"Lachrimae Antiquae Novae" by Geoffrey Hill

Soundtrack to this episode

Note: My use of the phrase "men without chests" and Matthew's were completely coincidental! 

Text of poem:

Lachrimae Antiquae Novae

Crucified Lord, so naked to the world,

you live unseen within that nakedness,

consigned by proxy to the judas-kiss

of our devotion, bowed beneath the gold,

with re-enactments, penances foretold:

scentings of love across a wilderness

of retrospection, wild and objectless

longings incarnate in the carnal child.

Beautiful for themselves the icons fade;

the lions and the hermits disappear.

Triumphalism feasts on empty dread,

fulfilling triumphs of the festal year.

We find you wounded by the token spear.

Dominion is swallowed with your blood.

Topics discussed:

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The SLEERICKETS Geoffrey Hill episode

-Poetic accessibility, pro and contra

-John Dowland's "Lachrimae"

-My episode on Eliot's East Coker IV

-Choriambs??

-Scansion vs. delivery

-Hill's vorticism

-John Henry Newman's "illative sense" 

-The Wordsworthian cult of the child

-Plato's "Meno" dialogue

-Childhood neuroplasticity

-Psychedelic rewiring of the brain (see Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind")

-The Anglican tension

-"The Abolition of Man" by C.S. Lewis

-Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene"

-Old tears renewed