The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord

By Anthony Esolen

The Hundredfold is a tapestry of hymns, monologues, and short lyrics knit together as one book-length poem in praise of Christ in all his startling humanity. Drawing from the riches of the English poetic tradition—meter, rhyme, music—the poet considers the mysterious man from Nazareth and the world he came to set on fire with splendor. 

Having made a career translating the Italian masters Dante and Tasso, Anthony Esolen now puts on the dusty mantle of such English craftsmen as Donne, Milton, and Hopkins in his first book of original contemplative poetry. The Hundredfold contains dramatic monologues set in first-century Greece and Palestine; lyrical meditations on creation, longing, failure, modern emptiness, and unshakeable hope; and twenty-one brand-new hymns, set to such traditional melodies as “Picardy” and “Old One-Hundred-Twenty-Fourth”. 

The book includes an introduction with diamond-sharp insights into English poetic form—at a time when form is so often misunderstood, if not dismissed. It provides an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and poets themselves, as well as those who simply read poetry for pleasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Aug 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642290868

Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen, Professor of English at Providence College, is the editor and translator of the Modern Library edition of Dante's Divine Comedy. He has published scholarly articles on Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, and Tasso in various journals and is a senior editor and frequent contributor to Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity.

Book preview

THE HUNDREDFOLD

ANTHONY ESOLEN

The Hundredfold

type ornament

SONGS FOR THE LORD

IGNATIUS PRESS    SAN FRANCISCO

Contents

Introduction

The Hundredfold

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

More from Ignatius Press

Cover art:

David

by Jozef Israëls (1824–1911)

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Cover design by John Herreid

© 2019 Ignatius Press, San Francisco

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-62164-292-3 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-64229-086-8 (EB)

Library of Congress Control Number 2019931425

Printed in the United States of America

To my dear wife Debra, my first promoter in

the art, who never wavers in her faithfulness

Introduction

Dear Readers: I give you this work, The Hundredfold.

I don’t know whether anyone in the world of poetry will read it, or, if they do read it, whether they will like it or understand it. Perhaps they will judge it to be trash. It isn’t, but whatever it is, I leave that to the generations to decide. I’ll be pleased if the poetic literati take delight in it; but if not, I will not care overmuch. I am not writing for them. I am writing for you.

And who are you? Let me answer that question by bringing up what may at first seem to be a wholly unrelated matter.

You will notice right away, when you encounter the work, that I don’t write in free verse, which is far and away the language of poetry in the world born from the ruins of the First World War, just as great staring masses of concrete, steel, and glass have been the language of architecture, and transgression of coherent line and form has been the language of painting and sculpture, and atonality was, for a time, the language of classical music, until the thousandth patient in the Berlin Krankenhaus bleeding from the ears caused the authorities to put a stop to it.

I am in jest, of course.

But I don’t write in free verse. Robert Frost famously said that writing in free verse was like playing tennis with the net down. It is baseball without a strike zone or foul lines. It’s no fun. I am not implying that it is easy to write really good free verse. In a way, it is quite difficult to do so, precisely because the obvious challenge—the net—is missing. It is like writing really good atonal music that people will want to hear for its own sake, rather than as mood music or dramatic accentuation for film noir. Someone somewhere can do it—Stravinsky did it—but I believe that atonal music must remain something of an outlier. That is because the human mind craves organization and order, and the ordering principles must be perceptible, even if sometimes they are difficult to specify in words.

Let me put it another way. Suppose you say to someone, Would you like to hear an epigrammatic passage of dense prose, broken up ad hoc into lines on a page, with the occasional interior rhyme or alliteration or assonance, seasoned with a figure of speech or two? That would describe the great majority of free verse poems in English. The answer would be ambivalent at best. If your friend is kind and patient, he will tell you to go ahead, while he rubs the back of his neck and glances toward the door. But suppose you say, Would you like to hear a song? Then he smiles and says, Sure! That is because people like songs, just as they like beautiful old Victorian houses, or a spray of flowers on a rosebush—and for many of the same reasons, which have to do with form, repetition, variation, subordination, coherence, luminosity, and the capacity to arouse wonder. People are happy to hear a true folk song, even if it is a silly song. I’ve never met anyone whose heart warmed to epigrammatic passages of dense prose broken up ad hoc into lines on a page.

The result of the free verse revolution has been baleful. Poetry has lost its true audience, which in every human culture upon the face of the earth until our own can be summed up in one word: everybody.

Return with me to a big table in one of the outbuildings at the monastery of Whitby, circa A.D. 700. The men are not monks. The monks, who themselves do plenty of manual labor, employ these men to tend the cattle. It’s evening, and they are refreshing themselves with food and beer and song. A stringed instrument that goes by the name of a harp—the word is Germanic, not Latin—passes from one herdsman to the next. When the harp comes to you, you are supposed to play it and sing a song of one of the heroes of old, of warriors like Sigemund and Beowulf, or of the gods and their tussles with one another, or of how the blacksmith god Weland made a famous sword. You might in another time and place be an Irishman singing a ballad about lathering an English recruiter with your shillelagh.

One fellow, Caedmon, gets up from the table, embarrassed, and says he has to leave to see to the cows in the shed before he goes to sleep. He does so, and while he is asleep he is visited by an angel in a dream, who inspires him to compose a very different kind of poetry—but I will get to that in a moment.

Not one of those men could read and write. Yet they knew songs, dozens of them, perhaps great portions of hundreds of them, and these songs were passed from one generation to the next, like heirlooms. We have archaeological confirmation of events remembered in some of them, events that occurred several centuries before the songs were written down.

This sort of thing surprises us. It would not have surprised the boys of ancient Greece, listening to a rhapsode declaim the epics of Homer. It would not, I daresay, surprise the tribesmen living in the jungles of the Amazon. It would not have surprised the natives of America before Columbus arrived. It would not have surprised the men on Columbus’ ships.

If song is for everyone, and poetry is the most exalted form of song, then poetry too is for everyone. But it must be musical. It must be what can enter the mind forever, and be gotten by heart, because like music it enters the deepest chambers of the human person. It moves us, when a chronicle of events or a philosophical discourse would leave us cold.

And that brings me to a second baleful effect of free verse. The most exalted themes for the music of man have always been religious, in a broad sense. This is true of Homer and Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Milton, Dante and Petrarch. Go anywhere in the world and it is so. But the exponents of free verse have largely severed themselves from the tradition of religious hymnody. They do not think of the psalms. Their conceptual audience is not the congregation at their home church, supposing that they attend religious services at all. It is a small circle of fellow practitioners, and some professors and college students, and maybe a cramped niche of fellow travelers devoted to some political aim. So they do not sing, and they do not pray.

Perhaps that is why American schools have so thoroughly abandoned the study of literature written before 1900, and poetry in particular. It touches upon the eternal things. How can you read Paradise Lost, when in your mad institution God is deemed a filthier word than those scrawled by a teenage boy on the wall of a lavatory?

So the ordinary believer comes to sense that poetry is not for him, because poets are not for him. They do not break bread at the same table.

That is too bad. That angel of the Lord who spoke to Caedmon in his dream commanded him to sing something. When Caedmon replied that he didn’t know anything to sing, which was why he left the beer feast, the angel would not take it for an answer but said, Nevertheless, you can sing, and commanded him thus: Sing me frumsceaft—Sing me the first-shaping! Which Caedmon did, in his sleep, composing a brilliant little hymn on God’s creation of the world. He would then enter the monastery and, by ear and by mouth, since he remained illiterate, compose many long poems inspired by the stories of Scripture and the lives of the saints. Thence began an English poetic tradition that lasted for centuries, using the same musical meters that the men singing at the beer table all knew and treasured.

We Christians would now do likewise, except for a third baleful effect of free verse: the musical meters are gone.

It is the easiest thing in the world to do free verse badly, just as it is the easiest thing in the world to toss sprays and splotches of paint on a canvas badly. It is difficult to write in the old musical meters badly, for the simple reason that it is difficult to write in those meters at all. Unless you have at least some sense of it, some ear, you will not bother to begin. You will find the constraints insuperable, and you will leave matters to those with some native talent.

Let me turn for an analogy to drawing. There are many things I can do. Drawing a human face is not one of them. I can draw a free-floating idea of a human face, with a nose over there and two eyes over here and a mouth like a bag and hair like wires, and if that’s your idea of drawing—call it free drawing, nonrepresentational, quite the intellectual thing—I can oblige you. But I cannot draw a real human face badly. I cannot draw one at all.

What happens when the techniques, passed down through generations of artists, have been lost through neglect or contempt? You can’t summon them back by an act of will. They still exist, in that you can still read old poetry, but they don’t beat as pulses in the veins of poets-to-be who have been steeped in their music for as long as they can remember. Poets must then approach the meters from the outside, and unless they are remarkably humble and patient and blessed with musical talent, they will usually grasp only the most salient features of the meter. They will miss the complexities and subtleties. They won’t know how much they don’t know.

Sculptors, architects, and church organists have told me that the same problems beset their fields of art, and I’ll take their word for it. What do you do, if that’s the case?

You do what I have recommended in another book, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. You do what you can. Without any confidence that you can with any expedition recover even a small portion of what has been lost, you attempt to recover it anyway. If the art is buried under ten feet of rubble, you get out the shovel and start digging. There may be another way to recover it, but this is the only way I know. You study the art as best you can, and then you take up the chisel or the paintbrush or the pen, and you begin, or, if you have not the talent, you teach others what has been done before.

I happen to have read, taught, and studied such poetry for all of my adult life. And I have long practiced much of its art, in various translations of such epics as Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s time, I see, to resume what I used to do in my own right, many years ago.

I am beginning again.

If Music Be the Food of Love, Play On

I’ve said that poetry in musical form is the heritage of all peoples in the world, until our own time. But when people hear the word meter, they blanch. Their minds turn to a narrow-eyed schoolteacher with a smirk and a red pen, who rejoiced in her heart to find that her charges could not tell the difference between an iamb and an anapest and a trochee, and other members of that ungainly genus, with the incomprehensible Greek names. Poor children!

Let me clear up a few things right away. Languages differ, one to the next, in the kinds of sounds that people produce for meaning; the sounds they allow or don’t allow in certain positions; the stress or lack of stress they place on one syllable rather than another; the length of their vowels—that means how long you hold them—and whether differences in length differentiate words; the number and kinds of endings that can be added to a word to change its meaning or to specify who is doing what; and so forth. So, naturally, there will be a wide variety of musical traditions, each proper to the particular language, and though there will be some overlap, especially when languages are related to one another (as English is to German in one direction, and to French and Italian in another direction), what we really need to do is to get a feel for the music of the language we are working with. For us, that language is English.

So I will not engage in too much transposition of Greek and Latin terms into our discussion. I will begin with some obvious features of English pronunciation.

First, English is a language with strong stress. It is much stronger in English than in French, though probably not as strong as in Hebrew. It is sometimes the case that a difference in stress alone will distinguish an English verb from its related noun. So you proJECT a new bridge across the river, and that will be your PROJect. You atTRIBute a certain laziness to your brother Ed and say that it is his leading ATtribute. You reFUSE to allow your neighbor to leave his dog’s REFuse on your lawn.

Stress is the single most important quality of English verse, because it is so prominent in ordinary English pronunciation. But it isn’t like a switch, on or off. There are degrees of stress. For example, we in English do not like