Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  His violent end was the beginning of a long interregnum of violence. The close of the ninth century gave a foretaste of the greater troubles of the tenth. After the downfall of the Carolingian dynasty the popes were more and more involved in the political quarrels and distractions of the Italian princes. The dukes Berengar of Friuli (888–924), and Guido of Spoleto (889–894), two remote descendants of Charlemagne through a female branch, contended for the kingdom of Italy and the imperial crown, and filled alternately the papal chair according to their success in the conflict. The Italians liked to have two masters, that they might play off one against the other. Guido was crowned emperor by Stephen VI. (V.) in February, 891, and was followed by his son, Lambert, in 894, who was also crowned. Formosus, bishop of Portus, whom John VIII. had pursued with bitter animosity, was after varying fortunes raised to the papal chair, and gave the imperial crown first to Lambert, but afterwards to the victorious Arnulf of Carinthia, in 896. He roused the revenge of Lambert, and died of violence. His second successor and bitter enemy, Stephen VII. (VI.), a creature of the party of Lambert, caused his corpse to be exhumed, clad in pontifical robes, arraigned in a mock trial, condemned and deposed, stripped of the ornaments, fearfully mutilated, decapitated, and thrown into the Tiber. But the party of Berengar again obtained the ascendency; Stephen VII. was thrown into prison and strangled (897). This was regarded as a just punishment for his conduct towards Formosus. John IX. restored the character of Formosus. He died in 900, and was followed by Benedict IV., of the Lambertine or Spoletan party, and reigned for the now unusual term of three years and a half.273 § 63. The Degradation of the Papacy in the Tenth Century. Sources. Migne’s Patrol. Lat. Tom. 131–142. These vols. contain the documents and works from Pope John IX.–Gregory VI.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Their wives, who had been legally married with ring and religious rites, were insulted as harlots, and their children branded as bastards. Many of these unfortunate women died from hunger or grief, or committed suicide in despair, and were buried in unconsecrated earth. Peasants burned the tithes on the field lest they should fall into the hands of disobedient priests, trampled the host under foot, and baptized their own children.58 In England, St. Dunstan, archbishop of Canterbury, d. 988, had anticipated the reforms of Hildebrand, but only with temporary success. William the Conqueror made no effort to enforce sacerdotal celibacy, except that the charge of concubinage was freely used as a pretext for removing Anglo-Saxon prelates to make room for Norman rivals. Lanfranc of Canterbury was a Hildebrandian, but could not prevent a reformatory council at Winchester in 1076 from allowing married priests to retain their wives, and it contented itself with the prohibition of future marriages. This prohibition was repeated at a council held in London, 1102, when Anselm occupied the see of Canterbury. Married priests were required to dismiss their wives, and their children were forbidden to inherit their fathers’ churches. A profession of chastity was to be exacted at ordination to the subdiaconate and the higher orders. But no punishment was prescribed for the violation of these canons. Anselm maintained them vigorously before and after his exile. A new council, called by King Henry at London, 1108, a year before Anselm’s death, passed severe laws against sacerdotal marriage under penalties of deposition, expulsion from the Church, loss of property, and infamy. The temporal power was pledged to enforce this legislation. But Eadmer, the biographer of Anselm, sorrowfully intimates that the result was an increase of shocking crimes of priests with their relatives, and that few preserved that purity with which Anselm had labored to adorn his clergy. In Spain, which was as much isolated from the Continent by the Pyrenees as England by the sea, clerical celibacy was never enforced before this period. The Saracenic invasion and subsequent struggles of the Christians were unfavorable to discipline. A canon of Compostella, afterwards bishop of Mondonego, describes the contemporary ecclesiastics at the close of the eleventh century as reckless and violent men, ready for any crime, prompt to quarrel, and occasionally indulging in mutual slaughter. The lower priests were generally married; but bishops and monks were forbidden by a council of Compostella, in 1056, all intercourse with women, except with mothers, aunts, and sisters wearing the monastic habit. Gregory VII. sent a legate, a certain Bishop Amandus, to Spain to introduce his reforms, 1077. A council at Girona, 1078, forbade the ordination of sons of priests and the hereditary transmission of ecclesiastical benefices. A council at Burgos, 1080, commanded married priests to put away their wives.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  And you need to know that Julian and I never touched each other.” Charlie jerked away and looked at Yale wild-eyed. “I’m sorry, I thought maybe—I thought that might have been on your mind.” Charlie stood, throwing the blanket off like it was covered with spiders. He said, “Bloody fucking hell, Yale.” “Okay, I shouldn’t have brought it up. Come back. Come here. Come here.” Charlie did, and he cried for a while into Yale’s chest hair, and then he fell asleep there. 2015Arnaud had asked her not to call till 10 a.m., so Fiona called at 10:01. He didn’t answer and so she tried again, and then she killed time by showering. At 10:26, he answered. He said, “You got some rest?” “Tell me ,” she said. “I have photos, if you’d like to see.” “Was it them?” “Yes, yes.” “Was there—did they have—was it just them?” “Two adults. Listen, I can describe these forever or you can look for yourself.” They agreed to meet at noon at a place in Saint-Germain called Sushi House—not really Fiona’s idea of Paris, but at least she pronounced it easily for the taxi that took her there. And when they sat down and she made herself look at the menu, kept herself from diving across the table to rip open Arnaud’s messenger bag, she could also understand the food being described: sake nigiri, ikura, miso. Arnaud told her he’d waited in his car till eleven, and at last Kurt and Claire had come walking past his window, hand in hand. Arnaud held his phone out over the table. “You ready?” he said. She didn’t understand at first. She’d been expecting him to pull out a stack of glossy 8 × 10s. But the photos were on his phone; of course they were. The first was just of Kurt, a close-up. “It’s him,” she said. She waited to be overwhelmed with rage at the sight of his face, but instead she felt just the buzz of recognition, the click of encountering an old friend—which, after all, he was. Fiona couldn’t ever see him without also seeing the kid he’d been, the smart, nervous boy who would rattle off facts about German submarines and spy planes. The phone was still in Arnaud’s hand, and so she said, “Okay, I’m ready. Next?” But the next photo showed both Kurt and a tall woman with thick black hair. They were hand in hand, and the woman held a plastic shopping bag. It was not Claire. She yanked the phone from him, scrolled to the next photo and the next. They were taken in rapid succession, so it looked like a flip-book as the two figures moved down the sidewalk. “No,” she said. “Fuck.” She was angry at Arnaud, which made no sense. “No.” She felt trapped in the booth, suffocated under the yellow lights and quiet music.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I remember the night of the day that he moved out. By the light of my bedside lamp, I dug out an old T-shirt of my father’s from the bottom drawer of my dresser. It was from a diner in Oklahoma City whose corned beef hash my mother once loved, royal blue cotton jersey with the restaurant’s logo on the back. I’d taken it from my father’s closet the year after he died, and it still smelled like him, a high-pitched musk. In thirteen years, I’d never worn it. I didn’t want the smell to go away. But the day that Brandon moved out, I unfolded it and pulled it on, held the fabric to my nose until I was sobbing. I wanted company, and grief was it. I was free from the labor of our marriage: the tidying up after him, the keeping-track, the constant doing. After he moved out, I made a mess of the place. I left dirty dishes in the sink, threw my clothes on the rug. It was a relief to stop trying to set a shining example, to stop hoping he would follow suit. You’ve been begging the wrong person to see you, my therapist says. You don’t have to do that anymore. I nod, not entirely sure. Alone in our house—my house—I was defiant and furious. How had I put up with it, with how not-right we were, for so long? And then, picking up June at his apartment, I’d look around the room and nearly choke, guilt filling my mouth like a wad of gauze. June’s toys were strewn everywhere, and the laundry too, and here was all this furniture that used to be ours, in this alien, half-finished place. I was the one who’d landed him here, us here, June here. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Why can’t you stay married and just date girls on the side? a friend asks. It’s not like that, I say. I’m not who I was before. I couldn’t be who I am and stay where I was. We tried. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I drove around a lot that summer, to Brandon’s and back, to Nora’s and back, to camp drop-off and back, to the restaurant and back. In the car I played the same song on repeat, “The Swimming Song,” by Loudon Wainwright III. I wondered if June would remember it years later, how much I played it that summer. That summer I was always swimming, even when I wasn’t. I could have drowned at any time, and often I thought I might. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] If I spend enough time feeling guilty, I decided, things will be okay. If I feel guilty enough, he will stop being angry with me.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Even the laughably ugly paintings in thick pigments seemed familiar—green women with long breasts and vampire teeth, men with baroque erections. And I could remember my mother’s voice, her irritation when the roar of the cappuccino machine interrupted her reading, her books stacked on the table where I drew and took the money when someone bought one. I wanted her back. I was overwhelmed with a need to hear her low, expressive voice. I wanted her to say something funny and cruel about the art, or tell a story about one of the other poets. I wanted to feel her hand on my hair, stroking me while she spoke. Joan Peeler ordered peach tea. I took strong coffee with cream and sugar and the biggest pastry, a blueberry scone shaped like a heart. We sat at a table where we could see the street, the funereal umbrellas, hear the soft hiss of cars through puddles. She opened my case file on the sticky tabletop. I tried to eat slowly, to enjoy the buttery biscuit and the whole blueberries, but I was too hungry. I finished half of it before she even looked up. “Ms. Cardoza recommended you not be moved,” my new caseworker said. “She says the home is perfectly adequate. She says you have an attitude problem.” I could picture her writing it, Ms. Cardoza, her skin muddy with makeup applied like cake frosting. She never once took me out for a visit, always spent the whole time talking to Amelia in Spanish over plates of butter cookies and yerbabuena tea in matching flowered cups and saucers. She was so impressed by Amelia and the big house, the sparkling silver. All that remodeling. She never wondered where the money came from. Six girls bought a lot of remodeling, even antiques, especially if you didn’t feed them. I glanced up at a drippy, heavy painting of a woman lying on a bed, her legs spread, snakes crawling out of her vagina. Joan Peeler craned her neck around to see what I was looking at. “Did she say why I asked to be moved?” I licked powdered sugar off my fingers. “She said you complained about the food. And that Mrs. Ramos restricts use of the telephone. She found you bright but spoiled.” I laughed out loud, pulled up my sweater to show her my ribs. The men across the aisle looked too, a writer with a portable computer, a student making notes on a legal pad. Seeing if I’d pull it up any higher. Not that it mattered, I didn’t have much on top anymore. “We’re starving,” I said, covering myself again. Joan Peeler frowned, pouring tea through a wicker strainer into a chipped cup. “Why don’t the other girls complain?” “They’re afraid of a worse placement. She says if we complain she’ll send us to Mac.” Joan put her strainer down.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  Constantine not only put an end to offi- cial persecution of the church (somewhat before his conversion, in the year 313 C.E.), but he also bestowed special imperial favors upon it. He pro- vided extensive lands, magnificent buildings, and sizable revenues to churches, patronized leaders of the church in Rome and elsewhere, and took an active part in critical matters of Christian doctrine and church administration, for instance, by calling the famous Council of Nicea in 325 C.E., where the orthodox doctrine of Christology was established. It became not only acceptable but also fashion- able and even advisable in some circles to become a Christian. By the end of the fourth century, Christianity was named the official religion of the empire, with something like half of the entire popu- lation, some 30 million people, professing belief. This historic upheaval had profound effects for Jewish-Christian relations. In the early part of the second century Christians were a marginalized group that occasionally produced revolutionary and incen- diary tractates. By the end of the fourth century the tables had turned, and turned with a vengeance. ,What had started as the defensive posture of an insignificant and powerless minority group became a view shared by prominent members of the Roman bureaucracy. The official policies of the empire did not actively require or promote the persecution of Jews, but in many instances the Christian governors looked the other way or privately condoned it. Synagogues were burned, properties were confiscat- CHAPTER 24 CHRiSTiANS AND JEWS 365 ed, and Jews were publicly mocked and sometimes subjected to mob violence. Leading the way were Christians, who took the defensive rhetoric of their predecessors in the faith all too literally and acted on it by striving to deprive Jews of their right to exist. The result is one of the tragic ironies of history. Even though the founder of the Christian religion was a Jew, who lived among the Jewish people, fol- lowed the Jewish Law, worshipped in the Jewish synagogue, and selected Jewish followers, even though his Jewish disciples were taught to love their fellow Jews as themselves, and even though after their founder's death they developed a theol- ogy, a system of ethics, and a basic view of the world that continued to be rooted in Judaism, understanding themselves in light of the Jewish Scriptures that they believed had been given to the Jewish people by the Jewish God despite all these things, much of the subsequent history of Christianity involved a falling away from its Jewish roots and a sometimes violent opposition to the Jewish people. In an effort to define themselves in the world, Christians came to deny their ties to the history, religion, and people of the Jews. The trag- ic effects of that denial remain with us even today. SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Gager, John. The Origins of Anti-Semitism.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  generations, esp. in‏ -1ע-1ים 4 [תולדות] genealogies=account of a man and his des-‏ הולדת ;*4 Gn 2* Ru‏ תולדות cendants ;—cstr.‏ npn 8‏ 0-2 תלדות Gn 5'+ 6t.;‏ ODI Ex 28! 4 16 +¢.; ONDA‏ ;26% גוס 1 תּלְדתָיו Ex 6%";—a. account‏ תּלְדְתֶם Ch 5/+5t.;‏ 1 of men and their descendants Gn ₪ 6° 10! 111°"‏ rCh 6 successive‏ 4 טא Nu3'‏ 37° 361° 25'7 generations (in) of families (NNEWID) Gn 10” ef.‏ Ex 6°" 28"; genealogical divisions, by‏ ,2533 ; 1 וא M)+11‏ לְמָשֶמַּהתֶם) 1% parentage Nu‏ YON) + Ch 57 cf. 7°‏ למִשְפַּחְתָיו wninna‏ לתולדותם and prob. also v. Be, 74 85 go 26%.) 1 Ds‏ Gn 2° lit. begettings‏ תולדות השמים )7287 metaph.‏ of heaven and earth, i.e. account of heaven and‏ earth and that which proceeded from them (cf. Dr™5") In Hex always P. n.pr.loc. in Simeon 1 Ch 4% ₪‏ תולד אלול A Gwdad, GL Codad ; appar.=‏ ,ןטס ₪ p. 39.‏ .עגופ .+ q.‏ We / vb. Hiph. howl, make a howling (onomatop.)—Hiph. 7 ְהִילֶל‎ 601860.16 47°; DN consec. Am 8°; Jinpf. ליל‎ Is 15 43 t. (Ges 57% 5-5 Ky 1457, 221) , PN Je 48°; ְאִילִילָה‎ Mi 18; ילילו‎ Ho 7 (Ko*@); יְהִילִילוּ‎ Is 52°; DA Is 65%; Imv. הַילֶל‎ iz 21 Aerie הַילִילִי‎ Is 14% 49%+-36 48” Kt; הילילן‎ Is 13°+13t.+ Je 48% Qr, + Ez 30°(del. G Co);—wutter or make a howling, give a howl, in distress, || זעק‎ Ho 7¥ Je 472 Is 14 Je 25" 48% (sq. Sy), Ez 21”; || צעק‎ Is 65" (sq. (2 of occasion, source); || ספד‎ גג‎ 1* 76 4* Jo 1%; (| הביש‎ Jo 115 | בכה‎ (ef Ts 157% °23); sq. על‎ Je 51° Is 155; We prop. ילילו‎ for ינילו‎ Ho 10° (others ,יחילו‎ v. גיל‎ supr. p- 162); sq. Is 167; abs. והילילו שירות היבל‎ Am 8% and palace-songs shall become howlings, Is 13° 167 233% Je 48% 49° (Ez 30” v. supr.), Zp 1" Zer1”; in cruel exultation Is 52° cf. De Che Di.—On 70873 99° Is 14” ef, sub 1. הלל‎ supr. Pp: 237. toby n.[m.] howling (of beasts);—721 jw by Dt 327" in a waste of howling of a desert =in the howling waste of a desert; v. Dr). ילֶלְהז‎ n.f. howling ;— by Zp 1"°; estr. node Je25* Zcr1; mop’ Ts 15°°;— howling in distress Is 15°* (|| 7291), Je 25° (of leaders of ACD 52 Hpt*8'1"-)_abs. Dy‏ . ]\ך D]EWBs07‏ ,שי" ים 410 flock, metaph. for princes; || צעקה‎ Sip), Zp yo (| #d.); הָרְעִים‎ NDd קול‎ Ze xx רעים)‎ metaph. for princes). .לעע Pr 20% vy.‏ ילע (of 1011. ; mng. dub.; Ar. 5 111.‏ ילף is conjunctus fuit cum aliquo,etc., Frey; whence‏ as an accretion? so Thes ‘ab adhaerendo yi‏ ילפת 1 nod n.f. scab, scurf, an eruptive disease, Ly 21” 22” (in both || 373). . following; meaning dubious;‏ 4/1 ילק Thes al. comp. ppd lick; Ar. 335 1s hasten, ete.)‏

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  When Nero's enemies blamed him for the fire that leveled a good portion of the city--a blame that he evidently deserved he decided to use the Christians in Rome as his scapegoats. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, Nero made a pub- lic display of Christians, having some of them clothed in animal skins to be eaten by ravenous dogs and others rolled in pitch and set aflame to light his public gardens. Tacitus suggests that Nero could treat the Christians this way with impunity because of the general loathing for them. Nero, however, did not order persecutions of Christians living outside of Rome, and more importantly, he did not punish the Christians of Rome for being Christians. He condemned them for arson (even though they were apparently innocent of the charge). Thus, Christians were accused of com- mitting actual crimes. Nero may have set a precedent. Christians who were already looked upon with suspicion and hatred increasingly came to be seen as a public problem, and governors in the provinces must have known the disdain that the emperor himself had shown for them. The problems mounted with the passing of time, as Christians grew in number and openly refused to worship the state gods. This becomes clear in the second incident of official persecution that we can speak about with some confidence. In 112 C.E., Pliny, the governor of Bithynia-Pontus in Asia Minor, heard complaints about the Christians in his province and put them on trial. Afterward, he wrote to the Emperor Trajan to see whether he had handled the situation prop- erly. The letter still survives. In it Pliny tells the emperor that he arrested those suspected of being Christians and forced them to prove their loyalty to the state by paying homage to the images of the emperor and the state gods by offerings of incense and wine. He executed those who refused. Pliny had these people executed not because they worshipped the Christian God--they were free to do that--but because they refused to wor- ship the gods that supported the empire of Rome. Also, Pliny did not punish those who were sus- pected of having formerly been Christians so long as they were willing to worship the Roman gods. This procedure shows that it was not a crime to have been a Christian (since crimes are punished even after someone stops committing them). The crime was being adamant in refusing to worship the state gods. Pliny appears to have recognized that Christians were prevented by their religion from worshipping these gods.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  As such, it has lent itself readily to recurring situations in every century, not least the twentieth. There is anger toward taunting neighbors but surprisingly little toward the Babylonians, who were the main agents of Jerusalem’s misery. The reason is presumably that the Babylonians were believed to act on behalf of the God of Israel. It is not unusual for victims of violence to blame themselves and view the violence as punishment. The biblical reactions to the fall of Jerusalem take this attitude to an extreme. Only occasionally does Lamentations hint that the punishment is “beyond measure” or indeed unjustifiable in its severity. For a more thorough reflection on the justice of God, we will have to wait for the book of Job. Lamentations fills its role in the canon by testifying to the depth of human suffering and expressing the basic human emotion of grief. FOR FURTHER READING Habakkuk F. I. Andersen, Habakkuk (AB 25; New York: Doubleday, 1991). Detailed philological commentary. M. H. Floyd, Minor Prophets Part 2 (FOTL 22; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 79–162. Form-critical analysis. R. D. Haak, Habakkuk (VTSup 44; Leiden: Brill, 1992). Detailed study of text and historical context. T. Hiebert, “The Book of Habakkuk,” NIB 7:623–55. Brief homiletical commentary. J. J. M. Roberts, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah (OTL; Louisville: Westminster, 1991). Textual and philological analysis. M. A. Sweeney, The Twelve Prophets (Berit Olam; Collegeville, MN, 2000), 2:451–90. Concise exegetical commentary. Jeremiah L. C. Allen Jeremiah: A Commentary (OTL; Louisville: Westminster, 2008). Literary and theological commentary on the canonical form of the book. J. Bright, Jeremiah (AB 21; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965). Helpful but dated commentary. Regards much of the book as historically reliable. W. Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998). Theological and homiletical commentary. R. P. Carroll, Jeremiah (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986). Regards most of the text as the product of later editors. S. Davidson, Empire and Exile: Postcolonial Readings of the Book of Jeremiah (London: T&T Clark, 2011). Reading of selected passages in Jeremiah from the perspective of the exiles. W. L. Holladay, Jeremiah (2 vols.; Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986–1989). Detailed commentary. Exceptional confidence in the historical reliability of the book. P. J. King, Jeremiah: An Archaeological Companion (Louisville: Westminster, 1993). Useful collection of pertinent archaeological evidence. J. R. Lundbom, Jeremiah (3 vols. AB 21A–C; New York: Doubleday, 1999–2004). Emphasis on rhetorical criticism. ————, “Jeremiah, Book of,” ABD 3:707–21. Summary of critical issues. W. McKane, Jeremiah (2 vols.; ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986–1996). Thorough commentary, with extensive attention to the composition of the book. M. Leuchter, The Polemics of Exile in Jeremiah 26–45 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Views Jeremiah 26–45 as a supplement by scribes in the exile, continuous with the thought of Jeremiah. P. D. Miller, “The Book of Jeremiah,” NIB 7:555–1072. Judicious commentary with homiletical reflections. E.

• From The Fixed Stars (0)

  The doctor laughed merrily. Have you gone off the Pill? he asked. That’s the first step. But I don’t get a period without the Pill, I said. I don’t ovulate. Just try it, he said. Let’s not jump to conclusions. Give your body a few months off the Pill, and we’ll see what happens. My period arrived the next month. When I saw the bloody toilet paper, I yelped with surprise and scream-laughed. I wanted to run through the house waving it over my head. I was pregnant six months later. For all my difficulty imagining becoming a mother, pregnancy was easy on me. My abdomen stretched until it was round and tight, smooth as a ladybug. I couldn’t get over the fact that my skin could stretch like that, that far. Thinking about it gave me a deep, shivery kind of pleasure, like the first sip of a strong cocktail. I quietly cheered: my body was made for this. I’d had my doubts, but here we were. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I was nine weeks pregnant when my mother called with news: my aunt Tina, my mother’s twin sister, had been admitted to the hospital. She’d been having stomach pain for a few weeks, and more recently nausea and vomiting. A couple of days later we’d learn what it was: late-stage pancreatic cancer. She was sixty-five and looking forward to retirement, had recently bought herself a new white bicycle with upright handlebars. Tina couldn’t go back to her house, where there was no one to care for her, so my mother helped her fly to Oklahoma. Tina’s daughters and I rotated through town to help care for her. We had been through this before, too many times. We knew how to talk to doctors and nurses and how to speak the language of palliative care. But there was something about those weeks with Tina that I couldn’t penetrate. It felt wrong to be making life while Tina was leaving it. She couldn’t eat, and I was hungry. I kept a jar of peanut butter in my tote bag with a loaf of bread whose plastic wrapper crinkled as I walked down the hospital corridors. In a bathroom with fluorescent lights and a folding seat in the shower, I took photos of my pregnant belly. Tina died at my mother’s house, in a rented hospital bed like my father. The night before she died, my cousins slept on the floor beside her bed. It was early morning when her breathing changed, when they called for my mother and me. I stroked her hair, streaked silver at the temples, long and wiry like my mother’s. Their hair had always reminded me of horses’ manes, the strands coarse and distinct. I was twenty-five weeks pregnant that morning. As I leaned over Tina’s body, the aluminum rails of her bed left pink stripes across my tightening belly.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  By severe oppression under Trajan and Hadrian, the prohibition of circumcision, and the desecration of Jerusalem by the idolatry of the pagans, the Jews were provoked to a new and powerful insurrection (A.D. 132–135). A pseudo-Messiah, Bar-Cochba (son of the stars, Num. 24:17), afterwards called Bar-Cosiba (son of falsehood), put himself at the head of the rebels, and caused all the Christians who would not join him to be most cruelly murdered. But the false prophet was defeated by Hadrian’s general in 135, more than half a million of Jews were slaughtered after a desperate resistance, immense numbers sold into slavery, 985 villages and 50 fortresses levelled to the ground, nearly all Palestine laid waste, Jerusalem again destroyed, and a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, erected on its ruins, with an image of Jupiter and a temple of Venus. The coins of Aelia Capitolina bear the images of Jupiter Capitolinus, Bacchus, Serapis, Astarte. Thus the native soil of the venerable religion of the Old Testament was ploughed up, and idolatry planted on it. The Jews were forbidden to visit the holy spot of their former metropolis upon pain of death.18 Only on the anniversary of the destruction were they allowed to behold and bewail it from a distance. The prohibition was continued under Christian emperors to their disgrace. Julian the Apostate, from hatred of the Christians, allowed and encouraged them to rebuild the temple, but in vain. Jerome, who spent the rest of his life in monastic retirement at Bethlehem (d. 419), informs us in pathetic words that in his day old Jewish men and women, "in corporibus et in habitu suo iram a Domini demonstrantes," had to buy from the Roman watch the privilege of weeping and lamenting over the ruins from mount Olivet in sight of the cross, "ut qui quondam emerant sanguinem Christi, emant lacrymas suas, et ne fletus quidem i eis gratuitus sit."19 The same sad privilege the Jews now enjoy under Turkish rule, not only once a year, but every Friday beneath the very walls of the Temple, now replaced by the Mosque of Omar.20 The Talmud. After this the Jews had no opportunity for any further independent persecution of the Christians. Yet they continued to circulate horrible calumnies on Jesus and his followers. Their learned schools at Tiberias and Babylon nourished this bitter hostility. The Talmud, i.e. Doctrine, of which the first part (the Mishna, i.e. Repetition) was composed towards the end of the second century, and the second part (the Gemara, i.e. Completion) in the fourth century, well represents the Judaism of its day, stiff, traditional, stagnant, and anti-Christian. Subsequently the Jerusalem Talmud was eclipsed by the Babylonian (430–521), which is four times larger, and a still more distinct expression of Rabbinism.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Irenaeus has been represented as holding inconsistently all three theories, or at least as hesitating between the orthodox view and the annihilation scheme. He denies, like Justin Martyr, the necessary and intrinsic immortality of the soul, and makes it dependent on God for the continuance in life as well as for life itself.1147 But in paraphrasing the apostolic rule of faith he mentions eternal punishment, and in another place he accepts as certain truth that "eternal fire is prepared for sinners," because "the Lord openly affirms, and the other Scriptures prove" it.1148 Hippolytus approves the eschatology of the Pharisees as regards the resurrection, the immortality of the soul, the judgment and conflagration, everlasting life and "everlasting punishment;" and in another place be speaks of "the rayless scenery of gloomy Tartarus, where never shines a beam from the radiating voice of the Word."1149 According to Tertullian the future punishment "will continue, not for a long time, but forever."1150 It does credit to his feelings when he says that no innocent man can rejoice in the punishment of the guilty, however just, but will grieve rather. Cyprian thinks that the fear of hell is the only ground of the fear of death to any one, and that we should have before our eyes the fear of God and eternal punishment much more than the fear of men and brief suffering.1151 The generality of this belief among Christians is testified by Celsus, who tells them that the heathen priests threaten the same "eternal punishment" as they, and that the only question was which was right, since both claimed the truth with equal confidence.1152 II. The final Annihilation of the wicked removes all discord from the universe of God at the expense of the natural immortality of the soul, and on the ground that sin will ultimately destroy the sinner, and thus destroy itself. This theory is attributed to Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and others, who believed only in a conditional immortality which may be forfeited; but, as we have just seen, their utterances in favor of eternal punishment are too clear and strong to justify the inference which they might have drawn from their psychology. Arnobius, however, seems to have believed in actual annihilation; for he speaks of certain souls that "are engulfed and burned up," or "hurled down and having been reduced to nothing, vanish in the frustration of a perpetual destruction."1153 III. The Apokatastasis or final restoration of all rational beings to holiness and happiness. This seems to be the most satisfactory speculative solution of the problem of sin, and secures perfect harmony in the creation, but does violence to freedom with its power to perpetuate resistance, and Ignores the hardening nature of sin and the ever increasing difficulty of repentance. If conversion and salvation are an ultimate necessity, they lose their moral character, and moral aim.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The celebrated Hippolytus, in the beginning of the third century, was a decided antagonist of the Roman bishops, Zephyrinus and Callistus, both for doctrinal and disciplinary reasons. Nevertheless we learn from his work called Philosophumena, that at that time the Roman bishop already claimed an absolute power within his own jurisdiction; and that Callistus, to the great grief of part of the presbytery, laid down the principle, that a bishop can never be deposed or compelled to resign by the presbytery, even though he have committed a mortal sin. Tertullian. Tertullian points the heretics to the apostolic mother churches, as the chief repositories of pure doctrine; and among these gives especial prominence to that of Rome, where Peter was crucified, Paul beheaded, and John immersed unhurt in boiling oil(?) and then banished to the island. Yet the same father became afterwards an opponent of Rome. He attacked its loose penitential discipline, and called the Roman bishop (probably Zephyrinus), in irony and mockery, "pontifex maximus" and "episcopus episcoporum." Cyprian. Cyprian is clearest, both in his advocacy of the fundamental idea of the papacy, and in his protest against the mode of its application in a given case. Starting from the superiority of Peter, upon whom the Lord built his church, and to whom he intrusted the feeding of his sheep, in order to represent thereby the unity in the college of the apostles, Cyprian transferred the same superiority to the Bishop of Rome, as the successor of Peter, and accordingly called the Roman church the chair of Peter, and the fountain of priestly unity,223 the root, also, and mother of the catholic church.224 But on the other side, he asserts with equal energy the equality and relative independence of the bishops, as successors of the apostles, who had all an equally direct appointment from Christ. In his correspondence he uniformly addresses the Roman bishop as "brother" and "colleague," conscious of his own equal dignity and authority. And in the controversy about heretical baptism, he opposes Pope Stephen with almost Protestant independence, accusing him of error and abuse of his power, and calling a tradition without truth an old error. Of this protest he never retracted a word. Firmilian. Still more sharp and unsparing was the Cappadocian bishop, Firmilian, a disciple of Origen, on the bishop of Rome, while likewise implying a certain acknowledgment of his primacy. Firmilian charges him with folly, and with acting unworthily of his position; because, as the successor of Peter, he ought rather to further the unity of the church than to destroy it, and ought to abide on the rock foundation instead of laying a new one by recognizing heretical baptism. Perhaps the bitterness of Firmilian was due partly to his friendship and veneration for Origen, who had been condemned by a council at Rome. Nevertheless, on this question of baptism, also, as on those of Easter, and of penance, the Roman church came out victorious in the end. Comparative Insignificance of the first Popes.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  It’s just, they’re coming pretty fast.” Debbie said, “Here’s what we’re doing. I’m calling up to maternity, I’m getting you an escort up there, no ER for you, and Yale is sitting very tight and I’m staying right with him all night. Maybe you come back a lot skinnier, maybe you come back a couple ounces bigger. Okay?” And Fiona, who appeared to be holding her breath again, squeezed Yale’s hand and nodded. “But they’ll—can you keep me filled in? If I’m there a while, I want to know what’s happening. I still have power of attorney, right? Even if I’m up there?” “We can call you,” Debbie said, “and you would not believe how fast I can make an orderly run.” She was already beckoning someone in from the hallway, already picking up Yale’s phone to call Labor and Delivery. —When Yale woke from night sweats, Debbie was still there. Fiona was resting, she said, and they were trying to delay the labor. Her husband was on his way from Canada, where he’d been speaking at a conference. She’d let Yale know as soon as she heard anything. Meanwhile, she’d get his sheets changed. His heart felt bad. He could feel it working so hard, a fist trying to break through a wall. Which was exactly what Dr. Cheng said would happen. “The thing about you having multiple concurrent pathogens,” he’d said, “is we’re going to treat them all, but the treatments won’t necessarily get along. And it’s a lot of medicine, a lot of IVs, a lot of fluids. The risk is that we’re going to stress your heart out, more than it’s already stressed.” The almost inevitable result, in short, would be congestive heart failure—the same thing Nora had died of. How had she seemed so serene through all of it? —In the morning, everything was much worse. Debbie was gone and Bernard had taken her place. Bernard changed the catheter bag, and Yale tried to ask about Fiona, but all he got out was her name. “She’s calling the nurse’s station every ten minutes, I swear to God,” Bernard said. “She wanted to know when you woke up. No baby yet.” Dr. Cheng came by. He said, “You’re gaining weight, which is, for once, not a great thing. We’ve got some fluid collecting in your abdomen now. Which means the kidneys and liver aren’t doing too well.” Yale’s fingers tingled from low blood-oxygen, and he wasn’t sure he could feel his toes. His heart was climbing a mountain with every beat. In second grade, Mrs. Henry had been hospitalized with pneumonia and the substitute, a man who mostly told them stories about his time in the Peace Corps, had attempted to explain what was wrong with Mrs. Henry. “Take the deepest breath you can,” he said, “and don’t let it out.” They did, and then he said, “Now take another breath on top of that. Don’t let that one out either.” They tried.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The martyrologies date from this period several legends, the germs of which, however, cannot now be clearly sifted from the additions of later poesy. The story of the destruction of the legio Thebaica is probably an exaggeration of the martyrdom of St. Mauritius, who was executed in Syria, as tribunus militum, with seventy soldiers, at the order of Maximin. The martyrdom of Barlaam, a plain, rustic Christian of remarkable constancy, and of Gordius, a centurion (who, however, was tortured and executed a few years later under Licinius, 314) has been eulogized by St. Basil. A maiden of thirteen years, St. Agnes, whose memory the Latin church has celebrated ever since the fourth century, was, according to tradition, brought in chains before the judgment-seat in Rome; was publicly exposed, and upon her steadfast confession put to the sword; but afterwards appeared to her grieving parents at her grave with a white lamb and a host of shining virgins from heaven, and said: "Mourn me no longer as dead, for ye see that I live. Rejoice with me, that I am forever united in heaven with the Saviour, whom on earth I loved with all my heart." Hence the lamb in the paintings of this saint; and hence the consecration of lambs in her church at Rome at her festival (Jan. 21), from whose wool the pallium of the archbishop is made. Agricola and Vitalis at Bologna, Gervasius and Protasius at Milan, whose bones were discovered in the time of Ambrose Janurius, bishop of Benevent, who became the patron saint of Naples, and astonishes the faithful by the annual miracle of the liquefaction of his blood, and the British St. Alban, who delivered himself to the authorities in the place of the priest he had concealed in his house, and converted his executioner, are said to have attained martyrdom under Diocletian.54 § 25. The Edicts of Toleration. A.D. 311–313. See Lit. in § 24, especially Keim, and Mason (Persecution of Diocletian, pp. 299 and 326 sqq.) This persecution was the last desperate struggle of Roman heathenism for its life. It was the crisis of utter extinction or absolute supremacy for each of the two religions. At the close of the contest the old Roman state religion was exhausted. Diocletian retired into private life in 305, under the curse of the Christians; he found greater pleasure in planting cabbages at Salona in his native Dalmatia, than in governing a vast empire, but his peace was disturbed by the tragical misfortunes of his wife and daughter, and in 313, when all the achievements of his reign were destroyed, he destroyed himself.

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  Matthew etched over the transom of the main entry: INASMUCH AS YE DID IT UNTO ONE OF THESE MY BRETHREN, EVEN THESE LEAST, YE DID IT UNTO ME. “These least”? Chloe didn’t consider her little boy the least of anything, and it pained her not to be able to care for him any longer. Johnny never moved home again. Chloe died of breast cancer eighteen months later at the age of fifty. BY THE TIME MY parents went out on their first date, they were both eager to put the sadness of their families behind them and plow a new path. Grandma’s gamble had hit pay dirt. On March 17, 1951, about a year after their first date, my mother and father made a pit stop at Gesu Catholic Church on Marquette’s campus for a little prophylactic confession before heading off to the bars. It was St. Patrick’s Day, after all, and it was sure to be a bit of a bender. While my mother slipped into the confessional, Holmer reached into his pocket and pulled out the one-carat square-cut diamond ring set in platinum that Grandma had bought for him a few weeks earlier. He wedged it onto the crucifix of his rosary and handed it to my mother as she made her way to the rail to say her penance. The diamond sparkled as it reflected the stained glass, and my mother stared at it for several minutes, feeling light-headed enough to faint. She waited until saying her Hail Marys before grabbing Holmer’s arm and heading toward the door. Yes, she said as they stepped into the frosty night air, I will marry you . They kissed at the top of the steps, their souls newly wiped clean of sin. Then they made a beeline to meet their friends at the Silver Spring House, a tavern a few miles out of town, where they drank themselves into a stupor. The wedding was scheduled for the following August. It would be a lavish affair with three hundred guests at St. Monica’s Catholic Church in Whitefish Bay, followed by a reception at the Milwaukee Country Club, the society pages of The Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel announced. Upon more sober reflection, my mother was not so sure that this was a good idea. A few weeks before the ceremony, she told Holmer that she needed to let him know something very important. What she was about to say might come as a shock. Still, she wanted him to hear it from her. He could not imagine what this might be all about. Was she pregnant? If so, the baby certainly was not his. As Catholics, sex before marriage was strictly forbidden, though plenty of people violated that rule. Holmer and my mother, however, did not, tempted as they may have been, or so they always told us. Pregnant? No, she said. Worse.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  beloved spinner of the yarn and twister of the cloth. Ah mother, keeper of the home, mother, weaver and spinner Eh mother, keeper of the home and mistress of embroidery even the night sky itself was woven in your loom. you knew how to embroider the sky with in all its stars. I hope it is not disrespectful to admit that I prefer CK’s terminal location but AP’s doubled rendition of those passionately accurate lines. A final instance shows the “mourner’s plight” motif. This gets only lines 13–14 in AP but lines 27–34 in CK. The difference, however, is far greater than two against eight lines. There are no parallels to any of lines 27–40 from CK in the AP version. It is a long and stern reproach to the Holy Trinity, all the saints, and the miraculous Virgin Mary of Tinos Island. She vowed offerings; they did nothing. CK will go to church next Sunday (but only?) to remember her mother bringing her to communion long ago—that is, only “to see my mother.” Those lines make up one-third of the CK version. Does AP omit them because she is less religious or more religious than her mother? Less religious and therefore uninterested in them? More religious and therefore embarrassed by them? The omission, in any case, is hardly a vagary of memory. It is part of the standard censorship of oral repetition. THE LAMENT OF KALLIOPI FOR POULOS This second example comes from the other aside of the Cretan Sea, where three fingers point southward from the Greek Peloponnese into the Mediterranean. The middle finger is spined by the Taygetos Mountains and flanked by the Ionian Sea’s Messenian Gulf to the west and the Aegean Sea’s Laconian Gulf to the east. The southernmost part, past Outer Mani and Lower Mani, is Inner Mani. At its tip is Cape Tenaron, traditional entranceway into Hades. The female dirges of the Inner Mani are, in Fermor’s words, “entire poems, long funeral hymns with a strict discipline of metre. Stranger still, the metre exists nowhere else in Greece, The universal fifteen-syllable line of all popular Greek poetry is replaced here by a line of sixteen syllables” (57–58). Constantina-Nadia Seremetakis is interested in “the particular optic of Inner Mani” against the background of “recent anthropological literature that pluralizes the concept and tangible presence of power by identifying strategies of resistance that emerge and subsist in the margins” (1991:12). I have, as in the previous case, a far more limited focus at the moment. It is in oral multiforms, in the three different versions she gives of the lament for “the premature death, in 1932, of a young man [Poulos] who was engaged to be married to Kalliopi, a woman from a high-status clan. The deceased man was a schoolteacher, as was his fiancée. Both had studied in urban centers, and he died of an urban disease, tuberculosis, before the marriage could occur” (130).

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Chrysa Kalliakati was an eighty-five-year-old woman whose lament for her mother had become famous. “Both mother and daughter were great poets and story-tellers; both were skilled midwives and medicine women, possessors of a miraculous recipe for a potion which had reputedly cured many women of infertility” (1980:132). Caraveli-Chaves, a woman participating in a woman’s network, recorded two versions of the lament. The first and “passionate” one was from Alexandra Pateraki, Chrysa Kalliakati’s fifty-nine-year old daughter, in Dzermiathes. The second and “halting” one was from Chrysa Kalliakati herself, at her other daughter’s home in Athens (1980:133–136). I code those versions as AP and CK, respectively. The twin versions are classic examples of an oral multiform even within the close constraints of family and female tradition about the same lament. Exactly the same line opens them both: “Oh slowly, oh mournfully, I will begin lamenting,” but AP has thirty-nine lines while CK has forty-four lines. Here are three instances of the similarities and differences that can be expected in such a situation. The first instance concerns the “history of the deceased” motif. Although very similar in both versions, it is six lines separated into lines 11–12 and lines 20–23 in AP, while it is eight lines joined together as lines 5–12 in CK: Lines 11–12 and 20–23 (Alexandra Pateraki) Lines 5–12 (Chrysa Kalliakati) because at the prime of your youth, you clothed yourself in black and then the darkness of your heart matched that of your dress; Fate had written that at the prime of youth because at the prime of your youth fate had written you should lose our father, you should become a widow…. that you should lose our father, you should become a widow. You used to come home each night, mother, I say each night; you walked home from deliveries and made darkness scatter. Ah how many times at midnight, after the roosters had crowed wouldn’t you be coming down the road— pale and tired out!… How many times wouldn’t you come back from work—pale and tired out—way past midnight, near dawn, after roosters had crowed! How many times at midnight, on nights steeped in darkness wouldn’t you come home from the road—lips saddened and embittered! Both versions agree on the mother’s biography as that of widow and midwife, but AP has missed those first lines that give “an insight into the mother’s ‘heart’” and especially into the peculiar plight of a widow in a patriarchal society (1980:138). Another instance concerns the “praise/invocation” motif. There are four stunningly powerful lines combining and rhyming Chrysa Kalliakati’s work as “embroidery” (xobliástra) of the “stars” (ástra) in the sky. AP puts that superb image at the start in lines 3–6; CK places it at the end in lines 41–44: Lines 3–6 (Alexandra Pateraki) Lines 41–44 (Chrysa Kalliakati) Ah, mother, keeper of the home and mistress of embroidery, Eh mother, woman from Kritsa, eh keeper of the home, you knew how to embroider the sky with all its stars.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  [T]he final, essential moment, and the climax of this vast transformation of values, of the whole Iliad , is the lamentation of the dead Hektor. However Homer may have cooled down the ritual laments of women, which appear in a wilder form a little earlier in the conclusion, it remains true that it was by adapting women’s poetry at the climax, and by accepting women’s views, that he gave the Iliad its extraordinary power. The lamentation of Hektor is not a stray incident, nor a merely formal closure” (13). Female lament questions the morality of male heroism and of many other male characteristics and institutions as well. At the moment I look at lament in preparation for some very specific questions. They are the questions to be seen later in Helmut Koester’s claim that “the different versions of the passion narrative in the gospel literature” derive from “the oral performances of the story in the ritual celebrations, ever enriched by new references to the scriptures of Israel” (1995:18). They were seen already in the quotations from Marianne Sawicki and Kathleen Corley. These, then, are the questions: Are the different versions of the passion-resurrection in our gospels but the written accounts of oral multiforms? Are they inscribed from divergent traditions of female lament, especially from the narrative or biographical content of such mourning rituals? How, in other words, do female lament and the passion-resurrection tradition relate to one another? In preparation for answering those questions in the next and final sections, I look here at actual oral multiforms of female laments. It is impossible to prove or disprove claims of oral traditions that are completely lost. But if one has some written records of a tradition, there may be sufficient evidence to prove oral multiforms at base. That was seen for the oral and epic poetry of male performances at the start of this book. It can now be seen for the oral and lyric poetry of female laments in what follows. When we read such poetry today in books , we recognize another world staring us in the face from behind the written page. This is what oral multiforms look like. THE LAMENT OF CHRYSA KALLIAKATI FOR HER MOTHER Anna Caraveli-Chaves studied female lament poetry in “Dzermiathes … a large village, situated on the Lassithi plateau of the island of Crete, and the capital of the Lassithi province” where “moirologia (laments)—like other forms of ritual poetry—are rapidly becoming extinct. The present generation of lament poets is almost certainly the last.” Against them stand male attitudes, “the underlying fear of laments as magic songs, songs which open up perilous channels of communication between the living and the dead,” and modern standards and values. Her work is superbly evocative of the social context of those laments for “the women of the ‘patriarchal’ Greek village society … as strategies of survival” (1980:130, 131). In what follows I focus for my own present purpose on one somewhat minor aspect of her study.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Anna Caraveli-Chaves studied the “distinct thematic units … conventional to lament poetry in particular” and identified five that appear and reappear throughout a composition (135–136). They are intention, praise/invocation, history of the deceased, mourner’s plight, and invitation to share mourning. It is especially with that third of the “building blocks with which the singer will develop her song”—with the “history of the deceased”—that I am primarily interested in what follows. Here is one example of such a lament, given to underline that specific aspect but also to note some others every bit as important. HISTORY OF THE DECEASED On October 25, 1984, Peter Levi read Eilís Dillon’s translation of The Lament for Arthur O’Leary in his inaugural lecture as the University of Oxford’s Professor of Poetry. “It was composed in Irish at the end of the eighteenth century, and recovered in several different versions from illiterate or scarcely literate countrymen and fishermen in the south of Ireland in the 1890s and later…. I think it is the greatest poem written in these islands in the whole eighteenth century…. With this poem a world ended: we had not known that it had lived so long” (18–19). It was composed by Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill, widow of the murdered man. She was “born around 1743, her mother was a poet and her family had been patrons of traditional, wandering Irish poets” (19). The lament’s background is the anti-Catholic laws that Eileen’s younger kinsman Daniel O’Connell would eventually destroy—though far too late to save Arthur O’Leary from them. The latter was a captain in the Austrian army, but wearing a sword was illegal for a Catholic in Ireland. He won a horserace against Abraham Morris, high sheriff of Cork, and then refused to sell him the winning horse when asked; that refusal was likewise illegal for a Catholic in Ireland. On the run as an outlaw for these two crimes, O’Connell was betrayed by John Cooney and shot by one of Morris’s soldiers. Then a man named Baldwin, married to Eileen’s twin sister, Maíre, gave O’Leary’s horse to Morris. All of those characters are named in Eileen’s lament. Morris is wished “bad luck and misfortune.” Cooney of the “black heart” is “a píddling lout.” Maíre O’Connell gets “no bad wish,” but “I have no love for her.” Baldwin is “the ugly wretch with spindle shanks.” Eileen O’Connell married Arthur O’Leary in 1767, and he was killed in 1773. By that time they had two children, Conor and Farr, and a third “still within me / And not likely I’ll bear it.” All of those biographical details are mentioned in the lament, as are pertinent geographical locations connected to them: Killnamartyr, Cork, Toames, Macroom, Inchigeela, Carriganima, Geeragh, Caolchnoc, Ballingeary, Grenagh, Derrynane, Capling, and “all Munster.” It is lyric poetry edging toward epic in this lament of friend, lover, wife, and mother for friend, lover, husband, and father. These are stanzas VII and VIII (25): My friend you were forever!