She Makes Bleak Golden

Last updated on: December 17, 2016 at 11:17 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

She Makes Bleak Golden 2016-12-17T11:17:52-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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If you do not read Christina Rossetti, stop reading this now and go buy a book.

I can wait.

Those who know that Rossetti is the poet still standing against the alt-Left and the alt-Right, politically incorrect and yet a Lady, welcome you to the resistance. Rossetti wanted beauty more than wealth, virtue more than power, and God far more than the world. She is the antidote to American culture which has become bleak as Republican values fade to the lure of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Rossetti may not have liked the dark Satanic mills (Dante’s or Dickens’) of Victorian England, but she did not despair. She turned to Christ. She produced more lasting worth with her pen than the child labor factories made in a generation without the sin. Rossetti sided with the dying values of the Christian Middle Ages. Along with Anthony Trollope, if you love the quirky and beautiful corners of England as opposed to the Way We Live Now, thank beautiful souls like Rossetti.

My favorite carol, when not resting merrily like a gentleman, is based on a Rossetti poem: In the Bleak Midwinter. If it is less performed, this is because it is at war with commercial Christmas. There is no fixing these words. They are hostile to materialism or to any reduction of a Holy Day to anything less than profound mystery combined with jollification:

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk,
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.

Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air –
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.

What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb;
If I were a wise man
I would do my part;
Yet what I can, I give Him –
Give my heart.

This is brave, because it does not dodge the bleakness of the time that soon would incinerate the better world that could have been in the fires of World War I. Rossetti saw the coming death of Christian Britain, but she did not despair. Instead, she turned to eternal truths and when Christian Britain returns, as she has so many times, statues will be raised to her honor. Twenty years after her death, much that was good was lost, but she is not yet forgotten. She made too much beauty for even our jaded culture to totally forget her.

She saw that the Virgin was blessed enough to give a kiss to her Divine Son, an opportunity priceless beyond a peerage. Rossetti persevered, daring accusations of madness in the face of Tory moral compromise and Liberal evolution to revolutionary evils. Rossetti rejected feminism for womanhood while refusing to be “put in her place.” She was herself.

If discouraged, look to her example. The times are not so bleak as those she faced. We know now the evils of communism in ways that her generation did not. Nobody who thinks believes that industrialization is an unmixed good and the racist colonialism of her time is utterly repudiated. Against it all, especially an England that still cannot take her as she was, Rossetti stands. In the bleak midwinter, she saw the Holy Family and seeing them found Jesus. Seeing Jesus leads to joy . . . and joy to jollifications!

Let’s be like she is.

—————————

I write this on the day my beautifully, brilliant daughter Mary Kate Reynolds graduates. She faced every chance not to finish. We took her from a good place to a hard place in our move to Houston. She found good mentors in a “bleak midwinter” and prevailed. She is a lady that cannot be overvalued and a woman of great insight and courage. She is a Christian, educated, capable, and strong. She makes a bleak midwinter, or the ugly places she finds herself, a holiday.

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