Contracted light, wrapt in night's mantle

Today a sonnet from George Herbert, who was dubbed “Holy Mr Herbert” in the seventeenth century, and whose work was used as a devotional aid well into the eighteenth. The nice thing about Herbert is how many readers he has outside the church. People who would never dream of ‘using’ his poems still find them lovely. Indeed Aldous Huxley praised his “lyrics unexcelled for flawless purity of diction and appositeness of imagery” and conceded that “within his limits he achieves a real perfection.” (I would argue that limitation is almost the definition of art, but I won't quibble with Huxley since he's been so charming about Herbert.) Anyway, here's “Christmas”:

After all pleasures as I rid one day,
My horse and I, both tired, body and mind,
With full cry of affections, quite astray;
I took up the next inn I could find.
There when I came, whom found I but my dear,
My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief
Of pleasures brought me to Him, ready there
To be all passengers' most sweet relief?
Oh Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,
Wrapt in night's mantle, stole into a manger;
Since my dark soul and brutish is Thy right,
To man of all beasts be not Thou a stranger:
Furnish and deck my soul, that Thou mayst have
A better lodging, than a rack, or grave.

Immensity cloistered

Today's poem is from John Donne's sonnet sequence La Corona (“the crown”). This sequence works like a set of Ignatian meditations: sharp visualisations of scenes from the life of Christ are supposed to enhance devotion. The more vividly one can imagine the scents, sounds, colours, textures of the scene, the more one is involved and inspired to worship. With Donne, however, the conceptual enormities and ambiguities always seem to get in the way of pure sensuality. He can't help but wander into paradox and obscurity while trying to keep his mind on the physical events of Jesus' birth. I can't help but like him the more for it.

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-belov'd imprisonment,
There He hath made Himself to His intent
Weak enough, now into the world to come;
But O, for thee, for Him, hath the inn no room?
Yet lay Him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Stars and wise men will travel to prevent
The effect of Herod's jealous general doom.
Seest thou, my soul, with thy faith's eyes, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.

Now he is new

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest . . .
you who have had so far
to come.) Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled
a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world.
Charmed by doves’ voices, the whisper of straw,
he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed
who overflowed all skies,
all years.
Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught that I might be free,
blind in my womb to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth
for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.

“Mary's Song” Luci Shaw, 1971.

The pale unsatisfied ones

Since there is such an abundance of good poetry about the nativity, I thought I would spread it out over the next twelve days, rather than clog up this post with six or seven poems of which you would probably only read the first one or two anyway. So here's the first one, a dense little poem, written in 1914, called “The Magi” by WB Yeats.

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

I wouldn't pretend to understand this poem, but in the context of Yeats' rejection oforthodoxy and interest in the occult, the more I read it the more it seems to me to be about the strange conjunction of an episode in Christian history and a firmament of ancient, pagan mythology; a conjunction which promises more than the crucifixion appears to justify. The 'turbulence' at Calvary is, to these 'pale unsatisfied ones', an ordinary instance of bloody human struggle and death, whereas the nativity, told in the stars, is a compelling and, to them, endlessly mysterious intervention of divinity. Much depends on one's reading of Calvary itself. To a Christian, the incarnation entire (including the crucifixion) is an uncontrollable intervention unfolding on the bestial floor of mortal life. The death of Christ, no less than the birth, is a divine mystery. The search ends there; the star comes to rest above the cross.

Ruth Park dies at 93

Ruth Park died yesterday in Sydney where she lived most of her life after moving here from New Zealand. Her husband, D'Arcy Niland, was also an author and wrote The Shiralee. Their twin daughters were both illustrators. 

Though she wrote several adult novels, including The Harp in the South, she's more famous for her children's books Playing Beattie Bow and The Muddleheaded Wombat, a copy of which I once won as a prize in an eisteddfod. I hope her death might inspire more people (including me) to read her books.  Australia doesn't have so many literary icons that we can allow one of them to languish unread.

It certainly makes me want to hunt out my Wombat book. These opening lines, which Google found for me, remind me how sweet it was, and, bizarrely, how strongly my 10-year-old self identified with the wombat:

There was once a muddle-headed wombat sitting in the grass and feeling very lonely. A wombat is a square animal with thick hair like a door-mat, stumpy legs, and no tail to speak of. He has brown eyes and a comfortable, leathery flat nose like a koala. This wombat was lonely because he had no sisters or brothers or aunties or uncles, and besides, he had spent all his pocket money. 

“I wish I had a friend,” he thought, “a nice, comfy little friend who would fit in my cardigan pocket. A wombat could have lots of adventures with a friend like that.”