Bad Poetry: Fourteeners for St Catherine de Ricci, et Al.

What has an aging widow to say on the theme of love?

Well, not the silly teenaged kind, red hearts and sugar dove,

But of the kind called public spirit age has more to say,

So let's consider public spirit on Saint Catherine's Day--

Not Catherine of Siena, who for teaching won acclaim,

But Catherine de Ricci, student who received her name.

This Catherine's illness to the common people did appear

To show spiritual marks the people could admire and fear;

From public spirit this young, modest nun began to pray

That not her pain, but her distinctiveness would go away;

This prayer answered, then she found she had the strength to teach,

And walk, and talk, and work, and write, and even make a speech.

She never has been many people's very favorite saint

But those who heard her teach said, "There ain't no saints, if she ain't."

Mysteriously preserved, her body has reposed in state

For near five hundred years; Italians think that she was great.

Meanwhile many others also loved their people well.

Their stories and their glories we might profitably tell.

With malice toward none let's be, with charity toward all;

When caught up in disputes, on charity let's always call.

The kindest thing to do with extroverts might be to keep

Them ever from possessing power to make others weep;

Once they're in power, the only way's to praise them when they're right

Ignore them when they're wrong, thus force them up toward the light.

Protests puff up the egos of some tedious, tacky hacks

Who otherwise would fall down, disappearing, through life's cracks.

But "feed them good examples, and reward if they do good"

Might help them heed direction, if there's anything that could.

Cut-off point for tired eyes

Fourteen is a key number in English poetry. There are fourteen-line verses, sonnets and quatorzains, and last year we tried our hands at fourteen-word verses, and the fourteen-syllable lines that form the couplets above are a form called fourteeners. Fourteeners have been described as an excessively easy form that encourages doggerel. Well, this is the home of Bad Poetry (TM); we like doggerel.

The Poets & Storytellers United prompt of the week, looking ahead to Valentines Day, proposed "love" as a topic. Then this week's hostess at that site, Rosemary Nissen-Wade, "subverted the topic" with a reflection on protests and violence...

Valentines were named in honor of a man, a saint. What saint do Catholic Christians honor on the day before his official day? I looked it up. (I'm not a Catholic.) They rotate among at least a half-dozen very minor saints, I learned. Nobody ever gets as much attention as Valentine. One obscure saint who's being remembered this year was a sickly girl who was named Alessandra Lucrezia Romola de Ricci at birth; when she entered a convent, apparently unfit for marriage, she became Sister Catherine, a name chosen in honor of her mother and St Catherine of Siena. Exactly what was wrong with Sister Catherine will never be known, but it included narcolepsy, trances and visions, and what were perceived as "the stigmata," wounds in the places of Christ's wounds and of a wedding ring on her skin. Once convinced that she was spiritual and sane, the other nuns elected her Prioress, and her prayers were granted--that she would be able to show people the teaching of Christ rather than merely showing her "stigmata." She managed the convent well, surviving past age 60. A Dominican women's community is still called the Order of St Catherine de Ricci.

Monastic people can be tempted to slip from spirituality into mere masochism. I don't think that is good. I'm not saying that people in free countries should submit to misguided government without protesting at all. As regular readers know, I think we should call out bad ideas more early and often than we do--but we should respect, even love, people as we encourage them to reconsider bad ideas.