文档介绍：SHELLEY: AN ESSAY
SHELLEY: AN ESSAY
by Francis Thompson
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SHELLEY: AN ESSAY
The Church, which was once the mother of poets no less than of saints,
during the last two centuries has relinquished to aliens the chief glories of
poetry, if the chief glories of holiness she has preserved for her own. The
palm and the laurel, Dominic and Dante, sanctity and song, grew together
in her soil: she has retained the palm, but forgone the laurel. Poetry in
its widest sense, {1} and when not professedly irreligious, has been too
much and too long among many Catholics either misprised or distrusted;
too much and too generally the feeling has been that it is at best
superfluous, at worst pernicious, most often dangerous. Once poetry was,
as she should be, the lesser sister and helpmate of the Church; the minister
to the mind, as the Church to the soul. But poetry sinned, poetry fell; and,
in place of lovingly reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the door to
follow the feet of her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill for
poetry; it has not been well for religion.
Fathers of the Church (we would say), pastors of the Church, pious
laics of the Church: you are taking from its walls the panoply of
Aquinas--take also from its walls the psaltery of Alighieri. Unroll the
precedents of the Church's past; recall to your minds that Francis of Assisi
was among the precursors of Dante; that sworn to Poverty he forswore not
Beauty, but discerned through the lamp Beauty the Light God; that he was
even more a poet in his miracles than in his melody; that poetry clung
round the cowls of his Order. Follow his footsteps; you who have
blessings for men, have you no blessing for the birds? Recall to your
memory that, in their minor kind, the love poems of Dante shed no less
honour on Catholicism than did the great religious poem which is itself
pivoted on love; that in singing of heaven he sang of Beatrice--this
supporting angel was still carven on his harp