Time and Tide Wait For No Man

I have been thinking of two poems on this first day of the year 2019. I started by thinking of an old Thomas More College classic, The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy, but for some reason my mind ran to some lines Richard Wilbur uses to describe what he calls "pilgrims of defeat". In his poem for the newly built Statione Termini, he laughingly rebukes them with almost exultant lines. Whether they are historians, archeologists, or more likely, nostalgic traditionalists, "who with short shadows | Poked through the stubbled forum pondering on decline | And would not take the sun standing at noon | For a good sign", he wants to dig them all up. It is a fitting thing to remember on a new day of a new year, especially if you have a tendency toward nostalgia... So when I read this beautiful poem for the opening of a new bridge, it strikes a similar note. A praise for the way things have been and are, for the tradition that makes a place a place and makes all those "lost centuries of local lives that rose | And flowered to fall short where they began" worth having happened. And just as Wilbur's poem has a call, so too does this one. Get up! it calls us. Get up and keep on doing what is worth doing! Time and tide wait for no man.

Bridge for the Living

Philip Larkin

(The words of a cantata composed by Anthony Hedges to celebrate the opening of Humber Bridge, first performed at the City Hall in Hull on 11 April 1981)

Isolate city spread alongside water,

Posted with white towers, she keeps her face
Half-turned to Europe, lonely northern daughter,
Holding through centuries her separate place.

Behind her domes and cranes enormous skies

Of gold and shadows build; a filigree

Of wharves and wires, ricks and refineries,

Her working skyline wanders to the sea.

In her remote three-cornered hinterland

Long white-flowered lanes follow the riverside.

The hills bend slowly seaward, plain gulls stand,

Sharp fox and brilliant pheasant walk, and wide

Wind-muscled wheatfields wash round villages,

Their churches half-submerged in leaf. They lie

Drowned in high summer, cartways and cottages,

The soft huge haze of ash-blue sea close by.

Snow-thickened winter days are yet more still:
Farms fold in fields, their single lamps come on
Tall church-towers parley, airily audible,
Howden and Beverly, Hedon and Patrington,

While scattered on steep seas, ice-crusted ships
Like errant birds carry her loneliness,
A lighted memory no miles eclipse,
A harbour for the heart against distress.

*

And now this stride in our solitude,
A swallow-fall and rise of one plain line,
A giant step for ever to include

All our dear landscape in a new design.

The winds play on it like a harp; the song,
Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west,
Will never to one separate shire belong,
But north and south make union manifest.

Lost centuries of local lives that rose
And flowered to fall short where they began

Seem now to reassemble and unclose,

All resurrected in this single span,

Reaching for the world, as our lives do,
As all lives do, reaching that we may give

The best of what we are and hold as true:
Always it is by bridges that we live.

Wikipedia: “The Humber Bridge, near Kingston upon Hull, England, is a 2,220-metre (7,280 ft) single-span suspension bridge, which opened to traffic on 24 June 1981. It was the longest of its type in the world when opened, and is now the eighth-longest. It spans the Humber (the estuary formed by the rivers Trent and Ouse) between Barton-upon-Humber on the south bank and Hessle on the north bank, connecting the East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. When it opened in 1981 both sides of the bridge were in the non-metropolitan county of Humberside until its dissolution in 1996. The bridge itself can be seen for miles around and as far as Patrington in the East Riding of Yorkshire. As of 2006, the bridge carried an average of 120,000 vehicles per week.”


Special thanks to Adam Cooper for this one of several Larkin poems.

For the New Railway Station in Rome

Richard Wilbur

Those who said God is praised

By hurt pillars, who loved to see our brazen lust

Lie down in rubble, and our vaulting arches

Conduce to dust;

Those who with short shadows

Poked through the stubbled forum pondering on decline

And would not take the sun standing at noon

For a good sign;

Those pilgrims of defeat

Who brought their injured wills to a soldier’s home;

Dig them all up now, tell them there’s something new

To see in Rome.

See, from the travertine

Face of the office block, the roof of the booking-hall

Sails out into the air beside the ruined

Servian wall,

Echoing in its light

And cantilevered swoop of reinforced concrete

The broken profile of these stones, defeating

That defeat

And straying the strummed mind,

By such a sudden chord as raised the town of Troy

To where the least shard of the world sings out

In stubborn joy,

“What city is eternal

But that which prints itself within the groping head

Out of the blue unbroken reveries

Of the building dead?

“What is our praise or pride

But to imagine excellence, and try to make it?

What does it say over the door of Heaven

But homo fecit?”

Dr. Connell on Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur reposed on the 14th of this month at the ripe old age 96. Oddly, I visited New England the following week to convene with fellow alumni of Thomas More College, or as we call ourselves in the wake of our college’s usurpation, Cowan program alumni. We listened as one of the first TMC students to do Wilbur for a junior project read “The Beautiful Changes” in his honor. Dr. Connell continues to teach at the current school on their Rome campus. I seem to remember participating in a delegation to him to continue the study of Wilbur in Rome, but that would have been 2005.

Richard Wilbur wrote in one of his essays that the Commencement Address was one of the most difficult prose genres because the writer had so much to take into account. I would say the same for a tribute to Richard Wilbur himself.

The poetry of Richard Wilbur has been an integral part of the College (Thomas More) curriculum for decades. On the front page of my old marked copy of his New and Collected Poems is my name and “Roma 1997.” Thomas More College is the only institution of higher education in the United States (as far as I know) that undertakes something of a special study of Wilbur’s poetry for all students. Wilbur knew that fact and would always brush it off in his self-effacing manner, but secretly knowing that we were onto something, recognizing the order, precision, wonder–and insight–embodied in his work.

One year, probably about 2002, I thought the students might be tiring of Wilbur so I dropped his poetry from the Rome book list. As soon as the list was posted, I had a delegation of prospective Rome students come to my office wondering why I had done so. I explained my feeble reasons, and they responded emphatically that they wanted to read, study, and know Wilbur’s poetry in Rome and that it had become something of a College tradition to do so. So that was that.

Wilbur’s time in Rome at the American Academy in the early nineteen-fifties had a profound influence on his poetic sensibility. I have long thought that Wilbur embodied the quintessential American character, but that his muse was Roman. Compounded with these two elements–the American and the Roman–is a third of considerable importance. When Richard Wilbur served in the Second World War with his division, the 36th Texans, mainly in France and Italy, early on in his service a Catholic chaplain gave him a missal which he studied throughout the fighting. You can see the significance of this event in manifold ways in virtually all of his poetry.

Many times over the years students would choose a study of the poetry of Richard Wilbur as their Junior Project. I would always encourage those who undertook such a study to write Wilbur a letter at his home in Cummington, Massachusetts. Those who did so always received a reply that was courteous, witty, and urbane, so much a reflection of his character and poetry in general.
Ever since graduate school, I harbored a secret hope that I would have dinner with Wilbur one day. The opportunity for that in this life is no more, so now I must place my honest hope and well-founded expectation in the next.

Paul Connell ’85
Rome
October 17, 2017


The Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

To The Faculty of the Erasmus Institute of Liberal Arts

Dear faculty of the Erasmus Institute,

The United States cannot afford to lose the education that I was fortunate enough to experience at Thomas More College. That you all believe this is affirmed in the recent founding of The Erasmus Institute. There is no shortage of Catholic liberal arts colleges in this country, yet amongst all these bastions of revivalism what is lacking is a subtle continuity with the past--something for which these institutions seem to yearn so much. Instead, these colleges reject or combat the world of here and now; the world that allows us even to begin to wonder. The Cowan program, however, reaches toward the truth of necessity through that of contingent reality. It participates in and builds on the living tradition of American and Classical thought in a communal joy in proximity to truth.

 

 The fact that we studied William Faulkner in Literature, or Heidegger in Philosophy, or Voegelin in Political Science helped to define our school, but what was more essential and far more potent was the way students and faculty engaged their studies; the daily encounter on the part of everyone with poetry, tragedy and comedy, and most importantly, the idea of communitas. Communitas lay at the heart of the education and tied it in a unique way with the great community of philosophers throughout the ages. When I am asked what was so wonderful about my education I can only describe the liberating joy of understanding a part of a poem for the first or fifth time, of reveling in a philosophical debate, or of reading one of the greatest thinkers of all time, but most importantly, of knowing that we were all pursuing truth together in a community as free human beings. It was this shared joy in a community of such wildly different people that opened up the world of truth to me and to my classmates and changed all of us forever. 

 

That the Erasmus Institute of Liberal Arts may continue this tradition is essential to all education today. Thank you for everything that you have given to all of us--your students--over the years, and know that it is with the deepest gratitude that we think of the hardships you have endured to continue the best education in America. With this vision and attitude toward truth there exists so much promise, possibility and happiness, that for it to disappear would be a an unthinkable loss to the world.

 

Sincerely,

Clipstock

New Maps from Books Link

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Maps from Books XI

Utopia

by Thomas More

1518 Map of Utopia by Ambrosius Holbein

Pieces of Picus

I just revisited this wonderful insight from Rainscape this evening, and, being an admirer of Pico della Mirandola thought it worth posting, especially with regards to the patrimony of Thomas More.

This (The Life of John Picus) delights and instructs, and is moreover good! I've had the feeling that this is important for while, but finally have read it and selected some notable passages for you, my friends. More translated/wrote this life of Pico della Mirandola, one of his earliest works, while discerning his vocation, studying and praying in a small cell within the Carthusian "Charterhouse". He chose Pico as a model man of recent times, and what a choice! Even though More chose a different path in life than the eccentric Mirandola, his endorsement of Pico represents something he adopted to his temper and certainly never let go of.

PIECES OF THE LIFE OF PICUS
Earl of Mirandula, a great lord of Italy, an excellent cunning man in all sciences, and virtuous of living ; with divers epistles and other works of the said John Picus, full of great science, virtue, and wisdom : whose life and works be worthy and digne to be read and often to be had in memory.

Translated out of Latin into English by Master Thomas More.
Selected by Scrivener Adam Cooper.

He was of feature and shape seemly and beauteous, of stature goodly and high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage lovely and fair, his colour white intermingled with comely reds, his eyes grey and quick of look, his teeth white and even, his hair yellow and not too picked.
. . .
Under the rule and governance of his mother he was set to masters and to learning, where with so ardent mind he laboured the studies of humanity that within short while he was (and not without a cause) accounted among the chief orators and poets of that time, in learning marvellous swift and of so ready a wit that the verses which he heard once read he would again both forward and backward to the great wonder of the hearers rehearse, and over that would hold it in sure remembrance; which in other folks wont commonly to happen contrary, for they that are swift in taking be oftentimes slow in remembering, and they that with more labour and difficulty receive it, more fast and surely hold it.
. . .
He was of cheer always merry and of so benign nature that he was never troubled with anger, and he said once to his nephew that whatsoever should happen (fell there never so great misadventure) he could never, as him thought, be moved to wrath, but if his chests perished in which his books lay that he had with great travail and watch compiled. But forasmuch as he considered that he laboured only for the love of God and profit of His Church, and that he had dedicated unto Him all his works, his studies and his doings, and since he saw that, since God is almighty, they could not miscarry but if it were either by His commandment or by His sufferance, he verily trusted, since God is all good, that He would not suffer him to have that occasion of heaviness.
. . .
Some man hath shone in eloquence, but ignorance of natural things hath dishonested him; some man hath flowered in the knowledge of divers strange languages, but he hath wanted all the cognition of philosophy; some man hath read the inventions of the old philosophers, but he hath not been exercised in the new schools; some man hath sought cunning, as well philosophy as divinity, for praise and vainglory and not for any profit or increase of Christ's Church. But Picus all these things with equal study hath so received that they might seem by heaps as a plenteous stream to have flowed into him. For he was not of the condition of some folk (which to be excellent in one thing set all other aside) but he in all sciences profited so excellently that which of them soever ye had considered in him, ye would have thought that he had taken that one for his only study. And all these things were in him so much the more marvellous in that he came thereto by himself with the strength of his own wit, for the love of God and profit of His Church, without masters; so that we may say of him that Epicurus the philosopher said of himself, that he was his own master.
. . .
And oftentimes in communication he would admonish his familiar friends how greatly these mortal things bow and draw to an end, how slipper and how falling it is that we live in now; how firm, how stable it shall be that we shall hereafter live in, whether we be thrown down into hell or lifted up into heaven. Wherefore he exhorted them to turn up their minds to love God, which was a thing far excelling all the cunning that is possible for us in this life to obtain.
. . .
"But now behold, 0 my well-beloved Angel [his friend], what madness holdeth us. Love God (while we be in this body) we rather may, than either know Him or by speech utter Him. In loving Him also we more profit ourselves, we labour less and serve Him more ; and yet had we liefer, always by knowledge never find that thing that we seek, than by love to possess that thing which also, without love, were in vain found."
. . .
Liberality only in him passed measure : for so far was he from the giving of any diligence to earthly things that he seemed somewhat besprent with the freckle of negligence. His friends oftentimes admonished him that he should not all utterly despise riches, showing him that it was his dishonesty and rebuke when it was reported (were it true or false) that his negligence and setting naught by money gave his servants occasion of deceit and robbery. Nevertheless, that mind of his (which evermore on high cleaved first in contemplation and in the ensearching of nature's counsel) could never let down itself to the consideration and overseeing of these base, abject, and vile earthly trifles.
. . .
His lovers and friends with great benignity and courtesy he entreated, whom he used in all secret communing virtuously to exhort to Godward, whose godly words so effectually wrought in the hearers that where a cunning man (but not so good as cunning) came to him on a day for the great fame of his learning to commune with him, as they fell in talking of virtue he was with two words of Picus so throughly pierced that forthwithal he forsook his accustomed vice and reformed his conditions. The words that he said unto him were these : "If we had evermore before our eyes the painful death of Christ which He suffered for the love of us, and then if we would again think upon our death, we should well beware of sin."
. . .
Wedding and worldly business he fled almost alike. Notwithstanding, when he was asked once in sport whether of those two burdens seemed lighter and which he would choose if he should of necessity be driven to that one, and at his election; which he sticked thereat a while, but at the last he shook his head and a little smiling he answered that he had liefer take him to marriage, as that thing in which was less servitude and not so much jeopardy. Liberty above all he loved, to which both his own natural affection and the study of philosophy inclined him; and for that he was always wandering and flitting and would never take himself to any certain dwelling.
. . .
“Nephew;" said he, “ this will I show thee, I warn thee keep it secret ; the substance that I have left, after certain books of mine finished, I intend to give out to poor folk, and fencing myself with the crucifix, barefoot walking about the world in every town and castle I purpose to preach of Christ."
. . .
In the year of our Redemption, 1494, when he had fulfilled the thirty-second year of his age and abode at Florence, he was suddenly taken with a fervent access which so far forth crept into the interior parts of his body, that it despised all medicines and overcame all remedy, and compelled him within three days to satisfy nature and repay her the life which he received of her.
. . .
After that he had received the holy Body of our Saviour, when they offered unto him the crucifix (that is the image of Christ's ineffable passion suffered for our sake, that he might ere he gave up the ghost receive his full draught of love and compassion in the beholding of that pitiful figure as a strong defence against all adversity and a sure portcullis against wicked spirits) the priest demanded him whether he firmly believed that crucifix to be the image of Him that was very God and very man: which in His Godhead was before all time begotten of His Father, to Whom He is also equal in all things, and Which of the Holy Ghost, God also, of Him and of the Father coeternally going forth (which three Persons be one God) was in the chaste womb of our lady, a perpetual virgin, conceived in time; Which suffered hunger, thirst, heat, cold, labour, travail, and watch; and Which at the last for washing of our spotty sin contracted and drawn unto us in the sin of Adam, for the sovereign love that He had to mankind, in the altar of the cross willingly and gadly shed out His most precious blood :-when the priest inquired of him these things and such other as they be wont to inquire of folk in such case, Picus answered him that he not only believed it but also certainly knew it.
. . .
He showed also to the above-named Albertus and many other credible persons that the Queen of heaven came to him that night with a marvellous fragrant odour, refreshing all his members that were bruised and frushed with that fever, and promised him that he should not utterly die.
. . .
Now since it is so that he is adjudged to that fire from which he shall undoubtedly depart unto glory, and no man is sure how long it shall be first, and maybe the shorter time for our intercessions, let every Christian body show their charity upon him to help to speed him thither where, after the long habitation with the inhabitants of this dark world (to whom his goodly conversation gave great light) and after the dark fire of purgatory (in which venial sins be cleansed) he may shortly (if he be not already) enter the inaccessible and infinite light of heaven, where he may in the presence of the sovereign Godhead so pray for us that we may the rather by his intercession be partners of that unspeakable joy which we have prayed to bring him speedily to. Amen.
Here endeth the life of John Picus, Earl of Mirandula.

HERE FOLLOWETH IN PART AN EPISTLE OF THE SAID JOHN PICUS

But here ye will say to me thus: “I am content ye study, but I would have you outwardly occupied also. And I desire you not so to embrace Martha that ye should utterly forsake Mary. Love them and use them both, as well study as worldly occupation." Truly, my well-beloved friend, in this point I gainsay you not; they that so do I find no fault in nor I blame them not, but certainly it is not all one to say we do well if we do so, and to say we do evil but if we do so . . . Shall a man then be rebuked because that he desireth and ensueth virtue only for itself, because he studieth the mysteries of God, because he ensearcheth the counsel of nature, because he useth continually this pleasant ease and rest, seeking none outward thing, despising all other thing, since those things are able sufficiently to satisfy the desire of their followers? By this reckoning it is a thing either servile, or at the leastwise not princely, to make the study of wisdom other than mercenary. Who may well hear this, who may suffer it? Certainly he never studied for wisdom which so studied therefor that in time to come either he might not or would not study therefor. This man rather exercised the study of merchandise than of wisdom. Ye write unto me that it is time for me now to put myself in household with some of the great princes of Italy, but I see well that as yet ye have not known the opinion that philsosophers have of themselves, which (as Horace saith) repute themselves kings of kings; they love liberty; they cannot bear the proud manners of estates; they cannot serve. They dwell with themselves and be content with the tranquillity of their own mind; they suffice themselves and more; they seek nothing out of themselves; the things that are had in honour among the common people, among them be not held honourable. All that ever the voluptuous desire of men thirsteth for, or ambition seeketh for, they set at naught and despise. Which while it belongeth to all men, yet undoubtedly it pertaineth most properly to them whom fortune hath so liberally favoured that they may live not only well and plenteously, but also nobly. These great fortunes lift up a man high and set him out to the show, but oftentimes as a fierce and a skittish horse they cast off their master. Certainly always they grieve and vex him and rather tear him than bear him. The golden mediocrity, the mean estate, is to be desired, which shall bear us as it were in hands a more easily, which shall obey us and not master us. I therefore, abiding firmly in this opinion, set more by my little house, my study, the pleasure of my books, the rest and peace of my mind, than by all your kings palaces, all your common business, all your glory, all the advantage that ye hawk after, and all the favour of the court. Nor I look not for worldly business, but that I may once bring forth the children that I travail on; that I may give out some books of mine own to the common profit which may somewhat savour if not of cunning yet at the leastwise of wit and diligence. And because ye shall not think that my travail and diligence in study is anything remitted or slackened, I give you knowledge that after great fervent labour with much watch and indefatigable travail I have learned both the Hebrew language and the Chaldee, and now have I set hand to overcome the great difficulty of the Arabic tongue. These, my dear friend, be things which do appertain to a noble prince, I have ever thought and yet think. Fare ye well.

A word from Rainscape.

Vivat Professores!!!

Dr. Sampo's last day teaching humanities on the Merrimack campus.