The Old Nun (verse)
Maynard, Theodore
474 THE COMMONWEAL September 23, 1925 sensibly serious. The story of his religious life, which developed out of the war and was molded by the delicate far-off fingers of Newman, need not be...
...Their dreams are true anon...
...But when he did enkindle radiance, the humblest simplicities of life went climbing towards the sky, for their wedding with the Infinite...
...He was certainly not a singer because he was a priest, although I think that without anointed hands he would hardly have reached his destiny as man or artist...
...But there was not a whit of the highbrow in his soul...
...his strong human bias ("with respect to his poetry he was as vain as any woman could be of her beauty," his biographer confesses) the almost tragic loneliness of his blind old age...
...The others he shared with his ancestry, in the honest American fashion...
...Numberless little things, spurned so wearily by the restless, become once more the fuel of a song...
...Sometimes too elfish, too obscure, or too badly spotted with wilful phrasing, its unfailing virtues are pure spontaneity and deep reflectiveness...
...and a priest of goodly sacrifice who continues the old quest of his race for prayer and mystical belief...
...but they seem to have come into the world with a full cargo of wisdom...
...He had pride enough to be shy, and sufficient courage to believe his readers willing to knock twice at his door...
...The Old Nun Bowed at her prie-dieu, fingering her beads, She kneels, or quavering in the choir she sings Sonorous Latin as the organ leads Skywards the psalm...
...Thus, while our days the dreams renew Of some forgotten sleeper, we, The dreamers of futurity, Shall vanish when our own are true...
...What poetry he made was always purely human—the themes it took were everybody's...
...In At the Year's End, he says— Night dreams of day, and winter seems In sleep to breathe the balm of May...
...Theodore Maynard...
...So waits she for her end—the happy night When she will hear the singing round her bed Of salve, as the darkening room grows bright, And she goes forth, the youngest of the dead, To life eternal and eternal light...
...In the spiral of its ascending song there is no exotic odor, even if the fumes are sharp and lingeringly sweet...
...he looks deeply into the eyes of earth and so has scant need of explanations...
...Adoring at the altar in the dim Light of the winter dawns, her soul goes free, No longer bounded by the world's small rim, But yearning to her approaching God as He Kisses His bride, and draws her close to Him...
...He loves, but whispers his affection...
...Father Tabb built no mountains...
...Now, as to the utterance of Father Tabb's verse, let us be willing not to find it all upon the surface...
...The import of his verse was modified in consequence, and he folded his hands whenever he saw the face of beauty...
...They brought him strangely into union with a brotherhood of seventeenth-century poets of whom he knew practically nothing...
...The melody of the Catholic revival entranced him like a tribal song...
...She has no learning save in the deep skies' Profundities—in simple faith and hope And candid love, that makes the simple wise, And innocence that holds within its scope Joy, and sheds tenderness upon the eyes...
...Like every true poet, Father Tabb saw the magnificence of the microscopic...
...His songs are born indeed, and not made...
...Reverent and wild, kneeling loftily, what does his verse resemble so much as a sprig of pine cast into an incense burner...
...Our poet keeps the essence of his sacrificial rite, as if he were some hermit seer lost in the Virginian mountains, and dispenses with the graces of festival or the rich concourse of robed assistants...
...Such then is the man—a staunch independent with a rapier sheathed in his thought...
...His speech, however, is elusive, intuitive, amatory...
...Of such quality is the poetry of John Bannister Tabb...
...he knows the charms of beauty but lifts her sacred veil only under the moon...
...That he made a sacrifice of his career by joining the Catholic priesthood and observing its rules, was the natural result of his reticence and humble thoroughness...
...Ever so much more should get into the portrait—his friendship, loyal enough to risk perennial fun...
...But all these lesser things were his alone...
...Inevitably his poetry is expressive of himself, and so of his people...
...and, among literary quiddles, his violent devotion to Keats...
...Joy and pain clutch together at the blazing thought, as rain and sunshine are woven into a tree...
...Always there is fundamentally only God and man, though they may meet dimly on the "lonely mountain" or in the "school of darkness...
...The mood is, indeed, as old as the earth, but I do not believe any other poet has voiced it in quite this same way, finding the perfect circle which can wed together man and nature in a throbbing thought that lives and pulsates...
...How could he have made all this thin and commonplace, or stretched its swift ecstasy into odes...
...Though with it her spirit wings, She understands but vaguely the words she reads...
...He did not always succeed at expression...
...A glance, an outcry, sometimes a kiss—thus does our poet woo the soul of the universe...
...The story of his religious life, which developed out of the war and was molded by the delicate far-off fingers of Newman, need not be told here...
...a lover of home, knowing the hills and every voice upon them...
...he could only climb them...
...but they, The dreamers, then, alas, are dreams...
...Those hands taught him to hold life solemnly, tenderly...
...indeed he often resembles a boy striking matches in the wind...
...We who speak are really not ourselves," says Hermann Bahr, "it is the blood of our tribe that speaks through us...
Vol. 2 • September 1925 • No. 20
