You Are What You Eat, Mr Bond

(I have decided to write a bit about a childhood hero from the popular fiction of the period - James Bond.)

Overwhelmingly, most writers who spend any time examining the popularity of the Fleming creation James Bond spend quite a bit of it on Bond's discerning taste in food and drink. The fansites offer exhaustive lists of the meals consumed in the Fleming series, and I daresay these are the most popular compendiums on those sites.

For this is the area where we can perhaps most easily BECOME a bit like James Bond, and eat the foods we actually like.

Price may be a bit of an objection, but the "James Bond Diet" is more affordable today than before, and most items aren't out of reach even for a guy on food stamps, providing he can cook at home.

If you don't already know, Bond eats eggs a lot - for breakfast of course, but also for any other time a pick-up meal is necessary. Usually scrambled in butter and usually three at a time, but also poached, or soft-boiled and served in the shell. This comes with bacon and/or link sausage, and at least two pieces of toast with butter and jam. At breakfast times this all will be chased down with orange juice and coffee, and at other times with vodka-tonic or champagne.

Bond brunches and suppers on more elaborate egg dishes like Eggs Benedict and eggs coddled in cream with slivers of ham and smoked cheese…and with all the time he spends in France it's difficult to believe he doesn't often consume a simple omlette.

All this is easy enough - even Eggs Benedict isn't too hard if you substitute whipped mayonaise for the hollandaise sauce. The ingredients, bought in bulk, are very affordable.

A quick lunch is usually two or three meat sandwiches - either ham with mustard, or a Chicken Club in a restaurant - washed down with iced coffee. Otherwise lunch is the same as dinner.

James Bond eats red meat - lamb chops, grilled steak with french fries, chopped steak (also with fries) and sliced steak on toast with bernaise sauce (comes by the bottle FYI). At home alone he might have sliced roast beef and potato salad from the deli.

Bond enjoys chicken almost anyways, but only when he's out - it isn't the kind of thing he'd get up to himself, or put the housekeeper to. He has an aversion to holiday turkeys and - one assumes - goose or duck. It is simply too much domesticated fuss for him.

Bond isn't much about pork save for breakfast meats and ham sandwiches. He HAS lunched on Pate Maison (pork liver and pork pate) and foie gras (goose liver pate). One thinks liverwurst on toast would serve as well for the first, and various chicken, duck and goose liver pate's have become almost economical.

James Bond eats fish, but he prefers boneless grilled fillets, Sole and the like. Otherwise it's mostly appetiser stuff - shrimp cocktail and lobster salad, steamed clams or mussels, smoked salmon and chilled crab-meat. And, of course, caviar on toast with diced onion and chopped hard-boiled egg. Most of these "appetisers" could stand for a meal themselves and, provided you don't require Beluga caviar, could be budgeted as such.

Aside from all the toast, and sandwiches, Bond takes no interest in breads or baked goods. Apart from potatoes he treats most vegetables as garnish. He does fancy asparagus with hollandaise - sometimes a meal in itself. He does simple salads with sweet and rich dressings.

Other than the cheese and cream that go in some entrees Bond might eat a Welsh Rarebit (a kind of fondue toast item) but hasn't otherwise "got milk".

Bond isn't really into dessert, but if he needs to settle a meal may take sliced fresh fruit, the cheese board, salad with sweet dressing…or possibly yogurt, which he actually likes.

Most of us could afford to eat in something like this fashion (albeit with some cheaper substitutions) and even thrive on the diet(you might want to take a vitamin daily)…if we lived alone, and had the daring and patience.

I once worked with a gay man who lived alone, and he confided that about every other night his supper was a ham and cheese omlette. For anyone who has lived within the constraints of family life it is hard not to envy him. It is similarly hard not to envy the James Bond of the Fleming novels…just think of all the womanish and childish crap Bond DOESN'T have to eat!

The James Bond of Fleming's novels is not the stuffy sophisticate of the various film incarnations. Bond's food preferences are an assertion of his personal independence, and have little to do with erudition or refined taste as such.

James Bond is, in so many ways, appealing for a Fling, but ill-suited for a Permanent Thing.

Aspects of Weldon

A lot of Kee's poems are suicide-themed. This is a probable candidate:

Robinson

The dog stops barking after Robinson has gone.
His act is over. The world is a gray world,
Not without violence, and he kicks under the grand piano,
The nightmare chase well under way.

The mirror from Mexico, stuck to the wall,
Reflects nothing at all. The glass is black.
Robinson alone provides the image Robinsonian.

Which is all of the room - walls, curtains,
Shelves, bed, the tinted photograph of Robinson's first wife,
Rugs, vases panatelas in a humidor.
They would fill the room if Robinson came in.

The pages in the books are blank,
The books that Robinson has read. That is his favorite chair,
Or where the chair would be if Robinson were here.

All day the phone rings. It could be Robinson
Calling. It never rings when he is here.

Outside, white buildings yellow in the sun.
Outside, the birds circle continuously
Where trees are actual and take no holiday.

Or, pre-suicide:

Robinson At Home

Curtains drawn back, the door ajar.
All winter long, it seemed, a darkening
Began. But now the moonlight and the odors of the street
Conspire and combine toward one community.

These are the rooms of Robinson.
Bleached, wan, and colorless this light, as though
All the blurred daybreaks of the spring
Found an asylum here, perhaps for Robinson alone,

Who sleeps. Were there more music sifted through the floors
And moonlight of a different kind,
He might awake to hear the news at ten,
Which will be shocking, moderately.

This sleep is from exhaustion, but his old desire
to die like this had known a lessening.
Now there is only this coldness that he has to wear,
But not in sleep.—Observant scholar, traveller,

Or uncouth bearded figure squatting in a cave,
A keen-eyed sniper on the barricades,
A heretic in catacombs, a famed roué,
A beggar on the streets, the confidant of Popes—

All these are Robinson in sleep, who mumbles as he turns,
“There is something in this madhouse that I symbolize—
This city—nightmare—black" He wakes in sweat
To the terrible moonlight and what might be
Silence. It drones like wires far beyond the roofs,
And the long curtains blow into the room.

or, Robinson conceiving the idea:

Aspects of Robinson

Robinson at cards at the Algonquin: a thin
Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.
Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.
The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.
This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.

Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats
Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down.
Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,
Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour.
—Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.

Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant.
Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson
Saying, “Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday
At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?”
Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall.

Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson
In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home;
Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun
Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward
The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars.

Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes,
Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down,
The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief-
Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering
His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.

And, finally, Robinson encountering Robinson:

Relating to Robinson

Somewhere in Chelsea, early summer;
And, walking in the twilight toward the docks,
I thought I made out Robinson ahead of me.

From an uncurtained second-story room, a radio
Was playing There’s a Small Hotel; a kite
Twisted above dark rooftops and slow drifting birds.
We were alone there, he and I,
Inhabiting the empty street.

Under a sign for Natural Bloom Cigars,
While lights clicked softly in the dusk from red to green,
He stopped and gazed into a window
Where a plastic Venus, modeling a truss,
Looked out at Eastbound traffic. (But Robinson,
I knew, was out of town: he summers at a place in Maine,
Sometimes on Fire Island, sometimes the Cape,
Leaves town in June and comes back after Labor Day.)
And yet, I almost called out, “Robinson!”

There was no chance. Just as I passed,
Turning my head to search his face,
His own head turned with mine
And fixed me with dilated, terrifying eyes
That stopped my blood. His voice
Came at me like an echo in the dark.

“I thought I saw the whirlpool opening.
Kicked all night at a bolted door.
You must have followed me from Astor Place.
An empty paper floats down at the last.

And then a day as huge as yesterday in pairs
Unrolled its horror on my face
Until it blocked—” Running in sweat
To reach the docks, I turned back
For a second glance. I had no certainty,
There in the dark, that it was Robinson
Or someone else. The block was bare. The Venus,
Bathed in blue fluorescent light,
Stared toward the river. As I hurried West,
The lights across the bay were coming on.
The boats moved silently and the low whistles blew.

Unmistakeably modelled on the "familiar compound ghost" of the Four Quartets, when Eliot meets Dante during the London Blitz, and assumes the identity of Dante meeting Virgil at the entrance to the Underworld.

Only here, the condensation is greater - Robinson recognises Robinson…"I had not thought Death had undone so many!"

Clueless About Kees

Dan Schneider, of Cosmoetica, wrote a laudatory essay on Weldon Kees a few years ago, which I stumbled on the other day. Nice that someone - there are not so many - knows Kees, and defends him. Curiously clueless about some things though:

The Scene of the Crime

There should have been some witness there, accusing -
Women with angry mouths and burning eyes
To fill the house with unforgiving cries;
But there was only silence for abuse.

There should have been exposure - more than curtains
Drawn, the stairway coiling to the floor
Where no one walked, the sheeted furniture,
And one thin line of light beneath the door.

Walking the stairs to reach that room, a pool
Of blood swam in his thoughts, a hideous guide
That led him on and vanished in the hall.
There should have been damnation. But, inside,
Only an old man clawed the bed, and drooled,
Whispering, "Murderer!" before he died.

It's pretty obvious the "murderer" accused here is the Universe, or God - the "crime", the terms upon which life is proferred to mortal man. But Schneider misses all this…perhaps because he has phobias about death, disease and ageing evident elsewhere in his otherwise interesting critiques. (Schneider can't abide the fact that Thom Gunn wrote about the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.)

BTW the poem above helps explain some of Kee's problems with the critics: it teeters on light verse - despite its evident skill - with a "gotcha" ending. Much the same could be said for another Kees effort, an untitled villanelle, with a cumulative "gotcha":

The crack is moving down the wall.
Defective plaster isn’t all the cause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

It’s mildly cheering to recall
That every building has it’s little flaws.
The crack is moving down the wall.

Here in the kitchen drinking gin,
We can accept the damndest laws.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

And though there’s no one here at all,
One searches every room because,
The crack is moving down the wall.

Repairs? But how can one begin?
The lease has warnings buried in each clause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

These nights one hears a creaking in the hall,
The sort of thing which gives one pause.
The crack is moving down the wall.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

You may have gathered Kees was a death-obsessed poet (the best kind of poet). Similarly with another "gotcha" piece:

For My Daughter

Looking into my daughter's eyes I read
Beneath the innocence of morning flesh
Concealed, hintings of death she does not heed.
Coldest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh
Of seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands;
The night's slow poison, tolerant and bland,
Has moved her blood. Parched years that I have seen
That may be hers appear: foul, lingering
Death in certain war, the slim legs green.
Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting
Of others' agony; perhaps the cruel
Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.
These speculations sour in the sun.
I have no daughter. I desire none.

The "gotchas" are both amusing, and annoying, and the real case for Kees appears when he transcends such cleverness and romps in sheer despair:

The Beach in August

The day the fat woman
In the bright blue bathing suit
Walked into the water and died,
I thought about the human
Condition. Pieces of old fruit
Came in and were left by the tide.

What I thought about the human
Condition was this: old fruit
Comes in and is left, and dries
In the sun. Another fat woman
In a dull green bathing suit
Dives into the water and dies.
The pulmotors glisten. It is noon.

We dry and die in the sun
While the seascape arranges old fruit,
Coming in with the tide glistening
At noon. A woman, moderately stout,
In a nondescript bathing suit,
Swims to a pier. A tall woman
Steps toward the sea. One thinks about the human
Condition. The tide goes in and goes out.

and

Farrago

The housings fall so low they graze the ground
And hide our human legs. False legs hang down
Outside. Dance in a horse’s hide for a punctured god.

We killed and roasted one. And now he haunts the air,
Invisible, creates the world again, lights the bright star
And hurls the thunderbolt. His body and his blood

Hurries the harvest. Through the tall grain,
Toward nightfall, these cold tears of his come down like rain,
Spotting and darkening.— I sit in a bar

On Tenth Street writing down these lies
In the worst winter of my life. A damp snow
Falls against the pane. When everything dies

The days all end alike. The sound
Of breaking goes on faintly all around
Outside and inside. Where I go,

The housings fall so low they graze the ground
And hide our human legs. False legs hang down
Outside. Dance in a horse’s hide. Dance in the snow.

The first is a better "beat" poem than any name Beat ever wrote, and the latter is a better Confessionalist poem than anyone has written since.

Continued:

Poe

Eldorado

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old-
This knight so bold-
And o'er his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow-
"Shadow," said he,
"Where can it be-
This land of Eldorado?"

"Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,"
The shade replied-
"If you seek for Eldorado!"

In attempting to judge Edgar Allan Poe as a poet, one never quite gets to the end of it - to any solid conclusion: at first, it is all too easy to dismiss him, and very nearly reach the conclusion that Poe was worthless altogether…until the reading of some piece afresh sweeps you up against your will, with "nevertherless"; then, just as one would almost conclude Poe has some standing among the greats, one is thumped back into sobriety with an irresitable "Aw, come on!"

But Poe never fails to charm children, and much of the ordinary run of men, as few of the far worthier poets do.

I made a passing reference to Poe in the previous entry, and "nyn" a friend of mine left a note - which made me resolve to finally do an entry on the American Romantic. This evening I browsed an online collection of the poems and was struck by how few there actually are. Admittedly, Poe died at the age of forty, and his life was always a struggle, but he wrote quite a few stories and essays. Not so many pieces for a guy who did ultimately view himself as a Poet, however.

"Eldorado" is a poem I memorised in elementary school. When I was a kid, there was a weekly assignment to memorise and recite about twenty lines of verse. Poe was a favorite - plangent rhymes, limericky meter, and numerous parallels and repetitions made him easy to get down by rote. The piece also served as a leitmotiv in a Steve McQueen Western of the same name.

It contains a sorta of truncated and enigmatic story - or "tale", as Poe would have it. In Poe's short fiction the stories, while macabre in tone and subject matter, all resolve to sense. But in the poetry he tasks his imagination with fewer constraints. Still, there's nearly always a back story, alluded to but unexplained. Even in "The Bells", where the final section introduces the "ghouls", and their Quasimodo-like King.

Poe - although a competant versifier - had only few gifts as a poet, in the full sense of the word. He had no ear for the real language of men, he had no eye for detail, and his notions of metaphor seldom surpassed cliched figures of speech. Poe relentlessly substitutes editorialising language for genuine description.

But the inserted narrative elements do a lot to rescue his pieces, lending them a unity and mysterious signifigance they would otherwise not obtain. No doubt much of this is Byron, but Keats may also have served as a model. Keats becomes an interesting poet once he learns to tell a tale…and a great one, once he learns to trim the story back to the minimum, as in the great odes.

PS: I would suggest you could rest the strongest case for Poe the poet on "The Conqueror Worm". Interesting in its implied atheism. Maybe this is what tripped Baudelaire's trigger.

Dickey, Anapests and Mystery

For the moon never beams
without bringing me dreams
of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise
but I see the bright eyes
of the beautiful Annabel Lee

First off…does it not make you shudder, to think that Edgar Allen Poe is very likely the most frequently translated, and highly regarded, American poet in the non-English speaking world - and PERHAPS second only to Shakespeare (or maybe not?) of all English language poets?

But that is not why I cite him here. In the poem excerpted above, Poe is employing an anapestic rhythm.

Here is a more distinguished example from a poet latter in the 19th Century, Charles Algernon Swinburne:

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell…

A much better poet - and a more contemporary poet - used the same rhythm in nearly all of his successful poems, and to a much better purpose.

It is obvious from the Poe example above why the anapestic rhythm is usually relegated to Lite Verse, and seldom used for more serious purposes.

But then there was James Dickey, who explains his practice in the most admirable example of how a true poet thinks about his practice:

"First I heard, then I wrote, and then I began to reason; when I reasoned, I wrote more of the same. The reasoning ran something like this: suppose you have lines like

There's a land where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair…

and you decide that the level of meaning, compelling as it may be to saloon-keepers and retired postmen, is not good, but that the surge of the rhythm is, what then? What if images, insights, metaphors, evaluations, nightmarish narratives - all of originality and true insight - were put into (or brought into) the self-generating "on-go" that seems to have existed before any poem, and to continue after any actual poem ends? What if these things were tried? What then might be done? What might become?"

What then might be this, from the beginning of one of Dickey's most famous poems:

In a stable of boats I lie still,
From all sleeping children hidden.
The leap of a fish from its shadow
Makes the whole lake instantly tremble.
With my foot on the water, I feel
The moon outside

Take on the utmost of its power.
I rise and go out through the boats.
I set my broad sole upon silver,
On the skin of the sky, on the moonlight,
Stepping outward from earth onto water
In quest of the miracle

This village of children believed
That I could perform as I dived
For one who had sunk from my sight.
I saw his cropped haircut go under.
I leapt, and my steep body flashed
Once, in the sun.

The syllables in italics indicate where the metrical stress will fall. But what of the words I bolded. Well these are words that contain important information - and are arresting, in themselves - which do NOT correspond to the metrical stress.

You will notice that in the examples excerpted from Poe and Swinburne above, that there would be few - if any - words requiring such bolding. Nearly all the words conveying the most significant information in the excerpts have the entire word - or the initial syllable, in polysyllabic words - in the position of the metrical stress.

This is especially clear in the Swinburne example. Swinburne employs a technical device, not recognised in Poe's time, of "clipping" the initial two syllables "off" the first foot in his anapestic line, to begin some lines with a stress. eg:

Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven
Summer, with flowers that fell

ALL of the crucial words and syllables in the poet's diction are slapped smack into stress positions, and the rest of the syllables required to spin an anapestic rhythm are comprised of small words, and secondary syllables which, while necessary in some sense of course, are of comparatively little importance.

PART of Dickey's superiority over other poets who have attempted serious verse in anapestic rhythms is his "images, insights, metaphors, evaluations, nightmarish narratives" to be sure. But Swinburne was hardly a slouch, and his lines above deal with the most important themes witn deep images and striking language.

But every end must have a means, every content a form. It is Dickey's adroitness at "clotting" his lines with important and vivid syllables in non-stressed positions - and, even switching the MOST important info to non-stressed positions - that gives HIS nightmarish visions so much of their mystery and verve.

Yeah...this stuff is simple. So simple, that 99% of aspiring poets miss it.

Merton

Winter's Night
(1946)

When, in the dark, the frost cracks on the window
The children awaken, and whisper.
One says the moonlight grated like a skate
Across the freezing river.
Another hears the starlight breaking like a knifeblade
Upon the silent, steelbright pond.
They say the trees are stiller than the frozen water
From waiting for a shouting light, a heavenly message.

Yet it is far from Christmas, when a star
Sang in the pane, as brittle as their innocence!
For now the light of early Lent
Glitters upon the icy step -
"We have wept letters to our patron saints,
(The children say) yet slept before they ended."

Oh, is there in this night no sound of strings, of singers!
None coming from the wedding, no, nor
Bridegroom's messenger?
(The sleepy virgins stir, and trim their lamps.)

The moonlight rings upon the ice as sudden as a footstep;
Starlight clinks upon the dooryard stone, too like a latch,
And the children are again, awake,
And all call out in whispers to their guardian angels.

This is Thomas Merton in 1946, some years after he had taken vows as a Trappist monk. Although his original aspiration in life had been to be a writer, and he had trained to be a poet at Columbia, Merton wrote poetry only intermittently after taking on his life in Religion.

He wrote quite a lot around this time, toward the end of his first four or five years into his vocation. Basically, he didn't get on well with his superiors (who suspected - not without reason - that he was affected and prideful…and who may themselves have been jealous), and consoled himself with long walks in the forests about the Kentucky sanctuary. Also he wrote many longish poems.

You will notice that while the poem above appears to be pure free verse, there is an unmistakeable rhythm to it. An iambic rhythm, in fact:

The moonlight rings upon the ice as sudden as a footstep;
Starlight clinks upon the dooryard stone, too like a latch,
And the children are again, awake,
And all call out in whispers to their guardian angels.

This is "hetero-metrical verse". All the lines scan in a fairly regular Iambic rhythm, although the line-endings do not rhyme, and the lines often begin on the beat, and often end on the off-beat, and sometimes begin with a "reversed foot".

Merton wrote nearly ALL of his mature poetry in this verse approach, and it seems to work well enough here.

I do have a nagging doubt that this works only for a fairly narrow sort of piece. I cherish a kind of Neo-Classical notion that some verse forms suit certain themes and intentions better than others. Specifically, that this works here because it is primarily a "nature poem" with mystic overtones.

Through much of the rest of his life, Merton wrote many pieces primarily inspired by his travels and his social concerns. On the whole they are much less convincing artistically. The same type of verse sounds flat and prosey, even with a passionately felt topic, without the sinews of nature and primitive Faith to bind it together.

Another illustration that Form must match Content?

Advent

Charm with your stainlessness these winter nights,
Skies, and be perfect! Fly vivider in the fiery dark, you quiet meteors,
And disappear.
You moon, be slow to go down,
This is your full!

The four white roads make off in silence
Towards the four parts of the starry universe.
Time falls like manna at the corners of the wintry earth.
We have become more humble than the rocks,
More wakeful than the patient hills.

Charm with your stainlessness these nights in Advent, holy spheres,
While minds, as meek as beasts,
Stay close at home in the sweet hay;
And intellects are quieter than the flocks that feed by starlight.

Oh pour your darkness and your brightness over all our solemn valleys,
You skies: and travel like the gentle Virgin,
Toward the planets' stately setting,

Oh white full moon as quiet as Bethlehem!

For His Holiness, Benedict XVI

Rahab's House
(1946)

Now the lean children of the God of armies
(Their feet command the quaking earth)
Rise in the desert, and divide old Jordan
To crown this city with a ring of drums.
(But see this signal, like a crimson scar
Bleeding on Rahab's window-sill,
Spelling her safety with the red of our Redemption.)

The trumpets scare the valley with their sudden anger,
And thunderheads lean down to understand the nodding ark,
While Joshua's friend, the frowning sun,
Rises to burn the drunken houses with his look.
(But far more red upon the wall
Is Rahab's rescue than his scarlet threat.)

The clarions bind the bastions with their silver treble,
Shiver the city with their golden shout:
(Wells dry up, and stars fly back,
The eyes of Jericho go out,)
The drums around the reeling ark
Shatter the ramparts with a ring of thunder.

The kings that sat
On gilded chairs,
The princes and the great
Are dead.
Only a harlot and her fearful kindred
Fly like sparrows from that sudden grin of fire.

It is the flowers that will one day rise from Rahab's earth,
That have redeemed them from the hell of Jericho.

A rod will grow
From Jesse's tree,
Among her sons, the lords of Bethlehem,
And flower into Paradise.

Look at the gentle irises admiring one another by the water,
Under the leafy shadows of the Virgin's mercy,
And all the primroses and laughing flags
Bowing before Our Lady Mary in the Eden of her intercession,
And praising her, because they see the generations
Fly like a hundred thousand swallows into heaven,
Out of the jaws of Jericho,
Because it was the Son of God
Whose crimson signal wounded Rahab's wall,
Uttered our rescue in a figure of His Blood.

Thomas Merton

( I will be looking at Merton's poetry in - probably - my next post.)