The World - a sonnet by Christina Rossetti

As the month winds to its close and I'm on the verge of returning to the duties of academic existence in Denmark, I present you with a sombre poem by Christina Rossetti that adequately describes the mixed feelings that appear at the close of a vacation at home.


The World

By day she wooes me, soft, exceeding fair:
But all night as the moon so changeth she;
Loathsome and foul with hideous leprosy
And subtle serpents gliding in her hair.
By day she wooes me to the outer air,
Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety:
But through the night, a beast she grins at me,
A very monster void of love and prayer.
By day she stands a lie: by night she stands
In all the naked horror of the truth
With pushing horns and clawed and clutching hands.
Is this a friend indeed; that I should sell
My soul to her, give her my life and youth,
Till my feet, cloven too, take hold on hell?

Saint Olaf seated - an illumination from The Icelandic Model Book

Today is the feast of Saint Olaf, the patron saint of Norway, who died at Stiklestad north of Trondheim in 1030. He fought against an army of Norwegian nobles and the Danish king Knud, the latter having established overlordship over Norway when Olaf was sent into exile in Russia in 1028. The cult of Olaf was of great importance throughout medieval Norway, and also in the wider Nordic world. Of the few Norwegian saints, Olaf is by far the most widely and frequently depicted. In this brief blogpost, I wish to present one example of this, namely from the Icelandic Model Book, in which were drawn images from which the illuminators could see how various figures should be drawn. Olaf figures frequently in this, and below is one of the images, where he is seated, holding the axe of his martyrdom. This photograph was taken at the North-Atlantic House in Odense, when a friend and I attended the exhibition of the manuscript.

Another Song of a Fool - a poem by W. B. Yeats

For the, hopefully, quiet summer days, here is one of William Butler Yeats' perhaps lesser known poems, provided here by virtue of it being lesser known.


Another Song of a Fool

This great purple butterfly,
In the prison of my hands,
Has a learning in his eye
Not a poor fool understands.

Once he lived a schoolmaster
With a stark, denying look;
A string of scholars went in fear
Of his great birch and his great book.

Like the clangour of a bell,
Sweet and harsh, harsh and sweet,
That is how he learnt so well
To take the roses for his meat.

- From The Wild Swans at Coole, 1919

Summer reading

I'm currently enjoying a month's vacation at home in Norway. Consequently, my blogging will be quite sparse and my blogposts very brief this month. They will predominantly be snippets of summer life in the fjords, as exemplified by this little stack of books photographed at the family's cabin, containing my first batch of summer reading.

Portrait - a poem by Ngwatilo Mawiyoo

As an end to this month's blogging, and as a sort of farewell as I leave Denmark for Norway for my summer holiday, I present to you a poem by Kenyan poet Ngwatilo Mawiyoo from her collection Dagoretti Corner (Akashic Books, 2016).



Portrait

For Nairobi

i
And we are the dust that has no place,
that lines the walls and leaves.

ii
Daily, almost daily, a woman -
a man - wipes a floor;
head down, bottom high.
Pivoting a swirling shuffle,
left right and back: the path
of a clean woman, a good woman,
man a faithful servant.
When the floor dries the white line
reappears.

iii
My grandfathers are in the ground,
they are bone and smoothed tree.
My last Susu has lost her sight.
When her mind went, she listened for it
in our voices. She's losing interest.

iv
Tom Mboya Street defies rot.
The dust tells what we buried, calls
our memory to the good,
to grass, thorn trees, cool water.

Tu es Petrus - chants for the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul

In two days, June 29, it is the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul, a feast which commemorates both their martyrdoms. This is their primary feast, and is of great importance in the liturgical year. I was reminded of this as I was listening to a mass composed by Palestrina called Missa Tu es Petrus, a mass specifically addressing the history of Peter and to be performed on June 29. Its incipit is taken from Matthew 16:18, where Christ says to Peter: You are Peter, and on this rock [petram] I will build my church. This passage has been of vital importance in the emergence of Rome's primacy in Western Christendom, as the traditional interpretation has been that the site of Peter's martyrdom signifies the location of the heart of the Christian church. This interpretation has not been uncontested, and it did take a long time before Rome ascended to the primary position it eventually came to possess within Latin Christianity.

RARA M 28

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek
Photo by Jakob Povl Holck

Although I have listened to Palestrina's mass several times, today I was reminded of how this mass connects with my own research. During my months as a research assistant at the university library of University of Southern Denmark, one of the medieval manuscript fragments I worked on, RARA M 28, contained texts for the mass for the apostles Peter and Paul, and among the few chants that could be read, though badly damaged by moisture, were two chants that both bear the incipit Tu es Petrus. The exact type of these chants is not yet ascertained, though one of them is most likely a versicle.

 

RARA M 28

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek
Photo by Jakob Povl Holck

RARA M 28

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek
Photo by Jakob Povl Holck

This is, in short, one of those occasions when pleasure and professional life overlap to some degree, which I think to be very common to most medievalists.

Missa Tu es Petrus, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.1525-94)

History as Poetry - a poem by Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill is one of my favourite poets in any language,and reading him takes my mind back to the spring of 2011 when I was reading his poems while beginning in earnest to establish myself as a medievalist in the second semester of my MA studies. Much has changed since then, including myself, and the England I explored while exploring his poems now seems like a lost dream, a broken promise, in part due to the political development, in part because I have become disenchanted with English academia, in part because of personal disappointmnts. I was a staunch anglophile once, and I'm still fond of many things English, not least the many medieval buildings I have not yet seen in the flesh - or in the stone, rather - but the youthful, all-encompassing excitement of those spring days of 2011 is now a thing of the past. Occasionally, however, when reading Geoffrey Hill's early poems, I find my way back to that excitement, I reconnect with those feelings of wonder and novelty that made me love England and that made me long for it, and thus, for a brief window of time, as my eyes scan the lines of the poem, I relive that love of England that I no longer can claim.


History as poetry

Poetry as salutation; taste
Of Pentecost's ashen feast. Blue wounds.
The tongue's atrocities. Poetry
Unearths from among the speechless dead

Lazarus mystified, common man
Of death. The lily rears its gouged face
From the provided loam. Fortunate
Auguries; whirrings;tarred golden dung:

'A resurgence' as they say. The old
Laurels wagging with the nw: Selah!
Thus laudable the trodden bone thus
Unanswerable the knack of tongues.

- From King Log (1968)