An Orthodox churchman

Funny stories, etc. from Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia :

From the archives

November, a sonnet by Hartley Coleridge.

The poetry of autumn

David B. Hart at First Things' On the Square blog provides us with some of his favorite seasonal verse.

Vigilium nativitatis Dylan Thomas

To commemorate the occasion of the 95th anniversary of Dylan Thomas's birth, here is the voice of the poet reading "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London":

Catholic jokes

from fisheaters.com

The bilbo?

Emma Thompson learns English in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989):

Oddly prophetic

Somewhere toward the end of Dylan Thomas's poem "Lament," as the "old ram rod" is on his deathbed, he hears churchbells:

Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath

These lines were oddly prophetic. As Dylan Thomas lay comatose from his excesses, and from a doctor's unwisely injected morphine, he had the prayers of nuns for the welfare of his soul. He died in a Catholic hospital in New York. And chastity did indeed pray for him, and innocence not only "sweeten[ed] his last breath," but perhaps also rescued him from hell and brought him to the mercies of purgatory. We can hope.

(It is worth noting that the doctor who injected the morphine was not affiliated with St Vincent's Hospital, but was an unscrupulous character who would give the drug to just about anyone who complained of pain.)