February 2018
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Billy Graham's brand of Christianity was not mine; it never has been. Even apart from the vast doctrinal distance between his evangelical Protestantism and my Catholicism, simply as a matter of what you might call style or culture, it was not for me. There was a time when I more or less despised him as…
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I consider this to be one of the major lyric poems of the 19th century. A lot of people would agree with me. If I had continued my literature studies many years ago, I would have specialized in the Victorians. They understood the crisis that was coming upon our civilization with the fading of Christianity.…
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I seriously considered not going to Mass on Ash Wednesday. In fact I came pretty close to not going. My reason was partly that I just didn’t want to bother, and was possessive of the time involved, because I had some other things I wanted to do that day. But the strongest reason was my…
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I meant to mention: formatting poetry for the web can be a problem if the poem's format is very irregular or unusual. Simple line and stanza breaks are no problem. They do require some manual editing on my part, because when you force a line break in your word processing software it ends up being…
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Some believe the slumber Of trees is in December When timber’s naked under sky And squirrel keeps his chamber. But I believe their fibres Awake to life and labour When turbulence comes roaring up The land in loud October, And plunders, strips, and sunders And sends the leaves to wander And undisguises prickly shapes Beneath…
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I've listened to Beauty Will Save the World (the album by The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus), several times now, and I like it a great deal. It may not be everyone's cup of tea. It's certainly not a pop music album in any sense. The description I quoted from Wikipedia a couple of weeks ago…
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When I came across this poem by Denise Levertov (1923–1997), I was surprised because I’d assumed her work was only on secular themes. I didn’t know she’d become a Catholic late in her life and that she’d written poems about her faith. The Servant-Girl At Emmaus (A Painting by Velázquez) She listens, listens, holding…
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You can change your opinions, even your most deeply held beliefs, but you can't change your basic personality. I was thinking about that the other day as I read one of Rod Dreher's columns. As you know if you read him much, he has a tendency to view current events as leading in a sort…
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Edna St. Vincent Millay was one of the poets I was introduced to in high school. I remember my English teacher talking about how her poem “Renassance” won recognition in a literary contest when she was just nineteen, and that many were astounded that a nineteen year old could have actually written such a poem.…
Light On Dark Water 