Heaven Bears the Prize Away

Some things are simply too beautiful for words. The Glorious Assumption of the Blessed Virgin is a case in point. No words, however beautiful, can do justice to the sheer wonder of Our Lady’s being taken up into heaven to join her heavenly Son in His Kingdom. Words fail us.

The only appropriate response to such a glorious mystery is awe-struck silence. It is in that humble silence that we can allow our grateful wonder to move us to the contemplation that opens the mind and the heart into God’s Presence, thereby uniting ourselves, albeit imperfectly and inadequately, to Our Lady’s Assumption into His Presence. It is in such wonder that we can unite ourselves to her in Him.

Yet there is a time for words even in the midst of wonder. There’s a time for us to lift our voices in praise and adoration. There’s a time for chant, a time for polyphony, a time for hymns. And there’s a time to express ourselves in the words of poetry because it is in poetry that the words themselves sing. It might even be said that prose speaks but poetry sings. In the presence of something as poetic as Our Lady’s Assumption, it is right and fitting that we should raise ourselves beyond the merely prosaic to the realm of verse.  

Since this is so, let’s celebrate the feast of the Assumption with three poems inspired by this great mystery. The first is by a forgotten poet, Eleanor Downing, whose poem “On the Feast of the Assumption” was collected in Joyce Kilmer’s celebrated Anthology of Catholic Poets. It begins with the poet addressing the Blessed Virgin with a question: 

Mary, uplifted to our sight
In cloudy vesture stainless-white,
Why are thine eyes like stars alight,
Twin flames of charity?

The Virgin responds that her eyes “are on His glorious face” who has “clothed and crowned” her with grace.

The second poem is an anonymous verse from medieval England, titled “The Assumption”, which I included in my own anthology, Poems Every Catholic Should Know. As with the first poem, it is written as a dialogue. This time, however, it is not the poet addressing the Virgin, but Christ who is addressing His own mother:

Come my sweet, come my flower,
Come my culver, mine own bower,
Come my mother now with me,
For Heaven’s queen I make of thee.

The Blessed Virgin responds to her Son’s call with the purity and potency of a Mother’s devotion:

My sweet Son, with all my love
I come with thee to thine above;
Where thou art now let me be,
For all my love is laid on thee.

Whereas this anonymous verse was written during the days of Merrie England, at a time when the whole of the land was devoutly Catholic, the final poem, written by a saint and martyr, was written after England had been ripped from the Faith by the tyrannical Henry VIII and his heirs, Edward VI and Elizabeth I (Bloody Bess). “The Assumption of Our Lady” by St. Robert Southwell is not merely a pouring forth of devotion to the Blessed Virgin but is also a powerful defence of the doctrinal orthodoxy of the mystery of the Assumption at a time when Protestants were attacking Catholics for their alleged “Mariolatry”.

Southwell, who would be martyred in 1595 for the “crime” of being a priest in Bloody Bess’s England, begins with a theological explication of the Assumption as a logical and inexorable consequence of Our Lady’s being immaculately conceived:

If sin be captive grace must find release,
From curse of sin the innocent is free,
Tomb prison is for sinners that decease,
No tomb but throne to guiltless doth agree.

The second stanza connects our inability to understand the mystery of the Assumption to our being blinded by our sinful natures. We cannot see as we should because of Original Sin:

The dazzled eye doth dimmed light require
And dying sights repose in shrouding shades,
But Eagles’ eyes to brightest light aspire
A living looks delight in lofty glades.
Faint winged fowl by ground doth faintly fly,
Our Princely Eagle mounts unto the sky.

We cannot see the face of God because our eyes are dazzled by His light but she who is sinless can see with the perfect clarity of perfect charity. We cannot fly very high or very far from the ground because we are grounded by sin, whereas the Virgin, like a princely eagle, is free to ascend to the heights of heaven itself.

The final stanza situates the mystery of the Assumption in the Lord’s simple and unassailable justice which renders unto the immaculate Mother of God that which she rightly deserves:

Gem to her worth, spouse to her love ascends,
Prince to her throne, Queen to her heavenly king,
Whose court with solemn pomp on her attends,
And Quires of Saints with greeting notes do sing.
Earth rendereth up her undeserved prey,
Heaven claims the right and bears the prize away.

What is especially beautiful about this wonderful poem, beyond anything the words could possibly say, is that the poet is now himself in the choirs of saints about whom he wrote. We can rejoice that St. Robert Southwell is now rejoicing with all the company of heaven at the glorious Assumption of the queen of heaven and the queen of all saints in the eternal presence of the Son who claimed the right to bear the prize away.