A Literary Pilgrimage to Oxford — Martin

When my wife and I were planning our trip to England this summer, I wanted to make sure we visited Oxford. Oxford University has produced so many exceptional and diverse writers such as: W.H. Auden, Lewis Carroll, Evelyn Waugh, Oscar Wilde, A.A. Milne, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jonathan Swift and John Donne — not to mention musicians, preachers and political leaders.

During our brief time, I managed to slip away from our tour to step into the quadrangle at Balliol College where one of my favourite poets — Gerard Manley Hopkins — and one of my favourite novelists — Graham Greene — had been students.

Above all, I wanted to visit a little pub in Oxford informally known as “The Bird and Baby”, but officially named “The Eagle and Child”. This was the place where C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J.R.R. Tolkien and others met for years to discuss their writing and to share friendship. Lewis and various members of the “Inklings”, as they were known, met in “The Rabbit Room” of the pub between 1939 and 1962. Today the little room has become something of a shrine.

To enjoy our lunch in “The Eagle and Child” made C.S. Lewis and his friends seem that much closer — especially when it turned out that our waitress was from Calgary. Whenever I have a chance to return to Oxford, with more time to wander, I’ll certainly investigate Magdalen College where Lewis taught, and visit the home he shared with his brother Warnie, “The Kilns” — and I will stop for lunch at “The Bird and Baby”.

As a writer these are all good reasons to travel to a city as inspiring as Oxford.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

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Kingdom Poets — Martin

Announcing Kingdom Poets — a new blog intended to be a resource for those who are interested in Christian poetry. Every Monday you’ll be able to see a new post: a brief introduction to a Christian poet, along with one or two sample poems.

It’s brand new. My very first post went up Monday, February 15th, and features George Herbert: a fine 17th century English poet of deep faith. For my second and third posts I leapt into the late 20th century — with George Mackay Brown, a Scottish poet who wrote of his community in the remote Orkney Islands, and is not well known on this side of the Atlantic — and Jane Kenyon, a fine American poet who died while she was still quite young.

Yesterday, I posted about one of the most influential poets of the 1800s — Gerard Manley Hopkins. I’ll leave it to you to check it out here. If you want to know who else is being featured, check back every Monday.

The poets represent a wide range of denominations. Early poets, of course, are primarily Anglicans and Catholics. This, however, tends to also be true today. Some poets raised in Evangelical circles have been drawn towards more traditional denominations — Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox — due perhaps to their rich histories, appreciation of the arts and beauty, liturgy, or their acceptance of poetry as an acceptable service.

Check out Kingdom Poets, become a follower, and leave a comment.

D.S. Martin is Music Critic for Christian Week. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

The Three Platonic Ideals: Beauty — Martin

In November, I introduced the three Platonic ideals of Goodness, Beauty and Truth. These three ideals have slipped in and out of fashionable thought, and yet their centrality remains. As I mentioned in my blog on Goodness (November 14th) the one of these three virtues most neglected by the church, in recent years, has been beauty. This has not always been so.

During the Renaissance and the Reformation, the church (first the Catholic and later the Protestant churches) had great influence over painting, sculpture and music. Consider Biblical themes in the paintings of such masters as Giotto, Raphael, Michelangelo, El Greco, and Rembrandt. Consider the spirituality behind the music of such composers as Handel and Bach.

Today, we are beginning to again acknowledge the importance of celebrating all of God’s creation, and that the beauty of that creation tells us much about the creator. Similarly, we are learning that we are called on to imitate God — not merely in his Goodness and Truth, but also in his creation of Beauty. Eugene Peterson (author of The Message) in reflecting on Psalm 29 in his sermon "The Beauty of Holiness" said, "Beauty is our sensory access to holiness" (Image #29). He went on to say, "Beauty is the term we apply to these hints of transcendence, these perceptions that there is more going on here than we can account for."

My reflection on Beauty, from my poetry collection Poiema, follows:


Let Beauty Come

Psalm 90:17

Let beauty rest on us like a shaft of light
penetrating to the dimness of our forest floor
our eager green turns toward it

Let beauty come like rain for Hopkins’ roots
splattering exuberantly on our disappointments
making right what we could never foresee

Awaken our hibernating senses so we find
what was hiding & what was on its way
The affirmation of blessing

Let beauty grow in the work of our hands
not our own but truest beauty
growing in the work of our hands

As Peterson has said, "We are in a world at play to the glory of God, in the beauty of holiness."

D.S. Martin is Music Critic for Christian Week; his new poetry book, Poiema (Wipf & Stock), and his chapbook So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed are available at http://www.dsmartin.ca/

A Tribute to Gerard Manley Hopkins - Martin

Last month I blogged here concerning an excellent new novel, Exiles, about the influential English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Today I’d like to encourage you to look deeper into Hopkins’ poetry itself. Many of you will be familiar with his best-known work such as “The Windhover” and “Pied Beauty”. Regardless, I’d like to encourage you to invest a few minutes meditating on his verse.

Hopkins wrestled with reconciling the humility of Christian servanthood with the inherent pride in producing art. He dedicated whatever time he could — which was minimal due to the demands of the priesthood — to his unique poetic vision, and he submitted his talent to God as a gift. The Norton Anthology of English Literature touches on his story by saying, “During his lifetime, these remarkable poems, most of them celebrating the wonders of God’s creation, had been known only to a small circle of friends, including his literary executor, the poet Robert Bridges, who waited until 1918 before releasing them to a publisher.” It is my belief that Hopkins’ attitude of submission to God, and his dedication to his art, are the essential elements that pleased his Lord — so that God has chosen to elevate Hopkins’ poetry.

The words of the following poem often play in my mind, in the same way the psalms do, when I’m out in God’s creation, leading me to worship.

God’s Grandeur (1877)

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.


In contrast to “God’s Grandeur”, Gerard Manley Hopkins also wrestled in prayer concerning the difficulties in his life. The following poem (one of his “terrible sonnets”) included a quote in Latin from Jeremiah 12:1, which reads in the NIV, “You are always righteous, O Lord, when I bring a case before you. Yet I would speak with you about your justice: Why does the way of the wicked prosper?” The final line of this poem has often found itself in my own prayers.

[Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord] (1889)

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? And why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,

Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look and fresh wind shakes

Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.


May we approach our lives and art as Hopkins did.

D.S. Martin is Music Critic for Christian Week; his poetry chapbook So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed is available at www.dsmartin.ca
His full-length poetry book, Poiema (Wipf & Stock), will be available in September.

Exiles: Historical Fiction With More Than Story - Martin

Yesterday, I finished reading an intriguing new novel by Ron Hansen, entitled Exiles. Having read other Hansen novels — including the exceptional little book Mariette in Ecstasy — I was looking forward to this book. This was especially so, because American poet (and recent Gerard Manley Hopkins biographer) Paul Mariani had excitedly told me Exiles would soon be published, when I met him back in April.

Exiles is two stories: Hansen’s well-researched telling of the story of the five German nuns who drowned off the English coast aboard the ship Deutschland in 1875, and the surrounding story of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the writing of his famous poem “The Wreck Of The Deutschland”.

Hansen is a major literary novelist who is unafraid of being labelled a genre writer. His first two novels Desperadoes, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (the latter recently turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt) are westerns, and many of his other novels, such as the gripping Hitler’s Niece, are historical fiction.

Both stories within Exiles are thought-provoking in terms of God’s call on our lives. The nuns had been exiled because of German persecution of Catholics, and had been anticipating years of service in the United States — which never happened. Hopkins had been sent by church authorities to Ireland, into conditions where his talents were unable to flourish and where his health deteriorated — leading to his premature death.

As we wonder about five young women tragically lost even though they’ve dedicated their lives to God’s service, Hansen has one of the doomed nuns speak of how strangely some prayers are answered while others are not; another simply responds, “prayer is not like money”.

Similarly we wonder along with Hansen about what Hopkins could have accomplished if he had lived and his talent been nurtured. Hopkins only had two original poems published in his lifetime, and was far overshadowed by his friend Robert Bridges who later became Britain’s poet laureate. Ironically (and the Kingdom is often ironic) Hopkins today is the one considered the great poet, while Bridges’ work is all but forgotten.

“Also in some meditations today I earnestly asked our Lord to watch over my compositions...” Hopkins wrote, and, “that He would have them as His own and employ or not employ them as he should see fit.” We have seen the outcome to these prayers.

Exiles is an engaging novel in its own right, yet should also inspire readers to carefully consider the spiritual, insightful and often difficult poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Exiles is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2008)

D.S. Martin is Music Critic for Christian Week; his poetry chapbook So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed is available at www.dsmartin.ca
His full-length poetry book, Poiema (Wipf & Stock), will be available in September.