Meditation of The Holy Virgin (1889), art by Sarah Paxton Ball Dodson

May is Mary’s month, and I
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 everything —

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-surfed cherry.

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all —

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

~ A poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

❤

“Mother of God, tell me your mystery;
of how your earthly life was spent:
the way, right from the time of ‘Fiat – how you’d be
buried in adoration, Mary!
Say how – in a peace, a silence – you could enter in
to deeps that none but you could do –
bearing the gift of God within.
Secure in God’s embrace keep me I ask.
In me his imprint may He place –
For wholly love is he.”

Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity, O.C.D.