Religion Flashcards
the phenomena of life are… (‘In Due Season’)
‘born sacramental signs’
Gareth Reeves on Prime
‘a simulacrum of time suspended, a timeless now, this holy moment, before the onset of History and being in time’
Terce
‘intransigently secular perspective’
What does Compline do?
Auden places our secular lives in religious contexts and makes the pomes amenable to different people as he recognises not every one is Christian
What does Horae Canonicae do?
looks at relationship between living secularly and what that means in religious terms. Pre-empts the inevitability of death.
Religious quotes in praise of Limestone
‘unable/ To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral’
‘Saints-to-be/ Slipped away sighing’
‘these are our Common Prayer’
Religious Quotes Winds
‘Goddess of winds and wisdom’ ‘His holy insufflation’
Prime Quotes
‘Simultaneously, as soundlessly, spontaneously, suddenly as, at the vaunt of dawn, the kind gates of the body fly open’
Terce Quote
‘He will apply on earth the Law that rules the stars’ ‘now each of us prays to an image of his image of himself’
When did Auden become religious?
from 1944
“Law is neither wrong nor right, // Law is only ___ // Punished by places and by times”
Crimes (Law, Like Love 1939)
in apparently secular poems, he often kept hidden what was often their religious _______.
starting point
HIs ominous ballad “O what is that sound that so thrills the ear’ seems to be set in 18th century England with its ‘scarlet soldiers’…
BUT as he recalled later the stimulus for the poem was a painting of the Agony in the Garden, where the soldiers appear harmless, and ‘it is only because one has read the Gospel story, that one knows that, in fact, they are coming to arrest Jesus’
words themselves have a ______ value for the poet
numinous
e.g. ‘Earth, sky, a few dear names’ (winds)
the final lines of “streams’ get to the centre of Auden’s sense of the sacredness of language:
‘wishing, I thought, the least of men their / figures of splendour, their holy places’ (analogy with figures of speech which are central to sacred awe)
