TRIBUTES OF PROTESTANT POETS TO THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 19, 11 May 1899, Page 4

TRIBUTES OF PROTESTANT POETS TO THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY.

SOME SWEET FLOWERS ffi RESPECT AND VENERATION

An esteemed young correspondent from Southland sends us (N.Z Tablet) — very appropriately for the month of May — the following hymn to the Blessed Virgin from the pen of the American pcet, Edgar Allen Poe :— 1 At morn, at noon, at twilight dim, Maria I thou hast heard my hymn ! In joy and woe, in good and ill, Mother of God, be with me still ! When the hours flew brightly by, And not a cloud obscured the sky, My soul, lest it should truant be, Thy grace did guide to thine and thee ; Now when storms of Fate o'ercast Darkly my Present and my Past. Let my Future radiant shine With sweet hopes of tbee and thine !' Our Southland friend inquires if Edgar Allen Poe was a Catholic. Whereunto we make reply and say that Poe never was a Catholic, nor made much, if any, profession of any religious belief during the course of a life which was cut short in IS4'.) by drink and other etc Hst-s. I'oe had, however, his saner and more repentant moments. They brought to him whirlwinds of bitter remorse, gave him bright g'imp'x at the beautiful world of virtue that lay off his track, and resolutions Lhat melted before temptation like the morning inifet< before the sun. In this respect he resembled the unfortunate, but more gifted, Irish poet, James Clarence Mangan, who died in the same year, and like Poe, in a public hospital. It is possible that in his better moods Poe may have recognised the beauty and elevating character of Catholic devotion to Our Lady. Many Protestant poets have penned lines of great beauty in her honour. Cesare Cantu, the distinguished Italian historian, quotes in his discourses a poem in honour of the Blessed Virgin written in Italian by Byron at Ravenna. The poem, which lies before v«. is a gem of devotional feeling, but as far as we have been able to discover, it is not included in any of his collected works. In the third canto of his Lady of the Laid , Sir Walter Scott puts the following evening hymn into the mouth of the fair Ellen as she and her father are about to spend their first night in the Goblin-cave :—: — ' Aye Maria ! Stainless styled ! Foul demons of the earth and air, From this their wonted haunt exiled, Shall flee before thy presence fair. We bow us to our lot of care, Beneath thy guidance reconciled ; Hear for a maid a maiden's prayer, And for a father hear a child.' Wordsworth, who was a thorough-going member of the Church of England, went farther and did better than Scott in the famous lines which he addressed to Our Lady in one of his ecclesiastical sonnets :—: — ' Mother ! whose virgin bosom was urcrost With the least shade of thought to sin allied ; Woman ! above all women glorified, Our tainted nature's solitary boast ; Purer than foam on central ocean tost, Brighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewn With fancied roses, than the unblemished moon Before her wane begins on heaven's blue coast, Thy image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween, Not unforgiven, the suppliant knee might bend, As to a visible power, in which did blend All that was mixed and reconciled in thee, | Of mother's love with maiden purity, Of high with low, celestial with terrene.' Side by side with Wordsworth's lovely sonnet (says the late Father Bridget, C.SS.R.) must always be puofd the lines in which Southey has depicted devotion to the Bitb^td \ irgin, as the etlcol and climax of soenic beauty :—: — ' How calmly, gliding through the dark-blue sky, The midnight moon ascends ! The watchman on the battlements partakes The stillness of the solemn hour ; he feels The silence of the earth, the endless sound Of flowing waters soothes him, and the stars Which in that brightest moonlight well-nigh quenched, Scarce visible, as in the utmost depth Of yonder sapphire infinite, are seen, Draw on with elevating ii-fluence Towards eternity the attempered mind. Musing on worlds beyond the grave he stands, And to the Virgin Mother silently Bre ithes forth her hymn of praise.' In some of his prose Southey was strongly anti-Catholic. Hi.s better and finer sentiments came out in his poems. Longfellow and ooher poets might al«o be quoted for their sense ot the spiritual beauty and worth of devotion to Our Lady. But we have contented ourselves with referring to four such representative British po3ts as Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Southey. It is beyor.d the scope of these brief lines to refer to the manner in which, during the past fifty years, devotion to the Blesyed Virgin has spnad among a large and steadily growing section of the Anglican Church The old Cathoho sentiment was, perhaps, never quite dead in the Establishment. Bishop Joseph Hall (1574-1856") — who was much

persecuted for his supposed leanings to Puritanism — gave expression to it over two and a half centuries ago in the following remarks on the words which the Angel Gabriel said to Mary :—: — ' But bow gladly do we ce^ond the Angel in his praise of her, which was more ouis than his ' flow justly do we hies? her, whom the angels pronounced bleeped ! How worthily is she honoured of men, whom the Angel proclaimed beloved of God I 0 blessed Mary, he cannot bless tbee. he cannot honour thee too much, that deifies thee not 1 That w hich the Augel said of thee, thou hast prophesied of thyself ; we believe the Angel said of thte : " All generations shall call thee blessed," by the fruit of whose womb all generations are blessed.'