The May Magnificat by Gerard Manley Hopkins was published in 1918, at a time when the world had been at war for four years and was experiencing a flu epidemic which was killing many millions of people. Focussing on the beauty of nature, the poem expresses hope and faith in God, while pondering as to why the month is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The month of May is traditionally a “Marian month” for Catholic and Anglo Catholic Christians. A Mary garden is a small sacred garden enclosing a statue or shrine of the Virgin Mary. The practice started with the medieval monasteries when people saw reminders of Mary in the flowers and herbs growing around them. The Marigold, or Marygold, is a flower named after her. In a 1373 English recipe, it was used as a potion to ward off the plague. After falling out of use, Mary Gardens were revived in the twentieth century.
Gerard Manley Hopkins was a priest and poet who had a profound sense of God in nature. Today, he is considered one of England’s greatest poets with a style quite different to that of his contemporaries. His poems were not widely recognized until 1918, when they were edited and published by the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, some 29 years after Gerard Manley Hopkins had died.
The May Magnificat
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season—
Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?
Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flowers finds soonest?
Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?—
Growth in every thing—
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.
All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.
Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.
Well but there was more than this:
Spring’s universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.
When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry
And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all—
This ecstacy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.
Photo of marsh marigolds in the Vicarage Garden by Joseph Morris