Verses Recalled

I just discovered something shocking...well, I suppose shocking is a bit hyperbolic, but it's not a good thing. Apparently school children are no longer required to memorize poems as they study English literature in middle and high school. According to my reliable source — a current high school teacher of English — many schools ignore centuries of great English and American literature, preferring instead to focus on modern novels by writers like Stephen King. And poetry? Apparently, at best, it's back-burnered or completely ignored. I hope this is not true, or at least not universal.

If you're my age or even a few years younger, I'm pretty sure you were exposed to at least some of the English language's great poetry, and probably had to memorize many of those poems. I can still recite some of them, so burned into my memory were those lines. A poem like Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty" will always be with me:

Glory be to God for dappled things -- 

    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

        For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings;

    Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;

        And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

    Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

        With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                        Praise him.

(Although I can still recall all the words, I had to look up the punctuation.)

The first time I read this poem, in my eighth-grade classroom, I was intrigued by its sounds, by the flow of the verse, but I hadn't a clue what all those strange words meant. I then made the mistake of mentioning this to Sister Francis Jane, O.P. In doing so I had talked myself into another homework assignment: "Find out," she ordered, "and tomorrow you can tell the class what you discovered." 

The next day, I introduced the class to another new word -- new, at least, for me -- "paradox"  -- and went on to explain, very poorly and nervously, how God fills the world with wondrous things that show off the variety and surprise of His creation. It's a creation, too, of opposites that display His glory. And, perhaps not surprisingly, man, in his own use of nature's gifts, imitates God. 

My brief commentary resulted in lots of blank looks and no applause, but one cute girl with long, auburn tresses seemed mildly impressed, so it was worth it. Of course, I ended up angering the entire class because "Franny Jane" (as we affectionately called Sister behind her back) decided that everyone should memorize the poem...lots of groans and dirty looks directed at yours truly.

And how many of you had to memorize Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"? Once again the words have remained with me. I found Frost's poetry refleshing because I could understand what he was saying without turning to the Oxford English Dictionary. It just took me a while to comprehend his deeper meanings related to the choices life places before us. And with that, Franny Jane introduced us to symbols and metaphors and similes. 

There's so much more verse tucked away in my aging memory banks -- poetry by Shakespeare, Tennyson, Pope, Dickinson, Francis Thompson, and many others -- and like the songs we loved in our youth, I can recall these poems and savor them when life's challenges demand a touch of calm or a reminder of reality. How sad that the memories of many of today's children will be empty of such wonderful poetry, for poetry introduces us to the fullness and intensity of language. Indeed, poetry, for me, is another proof of the very existence of God, in whose image and likeness you and I were created. The Creative Word presents us with a perfect divine song, a gift from a loving God who fills His creation with the objects of our poetry.

20th-Century Man: Ray Bradbury

Born in 1944 I am definitely a child of the 20th century. My childhood, my education, my marriage, the birth of my children, my many years in the military, most of my subsequent working life, my years of formation for the diaconate, my ordination...all of this was packed into the 20th century. About the only thing I've done in the 21st century is retire. Anyway, the current century isn't really worth talking about, at least not yet. After all, at the age of 12 it's barely an adolescent and by the time it's mature enough to be evaluated objectively I probably won't be around to pass judgment. So I'll remain happily trapped in my century of choice.

This deep personal connection I have with the past century manifests itself in strange and unpredictable ways. For example, a few months ago while writing a check to pay the nice man who weeds our flower beds and trims our shrubbery, I entered "March 15, 1992" as the date. I was off by exactly 20 years. Although a therapist might try to relate this simple mistake to some long-forgotten, deep-seated conflict in my past, the weed guy just handed the check back to me and said, "Uh...I think you wrote the wrong date." He neither laughed nor smiled. He's a very kind young man.

Of course, a century is nothing more than the passage of time measured by 100 consecutive revolutions of the earth around the sun. It takes humanity to give a century some meaning. Without us humans there would be no 20th or 21st or any other century. Dinosaurs and cockroaches and maple trees don't keep track of such things as the passage of time. They simply strive to survive. On the other hand, we humans, once we've taken care of the survival thing, come up with all kinds of activities to keep us busy. And some 20th-century humans were very busy indeed.

Most of the people who defined the 20th century are now gone or soon will be. Some -- the Stalins, Hitlers, Maos and their wannabe imitators -- will not be missed. But so many others left far more positive marks on their time, in art, literature and music, in statecraft and industry, in science and technology, in philosophy and theology. Maybe some day I'll take the time to write about those who had the most influence on me...but not today.

Ray Bradbury

Today I'm going to mention just one man, Ray Bradbury, who died last week at 91. Probably more than any other writer Bradbury brought respectability to science fiction. I read his Fahrenheit 451 the summer after I graduated from high school and became an instant fan. Throughout that summer I haunted our public library and read everything of Bradbury's I could find. I think what attracted me to his work was its inherent morality, and the fact that he wrote so very well.

I could write much more in praise of Bradbury, but another of my heroes, the late Russell Kirk, wrote about him far more eloquently than I ever could. The following is an excerpt from an assessment Kirk wrote of the work of his close friend, Ray Bradbury. It was written in 1968.

Bradbury (who thinks of himself, so far as he has any politics, as something of a revolutionary) was assailed by the New York critics as a "romantic reactionary." Charitably, Bradbury later remarked to me that perhaps the Manhattan critics merely had been waiting to gun him down once he should ride out of his western fastness. But there was more than that to their vituperative detestation. They perceived that Bradbury is a moralist, which they could not abide; that he has no truck with the obscene, which omission they found unpardonable; that he is no complacent liberal, because he knows the Spirit of the Age to be monstrous—for which let him be anathema; that he is one of the last surviving masters of eloquence and glowing description, which ought to be prohibited; that, with Pascal, he understands how the Heart has reasons which the Reason cannot know—so to the Logicalist lamp-post with him.

Thus the champions of decadence and deliquescence, the enemies of the permanent things, accurately discerned in Ray Bradbury a man of moral imagination, who must be put down promptly. For like Lewis, like Tolkien, like other talented fabulists, Ray Bradbury has drawn the sword against the dreary and corrupting materialism of this century; against society as producer-and-consumer equation, against the hideousness in modern life, against mindless power, against sexual obsession, against sham intellectuality, against the perversion of right reason into the mentality of the television-viewer. His Martians, spectres, and witches are not diverting entertainment only: they become, in their eerie manner, the defenders of truth and beauty.

You can read Kirk's entire article here: The World of Ray Bradbury.

If you haven't read Bradbury, read the wonderful stories in The Martian Chronicles; read Something Wicked This Way Comes.


Ray Bradbury, rest in peace.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad