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| Ad Jesum per Mariam. J-J Tissot. |
The Novena is offered as a gift to Our Lady praying that, through her maternal intercession, she will mediate graces so as to guide and protect the author, his family* and all the members of the Church Militant, in these disturbing times. [*E, E, K, P, T, E ,E; E, A.]
We have been posting each day an example of Marian poetry written by St Robert Southwell who himself lived in a terrible time of trial for Catholics. Much of his poetry was written whilst he was in solitary confinement prior to his execution at Tyburn on the 21st of February, 1595.
The original spelling and punctuation has been retained; the notes which follow each poem are my own.
The Assumption of our Ladie
If sinne be captive grace must finde release
From curse of sinne the innocent is free
Tombe prison is for sinners that decease
No tombe but throne to guiltless doth agree
Though thralles of sinne lye lingring in their grave [5]
Yet faultles cors with soule rewarde must have.
The daseled eye doth dymmed light require
And dying sightes repose in shadowinge shades
But Eagles eyes to brightest light aspire
And living lookes delite in loftye glades [10]
Faynte winged foule by grounde doth fayntly flye
Our Princely Eagle mountes unto the skye.
Gemm to her worth spouse to her love ascendes
Prince to her throne Queene to her heavenly kinge
Whose court with solemn pompe on her attends [15]
And Quires of Saintes with greeting notes do singe
Earth rendreth upp her undeserved praye
Heaven claymes the right and beares the prize awaye.
Notes
Background: According to the general rule, God does not will to grant to the just the full effect of the victory over death until the end of time has come. And so it is that the bodies of even the just are corrupted after death, and only on the last day will they be joined, each to its own glorious soul.
Now God has willed that the Blessed Virgin Mary should be exempted from this general rule. She, by an entirely unique privilege, completely overcame sin by her Immaculate Conception, and as a result she was not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave, and she did not have to wait until the end of time for the redemption of her body.
St. John Damascene (c675-c749) spoke out with powerful eloquence when he compared the bodily Assumption of the loving Mother of God with her other prerogatives and privileges.
“It was fitting that she, who had kept her virginity intact in childbirth, should keep her own body free from all corruption even after death. It was fitting that she, who had carried the Creator as a child at her breast, should dwell in the divine tabernacles. It was fitting that the spouse, whom the Father had taken to himself, should live in the divine mansions. It was fitting that she, who had seen her Son upon the cross and who had thereby received into her heart the sword of sorrow which she had escaped in the act of giving birth to him, should look upon him as he sits with the Father. It was fitting that God’s Mother should possess what belongs to her Son, and that she should be honored by every creature as the Mother and as the handmaid of God.”
For more, see: Munificentissimus Deus (1950).
[l 5] thralles: thrall - One who is in bondage to a lord or master; a villein, serf, bondman, slave; also, in vaguer use, a servant, subject; transf. one whose liberty is forfeit; a captive, prisoner of war. fig. One who is in bondage to some power or influence; a slave (to something).
[l 6] cors: bodies.
[l 7] daseled: dazzled.
[l 11] Faynte: Sluggish, timid, feeble.Wanting in courage, spiritless, cowardly. Obsolete or arch. Wanting in strength or vigour. foule: fowl, birds.
[l 14] Prince: Mary. Applied to a female sovereign. Obsolete.
1594 Willobie his Auisa iv. f. 7 'Cleopatra, prince of Nile.'
[l 17] praye: prey.
“The Assumption of Our Lady” is the final poem of a sequence of fourteen on the intertwined lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ. There are, as Louis Martz has observed, echoes of the rosary in this sequence . These echoes intensify when one considers that the end of the sixteenth century saw increasing interest in the rosary amongst recusant worshippers.
The first two stanzas of this poem are a series of antitheses which juxtapose the Virgin’s sinless body, rising to heaven, with the heavy, sluggish body of concupiscent man. In the poem’s opening lines, Southwell’s antitheses force the reader to dart back and forth, from “sinne” to “grace”, “tombe” to “throne”, ‘sinners” to “guiltless” in a manner which recalls stichomythia.[1] The stichomythic effect continues in the second stanza. Here,concupiscent man is represented in the first two lines using the synecdoche[2] of the “daseled eye” and imagery of light and darkness — “dymmed light”, and ‘shrowdinge shades”. The eyes of sinful man are here shown to be as frail and feeble as his body, and too weak for the dazzling light of God’s love. This is a Southwellian commonplace:images of mists and shadows in his poetry reveal that the eyes of the fallen man are unable to encounter external representations of God’s brightness. In “The prodigall chylds soule wracke”, for example, Southwell’s sinful speaker bewails the inadequacy of his “dazeled eyes” (Davidson and Sweeney 38:45).
In Southwell’s “Assumption of Our Lady”, man’s feeble eyes and the darkness of his existence are juxtaposed in the second stanza to eyes of the Virgin who is metaphorically represented as an eagle: “But Eagles eyes to brightest light aspire”. Southwell’s use of the eagle metaphor condenses a number of associations. It both anticipates Mary’s regality as Queen of Heaven, seen in the image of “Our princely Eagle”, and foregrounds her sinless state: compared with sinful man, her vision is strong, pure and clear. It was believed that the eagle could look at the sun without blinking; Nancy Pollard Brown and James H. McDonald gloss the phrase “loftye glades” as “beams of the clear light of heaven”, commenting that the word “glades” had, at the time, associations with flashes of lightning and tails from comets. The Virgin’s eyes are, thus, set in direct contrast to the dazzled eyes of sinful man. The use of the eagle is also an allusion to another Biblical text traditionally associated with the Assumption — that of the vision of the Woman Clothed with the Sun of the Book of Revelation who, in escaping from a dragon, is transformed: And there were given to the woman two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the desert. (Revelation xii.14)
[1] In classical Greek Drama, dialogue in alternate lines, employed in sharp disputation, and characterized by antithesis and rhetorical repetition or taking up of the opponent's words. Also applied to modern imitations of this.
[2] A figure of speech in which a more inclusive term is used for a less inclusive one or vice versa, as a whole for a part or a part for a whole.
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