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”.
The May Magnificat
| 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. |
Dreams And Escapes 