A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
~Wallace Stevens
Praise the spells and bless the charms, I found April in my arms. April golden, April cloudy, Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy; April soft in flowered languor, April cold with sudden anger, Ever changing, ever true — I love April, I love you.
I’m not an April girl, but for those of you who are, this poem seems appropriate. In George MacDonald’s Phantastes, he indicates that he believes that the time of year we’re born does have some effect on our disposition and personality. I’m not sure I agree, but who knows? Maybe April Girls are changeable and spring-like.
Here I come, creeping, creeping, everywhere;
By the dusty roadside,
On the sunny hillside,
Close by the noisy brook,
In every shady nook,
I come creeping, creeping, everywhere.
Here I come, creeping, creeping everywhere;
All round the open door,
Where sit the aged poor,
Here where the children play,
In the bright and merry May,
I come creeping, creeping, everywhere.
Here I come, creeping, creeping, everywhere;
You can not see me coming,
Nor hear my low, sweet humming,
For in the starry night,
And the glad morning light,
I come, quietly creeping, everywhere.
Here I come, creeping, creeping, everywhere;
More welcome than the flowers,
In summer's pleasant hours;
The gentle cow is glad,
And the merry birds not sad,
To see me creeping, creeping, everywhere.
Here I come, creeping, creeping, everywhere;
When you're numbered with the dead,
In your still and narrow bed,
In the happy spring I'll come,
And deck your narrow home,
Creeping, silently creeping, everywhere.
Here I come, creeping, creeping, everywhere;
My humble song of praise,
Most gratefully I raise,
To Him at whose command
I beautify the land,
Creeping, silently creeping, everywhere.
Come, read to me some poem, Some simple and heartfelt lay, That shall soothe this restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of day.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Samuel Longfellow was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s younger brother, the youngest of eight children, and he was an ordained Unitarian minister. He wrote a number of hymn lyrics, this poem being one of them.
Lo, the earth is risen again From the winter’s bond and pain! Bring we leaf and flower and spray To adorn our holiday!
Once again the word comes true, Lo, He maketh all things new! Now the dark, cold days are o’er, Light and gladness are before.
How our hearts leap with the spring! How our spirits soar and sing! Light is victor over gloom, Life triumphant o’er the tomb.
Change, then, mourning into praise, And, for dirges, anthems raise! All our fears and griefs shall be Lost in immortality.
I’ve posted poems by George Herbert, the seventeenth century Christian poet, on this blog numerous times. He’s one of my favorite poets. If one were to spend the entire month of April just reading through the poems of Mr. Herbert, one a day, it would be devotional enough to last you through the season and to bring you to an awareness of poetry of faith.
Here are some of the posts from Semicolon about George Herbert’s poetry:
Colossians 3:3 OUR LIFE IS HID WITH CHRIST IN GODMy words & thoughts do both express this notion,
That Life hath with the sun a double motion
The first Is straight, and our diurnal friend
The other Hid, and doth obliquely bend.
Our life is wrapt In flesh and tends to earth,
The other winds towards Him, whose happie birth
Taught me to live here so, That still one eye
Should aim and shoot at that which Is on high:
Quitting with daily labour all My pleasure,
To gain at harvest and eternal Treasure.
The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have ‘learned in suffering what they taught in song.’ In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim’s Progress.
~George MacDonald
Chained is the Spring. The night-wind bold
Blows over the hard earth;
Time is not more confused and cold,
Nor keeps more wintry mirth.
Yet blow, and roll the world about;
Blow, Time---blow, winter's Wind!
Through chinks of Time, heaven peepeth out,
And Spring the frost behind.
This little poem, or piece of a poem, came from chapter twelve of Phantastes by George MacDonald, and I especially liked the idea of heaven peeping out through the chinks of Time. I don’t really understand Phantastes, but I do get inklings of ideas and images that are delightful.
“The compliments of the season to my worthy masters and a merry first of April to us all. We have all a speck of motley.”
~Charles Lamb
"Let's make him a sailor," said Father,
"And he will adventure the sea."
"A soldier," said Mother, "is rather
What I would prefer him to be."
"A lawyer," said Father, "would please me,
For then he could draw up my will."
"A doctor," said Mother, "would ease me;
Maybe he could give me a pill."
Said Father: "Let's make him a curate,
A Bishop in gaiters to be."
Said Mother: "I couldn't endure it
To have Willie preaching to me."
Said Father: ""Let him be a poet;
So often he's gathering wool."
Said Mother with temper: "Oh stow it!
You know it, a poet's a fool.
Said Father: "Your son is a duffer,
A stupid and mischievous elf."
Said Mother, who's rather a huffer:
"That's right - he takes after yourself."
Controlling parental emotion
They turned to me, seeking a cue,
And sudden conceived the bright notion
To ask what I wanted to do.
Said I: "My ambition is modest:
A clown in a circus I'd be,
And turn somersaults in the sawdust
With audience laughing at me."
. . . Poor parents! they're dead and decaying,
But I am a clown as you see;
And though in no circus I'm playing,
How people are laughing at me!
I have some things to say, here on my own little piece of internet turf:
Teaching that sex outside of marriage between one woman and one man is immoral is traditional Christian teaching. It is Biblical, longstanding, and faithful Jesus’ teaching and to the Christian understanding of human flourishing. (Not to mention to the teaching of most other religions for the past six thousand years.)
Teaching that sexual expression outside of marriage is sin is not equivalent to denying one’s sexuality. The fact that we are sexual beings does not mean that we are compelled or allowed to express that sexuality in any and every way we want. In fact, sexuality is a gift with boundaries. And Christians believe that God asks us, for our own good, to have sex only within those boundaries.
If I say that those boundaries include no rape, no pornography, no homosexuality, no bestiality, no adultery, no prostitution, no fornication (sex before marriage), and no pedophilia, that does not mean that I am saying that fornication is the same as bestiality.
Nor does it mean that I am equating the people that engage in any of these sins or the people who are victims of those who engage in these sins with animals.
Nor am I “sin-leveling”: I recognize that some of these sins are more damaging to humans than others. Nevertheless, all are sin.
This teaching of “sexual purity” (if you want to call it that) does not lead directly or indirectly to murder.
Giving men and women strategies to use to redirect their thoughts away from sexual temptation does not lead directly or indirectly to murder either.
Jesus said, “I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” He is telling men not to look at a woman with lust: the desire and intent to dehumanize and use that woman to satisfy his own sexual desires. Telling men not to look at pornography and not to look at actual human beings with lust, to look away when temptation comes, is not disrespectful to women, it is not blaming those women for his temptation, and it is not bad advice.
If a man or a woman does blame other people for his or her own temptations and sin, that person is engaging in an age-old attempt to justify his or her own sin. Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the serpent. But God holds each of us responsible for our own actions.
There is hope for any person who believes he has a “sexual addiction”, and that hope is found in the forgiveness and redemption provided by Jesus Christ. Fall on His grace and then choose to follow Him daily, hourly, in obedience and love for other people who are all His creation, made in His image, not to be used or regarded as sexual objects.
There is also hope for those who are the victims of sexual abuse and objectification. Jesus has compassion for the suffering that any of us endure at the hands of others, and He offers rest for the weary and victimized and forgiveness for any sin which separates us from the perfection that God demands.
I am reading MacDonald’s quite strange and wonder filled book, Phantastes. In chapter eight, Anodos, a young man travelling in Fairyland, takes on a shadow-self that follows and eventually surrounds him, killing any light and any beauty that comes near. And after some travel in the company of the shadow, Anodos writes:
“But the most dreadful thing of all was that I now began to feel something like satisfaction in the presence of the shadow. I began to be rather vain of my attendant, saying to myself, ‘In a land like this, with so many illusions everywhere, I need his aid to disenchant the things around me. He does away with all appearances, and shows me things in their true color and form. And I am not one to be fooled with the vanities of the common crowd. I will not see beauty where there is none. I will dare to behold things as they are. And if I live in a waste instead of a paradise, I will live knowing where I live.'”
Phantastes by George MacDonald, p.78
Just like C.S. Lewis’s dwarfs in The Last Battle, Anodos is no longer to be fooled by the illusions of beauty and magic and fairy dust. Anodos believes that the darkness of the shadow is showing him reality, but darkness can’t “show” anything. One can only truly see when one is in the light, not the shadow.
Unfortunately, I know at least one young man whose name could be Anodos, a name that means “lost” or “pathless.” I am praying that he comes to see the enchanted and beautiful paradise where he actually could be living instead of trusting the disenchantments of the Shadow.
If a reader wants to be immersed in the world of mid-eighteenth century London, with lexicographer Samuel Johnson, actor David Garrick, painter William Hogarth, Jacobites and Hanoverians, orphans, beggars, spies and even murder, At the Seven Stars would be just as immersive if not quite as wide-ranging as A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. ( The main character of At the Seven Stars does make a brief, compelled visit to France.) The story begins in 1752 as fifteen year old impoverished and orphaned Richard Larkin, sent to London from the Pennsylvania Colony to live with his uncle who pre-deceases Richard’s arrival, discovers a three year old abandoned child, Abby, who is worse off than he is. And who should come along as unlikely savior but an ugly and monstrous old man, Mr. Johnson, who gives the young child a penny and also deigns to give young Richard some advice: go and apply for work at the Seven Stars, a nearby tavern. The Seven Stars seems to be a good place to work and a good place for little Abby to cosseted and cared for—until Richard inadvertently witnesses a political plot and even worse, a murder. Now where can Richard and Abigail find refuge from the spies and counter-spies and political intrigue that threaten their lives?
Central to the plot of this novel, which I would classify as Young Adult because of the age of the protagonist and because of the aforementioned murder (and subsequent violence and murder, which is described starkly but not gratuitously), is the Elibank Plot of 1752. You can look it up if you want, or just find out about it as you read the novel. The plot is engaging while not as fast-moving as a novel published in the twenty-first century might be. (At the Seven Stars was published in 1963, before the designation of YA became popular, and before attention spans were quite so much attenuated by various factors of modern life.) But the plot was not the most salient feature of the novel. The setting is so well realized that I found myself turning pages not to see what would happen so much as to read new revelations about what life and politics were like in 1752 London.
Recreated in full costume, are the lords and ladies, the street urchins, the men of arts and letters, who peopled the flowering of the Age of Reason. With cloak-and-dagger overtones, a history adventure that is vivid, authentic, and hard to put down.
We have tried to make our historical personages as real as it is possible to make them in every way–in speech, personality, views, action, and in their physical appearance in 1752.
The speech of the characters in this book has been re-created from eighteenth century literature and documents. Samuel Johnson, Hogarth, Garrick and the others, including the London cockney characters, actually would have spoken in the manner and used the words we have given them.
from the book jacket blurb, Foreword, and the Author’s Note at the end of the book
Patricia Beatty was a high school English teacher and author of tow previous books of historical fiction for children at the time of this novel’s publication, and her husband John was a college history and humanities professor, specializing in 17th and 18th century history. The couple combined their knowledge and talents, and their experience of living in London for a couple of years (1959-1960), to produce the verisimilitude and excitement of this spy novel which ends with neither the Jacobites nor the Hanoverians smelling too sweet. According to the depiction in this novel, the Jacobites were a nest of vipers, and the Hanoverians were even worse. A plague on both their houses!
Apparently, Samuel Johnson had Jacobite sympathies. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the hope of the Jacobites, died in Italy in 1788, deserted by his friends and allies and never having gained a throne. And the painter William Hogarth, who died in 1764 before the American Revolution was much more than a dim spark, was a friend and correspondent of none other than Benjamin Franklin. Actor David Garrick was a friend of Johnson’s and of Hogarth’s. Who knew? What side would you have taken in the politics of 1752? Jacobite or Hanoverian? Or well out of that frying pan and into the soon-to-be conflagration of the rebellious colonies?
“You must realize, Fernao, that the ambitions of our expedition are not for one nation alone, but for the benefit of all mankind. The all-important factor, therefore, is not whether any individual nation, such as Portugal, will underwrite it, but which one will have the foresight to do it. Let’s make haste for Spain and see King Carlos.” ~Cartographer Ruy Faleiro, as imagined in the Landmark history book, Ferdinand Magellan: Master Mariner, after the King of Portugal turned down the opportunity to fund the two men in their attempt to circumnavigate the globe.
I wonder if Magellan was truly so patriotic as to wish to give the glory of circumnavigating the globe to his birth nation of Portugal and whether Mr. Faleiro was truly such an internationalist. Whether or no, it turns out that Faleiro did not accompany Magellan on his famous voyage, either because Faleiro’s horoscope warned him of danger and violence or because Mr. F went mad just before the expedition was to set sail. Either way he missed out on the voyage for “the benefit of all mankind”, and Magellan (and Spain) got the glory–and the danger.
