Some Monday Readings - Dec. 2, 2024

St. Hedwig’s: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place – Rod Dreher at The European Conservative. 

The John le Carre Advent Calendar – Tom Gauld at The Guardian.

 

An Education in Thanksgiving – Rachel Alexander Cambre at Law & Liberty on Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter. 

 

Advent Sunday: Christina Rossetti – Malcolm Guite.

 

Finding Order in the Pieces – John Wilson at First Things Magazine.

 

Britain Votes for Death – The Four Discoursemen. 

 

Crossing the Thames at Woolwich – A London Inheritance.

 

Connect Before You Ask – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

A Look Back at the Battle of Franklin – Emerging Civil War.

 

Plainsong – poem by Donald Platt at The New Criterion. 

 

Top illustration: Christina Rossetti.

Some Thursday Readings

The renewables red herring – Derrick Berthelsen at The Critic Magazine. 

A sonnet for St. Francis – Malcolm Guite.

 

Now Available: “Stay and Fight It Out: The Second Day of Gettysburg” – Emerging Civil War.

Poet Laura: Goodbye – and Hello! – Dheepa Maturi at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge” by Malcolm Guite

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was first published in 1798 with other Coleridge poems and poems by William Wordsworth. The collection was entitled Lyrical Ballads, and “Mariner” was by far the longest poem. The collection was originally planned as the first in a two-volume series, but Wordsworth and Coleridge changed plans and published the first volume anonymously.

It is not an understatement to say that Lyrical Ballads changed poetry forever. What is less well known, except among Coleridge biographers and teachers, is that “Mariner” was written as part of a five-year burst of creativity by the poet. In fact, all of the poems we know as Coleridge’s were written in this five-year period. Coleridge did edit the poem for the next 20 years, and he provided his own extensive commentary on it, but those five years (1797-1802) saw the sum total of Coleridge’s poetic output.

The impact of “Mariner” is still felt today. It is one of those poems that have continued to resonate over the generations, although for often very different reasons. It is a poem that allows us to read into it the burning questions of the day, and our own individual journeys through life. Cambridge professor and chaplain Malcolm Guite has discovered something else: the poem, although written when Coleridge was 25, is a remarkable guide to the full span of Coleridge’s life. It’s as if “Mariner” foreshadowed what was to come in the poet’s life.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Illustration: One of Gustave Dore’s engravings for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Malcolm Guite’s “Parable and Paradox”

I find it extremely comforting – a blessed relief – to turn from the viciousness of the commentary about Brexit, the vote by the people of Britain to leave the EU, to poetry based on the sayings of Jesus and related themes. That’s what Parable and Paradox by poet, priest, and musician Malcom Guite is – a blessed relief.

Perhaps it’s the sonnet form Guite uses, a form that’s been around since at least the 1200s if not earlier. The sonnet is a 14-line poem that follows a specific rhyming pattern and structure. William Shakespeare used the form to write some of the most beautiful poems in the English language. So did Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The sonnet is a favored form by Guite, and he uses it to reflect upon, ponder, question, celebrate, and commemorate. In this poem, he does all five of these:

Pilgrimage

Come dip a scallop shell into the font

For birth and blessings as child of God.

The living water rises from that fount

Whence all things come, that you may bathe and wade

And find the flow, and learn at last to follow

The course of Love upstream toward your home.

The day is done and all the fields lie fallow,

One thing is needful, one voice calls your name.

Take the true compass now, be compassed round

By clouds of witness, chords of love unbound.

Turn to the Son, begin your pilgrimage,

Take time with him to find your true direction.

He travels with you through this darkened age

And wake you every day to resurrection.

Read it aloud. The act of reading such a poem is itself calming and soothing.

Parable and Paradox includes 27 new poems on subjects ranging from Bible study to hospitality; 50 sonnets on the sayings of Jesus; and a concluding series of poems entitled “Seven Whole Days.” Two of the new poems are named for two American poets – Scott Cairns and Luci Shaw.

Malcolm Guite

Guite is a poet, an Anglican priest, chaplain of Girton College at the University of Cambridge, a lecturer and speaker, and a rock band musician part of the Cambridge-based group Mystery Train. He’s published several books, including several poetry collections, such as Sounding the Seasons, The Singing Bowl, and Word in the Wilderness. He’s a lecturer and speaker. And he’s a rock band musician part of the Cambridge-based group Mystery Train. He received his undergraduate and masters degrees from Cambridge, and a Ph.D from Durham University, where his dissertation focused on the poets Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne and their influence on T.S. Eliot.

Read these poems called Parable and Paradox. Find a quiet place to read them aloud. Read them, and calm your spirit.

Related: My review of Word in the Wilderness.

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

For Lent: The Word in the Wilderness

This year, for the Lenten season, I decided to read The Word in the Wilderness by Malcolm Guite. Subtitled “A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter,” the book is simultaneously a devotional and a poetry reader.

Some might argue that “devotional” and “poetry reader” are possibly redundant. I might be one of those making that argument. Guite certainly is: “…the poetic imagination does indeed redress an imbalance and is a necessary complement to more rationalistic and analytical ways of knowing. What I would like to do in this book is top put that insight into practice, and turn to poetry for a clarification of who we are, how we pray, how we journey through our lives with God and how he comes to journey with us.”

The book is divided into seven sections, each with an introduction followed by daily poetry readings. Many of the poems are by Guite himself, but you will also find Seamus Heaney, Dante, John Donne, Alfred Tennyson, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Czelaw Milosz and others.

This Guite sonnet is the reading for Ash Wednesday:

Ash Wednesday

Receive this cross of ask upon your brow

Brought from the burning of Palm Sunday’s cross;

The forests of the world are burning now

And you make late repentance for the loss.

But all the trees of God would clap their hands,

The very stones themselves would shout and sing,

If you could covenant to love these lands

And recognize in Christ their lord and king.

He sees the slow destruction of those trees,

He weeps to see the ancient places burn,

And still you make what purchases you please

And still to dust and ashes you return.

But Hope could rise from ashes even now

Beginning with this sign upon your brow.

He then wonders at the use of ashes – a sign of destruction – as “a sign of repentance and renewal.” And yet there is something profound in that sign being both one of renewal and a signal of our ultimate return to ashes and dust.

Malcom Guite

Guite is a poet, but he is also an Anglican priest and chaplain of Girton College at the University of Cambridge. He’s published several books, including several poetry collections, such as Sounding the Seasons and The Singing Bowl. He’s a lecturer and speaker. And he’s a rock band musician part of the Cambridge-based group Mystery Train. He received his undergraduate and masters degrees from Cambridge, and a Ph.D from Durham University, where his dissertation, according to his entry in Wikipedia, focused on the poets Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne and their influence on T.S. Eliot.

I’ve now read the first three of the poems and readings in The Word in the Wilderness. Already I know that this is a Lenten journey well worth taking.

Top photograph by Jane Illnerova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.