They f*ck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were f*cked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern,
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man,
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

`Oh is it the jar of nations,
The noise of a world run mad,
The fleeing of earth’s foundations?’
Yes, yes: lie quiet, my lad,

The devil this side of the darnels
Is having a dance with man,
And quarrelsome chaps in charnels
Must bear it as best they can.

NOTHING TO BE SAID

For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured, cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slowly dying.

So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slow dying.
The day spent hunting pig
Or holding a garden-party.

Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.

Our long voyage of discovery is over, and our bark has drooped her weary sails in port at last. Once more we take the road to Nemi. It is evening, and as we climb the long slope of the Appian Way up to the Alban Hills, we look back and see the sky aflame with sunset, its golden glory resting like the aureole of a dying saint over Rome and touching with a crest of fire the dome of St. Peter’s. The sight once seen can never be forgotten, but we turn from it and pursue our way darkling along the mountain side, till we come to Nemi and look down on the lake in its deep hollow, now fast disappearing in the evening shadows. The place has changed but little since Diana received the homage of her worshippers in the sacred grove. The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough. But Nemi’s woods are still green, and as the sunset fades above them in the west, there comes to us, borne on the swell of the wind, the sound of the church bells of Aricia ringing the Angelus. Ave Maria! Sweet and solemn they chime out from the distant town and die lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marshes. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Ave Maria!

–Sir James George Frazer

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

–Matthew Arnold

As for “Churchgoing”, when last in Paris, France (2011), the lines outside the cathedrals were crazy. I took pictures of people taking pictures (many Asians). I thought of Cardinal John Henry Newman (also a poet), when he wrote, “In the capitals of Christendom the high cathedral and perpetual choir still witness to the victory of Faith over the world’s power. To see its triumph over the world’s wisdom, we must enter those solemn cemeteries in which are stored the relics and the monuments of ancient Faith–our libraries. Look along their shelves, and every name you read there is, in one sense or other, a trophy set up in record of the victories of Faith. How many long lives, what high aims, what single-minded devotion, what intense contemplation, what fervent prayer, what deep erudition, what untiring diligence, what toilsome conflicts has it taken to establish its supremacy! This has been the object which has given meaning to the life of Saints, and which is the subject-matter of their history.” His book, Conscience, Consensus, and the Development of Doctrine brought this nominally raised Catholic who spent 9 years in the Foursquare Church (studying the Bible backwards and forwards), back to Catholicism, where I am grateful I started out.

Fear among Medical Personnel:

“They Take Not Their Courage from Anger.”
In a vision of the night I saw them,
In the battles of the night.
‘Mid the roar and the reeling shadows of blood
They were moving like light . . .

With scrutiny calm, and with fingers
Patient as swift
They bind up the hurts and the pain-writhen
Bodies uplift . . .

But they take not their courage from anger
That blinds the hot being;
They take not their pity from weakness;
Tender, yet seeing . . .

They endure to have eyes of the watcher
In hell and not swerve
For an hour from the faith that they follow,
The light that they serve.

Man true to man, to his kindness
That overflows all,
To his spirit erect in the thunder
When all his forts fall, –

This light, in the tiger-mad welter,
They serve and they save.
What song shall be worthy to sing them –
Braver than the brave?

– Laurence Binyon, World War I veteran
“The Healers”