Poetry

Seeing Easter in a Sonnet

What is the sound we hear that alone may dispel the darkness, vanquishing beneath its wings the dangers that assail us? Nothing less than the Third Person of the Trinity.

Enoch Powell, Poet and Statesman

In this vale of tears one often meets unpleasant people. These are the sort of people who say things like, “You have too many books.” Yet sometimes the criticism sticks in one’s craw. As you lie upon the bed at night, you wonder, “Why on earth do I have so many (yet not too many) … Read more

Polish Poetry Under Occupation

As the Nazis prepared to invade Poland, they must have thought about the Polish history of sustaining its national spirit through art and literature. When Poland was partitioned in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was poets like Adam Mickiewicz and novelists like Henryk Sienkiewicz who kept Polish culture alive and inspired their downtrodden countrymen. … Read more

The Seven Ages of Man in the Pasture—You Come Too

While I write this review, I am going to read the good poem I am reviewing. You come too. “The Pasture” by Robert Frost I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I sha’n’t be gone long. – … Read more

The Bad Poetry of Modern Hymnody

In an earlier column, I asked why we could not sing hymns from the Christian treasury, which is nearly two thousand years old, and which features composers with names like Bach and Handel and poets from Prudentius to Thomas Aquinas to Isaac Watts, the Wesleys, and John Henry Newman, rather than silly, sloppy, banally sentimental, … Read more

Max Jacob, a Saintly Sinner

March 5, 2019, will be the 75th anniversary of the death of Max Jacob (1876-1944), a figure somewhat on the margins of the renouveau catholique, a literary renaissance marked by expressions of the Faith among a broad range of novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists in early twentieth-century France. Born to a secular Jewish family in … Read more

The Vulgar Morality of Tam o’ Shanter: A Tale by Robbie Burns

January 25 marks the birthday of Robert Burns (1759-1796), the national poet of Scotland, and is observed worldwide with the Robbie Burns Supper, a night of poetry, song, toasts, haggis, and “Tam o’ Shanter.” The tale of Tam and his devilish interloping is customarily enacted in vaudevillian style during the Supper, bringing the flare and flavor … Read more

Poetic Traditional Hymns Put Alternatives to Shame

I often hear that since most of what is produced in any age is garbage, the quality of the hymns in a compilation such as the Hymnal 1940 is partly an illusion, because the earlier bad stuff would have been tossed aside. This observation is by way of excusing the bulk of church songs composed since 1965; time … Read more

On Bryant’s “To A Waterfowl”

In December 1815, freshly admitted to the bar, the American poet William Cullen Bryant was walking to Plainfield, Massachusetts, when he observed a bird—probably a duck—flying across the horizon at sunset. That vision gave birth to what has been called the best short poem in any language and even by one “the most beautiful poem … Read more

Adam’s Curse: William Butler Yeats on Original Sin

We made a good run in Genesis… all of two and a half chapters before finding ourselves on the business end of a curse leveled at us by omnipotent God. Don’t you hate it when that happens? As a matter of fact, we have been hating it ever since. As a defining feature of our … Read more

Remembering the Troubadour of Saint Folly

“Pray that I may love God more. It seems to me that if I can learn to love God more passionately, more constantly, without distractions, that absolutely nothing else can matter…. I receive Holy Communion every morning, so it ought to be all the easier for me to attain this object of my prayers. I … Read more

The Poison That Spoils All the Virtues

In George Herbert’s seventeenth century poem “Humilitie,” the Virtues sit on a throne to receive gifts at court from the animals who serve their masters. Humility steps down to receive the gifts the beasts present to the members of the court. The angry Lion surrenders its paw to Meekness, the fearful Hare presents her ears … Read more

Nightfall: Péguy’s La Nuit and the Hope of Discontinuity

The French poet and philosopher Charles Péguy died in September, 1914 with a bullet through his head. He had anticipated the war that took his life—some say he even welcomed it, though his poetry resists that claim. He ​was​ a polemicist to the core and at odds with his temporal milieu, which was a modernity … Read more

On Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”

2018 marks the centennial of the death of Joyce Kilmer in northern France, 1918 (b. 1886, New Brunswick, NJ). In his day, some deemed him “America’s leading Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation, often compared to British contemporaries G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.” Today, I fear that most Americans have heard his name only … Read more

Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man”

Robert Frost’s classic poem captures the essence of the home as a place of belonging and hospitality where a person experiences love, welcome, care, worth, and dignity and where he comes to know the value of both justice and mercy which the home instills in its unique combination of love’s gentleness and firmness and blend … Read more

Hopkins, Autumn, and Christ

A young child, Margaret, grieves for the time-swept autumn leaves. She is the object of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall,” and her bright Goldengrove is now “unleaving.” Goldengrove, with all its connotations of idyllic youth and sunny play. Goldengrove, where we imagine little Margaret exulting, with Chestertonian wonder, in the gratuitous magic of … Read more

George Herbert’s “The Pulley”

In the style of the “wit” of metaphysical poetry—the ability to see striking, original analogies and to use fresh metaphors—Herbert writes of man’s relationship to God by comparing the communication of God to man and man to God to the movements of a pulley. In the language of seventeenth century poetry, Herbert uses a “conceit,” … Read more

Brendan Behan: Rebel, Writer, Penitent

The name of Brendan Behan—rebel, hell-raiser, and writer—is rarely linked with the word “Catholic.” This is an oversight, for he was by birth and upbringing very much a Catholic writer, if that is to be judged by his culture and social background. Nevertheless, it was more than just that. Its omission, or deliberate negation, is … Read more

The Singular Catholic Vision of Gerard Manley Hopkins

If every poem has a past, then the strands of my own past are laced with lines of the loveliest lyric, forged a century or more ago by Gerard Manley Hopkins, an obscure Jesuit priest whose sonnet, “God’s Grandeur,” I elatedly discovered while a student at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. His was the opening … Read more

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