The Feast of the Annunciation -- March 25th -- is
celebrated exactly nine months before the Nativity of Our Lord. It is, we might
say, the first feast of Christmas. This brief encounter between girl and angel
is pivotal to the Christian religion. It is the point at which God chooses to
make His astonishing initiative to humanity depend, yet more astonishingly,
upon a human response. Moreover, the mystery is intensified by the fact that
the human being in question is a very young woman living in circumstances of
exceptional political obscurity and social simplicity. That is why Mary cannot
be just like anyone else in the faith of Christians.
The Annunciation is notable for the extent to which it
has stimulated artistic creativity. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of
paintings of this biblical episode in indefinitely many styles. Mary's hymn of
response -- The Magnificat -- has been
set to music by composers in every period. Poets, too, have found themselves
driven to verse in the attempt to capture its intriguing 'feel'.
One of those was the Orkney poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959).
His poem is entitled simply "The Angel and the Girl"
The angel and the girl are met
Earth was the only meeting place.
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.
See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other's face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there.
He's come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time. Immediacy
Of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings
Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune
But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make.
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their grace would never break.
Pictures
The Annunciation (Study 2) Sorin Dumitresco, Romanian (b. 1946)
Angel of the Annunciation, Gerard David (1506)
Annunciation, Maria, Tintoretto (1594)
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