Saturday 15 May 2010

Why is May Mary’s Month?

In a poem, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins asks why May is Mary's month. Mary's different feasts, he reasons, are liturgically "dated due to season." May as Mary's month, he continues, must have something to do with "Spring" which means "Growth in everything."

All things rising, all things sizing,
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature's motherhood.

The poem continues, "Spring's universal bliss / Much, had much to say / To offering Mary May," and it concludes

This ecstasy all though the mother earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ's birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

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