Fire-Featuring Heaven

Here is part (slightly revised for this blog) of an article I wrote a few years ago for CHRISTIANITY AND SOCIETY JOURNAL. I wanted to include it here in part because it has to do with a sonnet written by Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves. This sonnet does not conform to the standard of five stressed syllables per line; it goes for eight. Yet he wrote it as a sonnet and it has been generally so accepted. There is room, even in so strict a form as the sonnet, for some deviation.

Reading Difficult Poetry as a Christian Endeavor
Tears began welling up in my oldest daughter's eyes.

The Ends of Being

In the years before their marriage Elizabeth Barrett wrote forty-four sonnets to Robert Browning. Although she did not want to publish them, being somewhat bashful about their extremely personal tone, he persuaded her. Still, in order to somewhat distance herself from them she gave the collection the inaccurate title of Sonnets From the Portuguese.

They are, as her husband told her, the best sonnets in English since Shakespeare. And, much more than Shakespeare's sonnets, they are a series rather than simply a collection. To some extent Shakespeare's sonnets should be read roughly in order and in context with one another. To a much greater extent Barrrett's sonnets should be read strictly in order. It is no accident

The Silent Millenium, #6

Anicius Boethius (480-524)
(trans. Alexander Pope)


O QUI PERPETUA MUNDUM RATIONE GUBERNAS

O thou, whose all-creating hands sustain
The radiant Heav'ns, and Earth, and ambient main!
Eternal Reason! whose presiding soul
Informs great nature and directs the whole!
Who wert, e're time his rapid race begun,
And bad'st the years in long procession run:
Who fix't thy self amidst the rowling frame,
Gav'st all things to be chang'd, yet ever art the same!
Oh teach the mind t' aetherial heights to rise,
And view familiar, in its native skies,
The source of good; thy splendor to descry,
And on thy self, undazled, fix her eye.

Oh quicken this dull mass of mortal clay;
Shine through the soul, and drive its clouds away!
For thou art Light. In thee the righteous find
Calm rest, and soft serentity of mind;
Thee they regard alone; to thee they tend;
At once our great original and end,
At once our means, our end, our guide, our way,
Our utmost bound, and our eternal stay!