above earth and heaven.

14: He has raised up a horn for his people, praise for all his saints, for the people of Israel who are near to him. Praise the LORD!

Et resurrexit tertia die!

'Why search among the dead for one who is alive?'
Luke 24.5 (REB)

Kathleen Norris
"Triduum Notes : Saturday" from The Cloister Walk

The air is full of the anticipation of snow, a howling wind. Words will not let me be : in cold and silence you are born, from the womb of earth, the cloud of snow yet to fall. And from somewhere in the liturgy : What has been prepared for me? Tonight I have a big responsibility; after the Service of Light, after the long story of the Exultet is sung -- "This is the night, this is the night" -- I will speak the first words of the Liturgy of the Word, the opening lines of Genesis : "In the beginning, God ..."

My friend Columba and I share this first reading -- here, they divide it between God and a narrator. Rehearsing in the abbey's chapter house, we had flipped a coin, and Columba won the part of God, which I didn't mind in the least. The narrator has better lines. Now, standing in the church full of people I can barely see, I say them slowly, as if I had all the time in the world. It is the creation of the world we are saying, and I'm surprised to find surprise in the lines : let there be ... and there was, God waiting to see, and to call it good.

As my eyes grow accustomed to the light in the church, I can see my husband hunched in the balcony. I had warned him not to come, because the Mass usually puts him in such a bad mood.

[...]

Nearly three hours after we've begun, the abbot announces, just before the final blessing, that coffee and orange juice and light refreshments will be served in the Great Hall. I wonder if Benedictines can do anything without feeding people, without making it a party. And it's quite a party, full of stone-sober people who are drunk on liturgy. I look for my husband. He's been outside smoking, and when he comes up to us he puts his arm around me and says to the monks, "The last time I went to the Vigil it was still in Latin, but you guys do it up right." They laugh. "The choir sounded magnificent," David says to me. "You liked it?" I reply, amazed. "It was beautiful," he says, and he seems to mean it. "Abbot Timothy," I say, "we have an emergency. This is not the man I married." The abbot laughs, we all laugh, and visit until nearly 2 A.M.

Norris, op. cit. (Riverhead Books, 1996), pp. 181-2.

Exsultet

On this page, in English and Latin.

And below, in Latin :

Exsultet iam angelica turba caelorum:
exultent divina mysteria:
et pro tanti Regis victoria tuba insonet salutaris.

Gaudeat et tellus tantis irradiata fulgoribus:
et, aeterni Regis splendore illustrata,
totius orbis se sentiat amisisse caliginem.

Laetetur et mater Ecclesia,
tanti luminis adornata fulgoribus:
et magnis populorum vocibus haec aula resultet.

Quapropter astantes vos, fratres carissimi, (1962: "adstantes")
ad tam miram huius sancti luminis claritatem,
una mecum, quaeso,
Dei omnipotentis misericordiam invocate.

Ut, qui me non meis meritis
intra Levitarum numerum dignatus est aggregare,
luminis sui claritatem infundens,
cerei huius laudem implere perficiat.

(1962: Per Dominum nostrum Iesus Christum filium suum: Qui cum eo vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus. Per omnia saecula saeculorum. R. Amen.)

V. Dominus vobiscum.
R. Et cum spiritu tuo.
V. Sursum corda.
R. Habemus ad Dominum.
V. Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro.
R. Dignum et iustum est.

Vere dignum et iustum est,
invisibilem Deum Patrem omnipotentem
Filiumque eius unigenitum,
Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum,
toto cordis ac mentis affectu et vocis ministerio personare.

Qui pro nobis aeterno Patri Adae debitum solvit,
et veteris piaculi cautionem pio cruore detersit.

Haec sunt enim festa paschalia,
in quibus verus ille Agnus occiditur,
cuius sanguine postes fidelium consecrantur.

Haec nox est,
in qua primum patres nostros, filios Israel
eductos de Aegypto,
Mare Rubrum sicco vestigio transire fecisti.

Haec nox est,
quae peccatorum tenebras columnae illuminatione purgavit.

Haec nox est,
quae hodie per universum mundum in Christo credentes,
a vitiis saeculi et caligine peccatorum segregatos,
reddit gratiae, sociat sanctitati.

Haec nox est,
in qua, destructis vinculis mortis,
Christus ab inferis victor ascendit.

Nihil enim nobis nasci profuit, nisi redimi profuisset.
O mira circa nos Tuae pietatis dignatio!

O inaestimabilis dilectio caritatis:
ut servum redimeres, Filium tradidisti!

O certe necessarium Adae peccatum,
quod Christi morte deletum est!
O felix culpa,
quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!

O vere beata nox,
quae sola meruit scire tempus et horam,
in qua Christus ab inferis resurrexit!

Haec nox est, de qua scriptum est:
Et nox sicut dies illuminabitur:
et nox illuminatio mea in deliciis meis.

Huius igitur sanctificatio noctis fugat scelera, culpas lavat:
et reddit innocentiam lapsis et maestis laetitiam.
Fugat odia, concordiam parat et curvat imperia.

In huius igitur noctis gratia,
suscipe, sancte Pater, laudis huius sacrificium vespertinum,
quod tibi in hac cerei oblatione sollemni,
per ministrorum manus
de operibus apum, sacrosancta reddit Ecclesia.

Sed iam columnae huius praeconia novimus,
quam in honorem Dei rutilans ignis accendit.

Qui, licet sit divisus in partes,
mutuati tamen luminis detrimenta non novit.
Alitur enim liquantibus ceris,
quas in substantiam pretiosae huius lampadis
apis mater eduxit.

(1962: O vere beata nox,
quae exspoliavit Aegyptios,
ditavit Hebraeos!
Nox in qua terrenis caelestia,
humanis divina iunguntur.)

(O vere beata) nox,
in qua terrenis caelestia, humanis divina iunguntur!
Oramus ergo te, Domine,
ut cereus iste in honorem tui nominis consecratus,
ad noctis huius caliginem destruendam,
indeficiens perseveret.

Et in odorem suavitatis acceptus,
supernis luminaribus misceatur.
Flammas eius lucifer matutinus inveniat:
Ille, inquam, lucifer, qui nescit occasum:
Christus Filius tuus,
qui, regressus ab inferis, humano generi serenus illuxit,

(1962: Precamur ergo te, Domine: ut nos famulos tuos, omnemque clerum, et devotissimum populum: una cum beatissimo Papa nostro N. et Antistite nostro N., quiete temporum concessa, in his paschalibus gaudiis, assidua protectione regere, gubernare et conservare digneris. Respice etiam ad eos, qui nos in potestate regunt, et, ineffabili pietatis et misericordiae tuae munere, dirigere cogitationes eorum ad iustitiam et pacem, ut de terrena operositate ad caelestem patriam perveniant cum omni populo tuo. Per eundem Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum, Filium tuum: Qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus: per omnia saecula saeculorum. R. Amen.)

et vivit et regnat in saecula saeculorum.

R. Amen.

this post

has been deleted

Easter Vigil, 1966
by Karol Wojtyla (b. 1920)

This is a Night above all nights, when
keeping watch at Your grave
we are the Church.
This is the night of strife
when hope and despair do battle within us.
This strife overlays all our past struggles,
filling them all to their depths.
(Do they lose their sense then, or gain it?)
This is the Night, when the earth's ritual attains its beginning.
A thousand years is like one night :
the night keeping watch
at Your grave.

From The Place Within : The Poetry of Pope John Paul II, trans. Jerzy Peterkiewicz (Random House, 1982, 1994), p. 140.

from Psalm 88
King James Version

10: Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and praise thee? Selah.

Zone of Death
by William Everson (Brother Antoninus, 1912-1994)

Wind is not nigh.

No Holy Ghost,
Spirit outspilt,
Burnt this charred day.

What sin did this?
Could I?

Hot light blares.
Stars, outblistered now,
Mark time, extinct.

Night might bring
The seasonal constellations
In its sphere,
But night is nowhere.

Sun. Sand.
The noon-crazy jays
Cackle and gibber,
Jar on the gritted ear.

Dawn sneaked in unsmelt.
No wine, no water here.

Now the lance-riddled man
On yon pronged tree,
Stretched in the death-tread there,
Opens his executing eye
And gibbets me.

From The Voice That Is Great Within Us : American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, ed. Hayden Carruth (Bantam Books, 1970), p. 353.

mud above the ankles
a smile-engendering simile at Notes from a Hillside Farm

Down at the sheep barn there was mud above the ankles, sometimes up to the boot top, grabbing and holding on like an insistent drunk at a party -- "Have you heard the one about . . .?"

Encyclical letter

Ecclesia de Eucharistia.

I have not read it in its entirety, and prefer to read documents of this length in hard copy so as to underline in faint pencil, or to make marginal notations : but what I have read of it gives the impression of a richness and a depth far beyond that reported by the media ("Gasp! Horror! He's saying Catholics shouldn't receive Protestant communion" -- what the blogger at Disputations called the Ginger factor, after the Far Side cartoon : the media hearing only what they want to hear).

The world's last night

John Donne's Holy Sonnet XIII via Lane Core.

See also, at Blog from the Core, a poem by C S Lewis.

Verse and response

Adoramus te, Christe, et benedicimus tibi :
Quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum.

from Isaiah 52 and 53

He grew up like a sapling before him,
like a shoot from the parched earth;
there was in him no stately bearing to make us look at him,
nor appearance that would attract us to him.
He was spurned and avoided by people,
a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity,
one of those from whom people hide their faces,
spurned, and we held him in no esteem.

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,
our sufferings that he endured,
while we thought of him as stricken,
as one smitten by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our offenses,
crushed for our sins;
upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole,
by his stripes we were healed.
We had all gone astray like sheep,
each following his own way;
but the LORD laid upon him
the guilt of us all.

Though he was harshly treated, he submitted
and opened not his mouth;
like a lamb led to the slaughter
or a sheep before the shearers,
he was silent and opened not his mouth.
Oppressed and condemned, he was taken away,
and who would have thought any more of his destiny?
When he was cut off from the land of the living,
and smitten for the sin of his people,
a grave was assigned him among the wicked
and a burial place with evildoers,
though he had done no wrong
nor spoken any falsehood.

[...]

Because of his affliction
he shall see the light in fullness of days;
through his suffering, my servant shall justify many,
and their guilt he shall bear.
Therefore I will give him his portion among the great,
and he shall divide the spoils with the mighty,
because he surrendered himself to death
and was counted among the wicked;
and he shall take away the sins of many,
and win pardon for their offenses.

Another recent bit
of patristic "roulette" from Doxos

It is better to make peace with your own soul than to pacify those who are at variance by your teaching.
Isaac of Syria

Encouragement from the Psalter
this time, from the Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha

from Psalm 31

7 I shall rejoice and be glad in your unfailing love,
for you have seen my affliction
and have cared for me in my distress.

19 How great is your goodness,
stored up for those who fear you,
made manifest before mortal eyes
for all who turn to you for shelter.

21 Blessed be the Lord,
whose unfailing love for me was wonderful
when I was in sore straits.

22 In sudden alarm I said,
'I am shut out from your sight.'
But you heard my plea
when I called to you for help.

24 Be strong and stout-hearted,
all you whose hope is in the Lord.

+ + + + +

from Psalm 34

18 The Lord is close to those whose courage is broken;
he saves those whose spirit is crushed.

Good Friday
by Vernon Watkins (1906-1967)

After the winter solstice came
Ice and low flame,
The cockerel step by which the light
Shortened the sleep of earth and night.

And slowly as the days of Lent
Waxed and were spent,
Trees, birds and flowers all increased
In expectation of the feast.

Spring with such promise did abound
That the gemmed ground
Already showed in clustered grass
The printless light of unseen stars.

But now light grows where rays decline.
Now the crushed wine
Transfigures all, leaf, blossom, fruit,
By reference to the sacred root.

Day must die here that day may break.
Time must forsake
Time, and this moment be preferred
To any copy, light or word.

In this a night we apprehend
Which has no end.
Day dies. We make our choice, and say :
'This, this we seek; no second day.'

Not in the speculative skies
Instruction lies,
But in the nails of darkness driven
Into these hands which hold up heaven.

For, as old ages antedate
Love's present weight,
So the pulse falling gives the chain
Momentum to what years remain.

All lives, to flourish, here should stop
Still; and all hope
To live, must die here first, and pull
New ages to this mountain skull.

Now let the geography of lands
Learn from these hands,
And from these feet the unresting seas
Take, from unfathomed grief, their ease.

Our mortal life is composite
Until we knit
All possible days to this, and make
A seal, from which true day must break.

Come, Easter, come : I was afraid
Your star had strayed.
It was behind our darkest fears
Which could not see their God for tears.

from Psalm 22. Deus, Deus meus.

11 O go not from me; for trouble is hard at hand, * and there is none to help me.

19 But be not thou far from me, O LORD; * thou art my succour, haste thee to help me.

24 For he hath not despised nor abhorred the low estate of the poor; * he hath not hid his face from him; but when he called unto him he heard him.

Five Short-Shorts
by Hayden Carruth (b. 1921)

Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us.

*

Ah, you beast of love,
my cat, my dove, my spider
-- too late I'm natured.

*

A hard journey. Yes,
it must be. At the end they
all fall asleep.

*

Your tears, Niobe,
are your children now. See how
we have multiplied.

*

So be it. I am
a wholeness I'll never know.
Maybe that's the best.

from The Voice That Is Great Within Us : American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, ed. H. Carruth (Bantam Books, 1970), pp. 482-3.

Nor ever chaste except ...

ELC gives us today one of the most famous of Donne's Holy Sonnets.

Hymn : Vexilla Regis

The royal banners forward go,
The cross shines forth in mystic glow;
Where he in flesh, our flesh Who made,
Our sentence bore, our ransom paid.

Where deep for us the spear was dyed,
Life's torrent rushing from His side,
To wash us in that precious flood,
Where mingled water flowed, and blood.

Fulfilled is all that David told
In true prophetic song of old,
Amidst the nations, God, saith he,
Hath reigned and triumphed from the tree.

O tree of beauty, tree of light!
O tree with royal purple dight!
Elect on whose triumphal breast
Those holy limbs should find their rest.

Blest tree, whose chosen branches bore
The wealth that did the world restore,
The price of humankind to pay,
And spoil the spoiler of his prey.

Upon its arms, like balance true,
He weighed the price for sinners due,
The price which none but He could pay,
And spoiled the spoiler of his prey.

O cross, our one reliance, hail!
Still may thy power with us avail
To give new virtue to the saint,
And pardon to the penitent.

To Thee, eternal Three in One,
Let homage meet by all be done:
As by the cross Thou dost restore,
So rule and guide us evermore.

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Vexilla Regis prodeunt:
Fulget Crucis mysterium,
Qua vita mortem pertulit,
Et morte vitam protulit.

Quae vulnerata lanceae
Mucrone diro, criminum
Ut nos lavaret sordibus,
Manavit unda, et sanguine.

Impleta sunt quae concinit
David fideli carmine,
Dicendo nationibus:
Regnavit a ligno Deus.

Arbor decora et fulgida,
Ornata regis purpura,
Electa digno stipite
Tam sancta membra tangere.

Beata, cujus brachiis
Pretium pependit saeculi,
Statera facta corporis,
Tulitque praedam tartari.

O Crux ave spes unica,
Hoc passionis tempore
Piis adauge gratiam,
Reisque dele crimina.

Te, fons salutis Trinitas,
Collaudet omnis spiritus:
Quibus Crucis victoriam
Lariris, adde praemium.

Venantius Honorius Fortunatus, 569
trans. John Mason Neale, 1851

Via Doxos
what the blogger calls 'Patristic Roulette' !!

Abba Xanthios said, "A dog is better than I am, for he has love and he does not judge."

The Poets
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

O ye dead Poets, who are living still
    Immortal in your verse, though life be fled,
    And ye, O living Poets, who are dead
    Though ye are living, if neglect can kill,
Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill,
    With drops of anguish falling fast and red
    From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head,
    Ye were not glad your errand to fulfil?
Yes; for the gift and ministry of Song
    Have something in them so divinely sweet,
    It can assuage the bitterness of wrong;
Not in the clamor of the crowded street,
    Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,
    But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.

Encouragement from the Psalter
via the Msgr Knox translation of the Holy Bible

from Psalm 51 (50 in Knox)

... tidings send me of good news and rejoicing, and the body that lies in the dust shall thrill with pride.

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from Psalm 19 (18 in Knox)

... he has made a pavilion for the sun, which comes out as a bridegroom comes from his bed, and exults like some great runner who sees the track before him.

That latter, for the marathoners who take to the course on Easter Monday !!

Bishop KALLISTOS (Ware) of Diokleia
author of The Orthodox Way

God alone is noun; all created things are adjectives.

Orthodox quote for today via the website of Boston's OCA cathedral.

Ware, op. cit. (SVS Press, 2002), p. 45

Encouragement
from the Psalter

Psalm 93. Dominus regnavit.

2 He hath made the round world so sure, * that it cannot be moved.

5 The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horribly; * but yet the LORD, who dwelleth on high, is mightier.

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Psalm 84. Quam dilecta!

5 Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; * in whose heart are thy ways.

6 Who going through the vale of misery use it for a well [...]

Psalm 38. Domine, ne in furore.

PUT me not to rebuke, O LORD, in thine anger; * neither chasten me in thy heavy displeasure :

2 For thine arrows stick fast in me, * and thy hand presseth me sore.

3 There is no health in my flesh, because of thy displeasure; * neither is there any rest in my bones, by reason of my sin.

4 For my wickednesses are gone over my head, * and are like a sore burden, too heavy for me to bear.

5 My wounds stink, and are corrupt, * through my foolishness.

6 I am brought into so great trouble and misery, * that I go mourning all the day long.

7 For my loins are filled with a sore disease, * and there is no whole part in my body.

8 I am feeble and sore smitten; * I have roared for the very disquietness of my heart.

9 Lord, thou knowest all my desire; * and my groaning is not hid from thee.

10 My heart panteth, my strength hath failed me, * and the light of mine eyes is gone from me.

11 My lovers and my neighbours did stand looking upon my trouble, * and my kinsmen stood afar off.

12 They also that sought after my life laid snares for me; * and they that went about to do me evil talked of wickedness, and imagined deceit all the day long.

13 As for me, I was like a deaf man, and heard not; * and as one that is dumb, who doth not open his mouth.

14 I became even as a man that heareth not, * and in whose mouth are no reproofs.

15 For in thee, O LORD, have I put my trust; * thou shalt answer for me, O Lord my God.

16 I have required that they, even mine enemies, should not triumph over me; * for when my foot slipt, they rejoiced greatly against me.

17 And I truly am set in the plague, * and my heaviness is ever in my sight.

18 For I will confess my wickedness, * and be sorry for my sin.

19 But mine enemies live, and are mighty; * and they that hate me wrongfully are many in number.

20 They also that reward evil for good are against me; * because I follow the thing that good is.

21 Forsake me not, O LORD my God; * be not thou far from me.

Might be quieter hereabouts

for the Triduum. Although, if truth be told, "quieter" might mean 3 or 4 posts a day instead of 7 or 8 !!

Wednesday of Holy Week takes precedence

but the saint for April 16th is Benedict Joseph Labre.

Via Quenta Nârwenion.

Record high and record low possible
within 24 hrs.

84 earlier, it's dropped to 50.

I've seen forecasts of 27 by dawn.

Update, just before dawn Thursday : It's 34.

Not done with Donne

Lane Core gives us Holy Sonnet XV.

a few lines from Psalm 56
as it appears in Magnificat

You have kept an account of my wanderings;
you have kept a record of my tears;
are they not written in your book?

This I know, that God is on my side.

O God, I will offer you praise
for you have rescued my soul from death,

that I may walk in the presence of God
and enjoy the light of the living.

Changed a few

of the pictures in the left margin. Also moved "Politics, papers, periodicals" below "Poetry & culture" and just above the weatherpixie, who is evidently enjoying the warmer weather.

estlin alive
poem XLIX from One Times One

trees
            were in(give
give)bud when to me
you
made for by love
love said did
o no yes

earth was in
                        (live
live)spring
with all beautiful
things when to
me
you gave gave darling

birds are
                  in(trees are in)
song
when to me you
leap and i'm born we
're sunlight of
oneness

Cummings, op. cit. (Liveright, 2002), p. 51

Emily Dickinson

1830-1886

Between these years -- a Life --
Of unobtrusive Fame --
Of nameless Notoriety --
Anonymous -- Renown --

Gathering gemlike Accidents
Of primness and panache --
A coruscating heaven's-worth
Of Treasures -- in the Mesh --

A canticle of Lazarus
That makes a poor soul rich --
A Wealth of Sound -- a golden Trove --
That hallows Avarice --

A talent for the Sparrow --
A farthing for the King --
Such prodigal Economies
And saintly Reasoning!

Your ardent Chill -- engenders --
A realm of Light beyond
The World we know -- of Task and Tears --
Of Thorn and Scorn -- and Wound

Your cloistered Ecstasies possess
A foretaste of the Next
Illimitable brilliancy
Undimmed -- and unsurpassed --


2002

In Country Heaven
by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

      Always when he, in country heaven,
                                                (Whom my heart hears),
Crosses the breast of the praising East, and kneels,
                        Humble in all his planets,
            And weeps on the abasing hill,

Then in the delight and grove of beasts and birds
                        And the canonized valley
      Where the dewfall stars sing grazing still
            And the angels whirr like pheasants
                                                Through naves of leaves,

      Light and his tears glide down together
                                                (O hand in hand)
From the country eyes, salt and sun, star and woe
                        Down the cheek bones and whinnying
            Downs into the low browsing dark.

Housed in hamlets of heaven swing the loft lamps,
                        In the black buried spinneys
      Bushes and owls blow out like candles,
            And seraphic fields of shepherds
                                                Fade with their rose-

      White, God's bright, flocks, the belled lambs leaping,
                                                (His gentle kind);
The shooting star hawk statued blind in a cloud
                        Over the blackamoor shires
            Hears the belfries and the cobbles

Of the twelve apostles' towns ring in his night;
                        And the long fox like fire
      Prowls flaming among the cockerels
            In the farms of heaven's keeping,
                                                But they sleep sound.

Dylan Thomas, reading poetry for the BBC.

Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, c. 1938

Dylan Thomas, in his late 30s.

In my craft or sullen art
by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Continuing

with his most fitting observance, Lane Core gives us Holy Sonnet XVI by John Donne.

Had some enemy decried me,

I could have borne it patiently; some open ill-wisher, I could have sheltered myself from his attack. But thou, my second self, my familiar friend! How pleasant was the companionship we shared, thou and I; how lovingly we walked as fellow pilgrims in the house of God!

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The verses above were part of the morning prayers in Magnificat for today. (Magnificat uses the Grail Version; here I have used Msgr Knox's translation.) The verses are from Psalm 55, or 54 in the Vulgate's and in Knox's reckoning. They are included in the Holy Week readings as a foreshadowing of how our blessed Lord is treated by Judas, his disciple turned traitor.

But there is, I would venture, a different way of reading those lines. Perhaps could we read them as what sinners say to God, what Judas might have thought about our Lord, what absurd words reach the lips, what thoughts reach the mind, of those who have been "disappointed" by the infinite grandeur of God, the limitless compassion, the omniscient understanding -- failing to make Itself small and palatable and cozy and free of shock?

Were there not those in our Lord's day who were looking for a political Messiah, a revolutionary savior, to throw off the yoke of Roman oppression, to return the chosen people to temporal glory? Don't we sometimes approach the Lord looking for some temporal or worldly gain, and then, not finding it, use Jeremiah's words "You deceived me, and I let myself be deceived" (cf. Jer 20:7)?

Do we ever approach the Crucified Son of God, strangely, almost bizarrely, expecting him to remove all our obstacles, our roadblocks, our slings and arrows, our thorns and nettles? And aren't we reminded time and time again Unless you take up your cross ... Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake ... but we continue to think "Well, those admonitions are for other kinds of Christians, maybe for the heroic saints of old. It's good enough to be, well, to be good enough."

And when the world, or parts of it, come at us with whatever it comes at us with, don't we turn to the Lord in petulance and defiance and say, "Hey, Buddy," (perhaps not so bluntly but this must be the effect) "weren't you supposed to take care of this problem? Haven't I been one of your friends? Aren't we simpatico? I'm keeping my part of the bargain : I'm going to Mass, I'm praying, I'm steering clear of Grave Sin X and Very Grave Sin Y and (most of the time) More-than-Semi-Grave Sin Z. Aren't you going to hold up your end? Aren't you going to make my life easier? Didn't You say, My yoke is easy and my burden is light?"

And so on, with such similar mockeries of God which we pray are burned up like so many dead leaves in the bonfire of his mercy.

Have we ever come to prayer accusing God, secretly, subconsciously, or even openly, of being a traitor to us?

I know I have. And how is this possible, when to ponder for longer than twenty seconds the smallest of his mercies to me, should send me to my knees in tears of gratitude ... but no ... I have a splinter of the Cross, one thorn of the mockery-crown, a milligram of the scorn that He called his glory ... and I complain endlessly and fiercely and unmanfully. And complain, and complain.

He forgave his enemies from the cross. And I never forget a slight.

He was silent before his judges. I am garrulous with self-justifications and excuses.

His touch brought healing and new life.

He helped all who came to him and believed in him.

His was a life of kenosis, of self-emptying, and of fervent prayer.

And he had not where to lay his head. And he called his death-pains his glory.

May the blood of Christ, shed on the cross for our redemption, silence those devils, and expel them from me, who dare to call God traitor and deceiver, even unconsciously, for whatever flimsy pretext or treasonable reason.

I think

the template problem's fixed. Perhaps only chez moi. So, proceed with caution!

Gracias, google pyra!!

Possibly upcoming (later tonight or tomorrow but if I put it off until tomorrow I might as well forget about it) and I would emphasize possibly not definitely at any rate you know the drill

A personal look at some verses of Psalm 55, which appeared in this morning's Magnificat readings.

Isaiah 49
from today's Mass readings

Though I thought I had toiled in vain,
and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength,
Yet my reward is with the Lord,
my recompense is with my God.

Update

Still a three-month old template when I go to edit, therefore I can't edit.

MEMORANDUM TO GOOGLE PYRA STOP FIX IMMEDIATELY STOP THANK YOU STOP

The patience of the saints, I have. The patience of the saints !!

This is extremely bizarre

Went to edit my template just now, to move the dialy psalm-verse a wee bit closer to the top. And what do I find, but my old template. With the young Russian girl holding a candle, with Queen Latifah, with no psalm-verse at all on the template. Obviously, the current template is in someone's memory or you wouldn't be seeing the church of Spencer Abbey or St Patrick's stamp or the psalm-verse (scroll way down) ... but how can blogger-google-pyra-whatchamacallit properly display what I've put in, but when I go to edit ... provide me with data that a month or two out of date?

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Here is today's psalm-verse

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.
Psalm 16:11 (KJV)