Irish Jesuit Province

Poets and the Blessed EucharistAuthor(s): Michael WalshSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 60, No. 708 (Jun., 1932), pp. 324-329Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20513277 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 06:31

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Irish Jesuit Province is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Irish Monthly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.111 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:31:24 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

324

POETS AND THE BLESSED EUCHARIST

By MICHAEL WALSH

HEN the Editor expressed! a wish that I should write on the poets and the Blessed Eucharist I at once thought of a somewhat melancholy

poet of tragic genius who left us some unforgettable verses bearing on this sacred subject.

ff ever there is a selection or anthology of Eucharistic verses of quality brought out in volume form, this book cannot be complete without Ernest Dowson's "' Nuns

of Perpetual Adoration." This poor flotsam of genius

on the human tide who sang out of a weariness and 'sad satiety"

"They are not long-the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate;

I think they have no portion with us after

We pass the gate."1

gave us also those memorable verses on the silent sisters who have long since found the world hollow and have vowed to watch forever with Him under the Sanctuary lamp

"Calm, sad, secure, behind high convent walls These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray

And it is one with them when evening falls And one with them the cold return of day.

These heed not time; their nights and days they make Into a long returning rosary,

Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ's sake, Meekness and vigilance and chastity.

A vowed patrol, in silent companies, Life-long they keep before the living Christ;

In the dim church their prayers and penances Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed.

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.111 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:31:24 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

I POETS AND THE BLESSED EUCHARIST 325

Otutside, the world is wild and passionate; AMan's weary laughter and his sick despair

1Entitreat at their impenetrable gate; They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.

They saw the glory of the world displaced, They saw the bitter of it and the sweet;

They knew the roses of the world should fade And be trod under by the hurrying feet.

Therefore they rather put away desire, And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary,

And veiled their heads and put on coarse attire, Because their comeliness was vanity.

And there they rest; they have serene insight Of the illuminating dawn to be;

Mlary's Sweet Star dispels for them the night, The proper darkness of humanity.

Calm, sad, secure, with faces worn and mild, Surely their choice of vigil is the best;

Yea, for our roses fade, the world is wild, But there beside the altar there is rest."

Dowson himself, as Theodore Maynard put it, " like many of the writers and artists of the eighteen-nineties, ca,me into the Church but wearily and to find rest."

His "c Carthusians "7 has the same atmosphere, the same Divine peace that these contemplatives have found in life-long silence. When Dowson left us, " tired of the

world's foolish noise,"I he left us verses of quality, verses self-revealing if you will, in "' The Nuns of Perpetual

Adoration."> Let us hope that they will survive the sad, lovely, but hopeless " wine and roses."

I do not find Alice Mleynell's "'A General Com

munion " amongst the "1 Selected Poems " which Burns

Oates published last year. Regarding this poem in a

critical review of Alice Meynell which has appeared in the United States, I find this written: " The mystic

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.111 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:31:24 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

326 THE IRISH M1ONTHLY

uses words as a builder uses stones, making them bear only such meanings as those for which they were in tended. They will be austere, fitting, exact. So we find in Alice Meynell's poetry that her theology has a scholastic accuracy."

This is " A General Communion

"I saw the throng, so deeply separate, Fed at one onEly board

The devout people, moved, intent, elate, And the devoted Lord.

Ah, struck apart! not side from human side, But soul from human soul,

As each asunder absorbed the multiplied, The ever unparted whole.

I saw this people as a field of flowers, Each grown at such a price;

The sum: of unimaginable powers Did no more than suffice.

A thousand single central daisies they, A thousand of the one;

For each the entire monopoly of day; For each the whole of the devoted sun."'

The mystery of the Mass has overawed Vachel Lindsay and other great poets and writers not of the Fold.

Even sceptical (some of them, at least) literary jour nalists who were in Dublin during the Catholic Emanci patitn Centenary ceremonies in 1929 were moved to their stirring heights of prose in touching on the solemn

moment of the Mass and the spectacle of the silent kneeling thousands. The Mass holds moments of awe beyond the farthest limits of poetry or thought, and we thank those great poets like Alice Meynell who help us to ponder on the mystery of the Eucharist. The Divine

Mysteries are the soul-even though the poet h'imself be sometimes unaware of it-of all great poetry.

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.111 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:31:24 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

POETS AND THE BLESSED EUCHARIST 327

If Joseph Plunkett saw " His Blood upon the rose," Padraic Colum saw a sacred symbol in the sudden vision of fuchsia hedges in Connacht. To appreciate this symbolism which is expressed in the last stanza one must quote the first and the second also. The poem is entitled "Fuchsia Hedges in Connacht ":

"I think some saint of Eirinn, wandering far, Found you and brouight you here Demoiselles! For so I'll greet you in this alien air!

Anid like those maidens who were only known In their own land as daughters of the King,

Children of Charlemagne You have, by following that pilgrim-saint, Become high votresses You havTe made your palace-beauty dedicate, And your pomp serviceable You stand beside your folds!

I think you came from some old Roman land Most alien but most Catholic are you; Your purples are the purples that enfold In Passion Week the Shrine;

Your scarlet is the scarlet of the Wounds; You bring before our walls, before our doors, Lamps of the Sanctuary."2

I need quote no further. Can we ever again look on the fuchsia and forget its manifold symbolism as set forth in those last seven lines?

Lionel Johnson pictured an ancient, weather-worn, grey church, with the dead leaves rustling about it: the stained-glass windows enshrining "1 saints in golden vesture

I were shakiing with the wind. All was so old

about the church and yet so young. Mass is being celebrated:

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.111 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:31:24 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

38 THE IRISH MONTHLY

"Only an ancient priest offers the Sacrifice, Murmuring holy Latin immemorial."

In the "1 Former Glory " Wilfred Childe recalls the England of the ages of Faith-old St. Paul's, the bells chiming on Easter Day when the people

* . watched the line of rose-crowned canons pass Beneath the windows live with fiery glass To some most glorious Sacring of the Mass."

But he laments:

The Eucharistic God has gone away Until the people learn again to pray."

Not to include lines from that great gay champion of Catholicism-that giant of philosophy and intellect Mr. Chesterton, would be unpardonable. Wilfred Childe would see the "rose-crowned canons," but

G. K. C. would see the Pope himself. The poet is mid way in the smoke and thunder of Lepanto-the whole silent world is in.suspense awaiting the moment that is to decide its fate:

"The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke (Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke);

The hidden room in man s house where God sits all the year,

The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear."

In a weary pilgrim turning in from the wayside to

kneel a moment where the Sanctuary Lamp flickers one poet is moved to touching lines; another looks on the

glory of the round setting sun and remembers the Sacred Host and the monstrance, while a third remembers the chalice in contemplating the shape of some beautiful flower.

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.111 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:31:24 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

POETS AND THE BLESSED EUCHARIST 329

But then it was in the language of poetry He Himself spoke at His Last Supper when He said: " Do this in commemoration of Me "-promising us in the Bread of Angels everlasting life.

COMMEMORATION OF SAINT PAUL

JUNE 30TH.

Hark to the prayer of a hurrying age O Saint of the hurrying feet, O Blessed seer whose blinded eyes Saw the old and the new worlds meet.

You who tore the clouds from the darkened West That the dawn from the East shine through;

Who taught the wisdom of Nazareth In the city that Plato knew.

Who brought to the foetid heart of Rome The hill-winds of Galilee,

Who guarded the freedom of Christ's sweet yoke For the peoples yet to be;

As you toiled for the span of your Master's life At a task that might never wait. For the sake of a deathless love, sprung red From the root of a deadly hate.

His wisdom the light of your burning pen His interests a fiery goad Since He spake your name in the Syrian noon On the white Damascus road.

HELEN PUNCH.

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.111 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 06:31:24 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions