A Handy Guide for Beggars: Especially Those of the Poetic Fraternity / Being Sundry Explorations, Made While Afoot and Penniless in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. These Adventures Convey and Illustrate the Rules of Beggary for Poets and Some Others.

Chapter 53: IN THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION CHURCH

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A series of episodic travel sketches and lyrical interludes records the narrator's afoot wanderings through Southern and Eastern states, combining practical rules for itinerant poets with vivid vignettes of hospitality, rejection, and small-town characters. Anecdotes range from freight-ride adventures and mountain baths to encounters with moonshiners and kindly householders, set amid reflections on voluntary poverty, artistic devotion, and the Gospel of Beauty. Interspersed poems and allegorical passages punctuate the narrative, offering both comic episodes and earnest meditations on artistic pilgrimage and the ethics of begging.

IN THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION CHURCH

Hunted by friends who think that life is play,

Shaken by holy loves, more feared than foes,

By beauty’s amber cup, that overflows,

And pride of place, that leads me more astray:—

Here I renew my vows, and this chief vow—

To seek each year this shrine of deathless power,

Keeping my springtime cornland thoughts in flower,

While labor-gnarled grey Christians round me bow.

Arm me against great towns, strong spirits old!

St. Francis keep me road-worn, music-fed.

Help me to look upon the poor-house bed

As a most fitting death, more dear than gold.

Help me to seek the sunburned groups afield,

The iron folk, the pioneers free-born.

Make me to voice the tall men in the corn.

Let boyhood’s wildflower days a bright fruit yield.

Scourge me, a slave that brings unhallowed praise

To you, stern Virgin in this church so sweet

If I desert the ways wherein my feet

Were set by Heaven, in prenatal days.