From “Magdalen” (A Few Words for Wednesday)

Last updated on: January 24, 2017 at 7:05 pm by Webster Bull

From “Magdalen” (A Few Words for Wednesday) 2017-01-24T19:05:00-05:00 Webster Bull

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I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Mary Magdalene. Our two daughters are named Martha and Marian, and I privately hoped that we would have a third daughter, named Madeleine. It didn’t happen. I love this image by Alexander Ivanov (1806–1858). And then I came across this poem, “Magdalen.”

I found it (a fragment really) in a book Frank sent me last week: Flowers of Heaven: One Thousand Years of Christian Verse (Ignatius 2005). The mysterious thing is, I can’t find the rest of the poem on line. But then the author is a mystery too: Dunstan Thompson (1918–1975), a native of New England, who moved to Old England and became a hero of the homosexual underground—until he converted to Catholicism and renounced his old life. He even instructed his literary executor never to republish the poems of his early years.

Thompson’s story is told online by the Gay & Lesbian Review. I am not a regular reader; it’s just that this was the best account of Thompson’s life I could find, in fact the only account. If you look at the story through the other end of the telescope than that used by the writer, you might just see a male version of Mary Magdalene.

Here’s a selection from “Magdalen.” If anyone finds the whole thing on line, please let me know:

High in the noonday sky,
His arms thrown open wide,
Love is about to die,
With a thief on either side.

One He has welcomed home,
The other prefers to hate,
Like the Pharisees, who roam
In packs and wait and wait.

The soldiers there below,
Bored and ashamed and blind,
Rattle the dice and throw
Their lives away like rind.

The mocking scholars toss
Their beautiful white heads
Far off; but at the Cross
Who reads?

His mother, calm in pain,
Adoring, and John,
The youngest friend, remain:
Fair weather friendships gone.

And one other. She,
Whose sins have had their share
In blossoming that tree,
Offers her sorrow there.

Those tears are now for Him,
Not for herself; she weeps
Outside her life; eyes swim
Up from their own deeps.

His gift of sacrifice
Opens her rusted heart:
With Him she pays the price
Of love, that suffering art.

And so triumphant grief
Makes her the fourth to stay:
Two innocents, a thief,
And a whore, together pray.

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