Holy Week, and Poetry
The next few days involve a variety of figures and moods.
This Sunday, March 29th, is Palm Sunday, when Christ rode into Jerusalem to a welcoming audience. Monday the 30th begins Holy Week, which evokes an archetypal drama that ends with the most important date on the Christian calendar: Easter Sunday.
The hero of this drama, Jesus, is himself the Word who has evoked tremendous art and literature, the spirit and the flesh in one.
Tuesday, March 31st, is the birthday of the poet Andrew Marvell, a 17th-century poet (and politician!). Marvell was the son of a Christian minister and also used his influence to help the poet John Milton (author of the Christian epic Paradise Lost).
As a poet himself, Marvell is known especially for his lyric “To His Coy Mistress.” This poem begins, “Had we but world enough, and time” and is a good example of the carpe diem or “Seize the day” type of poem. (Something akin to the modern You Only Live Once, perhaps?) So he too is a multi-faceted figure.
March 31st is also the birthday of Edward FitzGerald, the best-known English translator or paraphraser of stanzas by Omar Khayyam, an impressive Persian intellectual who was poet, mathematician,and philosopher (among other things).
Even people who have not read FitzGerald’s liberal translation have probably heard some of its phrases, for example, “The bird is on the wing,” “A Jug of wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou. . . .” In some ways, FitzGerald helped “announce” to Victorian English readers this remarkable work of the perishable and the eternal, a work that is simultaneously sensuous, philosophical, spiritual, personal, and poignant.
In my own humble book, "Dancing," I have used allusions to the above figures at least partly to suggest Eliza’s own archetypal journey and her struggle to integrate the sensual and the spiritual, as she tries to join that which fades with that which endures forever.
Many poems are set in the Easter season of various years. Furthermore, eleven of the poems are set on FitzGerald’s birthday--“St. Edward’s Day”--with one being set on the eve of that day. Also, one poem mentions Marvell and alludes to a coy lover.
It is my hope that whatever your beliefs, you enjoy the richness that these upcoming holidays suggest.
This Sunday, March 29th, is Palm Sunday, when Christ rode into Jerusalem to a welcoming audience. Monday the 30th begins Holy Week, which evokes an archetypal drama that ends with the most important date on the Christian calendar: Easter Sunday.
The hero of this drama, Jesus, is himself the Word who has evoked tremendous art and literature, the spirit and the flesh in one.
Tuesday, March 31st, is the birthday of the poet Andrew Marvell, a 17th-century poet (and politician!). Marvell was the son of a Christian minister and also used his influence to help the poet John Milton (author of the Christian epic Paradise Lost).
As a poet himself, Marvell is known especially for his lyric “To His Coy Mistress.” This poem begins, “Had we but world enough, and time” and is a good example of the carpe diem or “Seize the day” type of poem. (Something akin to the modern You Only Live Once, perhaps?) So he too is a multi-faceted figure.
March 31st is also the birthday of Edward FitzGerald, the best-known English translator or paraphraser of stanzas by Omar Khayyam, an impressive Persian intellectual who was poet, mathematician,and philosopher (among other things).
Even people who have not read FitzGerald’s liberal translation have probably heard some of its phrases, for example, “The bird is on the wing,” “A Jug of wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou. . . .” In some ways, FitzGerald helped “announce” to Victorian English readers this remarkable work of the perishable and the eternal, a work that is simultaneously sensuous, philosophical, spiritual, personal, and poignant.
In my own humble book, "Dancing," I have used allusions to the above figures at least partly to suggest Eliza’s own archetypal journey and her struggle to integrate the sensual and the spiritual, as she tries to join that which fades with that which endures forever.
Many poems are set in the Easter season of various years. Furthermore, eleven of the poems are set on FitzGerald’s birthday--“St. Edward’s Day”--with one being set on the eve of that day. Also, one poem mentions Marvell and alludes to a coy lover.
It is my hope that whatever your beliefs, you enjoy the richness that these upcoming holidays suggest.
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