Now I can take or leave Tennyson, but Browning...
Here's the Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister

Gr-r-r-there go, my heart's abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God's blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims--
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!

At the meal we sit together:
Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
What's the Latin name for "parsley"?
What's the Greek name for Swine's Snout?

Whew! We'll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps —
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)

Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
— Can't I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's?
(That is, if he'd let it show!)

When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As I do, in Jesu's praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp —
In three sips the Arian frustrate
While he drains his at one gulp.

Oh, those melons? If he's able
We're to have a feast! so nice!
One goes to the Abbot's table,
All of us eager to get a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double?
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange! And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!

There's a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails.
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?

Or, my scrofulous French novel,
On grey paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial's gripe:
If I double down its pages
At the woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in't?

Or, there's Satan! — one might venture
Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he'd miss it till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine . . .
'st! There's Vespers! Plena gratia
Ave, Virgo. Gr-r-r — you swine!

George Steiner is a twit. I would use a stronger word if there weren't ladies present.

I can't talk to people who don't like George Steiner. I have the same thing with Laurel & Hardy. I simply can't have a conversation with people who don't like Laurel & Hardy.

If it's a fight, then count me in.

Steiner: 1
Laurel and Hardy: 3

I said that I had no problems with serious theologians or philosophers. Steiner is not an artist. Thank goodness for that. He wrote only one novel and it wasn't a good one.

A The Browning reminds me of John Betjemin

B  In the Quarles, the only religious clue I note is the quote from the Song of Songs, as tinners says (My beloved is mine.)  The speaker could be a woman, of course.

No, Mary, hole in one in that case.

I believe that when the French Ambassador to Rome saw Bernini's famous carving of the Ectsasy of St Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria, he remarked  "If that's divine love, I know all about it."

Christian devotion in the West since the Middle Ages has had a large share of personal devotion to Jesus and in classic evangelicism it was the principal content of religion.  It comes as a surprise to realise that earlier and in the Orthodox East it is not particularly in evidence.

(Ie Prayer to God, silent contemplation, liturgical recital of the scriptures, etc.)

Soneto XVII

No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio
o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego:
te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva
dentro de sí, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,
y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo
el apretado aroma que ascendió de la tierra.

Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,

sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.


I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where 'I' does not exist, nor 'you',
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Pablo Neruda