Vixen (verse)
Kennedy, Leo
August 28, i929 THE COMMONWEAL 425 last winter by the rabbits and showing only a live shoot or two, is a flock of quail chicks that merely breaks covey and runs cheeping out of your reach. I...
...In cities, also, life is dull, and the people, pressed like prairie dwellers with nothing new to see, are apt to take to drinking, or hurrying...
...Scrawl upon your gate-post Ribaldries in chalk...
...Or you can pick grapes that leave a purple-pink stain, not snipping them off in a dainty way but running a whole branch through your fingers...
...Yet "it is not probable," as Wells goes on, "that Wilfrid became there first acquainted with the Benedictine rule, as Eddi's local pride makes him assert...
...Indeed he relates that Saint Wilfrid from Sussex went back "ad sedem coenobialem" (i.e., to a monastery...
...The real question might be this: Does there exist one shred of documentary or archaeological proof against these traditions ? A different criterion could easily lead one to deny--as has happened-----even the historical existence of Jesus, or of Saint Peter, or of Saint Clement Roman, or of Saint Benedict, etc., etc...
...Saint Placid . . . was sent to Messing...
...One may read, in his preface to the monumental Acta Sanctoram, O.S.B.,T.I., the fifth and eighth chapters: "De S. Mauri missione in Gallias," and "Augustinum sociosque monachos non tantum Fidei Christianae, sed etiam rei Benedectinae esse auctores...
...I know there tends to be about them something scraggly and angular, like the shell-barks and burr-oaks holding on to the clay of the hills...
...Litt...
...But hundreds of historians, among them Mabillon, Hergenr6ther, U. Berli~re, Gasquet, give these statements as a history, not as a tradition...
...Heddius, Bedae carus," as Hurter says (Nom...
...All these points lald down by Gasquet are for Dom Gray "nothing more than traditions...
...We trundled along over their feet, rested a moment leaning on their sides, and saw the world from their brows...
...We took physical shape and, I think, mental turns from looking seldom on a level but up and down their slopes, and if we became a little earthy they became very human...
...At least this seems to be the interpretation given to his words by Dora Gray...
...That is, Mabillon found exactly the contrary to what has been seen by Dom Gray...
...I, 650) "scripsit saepe panegyr/stae in modum vitam S. Wilfridi...
...August 28, i929 THE COMMONWEAL 425 last winter by the rabbits and showing only a live shoot or two, is a flock of quail chicks that merely breaks covey and runs cheeping out of your reach...
...O the Editor:--Dom Bede Gray, in his letter of July xo, x929, writes: "Mr...
...it was discovered by Mabillon, who says that he found in this work "the proof confirming the spread of the Benedictine rule in England made by the disciples of Saint Gregory, Augustine and others...
...The hill people for me...
...I would find the greatest pleasure in going for a walk today down the road east...
...That Eddi's Life"--as B. W. Wells confirms (English Historical Review, I89I, VI, 535)--"is the work of a partizan appears even from a cursory reading and is generally recognized...
...There does not exist one shred of documentary or archaeological proof confirming them as authentic history...
...A hill man is disappointed when he goes to live on the plains and finds so great a lack of diversity and color in nature and in the people's lives...
...f x en And if you went away Leaving me behind, I would seal a certain Corner of my mind...
...It was our road, the hills were ours, intimately made into our lives...
...Giordani, in The Commonweal for June x2, tells us: 'Saint Maur introduced monasticism into France...
...Eddius's Life was unknown to the Bollandists...
...A dozen persons went this way afoot or ahorseback or in rigs from dawn to dusk in summer, and a January snow might lie unbroken for weeks...
...Their horizon is an unbroken piece, almost a conventional thing...
...From his monastery on the Caelian he [Saint Gregory] sent Augustine, who with forty companions set foot on English soil in 596' 'And from this time Saint Benedict seems to have taken possession of England as his own.' Dom Gray ought to write: "Cardinal Gasquet tells us," because I was summing up his last book on Saint Benedict...
...But if you heard someone coming down the next hill you began to pull out and to figure how you could make room to pass...
...L~o KENNEDY...
...Near the peak of this last hill, just where you go down, you can reach up from your horse's back and help yourself to plums that, though of a scabby, cholera look and a lumpy meat, can be turned into an excellent jelly...
...Eddius, however, is not so reliable as Dom Gray believes...
...But tradition does not mean legend, nor imply opposition to, or defect of, truth...
...I killed a snake yesterday, a leathery livid bull, on this second hill, east side, going down, at the spot where that post is broken off in Big Man's fence...
...If Dom Gray had cited all the words attributed to Wilfrld...
...Now Kent is in England...
...This road was never trafllcky...
...I should say, however, that Eddius was not so partizan as to deny the most obvious truth...
...But there is less of the monotony that goes with the plain...
...For his objection, Dom Gray relies on a statement attributed by Eddius to Saint Wilfrid, according to which the Benedictine rule was introduced into England by this saint...
...Plant a second iris By the weathered gate, Lest you should surmise my Ver/om, or my hate...
...The seven or eight miles around are regarded by practical people as much shorter...
...Hardly anyone ever goes down the road east any more, and the mile of it, which before Einstein was the shortest distance from end to end, is seldom measured...
...If that were so, the very principles of religion and history would be broken...
...I would twist an iris From its narrow stalk...
...COMMUNICATIONS MONTE CASSINO Rome...
...and if he found the rule there, obviously the rule existed in England before him...
...its space is inconsiderable, but the space-time of it is avoided...
...Mabillon, for instance, quotes and examines critically more than one document, before reaching those conclusions...
...We were taken up and down them, as a child is taken to church, before we knew hill from plain...
...From Kent, relates Eddius, Saint Wilfrid brought also masons and cantors, among them Eddius himself...
...We were baptized in clay, and as we grew up they were there, always the same, before our opening minds...
...In spite of themselves, people of the prairies look out on a sameness and flatness...
...But . . . if you came again Some cool afternoon, I would break the silence Of that dusty room...
...then he went to Kent, whence he returned with the rule of Saint Benedict...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 17
