JANUARY

It freezes- all across a soundless sky 
The birds go home. The governing dark's begun: 
The steadfast dark that waits not for a sun; 
The ultimate dark wherein the race shall die.

Death, with his evil finger to his lip, 
Leers in at human windows, turning spy 
To learn the country where his rule shall lie 
When he assumes perpetual generalship. 

The undefeated enemy, the chill 
That shall benumb the voiceful earth at last, 
Is master of our moment, and has bound 
The viewless wind it-self. There is no sound. 
It freezes. Every friendly stream is fast. 
It freezes; and the graven twigs are still. 

~Hilaire Belloc

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"Winter Landscape" by Jan van de Cappelle (1626-1679).
Oil on canvas; private collection.

OUR LORD AND OUR LADY

THEY warned Our Lady for the Child
That was Our blessed Lord,
And She took Him into the desert wild,
Over the camel's ford.

And a long song She sang to Him
And a short story told:
And She wrapped Him in a woollen cloak
To keep Him from the cold.

But when Our Lord was grown a man
The Rich they dragged Him down,
And they crucified Him in Golgotha,
Out and beyond the Town.

They crucified Him on Calvary,
Upon an April day;
And because He had been her little Son
She followed Him all the way.

Our Lady stood beside the Cross,
A little space apart,
And when She heard Our Lord cry out
A sword went through Her Heart.

They laid Our Lord in a marble tomb,
Dead, in a winding sheet.
But Our Lady stands above the world
With the white Moon at Her feet.

~H. Belloc: Verses.

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"The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin" by Albrecht Dürer.
Oil on panel (main panel and side panels), c. 1496;
Alte Pinakothek, Munchen and Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.

"The New Year is over-valued"

"The New Year is over-valued. Properly speaking, it is not there at all. It is a whimsy; it is an imaginary; it is a fiction of the mind; it is a convention; it is a fraud."

~Hilaire Belloc: "On New Years and New Moons," in The Silence of the Sea. 

The Sailor's Carol

The Sailor─

"Noël ! Noël ! Noël ! Noël !
A Catholic tale have I to tell !
And a Christian song have I to sing
While all the bells in Arundel ring.

"I pray good beef and I pray good beer
This holy night of all the year,
But I pay detestable drink for them
That give no honour to Bethlehem.

"May all good fellows that here agree
Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me
And may all my enemies go to hell !
Noël ! Noël ! Noël ! Noël !
May all my enemies go to hell !
Noël ! Noël !"

Grizzlebeard. "Rank blasphemy I said, and heresy, which is worse. For at Christmas we should in particular forgive our enemies."
The Sailor. "I do. This song is about those that do not forgive me."
The Poet. "And it is bad verse, like all the rest."
The Sailor. "Go drown yourself in milk and water; it is great, hefty howl-verse, as strong and meaty as that other of mine was lovely and be-winged."
Grizzlebeard. "What neither the Poet nor you seem to know, Sailor, is that the quarrels of versifiers are tedious to stand-by, so let us go into the Cricketers' Arms and eat as you say, in God's name, and occupy ourselves with something pleasanter than the disputed lyric."


~Hilaire Belloc: Excerpt from The Four Men: A Farrago

"Christmas"

Hilaire Belloc

"THIS house where such good things are done year by year has suffered all the things that every age has suffered. It has known the sudden separation of wife and husband, the sudden fall of young men under arms who will never more come home, the scattering of the living and their precarious return, the increase and the loss of fortune, all those terrors and all those lessenings and haltings and failures of hope which make up the life of man. But its Christmas binds it to its own past and promises its future; making the house an undying thing of which those subject to mortality within it are members, sharing in its continuous survival."

~Hilaire Belloc: A Remaining Christmas.
See the complete article here

"The vision"

"WHERE THE VISION is but mirage, even there it is a symbol of our goal; where it stands fast and true, for however brief a moment, it can illumine, and should determine the whole of our lives. For such sights are the manifestation of that glory which lies permanent beyond the changing of the world. Of such a sort are the young passionate intentions to relieve the burden of mankind, first love, the mood created by certain strains of music, and—as I am willing to believe—the Walls of Heaven."

~Hilaire Belloc: On a Faery Castle.

Complete essay here.

THE LEARNED FISH

"This learned Fish has not sufficient brains
To go into the water when it rains."

~H. Belloc: The Bad Child's Book of Beasts.