Little Visits

I delight in the stories left behind in old books, finding particular meaning in treasures tucked away for safekeeping in old Bibles, missals and prayerbooks.  Special things people intended to keep safe, that had a particular resonance with the owner or volume itself.

I discovered this newspaper clipping in a Catholic prayer book published in the 1940s.  What first caught my attention was the author’s delightful and unusual name: Delight Cronin.  I didn’t expect to be drawn to the simple and naïve verse of the poem, Little Visits. 

Little Visits

I no longer call on my loved ones,

   Their tombs are too scattered and far.

The highlands are steep and the waters are deep,

   God Love them, wherever they are.

I used to bring blossoms in springtime,

   Caressingly dressing each plot.

Too old now to go to the kinsfolk I know?

   Ah, let it be said I forgot!

Instead, slipping into the chapel,

   I gather my dead in one place.

Contentedly there in the handclasp of prayer,

   I think of each name and a face.

Gems sparkling enchained in my fingers

   Beseech light, refreshment and rest.

Where Love finds me kneeling, Faith whispers revealing

   We all like this visiting best. 

The “little visits” are visits to cemeteries where we pray for the dead and attend to their graves.  As members of the communion of saints, Catholics support and pray for each other.  We the living can pray for the dead, the souls in purgatory, who need prayers on their journey to God.  November is the month the Church especially dedicates to praying for the dead.          

I like Cronin’s metaphor for the rosary: “Gems sparkling enchained in my fingers.”

Miss Delight Mabel Cronin, writer of “rhymed verse with a Catholic influence,” was born in 1907 and died in 1992.  There’s an entry found for the author in Volume 7 of The American Catholic Who’s Who, 1946 and 1947:

Author: Forget-Me-Nots (poems, 1934) contributor to OSV, Ave Maria, Far East, Queen’s Work, Magnificat, Extension etc. Home: 2339 Winter St., Fort Wayne, Ind.

Cronin’s poem is reminiscent of the works of Helen Steiner Rice, another 20^th century American Christian poet. 

Extremely rare Wicked Bible goes on sale

One of 10 remaining copies of 1631’s Sinners Bible, with its infamous typo imploring readers to commit adultery, is to be auctioned on November 11^th

A section of a page from the Wicked Bible of 1631. The section highlights a contemporary typographical error insofar as it omits the word not from the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery”. Via Wikipedia

The Wicked Bible, sometimes called Adulterous Bible or Sinners’ Bible, is the Bible published in 1631 by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the royal printers in London, which was meant to be a reprint of the King James Bible. The name is derived from a mistake made by the compositors: in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:14), the word not in the sentence “Thou shalt not commit adultery” was omitted, thus changing the sentence into “Thou shalt commit adultery”. This blunder was spread in a number of copies. About a year later, the publishers of the Wicked Bible were called to the Star Chamber and fined £300 (£44,614 as of 2015) and deprived of their printing license. The fact that this edition of the Bible contained such a flagrant mistake outraged Charles I and George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Over the centuries, many have speculated what went wrong. Traditionally, it was accepted that the mishap was a mere typographical error. But later, some suggested it may have been sabotage from Barker’s rival, Bonhom Norton. In 1632 Barker had a tainted reputation and no printing license. No doubt it became difficult for him to find work. By 1635, he started slipping in and out of debtors’ prison. He died behind bars in 1645.

Joy to the World

Isaac Watts was an 18th-century English churchman, educator and poet, a man of strong faith and great intelligence. A prolific and popular hymn writer, he is recognized as the “Father of English Hymnody“, credited with writing some 750 hymns.

Watt’s hymnal pictured here, The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and Applied to the Christian State and Worship, was printed in 1806 by Manning & Loring, at their office in the Cornhill section of Boston.

I initially viewed this book as a simple reproduction of the Old Testament Psalms of David.  Upon reading several pages I realized that the psalms had been transformed, translated into beautiful poetry in a language easily accessible to the reader, much improved from the archaic and stilted language of many Old Testament translations.

Writing in the Preface to The Psalms of David, Watts notes that the archaic language of the psalms creates a barrier to Christian worship, that when “the best of Christians attempt to sing many of them in our common Translations, that Spirit of Devotion vanishes and is lost, the Psalm dies upon their lips, and they feel scarce any thing of the holy Pleasure.”

Watts meant no criticism to David’s beautiful songs, noting that “the Royal Psalmist […] expresses his own Concerns in Words exactly suited to his own Thoughts, agreeable to his own personal Character, and in the Language of his own Religion: This keeps all the Springs of Pious Passion awake, when every Line and Syllable so nearly affects himself […]. But when we sing the same Lines, we express nothing but the Character, the Concerns, and the Religion of the Jewish King, while our own circumstances and our own Religion (which are so widely different from his) have little to do in the sacred Song; and our Affections want something of Property and Interest in the Words, to awaken them at first, and to keep them lively.”

Apparently it was a common practice of the time to transform the language of the Old Testament into verse that placed the original texts within a New Testament context and within the lives of modern believers, applying the English translation of the Biblical Hebrew to the “Christian State and Worship”.

Watts’s poetry based upon David’s psalms was intended as congregational song.  His “imitation of Psalm 98 (“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth…“) would become the popular Christmas carol, Joy to the World.  The American Lowell Mason would compose the familiar melody around 1848.

1 Joy to the world; the Lord is come;

Let earth receive her King;

Let every heart prepare him room,

And heaven and nature sing.

2 Joy to the earth, the Saviour reigns;

Let men their songs employ;

While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains,

Repeat the sounding joy.