The Project Gutenberg eBook, Shelley, by Francis Thompson

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Title: Shelley
An Essay

Author: Francis Thompson

Release Date: March 27, 2005 [eBook #1336]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHELLEY***

Credit

Transcribed from the 1914 Burns & Oates edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

SHELLEY: AN ESSAY

The Church, which was once the mother of poets no less than of saints,
during the last two centuries has relinquished to aliens the chief
glories of poetry, if the chief glories of holiness she has preserved for
her own. The palm and the laurel, Dominic and Dante, sanctity and song,
grew together in her soil: she has retained the palm, but forgone the
laurel. Poetry in its widest sense, {1} and when not professedly
irreligious, has been too much and too long among many Catholics either
misprised or distrusted; too much and too generally the feeling has been
that it is at best superfluous, at worst pernicious, most often
dangerous. Once poetry was, as she should be, the lesser sister and
helpmate of the Church; the minister to the mind, as the Church to the
soul. But poetry sinned, poetry fell; and, in place of lovingly
reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the door to follow the feet of
her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill for poetry; it has not
been well for religion.

Fathers of the Church (we would say), pastors of the Church, pious laics
of the Church: you are taking from its walls the panoply of Aquinas--take
also from its walls the psaltery of Alighieri. Unroll the precedents of
the Church's past; recall to your minds that Francis of Assisi was among
the precursors of Dante; that sworn to Poverty he forswore not Beauty,
but discerned through the lamp Beauty the Light God; that he was even
more a poet in his miracles than in his melody; that poetry clung round
the cowls of his Order. Follow his footsteps; you who have blessings for
men, have you no blessing for the birds? Recall to your memory that, in
their minor kind, the love poems of Dante shed no less honour on
Catholicism than did the great religious poem