The only teachers who instruct mankind
From just a shadow on a charnel wall
To find man’s veritable stature out
Erect, sublime,—the measure of a man;
And that’s the measure of an angel says
The Apostle.”
It is much to be regretted that the poetry of the present day does not always fulfil this high purpose. The poets of to-day—and by poets of to-day I mean the poets of the past half-century—are not “the only truth-tellers now left to God.” Nay, they are often disseminators of falsehood. It is true the non-Catholic poet—a Wordsworth, a Byron, a Longfellow, or a Tennyson—by being true to art and inspiration, which has as its basis Catholic truth, sometimes unwittingly expresses a Catholic truth of the deepest significance. But as poetry is only a reflection of life idealized, and as there is nothing in poetry but what is in life, we may expect the anti-Catholic seeds scattered about by prejudiced hearts in the garden of the world to bear the poisonous blossoms of falsehood as they are translated and reflected in the pages of modern poetry.
And this is sometimes done indirectly. Sometimes, too, it is done by expressing a half truth or by seizing on some exceptional phase of Catholic religious life and impressing it upon the non-Catholic mind with an “Ab uno disce omnes.”
A concrete example will best illustrate this. Browning has a poem entitled “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church.” Now Browning’s poetic workshop was Italy, so this great psychological poet wrote:
“Open my heart and you shall see