Christina Rossetti, RIP

The Anglo-Catholic, Tractarian, Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti died on December 29, 1894. The Poetry Foundation describes her religious and poetic inspirations:

Caught up in the Tractarian or Oxford Movement when it reached London in the 1840s, the Rossettis shifted from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic orientation, and this outlook influenced virtually all of Christina Rossetti’s poetry. She was also influenced by the poetics of the Oxford Movement, as is documented in the annotations and illustrations she added to her copy of John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827) and in her reading of poetry by Isaac Williams and John Henry Newman. For more than twenty years, beginning in 1843, she worshiped at Christ Church, Albany Street, where services were influenced by the innovations emanating from Oxford. The Reverend William Dodsworth, the priest there until his conversion to Catholicism in 1850, assumed a leading role as the Oxford Movement spread to London. In addition to coming under the religious influence of prominent Tractarians such as Dodsworth, W. J. E. Bennett, Henry W. Burrows, and E. B. Pusey, Rossetti had close personal ties with Burrows and Richard Frederick Littledale, a High Church theologian who became her spiritual adviser. The importance of Rossetti’s faith for her life and art can hardly be overstated. More than half of her poetic output is devotional, and the works of her later years in both poetry and prose are almost exclusively so. The inconstancy of human love, the vanity of earthly pleasures, renunciation, individual unworthiness, and the perfection of divine love are recurring themes in her poetry.

As this site shows, she wrote several poems for Advent and Christmastide, through to Candlemas, the traditional end of the 40 days of Christmas. One of the most familiar is called "A Christmas Carol" but we know it as "In the Bleak Midwinter":

In the bleak mid-winter
  Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
  Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
  Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
  Long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
  Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
  When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
  A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty
  Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him whom cherubim
  Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
  And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him whom angels
  Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
  Which adore.


  May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
  Throng'd the air,
But only His mother
  In her maiden bliss
Worshipped her Beloved
  With a kiss.

What can I give Him,
  Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
  I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
  I would do my part,--
Yet what I can I give Him,
  Give my heart.

Remember that today is also the feast of St. Thomas a Becket, and of Blessed William Howard, martyrs.

Sir Philip Sidney and St. Edmund Campion

Sir Philip Sidney, courtier, diplomat, poet, and soldier, is known as the great champion of Elizabethan, Protestant England. But he had connections to someone who would become the most hunted man in England, Edmund Campion.

As this biography of Campion notes, Sidney met with Campion when visiting Prague, while the latter was studying for the priesthood in April, 1577:

Meanwhile Rudolph II had succeeded to the imperial throne; and the “magnificently provided” Envoy who was sent to[67] Prague, bearing the congratulations of Queen Elizabeth, was none other than Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney’s mind was set upon seeing his old friend Campion, and talking with him; but he managed only with difficulty to carry out his wishes. He went officially in the Emperor’s train to hear his friend (not yet in priest’s orders) preach, and on his return to England unguardedly spoke with delight of the sermon. Whenever Sidney visited the Continent he was supposed to become tainted with a hankering after Catholicism, though in all his public actions he was conspicuously Protestant. Campion, who knew him from boyhood and was not given to misjudgment, believed that he had almost won over the star of English chivalry: “this young man so wonderfully beloved and admired,” he calls him in 1576; a testimony doubly interesting, when we remember that Philip Sidney was then but three-and-twenty, to the effect which his short life made upon all his contemporaries. “He had much conversation with me,” Campion’s letter goes on, “and I hope not in vain, for to all appearances[68] he was most keen about it. I commend him to your remembrances at Mass, since he asked the prayers of all good men, and at the same time put into my hands alms to be distributed to the poor for him; this trust I have discharged.” He ends by hoping that some of the missionaries then going back to England from Douay will have “opportunity of watering this plant . . . poor wavering soul!” Fr. Parsons in his Life of Campion tells us that Sidney “professed himself convinced, but said that it was necessary for him to hold on the course which he had hitherto followed.” Such was the sad answer of Felix to St. Paul.

Sidney and Campion had met before, of course, since Sidney had accompanied Elizabeth to Oxford when Campion had made his great impression on the queen and had earned the patronage of Sidney's uncle, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. Sidney had also studied at Oxford while Campion was a Fellow at St. John's and Proctor. Edmund Campion had served in Sidney's father's household in Ireland, where Sir Henry Sidney served as Elizabeth's Lord Deputy. Campion wrote his History of Ireland while in Sidney's service and had dedicated it to Leicester.

Katherine Duncan-Jones, a Somerville College Shakespeare Scholar, wrote a biography of Sidney in 1991 that Blair Worden appreciated in the London Review of Books (subscription required) in a review essay about Philip and Algernon Sidney:

Katherine Duncan-Jones’s Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet is the first major biography of its subject since 1915. Rarely is a scholarly book so spirited, or a spirited book so scholarly. Duncan-Jones’s learning, always profound and never advertised, is communicated with elegance and lightness of touch. She aims ‘not to debunk’ Sidney but to ‘summon him to life, spots and all’. Like so many of his family – not least Algernon – Philip had a querulous, at times violent character. He could also be a prig and a snob. And he could be deeply devious, a characteristic ruefully observed by a victim of it who remarked that Sidney had been bred up ‘at a bad school’, the school of the unscrupulous Leicester. On the credit side are his undoubted charm and affability and the breadth and discernment of his artistic and literary patronage. There is also a bottomless generosity, although here Duncan-Jones seems less clear-eyed than usual. He was indeed wonderfully generous, but with whose money? His mentor Hubert Languet apparently ate into his lifesavings to assist Philip’s gift-giving. On his deathbed Philip willed away endless possessions, and left Sir Francis Walsingham, his father-in-law and executor, to sink beneath the burden of Philip’s debts. . . .

Sidney’s religious beliefs interest Duncan-Jones more than his political ones. They nonetheless remain elusive. Her principal contribution is to emphasise his contacts and friendships with Roman Catholics, which appear to contradict the conventional picture of zealous Protestantism. Much is made of his ties with Edmund Campion, who hoped for Sidney’s conversion. I suspect that Sidney followed Leicester’s example and sought a power base across the religious boundaries even as he backed the party of forward Protestantism. Both in his life and in his art Duncan-Jones detects a growing religious intensity in the final years of Sidney’s life. When he went to the Netherlands the intensity acquired an apocalyptic strain, which seems to sit oddly beside his doctrinally liberal Platonism. How little we sometimes understand the theological equipment of the political thinkers of Early Modern England. The same puzzling combination would appear a century later, with so many of Philip’s characteristics, in his great-nephew Algernon.

Duncan-Jones also contributed an essay on Campion and Sidney to a collection edited by Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits.

RIP Henry Vaux, Poet and Priest Smuggler

Henry Vaux, the eldest son of William Vaux, third Baron Vaux of Harrowden, died on November 19, 1587. He was about 28 years old. He had renounced the family title in favor of his half-brother George (William remarried after the death of his first wife) because he had decided to devote his life to protecting the Jesuit missionary priests like St. Edmund Campion, St. Robert Southwell, John Gerard, Henry Garnet, Robert Persons, etc. His sisters Eleanor and Anne were also involved in these projects, which were of course fraught with danger because it was illegal in England to attend the Mass, to deny the governorship of the monarch over the Church, and to assist any Catholic priest, since he was a traitor. Jessie Childs told the story of the Henry's career in her study of  the Vaux family in God's Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England, which I've recently reviewed for a publication (more info to be announced).

Henry Vaux was tutored by Edmund Campion starting in 1568, who found Henry and his sister Eleanor to be excellent scholars with great aptitude, when Campion was still at Oxford University. He was particularly impressed with Henry, as this letter demonstrates:

From the day your Father first asked me to see you and to superintend your education I have become amazingly attached to you. For I marvelled and was almost perplexed when I saw a boy who had not yet completed his ninth year, scion of a notable family, of such pleasant demeanour and refinement; who wrote and spoke Latin so well; who was equally good at prose and verse, accurate and quick at figures, devoted to the study of letters, diligent in application, able to sketch out and arrange his whole course of study. If circumstances had permitted it I should have desired nothing better than to give my enthusiastic help to that celebrated man, your Father, and to you, a boy of such great promise. But since some unknown fate, yours and mine, has deprived you of me and me of you, your Father (by whom I am dearly loved, and whom I particularly revere) has easily persuaded me that my voice and advice should come to you. . . . (Translated by Father Godfrey Anstruther)

Vaux grew up at Grace Dieu, Leicester under the care of his maternal grandmother from 1571 to 1581. His cousins, the poet John Beaumont and playwright Francis Beaumont, were also raised there. 

As a poet, Vaux was following a family tradition, for his grandfather, Thomas Vaux, the second Baron Vaux had written poetry--and had been the friend of poets Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl Surrey. One of Thomas Vaux's poems, "A Quiet Mind":

When all is done and said,
In the end thus shall you find,
He most of all doth bathe in bliss
That hath a quiet mind:
And, clear from worldly cares,
To deem can be content,
The sweetest time in all his life
In thinking to be spent.

The body subject is
To fickle Fortune's power,
And to a million of mishaps
Is casual every hour;
And death in time doth change
It to a clod of clay;
Whereas the mind, which is divine,
Runs never to decay.

Companion none is like
Unto the mind alone;
For many have been harmed by speech,
Through thinking few or none.
Fear oftentimes restraineth words,
But makes not thought to cease;
And he speaks best, that hath the skill
When for to hold his peace.

Our wealth leaves us at death;
Our kinsmen at the grave;
But virtues of the mind unto
The heavens with us we have.
Wherefore, for virtue's sake,
I can be well content,
The sweetest time in all my life
To deem in thinking spent.

When his former tutor Father Edmund Campion, SJ, returned to England in 1580 with Father Robert Persons, SJ, Henry Vaux began his career as a priest smuggler which continued until his arrest on November 4, 1586 when pursuivants were looking for the Jesuit priests Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet. Imprisoned in Marshalsea, Vaux became desperately ill and was released on "medical leave" in May of 1587. His sisters Anne and Eleanor cared for him until his death.

In 2008 Timothy Christopher Hacksley submitted a thesis for his M.A. at Rhodes University which contains the texts of the Vaux's poems and it may be accessed here.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, RIP

Why did Gerard Manley Hopkins die? This blog posts an article with various recent attempts at diagnosis passed on reports of his symptoms and the course of his last illness in May and June, 1889:

It is also an undoubted fact, as noted earlier, that Hopkins suffered from generally poor health, and would have had a low level of resistance to infection. possibility; perhaps Hopkins' illness was not typhoid fever. There is some persuasive evidence for this notion. Writing in The Lancet in 1997, Dr. Kenneth Flegel of The Royal Victoria Hospital, Montreal examined the known details of Hopkins' final illness, and considered them in conjunction with the fact that Hopkins had suffered intermittently throughout his life from diarrhoea, fatigue and eye pain. He came to the conclusion that these conditions, allied to the absence of such typical symptoms of typhoid as headache and fever, indicated that Hopkins' illness was not typhoid fever, but Crohn's disease. This article led to a response from a group of doctors at St. Thomas' Hospital, London, who put forward a case for coeliac disease. The one point on which they all agreed was that they would never be sure where the truth lay - and neither are we. We do know that his condition was deteriorating. Peritonitis was diagnosed on about 04 June, and his parents were summoned from England by telegram. He was initially reluctant to have them come, not wishing them to see him so ill, but, after they had visited, he expressed his happiness at having them there. He gradually declined, and received absolution and the Blessing of the Sick on the morning of Saturday 08 June. He died at 1.30 in the afternoon. In the Roman Catholic faith, the rituals surrounding death are important. The death of a member of a religious community is a significant event in the life of that community; it is their opportunity to show their respect for their colleague, and to send him on his final journey with due solemnity. The funeral arrangements for Fr. Hopkins were put in place, and news of his death was sent to his family in England. They were shocked by the news, not having realised how ill he was. His brother Everard expressed his grief "that I could not see him once more". He was persuaded by his brother Arthur not to attend the funeral. "Perhaps", he said, "it is best for us to remember his sweet and beautiful face as we always knew it - not worn with sickness". Hopkins' death was reported in The Catholic Times, The Freeman's Journal and The Irish Times newspapers. The death notice in the Irish Times of Monday 10 June read as follows: HOPKINS - June 8, at University College, the Rev. Gerard Hopkins, SJ, Fellow of the Royal University. High Mass and Office at St. Francis Xavier's, Upper Gardiner street, on tomorrow (Tuesday) at 11 o'clock, funeral to Glasnevin immediately afterwards. On reading this notice, I was struck by how sparse and matter-of-fact it was; unlike modern death notices, it made no mention of his family or religious confreres.

Hopkins' last words on June 8, 1889 were, "I am so happy, I am so happy. I loved my life."

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon. May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace!

The Handsome Heart 

at a Gracious Answer

‘BUT tell me, child, your choice; what shall I buy
You?’—‘Father, what you buy me I like best.’
With the sweetest air that said, still plied and pressed,
He swung to his first poised purport of reply.

What the heart is! which, like carriers let fly—
Doff darkness, homing nature knows the rest—
To its own fine function, wild and self-instressed,
Falls light as ten years long taught how to and why.

Mannerly-hearted! more than handsome face—
Beauty’s bearing or muse of mounting vein,
All, in this case, bathed in high hallowing grace…

Of heaven what boon to buy you, boy, or gain
Not granted?—Only … O on that path you pace
Run all your race, O brace sterner that strain!

Herbert and Donne: Metaphysical Poets

John Stubbs reviews Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert by John Drury in this month's Literary Review, including a comparison and contrast of George Herbert and John Donne:

Quite unlike Donne's life of adventure, disgrace, regretful isolation and self-fashioned redemption, Herbert's followed a steady trajectory of study, duty and meditation. His main dilemma seems to have been whether to pursue a public career - as his talents, social connections and perhaps family pressures disposed him to - or to take the cloth. There was, of course, no direct contradiction between the two: a bishop in the 1620s could still become a high-ranking minister. Yet Herbert seemed aware that the priesthood would take him in another direction towards simplicity and comparative solitude. He followed the example set by men such as Lancelot Andrewes, the famed preacher and one-time dean of Westminister, who would spend the entire morning alone in prayer when his duties allowed: events were always counterpointed by steady and, by any standard, gruelling rituals of prayer, reading, repeating and mastering declensions. Not a life for everyone; yet it helped quieten rather than stifle the heart.
 
I struck the board, and cried, No more.
I will abroad.
What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?
My life and lines are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.

Herbert as much as Donne voices the waywardness of the passions, the anger that can send a child charging like an escaping balloon. But Herbert looks for a solution where Donne insists there is only a puzzle. For Donne, knowledge lies in dilemma, in paradox; for Herbert, this is only a stage. Their poetic language is also entirely different. In his famous 'Song: Go, and catch a falling star', for example, in telling his listener to 'Ride ... Till age snow white hairs on thee', Donne uses a metaphor from Horace, which an ancient book on rhetoric, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, explicitly disapproved of as 'far-fetched'. He even goes a step or three further. Snow is a metaphor for the visible effects of old age (white hair) and indeed age itself, but it is hard or even silly to visualise 'white hairs' literally snowing down onto someone's head. We have to go beyond that idea, by degrees, to the one Donne intends.

There is no such bad behaviour in Herbert. Because of this and other differences, the two poets have their camps of rival supporters; Drury avowedly belongs to Herbert's. In life, Donne and Herbert took mutual benefit from their diverse casts of mind. Although Donne was twenty years senior, he didn't treat Herbert as the younger man. They spent the summer of plague in 1625 together at the home of Herbert's stepfather in Chelsea and became respectful friends. By then Donne was the dean of St Paul's and was finding new self-definition in a venue that demanded preaching 'loose as the wind, as large as store' to fill its vast Gothic chamber. Herbert's path, on the other hand, lay towards minimalism, the quietness of retreat. He worked in small parishes, doing much to restore to his church at Leighton Bromswold and supporting the religious community at Little Gidding, the group in Huntingdonshire invoked in the fourth of T S Eliot's Four Quartets. Eliot, in many ways torn between the vision of Donne and the brighter influence of Herbert, illustrates the futility of asking which poet might be greater: we need both.

John Drury's excellent book is a fine guide and companion to such questions, bringing Herbert's 'life and lines' along the road without ever forcing a step. His attitude to Herbert the poet is one of inexhaustible wonder and inquiry, while to the man who died at 39 he is almost father-like, tender and humane. Music at Midnight should not cause readers or students to neglect Amy Charles's Life of George Herbert (1977), but no one interested in this writer should be without it.

Note that John Stubbs is the author of a biography of John Donne: Donne: The Reformed Soul (2006).