The May Magnificat

A close friend sent me this early this morning. She knows I always love the month of May. It is the month of Mama Mary.  What a lovely way to start the month reading a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English poet and a Jesuit priest.

According to Poetry Foundation,  “Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian era. He is regarded by different readers as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, or of melancholy. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I”.

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

May is Mary’s month, and I

Muse at that and wonder why :

Her feasts follow reason,

Dated due to season—

Candlemas, Lady Day ;

But the Lady Month, May,

Why fasten that upon her,

With a feasting in her honour ?

Is it only its being brighter

Than the most are must delight her ?

Is it opportunist

And flowers finds soonest ?

Ask of her, the mighty mother :

Her reply puts this other

Question : What is Spring?—

Growth in every thing—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,

Grass and greenworld all together ;

Star-eyed strawberry-breasted

Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin

Forms and warms the life within ;

And bird and blossom swell

In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing

Mary sees, sympathizing

With that world of good

Nature’s motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind

With delight calls to mind

How she did in her stored

Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this :

Spring’s universal bliss

Much, had much to say

To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple

Bloom lights the orchard-apple

And thicket and thorp are merry

With silver-surfèd cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes

Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes

And magic cuckoocall

Caps, clears, and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth

Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth

To remember and exultation

In God who was her salvation.

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