Christina Rossetti*

Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830—1894) is one of the Victorian era’s finest poets. Born in England, into an artistic family, the youngest daughter of an Italian refugee, poet and scholar ― she was educated at home by her mother, who cultivated intellectual and artistic excellence in her children, as well as an abiding faith.

Christina Rossetti had wanted to join the work of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, but instead served as a visiting parish nurse to the poor; she later volunteered a good deal of her time at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a charitable institution for the reclamation of fallen women.

In 1861, her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti sent her now famous poem “Goblin Market” to the art critic John Ruskin with the hope that he would recommend it for publication. Ruskin believed the poem was “unpublishable” for reasons which now demonstrate he had misjudged both the public and the value of Christina’s originality. Despite this, her poems began to find publication, and her book Goblin Market and Other Poems was published by Macmillan in 1862, to critical acclaim.

In 1874 she began publishing her books of devotional prose, through which can be seen explicitly much of what she expressed, almost cryptically, through the concise style of her poems. In her discussions of natural and biblical images, she expounds her symbolic view of the world.

The final poetry collection Rossetti had published in her lifetime, Verses (1893), consists of 331 poems of faith.

Before The Paling Of The Stars

Before the paling of the stars,
Before the winter morn,
Before the earliest cockcrow
Jesus Christ was born:
Born in a stable,
Cradled in a manger,
In the world His hands had made
Born a stranger.

Priest and king lay fast asleep
In Jerusalem,
Young and old lay fast asleep
In crowded Bethlehem:
Saint and Angel, ox and ass,
Kept a watch together,
Before the Christmas daybreak
In the winter weather.

Jesus on His Mother's breast
In the stable cold,
Spotless Lamb of God was He,
Shepherd of the fold:
Let us kneel with Mary maid,
With Joseph bent and hoary,
With Saint and Angel, ox and ass,
To hail the King of Glory.

*This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about Christina Rossetti: first post, second post, third post, fifth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.

Anne Brontë*

Anne Brontë (1820―1849) is one of the famous Brontë sisters who lived in Haworth, Yorkshire as the daughters of a country parson. Little is known about Anne’s life ― as distinct from that of her older sisters Charlotte and Emily. While quite young Emily and Anne created a fictitious island called Gondal, which they wrote stories and poems about.

From 1839 to 1845, Anne served as a governess, which provided much insight for her into the lives of a wider range of people ― giving her the perspective from which to write her first novel, Agnes Grey (1847). Her poetry and fiction was at first overshadowed by that of her sisters.

An examination of her output, however, shows Anne to be a subtle and sophisticated writer. She is concerned with character, morality, and faith, and yet does not resort to easy answers to difficult issues. Since the publication of W. T. Hale's study, Anne Brontë: Her Life and Writings (1929), Anne has been increasingly seen as a significant 19th century novelist.

Music on Christmas Morning

Music I love—but ne’er a strain
Could kindle raptures so divine,
So grief assuage, so conquer pain,
And rouse this pensive heart of mine;
As that we hear on Christmas morn,
Upon the wintry breezes borne.

Though darkness still her empire keep,
And hours must pass, ere morning break;
From troubled dreams, or slumbers deep,
That music kindly bids us wake:
It calls us, with an angel’s voice,
To wake, and worship, and rejoice.

To greet with joy the glorious morn,
Which angels welcomed long ago,
When our redeeming Lord was born,
To bring the light of Heaven below;
The powers of darkness to dispel,
And rescue Earth from death and hell.

While listening to that sacred strain,
My raptured spirit soars on high;
I seem to hear those songs again
Resounding through the open sky,
That kindled such divine delight,
In those who watched their flocks by night.

With them, I celebrate His birth;
Glory to God, in highest Heaven,
Good will to men, and peace on Earth,
To us a Saviour King is given;
Our God is come to claim His own,
And Satan’s power is overthrown!

A sinless God, for sinful men,
Descends to suffer and to bleed;
Hell must renounce its empire then;
The price is paid, the world is freed,
And Satan’s self must now confess,
That Christ has earned a right to bless.

Now holy peace may smile from Heaven,
And heavenly truth from earth shall spring:
The captive’s galling bonds are riven,
For our Redeemer is our King;
And He that gave His blood for men
Will lead us home to God again.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Anne Brontë: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.

Evelyn Mattern

Evelyn Mattern (1941―2003) is known as a social activist who worked as a lobbyist and organizer for the North Carolina Council of Churches. She was born and grew up in Philadelphia, where she joined the convent of the sisters of Immaculate Heart of Mary. She completed her doctorate in literature at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969, and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, to teach English at St. Augustine's University ― an historically black school.

She wrote two books for Ave Maria Press: Blessed Are You: The Beatitudes of Our Survival (1994) and Why Not Become Fire? Encounters with Women Mystics (1999). A collection of her poetry and prose ― Ordinary Places, Sacred Spaces ― with artwork by Helen David Brancato, appeared from the Calgary publisher Bayeux Arts in 2005.

The following poem first appeared in Sojourners in December 1986.

Advent

This bright blue first day of December
a tail wind brings my bike to town,
passing a pilgrimage of pick-up trucks
trailing five floats for the parade.
Styrofoam reindeer on crepe paper snow
pull that empty sleigh of sturdy foil
wrapping paper.
Coming home I pass the small black church,
in the head wind hear the choir,
patched cars parked on the grassless lawn,
trying out "Messiah" to the organ thumps.
Not through the wind or the fire
but the still small voice
of the whisper in the night
from the woman on the mule
to the man in the road
God speaks.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.

Julia Spicher Kasdorf*

Julia Spicher Kasdorf is a Pennsylvania poet who has published four collections. She has also authored the essay collection The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and the biographical study, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American.

Her latest poetry project is a significant departure from her earlier work. Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields (Pennsylvania State University Press), which she wrote in collaboration with Steven Rubin. She is a Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University, and he is a documentary photographer, who is a Professor of Art (also at Penn State).

“I’m a Mennonite ― I can’t understand anything first without understanding its history,” Kasdorf told a friend and interviewer. She had been teaching a course in documentary poetry, when she and her husband took a motorcycle ride through Lycoming County, Pennsylvania. Seeing the impact of fracking on the people and the landscape led her to want to document what is happening without coming down on either side of the debate.

The documentary approach to poetry also comes through in her other poetry books ― Sleeping Preacher, Eve’s Striptease, and Poetry in America ― particularly when she takes on the role of an observer of rural Mennonite or Amish life.

The following poem is from her third collection Poetry In America (Pittsburgh).

Sometimes It’s Easy To Know What I Want

On a road that cuts through the richest, non-irrigated land
in the nation, according to some Lancaster, PA, natives,

a minivan slowed, and a woman with a good haircut yelled,
Do you want a ride, or are you walking because you want to?

I didn’t reply because my life felt so wrecked―
no matter the reason, either you get this or you don’t―

wrecked in the way that makes gestures of tenderness
devastating, like the time I showed up in Minnesota, brittle

with sorrow, and the professor sent to fetch me
asked if I wanted heat in the seat of his sports car

or the local apple he’d brought in case I arrived hungry.
I didn’t know people make seats to hold a body in radiance

like the merciful hand of God. The apple was crisp and cold
and sweet. Maybe I looked in his eyes and shook his hand

in both of mine when I left, I don’t remember. Months later,
he sent an empty seed packet, torn open, lithographed

with a fat, yellow annual no one grows any more, flamboyant
as Depression-era glassware. That was all, thank you.

Thank you, oh thanks so much, I finally told the woman
framed by a minivan window, but yes, I do want to walk.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Julia Spicher Kasdorf: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.

Pádraig J. Daly*

Pádraig J. Daly is a Dublin poet and Augustan priest whose numerous poetry books include The Last Dreamers: New & Selected Poems (1999), The Other Sea (2003), Afterlife (2010) and God in Winter (2015). His most-recent collection is A Small Psalter (Scotus Press).

His work also includes translations of other poets’ writing from Irish and Italian. I highlighted his translations of Jacopone da Todi here at Kingdom Poets back in October.

In The Furrow, Madeleine Lombard said, “The language of Daly’s poetry is pared down, stripped bare, distilled to its essence, and there is not one unnecessary word, not one single distraction from either the ideas themselves or their poetic expression” ― which is high praise, indeed!

The following excerpts are from the title poem of his new poetry book.

from A Small Psalter

14.

I begged for faith and clarity
That my words might be storm-lanterns
For flounderers in uproarious seas.

But You have left me swinging still
From faith to numbness;
And back again.

I look for You
But wait must to be found.

26.

My Own, who hide
In the light and shadow of the world
And in the plunging ravines of the heart:

Lost in labyrinths of reason,
Few and fewer find You;

And we who do
Have but stumbling words to voice our certainty.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Pádraig J. Daly: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.

Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon (1886―1967) is primarily known as a poet of WWI. Even so, he continued writing for the rest of his life, including the faith-inspired poetry of his latter years.

He shocked Britain when ― on July 30th, 1917 ― his editorial “A Soldier’s Declaration” was read in the British House of Commons, and the next day appeared in The London Times. Such a statement was enough to have him court-martialled or even shot ― but how do you execute a war hero who’d been decorated with the Military Cross, for voicing the much-supported opinion that by that time the war should be over? The alternative had him treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital, which is where he first met Wilfred Owen.

Sassoon caused shockwaves in his personal life after the war ― having affairs with male writers, and then, suddenly in 1933, marrying high-society girl Hester Gatty, who was nineteen years younger than he was. Similarly, he caused a stir when he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1957.

This transition was spurred by an initial letter from Mother Margaret Mary McFarlin, superior of the Convent of the Assumption in Kensington Square, London, saying she discerned a “yearning for God” in his poetry. The two became close friends.

The following poem is from his book The Path to Peace (Stanbrook Abbey Press, 1960).

Awaitment

Eternal, to this momentary thing ―
This mind ― Thy sanctuary of stillness bring.
Within that unredeemed aliveness live:
And through Thy sorrowless sacrament forgive.
-------Let me be lost; and lose myself in Thee.
-------Let me be found and find my soul set free.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.

Andrew Marvell*

Andrew Marvel (1621—1678) is an English Metaphysical poet, who in the years following his death was best known for his satirical prose and verse. In the 1640s he was a royalist sympathizer, but later became a supporter of Cromwell and Parliament ― even becoming a member of Parliament, himself. He was a Puritan, a friend of John Milton, and an opponent of Catholicism.

Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” ― “perhaps the most famous ‘persuasion to love’ or carpe diem poem in English” ― eloquently praises the woman his protagonist desires, encouraging her to not delay accepting his wooing. And yet, as the Poetry Foundation suggests, “Everything we know about Marvell’s poetry should warn us to beware of taking its exhortation to carnality at face value.” Several alternatives are suggested before concluding, “The persona’s desire for the reluctant Lady is mingled with revulsion at the prospect of mortality and fleshly decay, and he manifests an ambivalence toward sexual love that is pervasive in Marvell’s poetry.”

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that his lyrical poems came out from under the shadow of his political writing. In 1921, T.S. Eliot published an essay in the Times Literary Supplement in which he struggled to define the quality in Marvell’s poetry that sets it apart ― wit and magniloquence, perhaps, in part ―
-------“The quality which Marvell had, this modest and certainly
-------impersonal virtue ― whether we call it wit or reason, or
-------even urbanity ― we have patently failed to define. By
-------whatever name we call it, and however we define that name,
-------it is something precious and needed and apparently extinct;
-------it is what should preserve the reputation of Marvell.”

Bermudas

Where the remote Bermudas ride
In th’ ocean’s bosom unespy’d,
From a small boat, that row’d along,
The list’ning winds receiv’d this song.

What should we do but sing his praise
That led us through the wat’ry maze
Unto an isle so long unknown,
And yet far kinder than our own?
Where he the huge sea-monsters wracks,
That lift the deep upon their backs,
He lands us on a grassy stage,
Safe from the storm’s and prelates’ rage.
He gave us this eternal spring
Which here enamels everything,
And sends the fowls to us in care,
On daily visits through the air.
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night;
And does in the pomegranates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows.
He makes the figs our mouths to meet
And throws the melons at our feet,
But apples plants of such a price,
No tree could ever bear them twice.
With cedars, chosen by his hand,
From Lebanon, he stores the land,
And makes the hollow seas that roar
Proclaim the ambergris on shore.
He cast (of which we rather boast)
The Gospel’s pearl upon our coast,
And in these rocks for us did frame
A temple, where to sound his name.
Oh let our voice his praise exalt,
Till it arrive at heaven’s vault;
Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may
Echo beyond the Mexic Bay.

Thus sung they in the English boat
An holy and a cheerful note,
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Andrew Marvel: first post.

Another Andrew Marvell poem was recently featured at Poems For Ephesians.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.