<br><strong><em>Prayer for Holy Week</em></strong>
<em>Love me in my willingness to suffer<br>Love me in the gifts I wish to offer<br> Teach me how you love and have to die<br> And I will try</em>
<em>Somehow to forget myself and give<br>Life and joy so dead things start to live.<br> Let me show now an untrammelled joy,<br> Gold without alloy.</em>
<em>You know I have no cross but want to learn,<br>How to change and to the poor world turn.<br> I can almost worship stars and moon<br> And the sun at noon</em>
<em>But when I'm low I only beg you to<br>Ask me anything, I'll try to do<br> What you need. I trust your energy.<br> Share it then with me.</em>
<br>
Elizabeth Jennings was an English poet and fervent Catholic who though dogged by mental illness produced well over a thousand poems spanning more than fifty years.<br><br>Dubbed the “Bag Lady of the Sonnets” by the British tabloids and secular press at the time, she has since been extolled by admirers ranging from the late Queen Elizabeth II to <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/dana-gioia"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Poet Laureate of California Dana Gioia</mark></a>, notes Heather King writing for the March 2024 edition of the <em>Magnificat</em> prayer guide booklet.
King highlights that in a 2018 <em>First Things</em> article, Gioia “brilliantly analyses Jennings’s life and work”, before coming to the conclusion that, in Gioia’s words, “Jennings ranks among the finest British poets of the second half of the 20th century” and is “England’s best Catholic poet since Gerard Manley Hopkins”.
Born in Boston, Lincolnshire, to a middle-class Catholic family, Jennings moved to Oxford when she was six and spent the rest of her life there. By thirty she was a celebrated poet: an Oxford graduate and the youngest to appear in the first (1962) volume of the <em>Penguin Modern Poets</em>. <br><br>She became an accepted member – and the only female one – of the group of poets dubbed "The Movement" that included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. But her Roman Catholicism meant, Jennings said, “that I wanted to write about subjects which were simply uninteresting to most Movement poets”. <br><br>“[I]t was her Catholic recognition of the primacy of love (true love, not the pinchbeck article that dazzles the pop culture) that set her apart,” the essayist and Newman scholar Edward Short <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2019/03/24/elizabeth-jennings-and-the-poetry-of-faith/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">writes</mark></a> in an article for <em>Catholic World Report</em>.
After winning the Somerset Maugham award for her 1955 poetry book <em>A way of Looking</em>, she embarked on a three-month trip to Rome, King notes, with the visit revitalising her faith and igniting her poetic imagination. Unfortunately though, King adds, “both Jennings’s temperament and physical constitution tended towards the frail” and she was “unfit for any employment” beyond poetry, with the resulting pressures taking their toll:
“She attempted suicide and underwent electroshock therapy. She ran out of money. She drank.”<br><br>Yet, King notes, through all that suffering, exile and loneliness, Jennings continued to write – prodigiously, and, if not appreciated by the British press and "the charlatans who pass for critics in the academy", as Short puts it, many <em>ordinary</em> people responded to her words. <br><br>"Writing of the things that preoccupy most readers – family, faith, love, loss, illness, hope, atonement, redemption – she not only won her readers' trust but their affection," Short highlights. "In light of the many false reputations that disfigure our literary landscape, Jennings' unfashionably popular work is tonic, especially since so much of its appeal derives from its Catholic character." <br><br>In 1961, Jennings wrote of <em>Delay</em>, one of her best-known poems, that “what the poem discovers – and this is its chief function – is order amid chaos, meaning in the middle of confusion, and affirmation at the heart of despair.”
While throughout her life Jennings was never entirely free of what she called “her little neuroses”, King notes that the poet once remarked: “My Roman Catholic religion and my poems are the most important things in my life.” <br><br>Jennings died in a nursing home at 75 years of age. <br><br>“For those similarly prostrated, Jennings’ honesty about her spiritual struggles is always endearing,” Short writes, noting the words written in one of Jennings's last poems:<br><br>"Matter never satisfies for long / Power dwindles fast and leaves us wondering / Why we pursued it. In the soul a strong / Yearning for a personal truth brings / Us to our knees and keeps us there..."<br><br><em>Photo: A man works on the restoration of the Crucifixion painting of the Issenheim altarpiece, sculpted by Nikolaus of Haguenau and painted by Matthias Grunewald from 1512 to 1516, at the Unterlinden museum in Colmar, France, 12 March 2019. (Photo credit SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP via Getty Images.)</em><br><br><strong><a href="https://www.heather-king.com"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Heather King</mark></a>'s analysis of Elizabeth Jennings appeared in the "Credible Witnesses" section of <em>Magnificat</em>. You can subscribe to the monthly <em>Magnificat</em> spiritual guide and pray book <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">here</mark></a>.</strong>