Word & Song By Anthony Esolen podcast

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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"More than most fair, full of the living fire"

2일 전

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When the poet Edmund Spenser wrote our Poem of the Week , it was as a part of the most wonderful wedding-gift a husband could give to his new wife. Spenser was then a widower, in his early forties, and he had met a beautiful young woman named Elizabeth Boyle, with whom he fell in love, courting her over the course of a year and more, when she finally agreed to marry him. Lady Diana Spencer, by the way, was a lineal descendant of theirs. But back to the gift: it’s called Amoretti and Epithalamion . “Amoretti” means “Little Loves,” that is, Cupids; and an epithalamion is a poem commemorating a wedding day. We’ve discussed the central poem of the work as a whole, sonnet 59, "Thrice happy she, that is so well assured" , and that poem and the one we’re presenting today show us that the persona of the speaker knows well that his beloved is a woman of great virtue, beauty, and piety. Unlike the love that most other sonneteers write about and usually subject to keen satire, Spenser’s love is meant to be fulfilled in marriage, and it directs his heart and mind toward divine love, not away. Support Word & Song w/Upgrade But what does this have to do with fire ? Well, it’s no surprise that poets have used fire as a symbol for what we feel when we’re in love: burning, flaming, active, restless, but often also consuming, scorching, destructive. The Italian poet Petrarch, whose love sonnets every poet for almost 300 years imitated or satirized or wrestled with, said famously that love had him freezing in fire and burning in ice. That wasn’t just supposed to be a nifty ironic figure of speech. Petrarch was getting at the contradictions inherent in a love that isn’t charity — even if it wasn’t sheer lust, as in his case it did not seem to be. Any love that reverses the order of the divine and the human, the Creator and the creature, is going to entangle the lover in contradictions; that’s what the poets took for granted, as an inevitable law of the world we live in. “Changing Homes,” George Elgar Hicks. Public Domain. But for Spenser — and please forgive me if I don’t draw a bright line here dividing the poet Spenser from his persona in the poems, the “Spenser” narrator he pretends to be — for Spenser, the love of Elizabeth Boyle elevates his soul. That’s because her eyes are “full of the living fire,” the fire of God himself, imparted to his creatures in varying degrees, depending on how close they are to him in their created nature. In the next sonnet, number 9, the companion to ours today, Spenser will say that Elizabeth’s shining eyes are not to be compared to the sun or the moon or the stars; they are beyond all those in their power and their virtue. They are, he concludes, most like “the Maker’s self,” “whose light doth lighten all that we here see.” Give a gift subscription Other than admiration, what effect does the living fire that dwells in the lady’s eyes cause in him? Think here of a reversal of expectations. He is, well, if not old, certainly not young, as she is. He’s seen a great deal of the world, and, in strife-riven Ireland where Queen Elizabeth sent him as an aide to her severe governor Lord Grey de Wilton, perhaps he’s seen more than enough. But she, not he, is the teacher — or rather, it’s her eyes and their light, shining from within by the fire of God. He may have his unruly desires, but her virtuous eyes teach them their rightful bounds. Thoughts may come into his mind, and words to his lips, but her eyes, the looks in her eyes, restrain, direct, shape, and elevate them. He may feel he’s all thunder and lightning within, but her eyes calm that interior storm. Please do not think that he’s engaging in a pretty exaggeration. He really does mean what he says: that’s where the drama lies, after all. Please share this post! Learn More About Word & Song Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published More than most fair, full of the living fire, kindled above unto the Maker near, no eyes but joys, in which all powers conspire, that to the world naught else be counted dear: Through your bright beams doth not the blinded Guest shoot out his darts to base affection's wound? But angels come to lead frail minds to rest in chaste desires, on heavenly beauty bound. You frame my thoughts and fashion me within, you stop my tongue and teach my heart to speak, you calm the storm that passion did begin, strong through your cause, but by your virtue weak. Dark is the world where your light shined never; well is he born, that may behold you ever. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. Note: Our full archive of over 1,000 posts, videos, audios is available on demand to paid subscribers. We know that not everyone has time every day for a read and a listen. So we have built the archive with our readers in mind. Free subscribers have access to a good number of our most recent posts. Please do browse, and please do share posts that you like with others. Browse Our Archive Thank you, as always, for supporting our effort to restore every day a little bit of the good, the beautiful, and the true.…

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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Come Down, O Love Divine

3일 전

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As many of our friends here know, Debra and I are tremendous admirers of the work of Ralph Vaughan Williams , and not only of his work, but of a real humility and openness to beauty wherever he might find it. Vaughan Williams combed the British Isles in search of folk melodies, many of which had never been written down, and would otherwise probably have been lost forever. One of my favorite of those is Monks Gate, which Vaughan Williams arranged and applied to the vigorous and jaunty hymn He Who Would Valiant Be , which he transcribed on a winter’s day in 1904, when an elderly lady who loved the old folk songs sang it for him in the Sussex village of that name. That hymn was sung to his melody at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in 2013, by the way. But Vaughan Williams also composed many of his own melodies specifically for already existing sacred poems. He did so with a quite remarkable insight into Scripture and what the hymns were supposed to mean, and the feelings they were to inspire in the singers, even though he said he was an agnostic. That might have been so; or it might have been his same natural humility at work. We must of course let God judge that. Of all his hymns, our current Hymn of the Week seems to have been the one that meant most to him, as he composed an unusual and brilliant melody for it — and he had to, because the meter, 6-6-11-6-6-11, is the only instance of such that I can find in our many hymnals. He then named it for the village where he was born, Down Ampney. And when his ashes were interred at Westminster Cathedral, that was the hymn, and fittingly enough, since we pray in it that the Holy Spirit, that Love Divine, will descend upon us with his holy flame and reduce our earthly passions to “dust and ashes,” so that the flame of heavenly charity will burn hot and bright within us. Support Word & Song with an Upgrade The hymn is a terrific translation of a sacred poem by Bianco da Siena, a fourteenth century Italian and member of an order called the Jesuates (not “Jesuits,” as those were founded in Spain by that soldierly Basque, Ignatius of Loyola, more than 150 years later). Bianco was a 17-year-old boy working as a wool carder in Siena when he felt the call to join the Jesuates, whose vocation was to poverty and humility. He lived in their order for the rest of his life, but he was endowed with real literary genius, which he devoted to writing sacred poems in praise of God: his Laudi. One of these, the 35th, is the source of our hymn, translated into English in the 19th century by the Reverend R. F. Littledale, a brilliant man in his own right. In the poem, Bianco calls upon the Holy Spirit, the holy Love, to come down into him and to burn, to burn with a thoroughly transforming fire . The Italian lines are precise and beautiful. Here’s the first stanza, so you can see what Littledale was looking at: Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Discendi, amor santo, visita la mia mente del tuo amor ardente, si che di te m'infiammi tutto quanto. In English, “Descend, holy love, visit my mind with your burning love, so that I shall be wholly enkindled with you.” Traditional Italian poetry works with many forms I don’t see in other languages, and Bianco’s got one here. Each of his next 7 stanzas will have 7 short lines such as the first three above, followed by the long line to sum it all up at the end, and all those final lines will rhyme with “santo” and “quanto” above. That’s Banco’s way of linking all the stanzas together. It’s a common thing in Italian poetry — the final line that rhymes with nothing else in the stanza, but does rhyme with the final line in the stanza next to it. The translator Littledale renders the effect as best he can by having all his long lines end in the suffix -ing, But above all that technical mastery, the poem simply burns with love, and Bianco says, rightly, that no human tongue can possibly find the words to describe it, until the Spirit himself makes the soul into his dwelling. Think, after all, of that miracle of Pentecost, with the tongues of fire descending upon the disciples, giving them not only the courage of ardent love, but the words with which to share it. Well that a poet should write those words, too! Share this Post We are fortunate to present today’s hymn recorded by the tremendous King’s College Choir. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Come down, O Love divine, Seek thou this soul of mine, And visit it with thine own ardor glowing; O Comforter, draw near, Within my heart appear, And kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing. O let it freely burn, Till earthly passions turn To dust and ashes in its heat consuming; And let thy glorious light Shine ever on my sight, And clothe me round, the while my path illuming. Let holy charity Mine outward vesture be, And lowliness become mine inner clothing; True lowliness of heart, Which takes the humbler part, And o'er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing. And so the yearning strong, With which the soul will long, Shall far outpass the power of human telling; For none can guess its grace, Till he become the place Wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. To receive our new posts, please join us as subscriber. Browse Our Archive Note: Paid subscribers have unlimited access on demand to our archive of over 1,000 posts; but our most recent posts remain available for several weeks after each publication. We think of the archive as a little treasure trove, and we hope that our readers will revisit and share our posts with others as we continue our mission of reclaiming — one good thing at a time — the beautiful and the true!…

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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"To Dream the Impossible Dream"

6일 전

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Sometimes a Song waits “in the wings” for just the right moment to put in its appearance at Word & Song. “ To Dream the Impossible Dream” is a masterful composition about what heroism is. Most folks reading this post will already know this song as the musical highlight of the Broadway play, Man of La Mancha , first produced in 1965. If you haven’t seen the play or the later film, Man of La Mancha is not a musical version of the Cervantes novel. It is a musical production of a television play written by Dale Wasserman about Cervantes himself. To Wasserman’s annoyance the TV producers insisted on billing his play, I, Don Quixote, fearful that their viewers would not know who the man of la Mancha was. The play is set in prison, where Cervantes is awaiting trial near the end of the notorious Spanish Inquisition. While there, Cervantes directs his fellow prisoners in a performance of his masterpiece, conveniently stashed away in his trunk. So the work that Dale Wasserman created, first for television and later for Broadway, was a play within a play — following in a time-honored stage tradition of the sort that Tony wrote about in his post on Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Wasserman exercised a good deal of poetic license in bringing the life of Cervantes, what is known of it, to his modern audience in an imagined look at how the author might have portrayed his own creation, one of the most beloved characters in the history of literature. Upgrade to Paid to Support Word & Song Broadway loved the Man of La Mancha , which ran for over 2,300 performances and eliminated any lingering concern that American audiences might not know who that particular man mentioned in the title was . And as the man who played that man —at age 43 and after twenty years as an actor in film, on television, and on stage — Richard Kiley became “an overnight sensation” in what he considered the role of a lifetime. The play nearly swept the Tony Awards in 1966, taking Best Musical, Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical for Richard Kiley, and Best Best Original Score, for Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion. After a tremendous first run, Man of La Mancha had five successful revivals in the United States alone. The play has been translated into well over a dozen languages and performed around the world. And at the very moment that Man of La Mancha opened on Broadway, “To Dream the Impossible Dream” assumed a rightful place in the Great American Songbook . Since then the song has been recorded by about every male singer you can think of, and a good handful of famous female singers, as well. To date, the song has been covered by 269 professional releases. But of all those recordings you won’t be too surprised, I suspect, that I’ve chosen for today our song today as performed by the the actor who first brought Don Quixote to life on Broadway, Richard Kiley. My favorite of his several recordings of “The Impossible Dream” is the one I’ve posted below, recorded on The Ed Sullivan Show to a wildly enthusiastic audience during the play’s first run on Broadway. Give a gift subscription I do want to add a note about Richard Kiley’s singing. His amazing vocal performance in Man of La Mancha didn’t just happen. Kiley caught the acting bug early in life, and left college after one year to study acting at the Barnum Dramatic School in his hometown of Chicago. After serving in WWII, Kiley moved to New York to pursue his acting career. But he did not neglect his vocal training, and he sought out an excellent voice teacher, Itzchok "Ray" Smolover, who had studied music at Columbia and Carnegie Melon and was a highly respected tenor, opera librettist, composer, and cantor. Ray considered Richard Kiley one of his star pupils, and his influence on Kiley’s rich baritone voice is obvious in the actor’s deeply emotive singing style, plaintively reminiscent of the sound of sung Jewish prayers. Listen for that, but most of all listen to the beauty and depth of Richard Kiley’s performance — in character as Don Quixote — of this moving song. Listen to Richard Kiley singing “To Dream the Impossible Dream” on The Ed Sullivan Show. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks . To participate in this project, join us as a subscriber. Paid subscribers have access to our entire archive of over 1,000 posts, including Tony’s reading of a wide assortment of poems and literary works, including — from last summer and fall — Huck Finn in its entirety. A goodly portion of our archive is open to free subscribers as well. Thank you for reading — and we hope, SHARING, Word & Song. Browse Our Archive Share…

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)

8일 전

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What do you do if it’s the Second World War, and your dad was a war hero in the First one, and everybody expects you to be a hero too, and why shouldn’t they, what with the name you’ve been saddled with: Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken). But you’re kind of on the short side, a bit of a nebbish, and you’ve got hay fever so bad, the Marines have had to discharge you. But you can’t tell your widowed mother, who worships your dad’s memory, and then there’s the town, and your girl friend Libby whom you’ve got to impress. So you’re working in a shipyard in San Diego, doing what you can, but you write letters home to Mom pretending that you’re overseas, knowing that she’ll be showing them around. Then you meet six Marines in a bar, and they really have just gotten back from Guadalcanal, and you tell them your story — it’s a sad one, because you’ve got yourself in a bind. But sure enough, the oldest of the Marines, Master Sergeant Heffelfinger (William Demarest; you may remember him as the grumbly good-hearted Uncle Charlie in My Three Sons ), actually served with “Hinky Dinky” Truesmith in the Great War! And he’s got a plan. Gosh, what could six boozy Marines come up with, when they’ve got loyalty galore — and it’s six against one, so poor Woodrow can’t help but get helped, and so it’s off to the little town — and they’ve got an election for mayor coming up, and Libby’s been seeing the current mayor’s son, and — and there’s not a second wasted, all comedy of errors, good intentions, big white lies, Woodrow all jittery, Mom overjoyed, darn it — and it’s Preston Sturges, the director and writer, all over. Upgrade to Support W&S Our Film of the Week was recommended to us by our dear friends Louis del Grande and Martha Gibson, whom our Canadian friends here may remember as the husband and wife team on the supremely popular comedy detective show, Seeing Things , back in the 1980’s. Louie and Martha are actually married, and we’ve spent many hours at their home, talking about books, dogs, crazy people, politics, television and films, music, antiques, and the Christian faith — which we share, and those two are saints of courage and patience and charity if ever I met any in my life. Anyhow, one day, back when we were all quite a lot younger and Debra and I were growing more and more interested in classic films, Louie said that in his opinion, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek was the greatest comedy Hollywood ever produced. “I’ve never heard of it,” I said. Here I could do a Louis del Grande impersonation — wide eyes, New York metro accent on the Jersey side, Italian decibels — “You have GOT to see it! You never HEARD of Preston Sturges? He’s BRILLIANT,” — and whenever Lou has recommended something to me, he’s been exactly right. His conversation is always immensely interesting, because he’s half crazy — he would say I’m selling him short there, and insist that he’s totally crazy — and because he thinks for himself, and he reads, and he’s seen some sides of life that aren’t in my experience, and he’s deeply religious, and he says what he thinks, straight out. So that’s when my family began to watch the films of Preston Sturges, and I agree entirely with my friend. For Sturges, without being sentimental, and while skating sometimes near the edge of tragedy, is never flippant, never merely satirical, never reaching for a cheap or quick laugh. Nobody ever wrote comic dialogue as snappy and madcap as Sturges did, like firecrackers going off one after another, but it’s never jaded, never tired; slapstick is there aplenty, but it’s closer to merriment than to cruelty; irony is never more than a step away, but never in the service of disbelief. Please don’t think I’m recommending Sturges because he’s got some deep meaning in mind! The depth is there, though, because he’s honest, and because, despite all the madness in the world, there is an unshakeable goodness, too. Give a gift subscription We have featured several of Sturges’ films here. There’s the one that gets my vote for the best comedy ever made in Hollywood, Sullivan's Travels ; or the one that gets the vote of a friend of mine for the same, and my vote for the best satire on the sexes, The Lady Eve ; and still another friend gives the nod to The Palm Beach Story . But this one above all the rest is about America, the good and the foolish, the profound and the superficial, the real and the bogus, and the cast is perfect, full of actors that Sturges was so loyal to, he ended up losing his contract with Paramount over his sticking up for them. Good for Sturges — but that was like him. In a way, he gives us heroes of the ordinary, and his wit is so irrepressible, he carries the viewer off in a whirlwind. This one too is for the whole family! Please share this post! Learn More About Word & Song Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. Thank you for reading Word and Song! . Many thanks to our subscribers for supporting our effort to restore every day a little bit of the good, the beautiful, and the true. Browse Our Archive…

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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Hiawatha (excerpt)

9일 전

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When Longfellow wrote The Song of Hiawatha, from which I’ve taken a passage for our Poem of the Week , it was beloved at once, and that in itself is telling, isn’t it? It reminds me of an account I read in The Century, by one of the boys who went as a group to visit Longfellow in his home in Cambridge. The day was February 27, 1882, a Monday, so it must have been after school was out, and the sky would have been getting dark. But they had to visit him on that day, because it was the poet’s 75th birthday. They wanted to wish him a Happy Birthday, and to tell him how much they loved his poems. Longfellow, always fond of children, invited the boys in for tea and scones, and they spent an hour or so with the great man, talking about poetry and other boyish things. That was Longfellow’s last; he died a few weeks later. That story seems incredible, doesn’t it? It’s as if it came from another world, one in which poetry is near to the hearts of ordinary people, especially to boys if the poetry celebrates the hero , as the gentle but brave Longfellow so often did. It was also a world in which you could have the run of your city if you were eleven or twelve years old. Nor was there so great a chasm set between the child and the old man. That story warms my heart. Support Word & Song w/Upgrade There are a couple of things, too, about The Song of Hiawatha that suggest to me a kind of scholarly heroism. For Longfellow, at age 18, was offered a job teaching modern languages — that is, their literature — at his alma mater, Bowdoin College. But to do that, Longfellow determined that he had to travel to Europe to immerse himself in the languages, and so he did; in fact, all his life long he seems never to have stopped learning languages. He came back well-versed in German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, and of course he’d have studied Latin and Greek in school. He’d go on to learn Old Norse to read the great sagas of the Norse gods and the giants; and it’s from the Finnish epic Kalevala that he got his inspiration for Hiawatha and also its metrical form: regular unrhymed trochaic lines of four feet, DA-da-DA-da-DA-da-DA-da. It fits well with the polysyllabic names in the Huron languages, as for example HI-a-WA-tha. Hiawatha, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Public Domain). That’s not all, though. Longfellow believed that beauty and nobility are to be found in all human cultures, even those that we’d otherwise look on as savage; and he thought, too, that God had granted to such people some strong hints of his existence, and even of man’s redeemer, Christ. That’s what Tolkien, talking with his friend the still-agnostic C. S. Lewis, and thinking of the pagan Germanic poetry and legends they both loved, called “good dreams.” Tolkien wasn’t going to confuse them with revelation, but what he said seemed to Lewis to open up the world: it was not all darkness, then. Longfellow seems to have harbored that sense too. He didn’t just invent The Song of Hiawatha out of his own head. It came from the work of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, historian and geologist, who collected the myths and legends of the Indian tribes of North America; or I should say from Schoolcraft as assisted by his wife, Jane Johnston, whose Indian name was the delightful O-bah-bahm-wawa-ge-zhe-go-qua (The Woman of the Sound Which the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky). Give a gift subscription Here’s the setup for the passage. Because Hiawatha — think here of the young King Solomon — has prayed not for victory in battle, or renown among the warriors, or for greater skill in hunting and fishing, but for “profit of the people, / For advantage of the nations,” he will be given the chance to prove his heroism by self-sacrifice, endurance, strength, and courage. The young and handsome god Mondamin, a friend to man, dressed in yellow and green, appears to Hiawatha and instructs him to fast for seven days. On the evening of each of these days, Mondamin comes to wrestle with Hiawatha, till on the seventh day our hero is exhausted, and his grandmother Nokomis is afraid for his life. But Mondamin gives him instructions: when he wins the match and Mondamin dies, Hiawatha is to strip him, bury him in the earth, tend the grave, and to keep the ravens away. Here is what happens. “Pitched It Sheer into the River / Where It Still Is Seen in Summer,” Remington (oil, black and white). Public Domain. Please share this post! Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published And victorious Hiawatha Made the grave as he commanded, Stripped the garments from Mondamin, Stripped his tattered plumage from him, Laid him in the earth, and made it Soft and loose and light above him; And the heron, the Shuh-shuh-gah, From the melancholy moorlands, Gave a cry of lamentation, Gave a cry of pain and anguish! Homeward then went Hiawatha To the lodge of old Nokomis, And the seven days of his fasting Were accomplished and completed. But the place was not forgotten Where he wrestled with Mondamin; Nor forgotten nor neglected Was the grave where lay Mondamin, Sleeping in the rain and sunshine, Where his scattered plumes and garments Faded in the rain and sunshine. Day by day did Hiawatha Go to wait and watch beside it; Kept the dark mould soft above it, Kept it clean from weeds and insects, Drove away, with scoffs and shoutings, Kahgahgee, the king of ravens. Till at length a small green feather From the earth shot slowly upward, Then another and another, And before the Summer ended Stood the maize in all its beauty, With its shining robes about it, And its long, soft, yellow tresses; And in rapture Hiawatha Cried aloud, “It is Mondamin! Yes, the friend of man, Mondamin!” Then he called to old Nokomis And Iagoo, the great boaster, Showed them where the maize was growing, Told them of his wondrous vision, Of his wrestling and his triumph, Of this new gift to the nations, Which should be their food forever. And still later, when the Autumn Changed the long, green leaves to yellow, And the soft and juicy kernels Grew like wampum hard and yellow, Then the ripened ears he gathered, Stripped the withered husks from off them, As he once had stripped the wrestler, Gave the first Feast of Mondamin, And made known unto the people This new gift of the Great Spirit. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. Learn More About Word & Song Browse Our Archive Note: Our full archive of over 1,000 posts, videos, audios is available on demand to paid subscribers. We know that not everyone has time every day for a read and a listen. So we have built the archive with our readers in mind. Free subscribers have access to our most recent posts. Please do browse, and please do share posts that you like with others. Thank you, as always, for supporting our effort to restore every day a little bit of the good, the beautiful, and the true.…

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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Thine Is the Glory

10일 전

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Our Hymn of the Week is one of triumph — and is the hymn our son David played on our chapel’s organ for Easter Sunday, for the recessional. Perfect. Mankind knows about triumph, right? If you ever go to the Roman Forum, look at the Arch of Titus, built to commemorate his destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. It’s appalling to consider that the ramifications of that event are with us still, as you can gather from the sculpture-work on the arch, wherein you may see the Temple raided and the seven-branched candelabrum carried off. A triumph was not the victory itself, by the way, but the triumphal parade. So Titus passed beneath the arch erected for the occasion: he and his army and their long train of captives and plunder. Support Word & Song with an Upgrade Alas for the irony of it, the Romans became involved in Palestine in the first place when Judas Maccabeus invited them into an alliance. Judas had driven out the armies of the Greek despot Antiochus IV and rededicated the Temple in 164 B.C., an event the Jews celebrate as Hanukkah. He’d heard about the Romans in those days of the republic, and their senate that consulted always for the common good, and their honesty in keeping their treaties with their allies. Some of that was wishful hoping, no doubt, but the Romans had a better reputation than Antiochus had. There was, at that time, no gouty Roman emperor you were supposed to adore as a god, and no nonsense about worshiping the city of Rome, either. Those Romans wanted to govern; otherwise they let their allies worship as they pleased. Arch of Titus, detail: the sacking of the Temple Antiochus, by contrast, had wanted to make the Jews Greek, introducing the gymnasion , for example, for sports and military exercise. That led plenty of Jewish youths to hide the physical sign of their being a people set apart by God. I won’t get into the details. Antiochus set up in the Temple the statue of Zeus, the “abominable idol of desolation.” Don’t we all worship the same God, really? So he might have said, impatient with the Jews. Hanukkah marks a victory against that muddle. Now come with me to London, 1746. The English armies, after a couple of embarrassing defeats, have routed the mostly Scottish forces of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart heir to the throne. That was at Culloden; the English general was the young Duke of Cumberland, William Augustus, son of George II. What better way to celebrate than to have the most renowned composer in England, Georg Friedrich Handel, to do it in music, on stage? Handel was German, as was the king; but educated people in those days were not shy of languages. Hence came the English oratorio Judas Maccabeus, as if the Duke of Cumberland had been that brave Jewish war leader fighting against all human and worldly odds, and as if the purity of English worship had been secured against an uneasy alliance of Presbyterian and Catholic Scots who favored Charlie. Judas Maccabeus was a smashing success. Yet the melody that now goes by that name was not written for that oratorio. Handel composed it five years later for Joshua (1751). People loved it so much, he decided to insert it into the earlier Judas Maccabeus, where it fits quite well, and where it has remained ever since, beginning with the mighty lines, “See, the conquering hero comes: / Sound the trumpets, beat the drums!” Enjoy this recording by the always excellent King’s College Choir, with a tremendous descant. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. Join us as subscriber. The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus, by Peter Paul Rubens, ca. 1635 Now we go to Switzerland, in 1884. A young Swiss evangelical minister, Edmond Louis Budry, has just lost his beloved wife. Inspired by hope that transcends human sadness, he sets Handel’s triumphant melody to words of his own, about the risen Christ. I’ll give you the first stanza here in Budry’s French. If you know the melody, you’ll see how fine is the fit: Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published À toi la gloire, O Ressuscité! À toi la victoire pour l’éternité! Brillant de lumière, l’ange est descendu, Il roule la pierre du tombeau vaincu. À toi la gloire, O Ressuscité! À toi la victoire pour l’éternité! To translate literally: “Thine be the glory, O Risen One, thine the victory for all eternity! The radiant angel has descended; he rolls back the stone of the defeated tomb.” Then the first two lines, serving as the refrain for all three stanzas, are repeated. Magnificent! How far we are from Culloden, no? “Death is swallowed up in victory,” cries Saint Paul, not just any person’s death, or this or that people’s defeat on the battlefield. Death itself has been vanquished, death “the last enemy,” death our grim master; death has been bound and led captive, and his own carcass gluts the grave. In Budry’s hymn, this conquest is also deeply personal. We can feel what it is to doubt, to waver; Thomas did so, and so did many when Jesus appeared in Galilee, before he began to speak. We need doubt no more. He who comes our way – and Budry will put us in the dramatic position of those who see from a distance, but more and more clearly as the object of our love and praise approaches – is the Lord. “I am not he who condemns,” said the Lord to Francis de Sales. “My name is Jesus.” Share this Post The following text is the standard English translation you’ll find in hymnals. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Refrain. Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son; Endless is the victory Thou o’er death hast won! Angels in bright raiment rolled the stone away; Kept the folded grave-clothes where Thy body lay. Refrain . Lo, Jesus meets us, risen from the tomb; Lovingly He greets us, scatters fear and gloom. Let His church with gladness hymns of triumph sing, For the Lord now liveth; death hath lost its sting. Refrain. No more we doubt Thee, glorious Prince of life! Life is naught without Thee; aid us in our strife; Make us more than conquerors, through Thy deathless love; Bring us safe through Jordan to Thy home above. Refrain. This post is adapted from my article which appeared in Touchstone, January 2025 .…

W

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

1
HERO

11일 전

나중에 재생

리스트

—

“Who was the greatest of all the Greek heroes?” a boy in the old British schools might ask, and it’s not an easy question to answer. We might say, “Hercules was!” — except that Hercules is a borderline case, a demigod, and there are aspects to his story that don’t fit the heroic mold, as when he fell in love with Iole and for her sake took up spinning and needlework, while she put on his lionskin, ten sizes too big, and tried to lug his club around. Anyway, if we’re really after the peculiarly human, even if he’s got a divine parent, the two great figures of Homer’s poetry stand forth, Odysseus and Achilles. I love Odysseus, the man of many shifts, a broken-field runner if there ever was one, feinting left and darting right, a man of brains and courage, whose main aim in the Odyssey is to get back home to Ithaca, sort of like wanting to get back from the Ardennes to the Ozark Mountains. Yet after Homer, judgment begins to tilt away from Odysseus, who is often portrayed as a liar and a cheat: “The inventor of impieties,” Virgil calls him. And then there’s Achilles, and the first lines in the Iliad bring us both him and our Word of the Week , hero. “So then,” says the curious boy, “that’s where Homer first calls Achilles a hero?” No, he doesn’t. This is what Homer says, if you’ll let me translate it in prose so as not to break up the visuals here on the page: “The rage of Achilles son of Peleus, sing to me, Muse, that dire rage that brought pain to many an Achaian, that pitched many stout-hearted heroes to Hades, and made of their bodies a feast for the birds and the dogs.” Good gracious, nobody writes poetry like that anymore! But wasn’t that what Achilles was supposed to do? No, not at all. The Achaians were his own people — and his implacable anger against King Agamemnon caused him to duck out of the war, leaving his own side vulnerable; but in his terrible fury he wanted to see them die, so they would learn the hard way what chance they had against the Trojans without him. Hardly four lines, and we’re stunned. The heroes named are those who died while Achilles was sulking, Achilles the hero. The Rage of Achilles, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1757). Achilles is about to cut Agamemnon down, when the unseen goddess Athena grabs him by the hair and yanks him away Support W&S with an Upgrade What does it mean to be a hero? Our last Film of the Week, Sergeant York, featured an American hero of the first order, a man of peace who gave up his comfort to fight so that others might live, and who methodically, and pretty much single-handed, took out a whole nest of German machine gunners, and led away as prisoners of war 132 surprised and abashed German soldiers. Of course, we can use the term metaphorically, to refer to anyone we admire. “He’s mah i-deel!” said Li’l Abner, who loved to read about Fearless Fosdick in the funny papers, Al Capp’s merciless sendup of Dick Tracy. But in the most fundamental way, heroism is courage under ultimate threats, such as death or destruction, or the risking of all that you have and enjoy. The guys who brought Flight 93 down in western Pennsylvania were such heroes: they might have held out some slender chance of surviving, not knowing with absolute certainty what the hijackers intended, but they bravely tossed that chance away. I’ve said that all cultures have heroes, but since ultimate matters are in question here, it may not be so simple after all to determine who the hero is. That’s especially true in Christian cultures, since the hero Christ conquers death by dying, so that, to use Milton’s words, “heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate.” Suggestions of this surprising inversion can be found in pagan cultures — “good dreams,” as Tolkien called them, but they’re common in Christian literature, these heroes where you least expect them. The boy Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island is a hero not just because he is brave and resourceful, but because he remains stoutly loyal to his friends even when they believe he has betrayed them, and he knows that they believe it. In David Copperfield, the schoolboy David looks up to Steerforth as a hero, because Steerforth protects him and is afraid of nobody, but we see true heroism in Mr. Peggotty, traveling all over Europe in his quest to find his niece Emily and bring her safely home, after Steerforth has run away with her. That old tar is as tough as oak, and filled with the energy of love. Again Milton’s words apply. Milton didn’t want to write a long poem about war, “hitherto the only argument / Heroic deemed,” which left “the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom / Unsung.” Always he has the Son of God in mind. Jim Hawkins discharges the pistols against the treacherous Israel Hands. Illustration by Louis Rhead, 1915 (Harper Brothers). Give a gift subscription We get our word hero pretty much intact from ancient Greek heros, borrowed straight into Latin, descending into French and from there into English. But of course we had the idea before we had this particular word. Our native word for it was haeleth — with an underlying idea of giving wholeness or increase. That’s the word the poet of The Dream of the Rood uses to name Christ, the young hero striding from afar to embrace the Cross and liberate all mankind. In English, hero displaced haeleth, but that word’s close cousin survived in German: the hero is der Held. Any distant cousins? That’s hard to tell. The guess is that Greek heros is a cousin of Latin servus, servant, of all things, but the servant considered as one who guards, protects. But isn’t that a stretch, to have a word beginning with s- related to one beginning with h-? Not if we’re talking about Greek, and the s- was followed by a vowel. So we have Latin sol, sun, but Greek helios (whence English helium ), and Latin sal, salt, but Greek halos (whence English halogen, a salt-making element). How odd, and yet appropriate, if the words heroic and serve were akin! Please share this post! Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcasts on a wide variety of topics. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, on-demand access to our full archive, and may contribute comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. We thank you for reading Word and Song! Learn More About Word & Song Browse Our Archive Note: Our full archive of over 1,000 posts, videos, audios is available on demand to paid subscribers only. We know that not everyone has time every day for a read and a listen. So we have built the archive with you all in mind. Please do browse, and please do share posts that you like with others. Thank you, as always, for supporting our effort to restore every day a little bit of the good, the beautiful, and the true.…

W

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

1
HERO

11일 전

나중에 재생

리스트

—

“Who was the greatest of all the Greek heroes?” a boy in the old British schools might ask, and it’s not an easy question to answer. We might say, “Hercules was!” — except that Hercules is a borderline case, a demigod, and there are aspects to his story that don’t fit the heroic mold, as when he fell in love with Iole and for her sake took up spinning and needlework, while she put on his lionskin, ten sizes too big, and tried to lug his club around. Anyway, if we’re really after the peculiarly human, even if he’s got a divine parent, the two great figures of Homer’s poetry stand forth, Odysseus and Achilles. I love Odysseus, the man of many shifts, a broken-field runner if there ever was one, feinting left and darting right, a man of brains and courage, whose main aim in the Odyssey is to get back home to Ithaca, sort of like wanting to get back from the Ardennes to the Ozark Mountains. Yet after Homer, judgment begins to tilt away from Odysseus, who is often portrayed as a liar and a cheat: “The inventor of impieties,” Virgil calls him. And then there’s Achilles, and the first lines in the Iliad bring us both him and our Word of the Week , hero. “So then,” says the curious boy, “that’s where Homer first calls Achilles a hero?” No, he doesn’t. This is what Homer says, if you’ll let me translate it in prose so as not to break up the visuals here on the page: “The rage of Achilles son of Peleus, sing to me, Muse, that dire rage that brought pain to many an Achaian, that pitched many stout-hearted heroes to Hades, and made of their bodies a feast for the birds and the dogs.” Good gracious, nobody writes poetry like that anymore! But wasn’t that what Achilles was supposed to do? No, not at all. The Achaians were his own people — and his implacable anger against King Agamemnon caused him to duck out of the war, leaving his own side vulnerable; but in his terrible fury he wanted to see them die, so they would learn the hard way what chance they had against the Trojans without him. Hardly four lines, and we’re stunned. The heroes named are those who died while Achilles was sulking, Achilles the hero. The Rage of Achilles, by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1757). Achilles is about to cut Agamemnon down, when the unseen goddess Athena grabs him by the hair and yanks him away Support W&S with an Upgrade What does it mean to be a hero? Our last Film of the Week, Sergeant York, featured an American hero of the first order, a man of peace who gave up his comfort to fight so that others might live, and who methodically, and pretty much single-handed, took out a whole nest of German machine gunners, and led away as prisoners of war 132 surprised and abashed German soldiers. Of course, we can use the term metaphorically, to refer to anyone we admire. “He’s mah i-deel!” said Li’l Abner, who loved to read about Fearless Fosdick in the funny papers, Al Capp’s merciless sendup of Dick Tracy. But in the most fundamental way, heroism is courage under ultimate threats, such as death or destruction, or the risking of all that you have and enjoy. The guys who brought Flight 93 down in western Pennsylvania were such heroes: they might have held out some slender chance of surviving, not knowing with absolute certainty what the hijackers intended, but they bravely tossed that chance away. I’ve said that all cultures have heroes, but since ultimate matters are in question here, it may not be so simple after all to determine who the hero is. That’s especially true in Christian cultures, since the hero Christ conquers death by dying, so that, to use Milton’s words, “heavenly love shall outdo hellish hate.” Suggestions of this surprising inversion can be found in pagan cultures — “good dreams,” as Tolkien called them, but they’re common in Christian literature, these heroes where you least expect them. The boy Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island is a hero not just because he is brave and resourceful, but because he remains stoutly loyal to his friends even when they believe he has betrayed them, and he knows that they believe it. In David Copperfield, the schoolboy David looks up to Steerforth as a hero, because Steerforth protects him and is afraid of nobody, but we see true heroism in Mr. Peggotty, traveling all over Europe in his quest to find his niece Emily and bring her safely home, after Steerforth has run away with her. That old tar is as tough as oak, and filled with the energy of love. Again Milton’s words apply. Milton didn’t want to write a long poem about war, “hitherto the only argument / Heroic deemed,” which left “the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom / Unsung.” Always he has the Son of God in mind. Jim Hawkins discharges the pistols against the treacherous Israel Hands. Illustration by Louis Rhead, 1915 (Harper Brothers). Give a gift subscription We get our word hero pretty much intact from ancient Greek heros, borrowed straight into Latin, descending into French and from there into English. But of course we had the idea before we had this particular word. Our native word for it was haeleth — with an underlying idea of giving wholeness or increase. That’s the word the poet of The Dream of the Rood uses to name Christ, the young hero striding from afar to embrace the Cross and liberate all mankind. In English, hero displaced haeleth, but that word’s close cousin survived in German: the hero is der Held. Any distant cousins? That’s hard to tell. The guess is that Greek heros is a cousin of Latin servus, servant, of all things, but the servant considered as one who guards, protects. But isn’t that a stretch, to have a word beginning with s- related to one beginning with h-? Not if we’re talking about Greek, and the s- was followed by a vowel. So we have Latin sol, sun, but Greek helios (whence English helium ), and Latin sal, salt, but Greek halos (whence English halogen, a salt-making element). How odd, and yet appropriate, if the words heroic and serve were akin! Please share this post! Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcasts on a wide variety of topics. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, on-demand access to our full archive, and may contribute comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. We thank you for reading Word and Song! Learn More About Word & Song Browse Our Archive Note: Our full archive of over 1,000 posts, videos, audios is available on demand to paid subscribers only. We know that not everyone has time every day for a read and a listen. So we have built the archive with you all in mind. Please do browse, and please do share posts that you like with others. Thank you, as always, for supporting our effort to restore every day a little bit of the good, the beautiful, and the true.…

W

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

1
"Semper Fidelis"

13일 전

나중에 재생

리스트

—

At Sometimes a Song I often find myself writing about prodigies. Have you noticed? And our song today, written in 1888 for the United States Marine Corps Band, is the work of a musical prodigy, John Philip Sousa. Sousa has something else in common with many of the musicians who gave us the great flourishing of American music in the 20th century: he was a child of recent immigrants, his father from Spain and his mother from Bavaria. Sousa was the eldest boy and third of ten children in his family. Music was already in the air in his family by the time John was born. His father was a trombonist with the U. S. Marine Corps Band when he met Maria Trinkhaus in Brooklyn, New York, when Sousa, Sr., was touring with the band. Not surprisingly, the Sousas lived in Washington, D. C., within an easy walk of the Marine Corps Barracks. At the time of John’s birth, I am sure his family could hardly imagine what an honored place their son would hold in the history of their adopted country and in the hearts of their fellow Americans. In the days before recorded music, and for long after the entrance of that technology on the scene, some musical proficiency was not uncommon among the common folk. And yet, John Philip had the uncommon advantage of being born into rare circumstances. He literally grew up in the company of The Marine Band and its music, and his father, likewise a musician, made very certain that his son had as solid a musical education as was open to him. As a child, young John Philip studied violin, piano, flute and several band instruments, as well as voice and music theory. He became so skilled on the violin that by the time he was thirteen (in 1868), his father feared that young John would be spirited away from the family by a traveling theatrical troupe. What’s a father of a prodigy to do? Well, in those days one could ENLIST a minor son (at the rank of “boy”) in an apprenticeship with the Marine Corps in what we would now consider a work-study situation. And that is exactly what Mr. Sousa did. John Philip was actually enlisted in the Corps, an enlistment that was binding until he reached the age of majority, 21. It was this astute move on the part of his father that put John Philip Sousa in the exact position to advance his musical career while working essentially as an adult musician and with constant experience as a band performer, and later as a conductor. During these years, John also had theatrical performing experience on his own, and was popular at Washington venues, including Ford’s Theater, where (when John Sousa was only a child of 11 years), the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated. Upgrade to See More Posts Like This Who could know then that John Philip Sousa would grow up to lead The President’s Own Marine Band during the administrations of five U. S. Presidents: Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, and Benjamin Harrison. During his tenure as director of “The President’s Own,” John Philip Sousa turned the Marine Corps Band into a national sensation, with a world-wide reputation, not just for their musical skill (which was excellent) but for the artistry of their music, much of it penned by their director himself. John Philip Sousa was not just a great musician, composer, conductor, and showman. He was also a great patriot. When he took The Marine Corps Band to England (before World War I), he earned international regard, and was dubbed The March King — quite a compliment, since formerly the title “King” had been used only for “The Waltz King,” Johann Strauss. For a composer, this designation was high praise, indeed. In WWI, Sousa was called out of retirement for a wartime commission as Lieutenant Commander, to resume the duties as director of The Marine Corps Band. Under his direction, that band set down some 400 recordings, despite Sousa’s disdain for the quality of the cylinders. (When flat shellac records were introduced, Sousa “changed his tune” and embraced the medium, but he did say — and he was right! — that the availability of recorded music would certainly make it less necessary and thus less likely that people would learn to play musical instruments themselves.) Give a gift subscription After the war, Sousa returned to private life, but in the early 1920’s, he was given a permanent commission as Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Reserves, although he did not serve in active duty. John Philip Sousa was (and still is) so beloved that every year on his birthday, November 6th, The Marine Corps Band performs “Semper Fidelis” at his grave in the congressional cemetery. God rest his soul. Semper fidelis, indeed. Share I hope you will enjoy the performances below of a few of the 145 marches that John Philip Sousa wrote over his long career. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, on-demand access to our full archive, weekly podcasts, and may contribute comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. Thank you for reading Word and Song! Browse our Archive Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, on-demand access to our full archive, weekly podcasts, and may contribute comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. Thank you for reading Word and Song! Give a gift subscription Thank you for joining us at Word & Song!…

W

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

1
"Semper Fidelis"

13일 전

나중에 재생

리스트

—

At Sometimes a Song I often find myself writing about prodigies. Have you noticed? And our song today, written in 1888 for the United States Marine Corps Band, is the work of a musical prodigy, John Philip Sousa. Sousa has something else in common with many of the musicians who gave us the great flourishing of American music in the 20th century: he was a child of recent immigrants, his father from Spain and his mother from Bavaria. Sousa was the eldest boy and third of ten children in his family. Music was already in the air in his family by the time John was born. His father was a trombonist with the U. S. Marine Corps Band when he met Maria Trinkhaus in Brooklyn, New York, when Sousa, Sr., was touring with the band. Not surprisingly, the Sousas lived in Washington, D. C., within an easy walk of the Marine Corps Barracks. At the time of John’s birth, I am sure his family could hardly imagine what an honored place their son would hold in the history of their adopted country and in the hearts of their fellow Americans. In the days before recorded music, and for long after the entrance of that technology on the scene, some musical proficiency was not uncommon among the common folk. And yet, John Philip had the uncommon advantage of being born into rare circumstances. He literally grew up in the company of The Marine Band and its music, and his father, likewise a musician, made very certain that his son had as solid a musical education as was open to him. As a child, young John Philip studied violin, piano, flute and several band instruments, as well as voice and music theory. He became so skilled on the violin that by the time he was thirteen (in 1868), his father feared that young John would be spirited away from the family by a traveling theatrical troupe. What’s a father of a prodigy to do? Well, in those days one could ENLIST a minor son (at the rank of “boy”) in an apprenticeship with the Marine Corps in what we would now consider a work-study situation. And that is exactly what Mr. Sousa did. John Philip was actually enlisted in the Corps, an enlistment that was binding until he reached the age of majority, 21. It was this astute move on the part of his father that put John Philip Sousa in the exact position to advance his musical career while working essentially as an adult musician and with constant experience as a band performer, and later as a conductor. During these years, John also had theatrical performing experience on his own, and was popular at Washington venues, including Ford’s Theater, where (when John Sousa was only a child of 11 years), the president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated. Upgrade to See More Posts Like This Who could know then that John Philip Sousa would grow up to lead The President’s Own Marine Band during the administrations of five U. S. Presidents: Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, and Benjamin Harrison. During his tenure as director of “The President’s Own,” John Philip Sousa turned the Marine Corps Band into a national sensation, with a world-wide reputation, not just for their musical skill (which was excellent) but for the artistry of their music, much of it penned by their director himself. John Philip Sousa was not just a great musician, composer, conductor, and showman. He was also a great patriot. When he took The Marine Corps Band to England (before World War I), he earned international regard, and was dubbed The March King — quite a compliment, since formerly the title “King” had been used only for “The Waltz King,” Johann Strauss. For a composer, this designation was high praise, indeed. In WWI, Sousa was called out of retirement for a wartime commission as Lieutenant Commander, to resume the duties as director of The Marine Corps Band. Under his direction, that band set down some 400 recordings, despite Sousa’s disdain for the quality of the cylinders. (When flat shellac records were introduced, Sousa “changed his tune” and embraced the medium, but he did say — and he was right! — that the availability of recorded music would certainly make it less necessary and thus less likely that people would learn to play musical instruments themselves.) Give a gift subscription After the war, Sousa returned to private life, but in the early 1920’s, he was given a permanent commission as Lieutenant Commander in the Naval Reserves, although he did not serve in active duty. John Philip Sousa was (and still is) so beloved that every year on his birthday, November 6th, The Marine Corps Band performs “Semper Fidelis” at his grave in the congressional cemetery. God rest his soul. Semper fidelis, indeed. Share I hope you will enjoy the performances below of a few of the 145 marches that John Philip Sousa wrote over his long career. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, on-demand access to our full archive, weekly podcasts, and may contribute comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. Thank you for reading Word and Song! Browse our Archive Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, on-demand access to our full archive, weekly podcasts, and may contribute comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. Thank you for reading Word and Song! Give a gift subscription Thank you for joining us at Word & Song!…

W

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

1
God of Grace and God of Glory

17일 전

나중에 재생

리스트

—

I fell in love with our Hymn of the Week when we sang it at Saints Peter and Paul, in the old mill village of Phenix, Rhode Island. One of the night school students at the college where we taught gave us an old upright piano as a gift, and on it I would play hymns out of an old hymnal or two that we’d collected. We have a whole bookcase full of hymnals now, but back then I was still learning about these things. It’s hard to describe, and perhaps impossible to do it precisely, but certain hymns seem, in their tempo and their melody, to be fit for a procession or parade , because there’s a boldness to them, and maybe also a kind of masculine air, a muscularity — as I said, hard to describe. Puccini’s air, “O mio babbino caro,” which you can hear the incomparable coloratura Maria Callas singing here , is undoubtedly feminine, just as the Toreador march in Carmen is undoubtedly masculine. Ah, vive la difference! Of course, I love all kinds of hymns, the sweet and gentle as well as the bold and bright; the glad, the sorrowful, the hopeful, the pleading, the song of petition, the hymn of high praise. But this week, just because of Memorial Day, my mind turns to this hymn, from the peace-loving fighter, Harry Emerson Fosdick. I don’t want to delve here into Reverend Fosdick’s life or his theology — there is much to admire in the former, and maybe even more to reject in the latter. That would distract us from the hymn. Caravaggio was a notorious sinner, but he did know that he was, and nobody ever painted more dramatic scenes from the New Testament than he did. It’s his art that counts, and for us today, it’s this hymn. Support Word & Song with an Upgrade Near the end of his great novel Perelandra, about an “Adam” and “Eve” on the planet Venus, who resist the temptation, C. S. Lewis gives us a song of everything in the created world, from the angels to the least particle of matter without form, and each creature is seen, correctly, as at the center of all, as the prime cause for God’s creating the universe, and “let none gainsay it,” they repeat. It is the same with time, as Lewis also suggests, in Perelandra, That Hideous Strength, The Screwtape Letters: every moment is a corner to turn, a hinge, a crux, the fulcrum upon which, for countless souls, eternal joy or eternal loss hangs in the balance. So when we sing, in this hymn, “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage / For the facing of this hour,” we needn’t think of 1930, that year following the stock market crash, or the turbulence in Germany and Japan. This is the hour of trial, now. The hymn calls us on to action, to fight. But to fight what? In the first instance, to fight timidity itself, self-satisfaction, lassitude. If God does not bring the church’s bud “to glorious flower,” then that is a judgment upon us, not a mercy. What else to fight? Evil — and here the hymn suggests that the evil is not only personal. There are “hosts of evil” around us; and that should be no surprise. Milton’s dreadful judgment on the fractious human race comes to mind: “As if (which might induce us to accord) / Man had hellish foes enough besides / That day and night for his destruction wait.” But the fighting is also internal. We are prone to “warring madness,” to pride, to greed, to be “rich in things and poor in soul.” So we call upon God to cure us, to bend us to his will, to shame us into giving up our desire to hoard up those riches that rust will wear away and moths consume. (Welsh miners singing the melody Cwm Rhondda, in How Green Was My Valley ) Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. Join us as subscriber. The melody I prefer for this hymn is the Welsh march Cwm Rhondda (“Rhondda Valley”), which we’ve featured here already for the Welsh hymn Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah (in Welsh, Arglwydd, arwain trwy’r anialwch, meaning “Lord, guide [me] through the desert”). I like it, because it gives free play to the final two verses of each stanza, repeating the final line, and also, in the second last line, building the melody up, with rising half-notes on the key verb “grant”). The stanzas themselves are artfully done. They are bound together by the penultimate line, “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,” so that each final line, rhyming on lines two and four, strikes us as perfectly complete but also as a surprise, because in each case we are held in suspense, not knowing yet what we are asking wisdom and courage for. The final line of the final stanza cannot be superseded. Ultimately, we say that we serve God because we adore: and thus is action fulfilled in contemplation. Share this Post Sung by the Melbourne Welsh Male Choir. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published God himself is with us; let us all adore him, And with awe appear before him. God is here within us; soul, in silence fear him, Humbly, fervently draw near him. Now his own Who have known God in worship lowly, yield their spirits wholly. Thou pervadest all things; let thy radiant beauty Light mine eyes to see my duty. As the tender flowers eagerly unfold them, To the sunlight calmly fold them, So let me Quietly In thy rays imbue me; let thy light shine through me. Come, abide within me; let my soul, like Mary, Be thine earthly sanctuary. Come, indwelling Spirit, with transfigured splendor; Love and honor will I render. Where I go Here below Let me bow before thee, know thee and adore thee. Gladly we surrender earth's deceitful treasures, Pride of life, and sinful pleasures. Gladly, Lord, we offer thine to be forever, Soul and life and each endeavor. Thou alone Shalt be known Lord of all our being, life's true way decreeing. Learn More about Word & Song…

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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

1
PARADE

18일 전

나중에 재생

리스트

—

It’s Memorial Day today in the United States, what used to be called Decoration Day, because that’s when everybody went to the graves of their kin to tend them and set down some flowers — at least, that’s what we did in Pennsylvania. Of course, the day was more specifically in honor of soldiers who had passed away, especially if they had died in battle. I’ve described before, I think, what the custom was in my town, Archbald. Early in the morning, my cousins Frankie and Bobby and I, and a couple of the neighbor boys too, would troop along with the parade — and there’s our Word of the Week — to the Protestant cemetery high on a hill on our side of town, where seven of the veterans in uniform would fire their rifles three times, the 21-gun salute, and then, as the smoke slowly cleared in wisps of burnt gunpowder, another of the veterans would play Taps. Otherwise everything was perfectly silent. We were in awe of that. And now that I think of it, awe is a great word for another week, from our native Anglo-Saxon stock. But then came the parade in earnest. For two or three years running, we managed to hop a ride on one of the fire trucks as they went their slow way through town; that was a heck of a lot better than watching the parade. The firemen didn’t mind. As I remember, it took us about an hour and a half to go nearly the full route, on up to the Catholic cemetery on a hill on the facing side of town — our town was built on a narrow defile cut by the Lackawanna River. There the whole parade stopped as one of the priests said Mass. When Mass was ended, the parade completed its last leg, coming down from the cemetery to the American Legion building on Main Street, where the Legionnaires gave everybody free doughnuts and orange juice. I loved it. Support W&S with an Upgrade Parades, as far as I know, quickly became a thing of the past for the towns in our valley, but there’s one that I remember very fondly. It was the summer of 1976, Archbald’s centennial, and also the centennial of St. Thomas Aquinas parish. In those days, it was not much of an exaggeration to say that the town was the parish and the parish was the town. Anyway, people got the idea that it would be a good thing if everybody dressed up in old-style costumes, and if the men grew beards. That was the only time I ever saw my father with a couple of weeks of growth on him — he shaved it off when the celebration was done, but some of the men decided to keep theirs. So it was a parade in which there were almost as many participants as there were people watching from the sidewalks — actually, from the side of the road, since our town was mostly too poor for sidewalks, and I don’t think we yet had any street signs. The celebration was notable for two other things. One was that a priest, a cousin to all the plentiful McAndrews in town, wrote a very handsome history of the parish, which was also a history of the town, complete with fine photographs. It couldn’t be written now, I think. It’s of high literary quality without the least bit of showing off, and of course there was nothing flippant, merely informal, topical, political, or off-hand about it. It was there only that I learned that the Italian who painted the murals and the ceiling of our church had done work on the Capitol rotunda in Washington, D. C. The other notable thing about the celebration is that it was the last time the town’s own high school was used for anything. The school was a very handsome building within a few hundred feet of the Catholic parochial school I attended, the Church, the rectory, the convent, and a small Knights of Columbus building that doubled as a candy store. After the celebration, the high school remained vacant, till finally they tore it down, made a little garden of the spot, and put up a plaque to commemorate what used to be there. Somehow, even though I did not attend either that school or the consolidated three-town’s monstrosity they built to replace it, I feel as if that spot and that plaque make up a cemetery of their own, a remembrance of a kind of town life that no longer exists. Saint Thomas Aquinas Church, 2011; photo, accompanying an article by Yours Truly, courtesy of Crisis Magazine and the Institute for Sacred Architecture Give a gift subscription A little bit on the word parade: it’s from Italian, through French and on into English. A lot of the words with -ade as a suffix are in the same category. Italian parata referred to a military drill, or something prepared in a big and fancy way, with a lot of fuss and feathers; that became French parade, entering English in the Middle Ages. The same sort of development gave us words like charade and stockade, and then, by analogy, applied to the hotheaded Rodomonte in Ariosto’s wonderful mock-epic Orlando Furioso, the word rodomontade. An Italian drink flavored with lemons is limonata, as you might say “lemoned”; it entered French as limonade, then English as lemonade. But then the English chopped off the suffix and stuck it onto other fruits, as in limeade and orangeade, and then they heard it as a word in its own right: ade. Imagine somebody speaking another language hearing an English suffix as its own separate word — say, “ing”. “Too many ings today!” says the busy shopkeeper. Better to pull up a chair and watch other busy people parading by. Reading of the Declaration of Independence, detail of sepia painting of American history on the frieze of the Capitol, by Filippo Costaggini, 1889 Please share this post! Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcasts on a wide variety of topics. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, on-demand access to our full archive, and may contribute comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. We thank you for reading Word and Song! Learn More About Word & Song Browse Our Archive Note: Our full archive of over 1,000 posts, videos, audios is available on demand to paid subscribers only. We know that not everyone has time every day for a read and a listen. So we have built the archive with you all in mind. Please do browse, and please do share posts that you like with others. Thank you, as always, for supporting our effort to restore every day a little bit of the good, the beautiful, and the true.…

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