Hurrahing the Harvest

hurrahingtheharvest — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 17:26:14 +0000

This Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem is achingly glorious:

SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,	5
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—	10
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

Quote for the day–Terry Eagleton

hurrahingtheharvest — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:56:28 +0000

The Yahweh of the Old Testament proclaims that his people shall know him for who he is when they welcome the immigrants, care for the destitute and protect the poor from the violence of the rich.

There is a carnivalesque quality about a faith for which the whole cosmos is at stake in the gift of a cup of water. The Son of Man sweeps majestically down on clouds of glory only to inquire whether you have visited the sick and fed the hungry. Conventional Messiahs tend to make their entrance into the national capital in bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey. Jesus is presented as a sick joke of a Savior. Yet the Christian gospel sees in such humdrum activity as clothing the naked the foretaste of the transfiguration of the earth, one which is folly to the French. The exceptional and the everyday are not divided domains, as they are for the disciples of Lacan. The material world is the locus of redemption. As Graham Pechey writes, behind modern writing’s ‘junking of the classical “separation of styles” and its discovery of the serious and the tragic in the everyday was a run-of-the mill police action in Roman Judaea which has shaken the world.’

Trouble With Strangers, 2009.

Hurrahingtheharvest's Weblog

Hurrahing the Harvest

Quote for the day–Terry Eagleton