In this PODCAzT I return to a theme I have explored many times: the liturgical year. We will hear about the Advent and Christmas cycle so that we can get our bearings on where we are… and who we are.
I also, from requests, include winter and even liturgical season appropriate poetry from Robert Herrick, T.S. Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Roman Liturgy’s Benedicite.
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I know I will have requests about the piece of music at the end. It is called “King David’s Royal Star” from the Christmas CD of the wonderful Benedictine’s of Mary, Queen of Apostles near Kansas City, MO. You… indeed you… can buy their disks and help them. Listen to them while shaving with soap from the Dominicans and while drinking Mystic Monk Coffee from Carmelites!
If you can work through them (and I mean work!) Hopkin’s (a Jesuit) poems are some of the most rewarding and profound I have read. Here is one of his poems on winter:
Winter with the Gulf Stream
The boughs, the boughs are bare enough
But earth has never felt the snow.
Frost-furred our ivies are and rough
With bills of rime the brambles shew.
The hoarse leaves crawl on hissing ground
Because the sighing wind is low.
But if the rain-blasts be unbound
And from dank feathers wring the drops
The clogged brook runs with choking sound
Kneading the mounded mire that stops
His channel under clammy coats
Of foliage fallen in the copse.
A simple passage of weak notes
Is all the winter bird dare try.
The bugle moon by daylight floats
So glassy white about the sky,
So like a berg of hyaline,
And pencilled blue so daintily
I never saw her so divine.
But through black branches, rarely drest
In scarves of silky shot and shine,
The webbed and the watery west
Where yonder crimson fireball sits
Looks laid for feasting and for rest.
I see long reefs of violets
In beryl-covered fens so dim,
A gold-water Pactolus frets
Its brindled wharves and yellow brim,
The waxen colours weep and run,
And slendering to his burning rim
Into the flat blue mist the sun
Drops out and all our day is done.
Tremendous! Thank you, Father … this made for a great Sunday afternoon.
Funny how Eliot seems to motor through his own poem. I begin to see what you mean about poets reading their own work.
I am grateful for a comment. Thanks!
You are quite the poet yourself, Father Z
Wonderful podcast, Father Z! I liked the recording of T. S. Eliot reading his own work (the sound in the background sounded an awful lot like the cutting of hair, though!). I’ve heard a reading of the poems that are the basis of the musical ‘Cats’-the actor who did it escapes me at the moment….
The music was rather interesting, too-quite the contrasts! From the jazzy version of ‘We Three Kings’ to the lovely singing of the Benedictines of Mary….
I echo jameeka’s comment: you ARE quite the poet yourself, Father Z!