The Male Mouse Will Not Depart: My Father And Mad Christopher Smart

Looking back on the long ribbon of time stretching behind me like a highway, I can dimly recall the few times my father has cried.

I must not share most of these: to tell when a man cries is to describe his soul, and perhaps it was not that Noah's son saw him naked that made him worthy of slavery and death but that he subsequently blogged about it.  

Some I can tell though because to do so honors the man and illuminates the journey that all of us take towards the truth.

But two poets made him cry: Hopkins and Smart.

I remember him tearing up as he read at the breakfast table when I was in high school, reading to me from his college thesis on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the sprung rhythm of the Welsh priest's great soul came from his tongue with the practiced diction and perfect rhythm that my father's voice had been trained for as a singer: Gerard Manley Hopkins

To Christ Our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

My father, complicated Republican with his late-acquired Reformation fire, with his old Catholic raising rattling in his mind, could never stomach Roman dogma or doctrine after his conversion.  But in the strange rhythms of Hopkins he had long ago found a kindred soul that expressed to him his own ache, and yearned after the wild worship that nature tucked into his soul, that he found ringing in the strange music of Hopkins.

I spent most of my adult life studying poetry in English and other languages.  But what poetry means for me is coming close to that feeling that I got listening to my mother read Donne or my Father read Hopkins.

And lately my father has watched my mother, his wife of 46 years, descending the ladder of life, and he has helped her descend. 

Sunday afternoon my brother and father and I were in the kitchen.  Mom was upstairs, sleeping.

We discussed the mouse behind the refrigerator who comes out to fraternize every morning, and dad quoted the old mad Anglican Christopher Smart:

Christopher Smart

For the Mouse is a creature
Of great personal valour.
For this is a true case--
Cat takes female mouse,
Male mouse will not depart,
but stands threat'ning and daring.
If you will let her go,
I will engage you,
As prodigious a creature as you are.
For the Mouse is a creature
Of great personal valour.
For the Mouse is of
An hospitable disposition.

My brother and I listened, I standing at the stove making Sunday dinner, he sitting, both of us as attentive as if we were at church, or hearing the news from a surgeon.  Dad knew the whole of Smart's Jubilate Agno, having sung Benjamin Britten's setting of it with the Philharmonic Choir. 

And when he was done reciting it with the aid of some liner-notes from the CD, his voice choked, and tears starting in his eyes, I asked him, "How did you ever sing it without weeping, dad?"

"I really don't know.  It wasn't easy," he said, his face radiant with the joy that sometimes comes with poetry or music.

Christopher Smart.  The anthologies tell us, "From 1757-63 he lived in various asylums. Among the symptoms of his insanity were his sudden compulsions to pray in public, at any time or place. His marriage collapsed in 1759."

What his madness was, I do not understand.

What his clarity was, that I can help you with.

He prayed in public because he felt in every moment the haunting of a divine truth.  He looked on the world and saw the things that few really see.  Like an autistic child, he counted the turns of his cat (seven times the cat turns), but like a real poet he saw something divine throbbing in every motion of his whiskered friend (and if you can read this aloud and feel its meaning without a catch in your breathing for the pleasure of a moment in time made perfect, I have no use for you):

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For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. 
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tyger.

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And my father, who even now prepares to take my mother again to the hospital through the bright hot day, who has cleaned the dishes and put them away and made the dinner, is also a creature of great personal valor who counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life, and he also is of the tribe of Tyger.

Comments

[Emma]

I love the joy he has in sharing these poems.

[St. Izzy O’Cayce]

Amen.