Unthinkable Wings

On an entirely different ecclesiastical note: did you know Wordsworth wrote a sonnet to Our Lady? Not a bad one, at that...

Mother! whose virgin bosom was uncrost
With the least shade of thought to sin allied;
Woman! above all women glorified,
Our tainted nature's solitary boast;
Purer than foam on central ocean tost;
Brighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewn
With fancied roses, than the unblemished moon
Before her wane begins on heaven's blue coast;
Thy Image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween,
Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend,
As to a visible Power, in which did blend
All that was mixed and reconciled in Thee
Of mother's love with maiden purity,
Of high with low, celestial with terrene!


Admittedly "I ween" is Wordsworth at his clunkiest, but I do like the last three and a half lines very much indeed.

The BBC has a page on answers to the difficult questions children ask, which are mostly science-y (except for 'why did God let my kitten die?' - and couldn't they have asked a theologian as well as the philosopher for that one? - and 'why does my friend have two daddies?').

One of them is 'why do I like pink?' On this, the lay answers are actually more helpful; the philosopher waffles about the Value of the Feminine, but on the other hand 'pink reminds you of other things you like' is reasonable, and an improvement on the psychologist, who produces the usual rubbish about evolutionary psychologists telling us that teh femalez haz evolved to like red, because of the redness of berries (because, of course, there's no such thing as edible blue, black or purple berries in nature!) or, alternatively, because they need to be able to spot when their babies have fevers, and are consequently flushed. Which I would have thought, if colour preference was really genetically hard-wired into us, that women would tend to be filled with a shrinking horror at the sight of pink/ red (why didn't he suggest the rosy cheeks of healthy infants, I wonder?)

Of course, it's all tosh anyway, because a brief examination of historical inventions shows that on the whole, previous centuries in Western Europe (can't speak to other places) associated red/ pink† with men, because it's the colour of blood and therefore Manly, whereas blue was rather feminine. Which is why you generally see Our Lady in blue* (which the more catholically inclined, as Mr Eliot reminds us, tend to consider 'Mary's color').

oursin, may I borrow your codfish?

† Of course there's a separate problem, in that the vocabulary we use to talk about colour is very culturally conditioned anyway, and the middle ages certainly didn't have the sophisticated distinctions between various shades; there isn't, as far as I know, a word in Middle High German for 'pink', for instance, and the colouring of paintings tends to be fugitive. Still, one can tell red from blue.

* Other iconographies of the BVM are available. Ask your art historian, parish priest, or friendly local Anglo-Catholic loon for details. (For instance, you sometimes do see Mary in red; this is to draw attention to the future sufferings of her Son and her participation in it, so it still comes back to bleeding men in the end).