EASTER GARDENER

 I recently came across a good poet for this Eastertide.

SERVANT of GOD MARIE (known by the pen-name Marie Noël) ROUGET was born in  Auxerre, Burgandy, France  in  1883.  She is known as the “warbler of Auxerre and she  dedicated a large part of her work to praising God.    Her cause for beatification was opened in 2017.

A noted poet, she won the Grand prix de poésie de l’Académie française in 1962, and was an officer in the Légion d’honneur.

She was born into a very cultivated Catholic family, though  Louis Rouget, her father, was agnostic. He was  professor of philosophy and art history at the Collège d'Auxerre. Her mother, née Marie-Emélie-Louise Barat, was a believer and had a more open and cheerful disposition which influenced her but she was also influenced by her  father’s stern skepticism. Her parents were cousins and both related to St. Madalene- Sophie  Barat, foundress of the Dames of the Sacred Heart.

“Song of Easter,” written for Holy Saturday, 1907, was published in her very first collection Les Chansons et les Heures (“The Songs and the Hours”) in 1920.

Though written at a young age, Marie Noël’s poem already captures with subtlety the spiritual might of the expectation of the Resurrection of the Lord, after the dark and arid Lenten path that leads to the death of Jesus on Good Friday.”   (Woodruff, Sara Elizabeth. “Marie Noël, Contemporary French Poet.” The French Review, vol. 26, no. 6, 1953, pp. 419–425. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/382492. Accessed 27 Apr. 2021).

She was known for her humility and shunned all publicity, hence taking the pseudonym of Marie Noel (chosen for the brother who died on Christmas eve).

 According to Solène Tadié  (the Europe Correspondent for the National Catholic Register) Marie  was consumed by a constant inner turmoil, torn between her deep thirst for God’s love and presence and guilt over her lack of complete trust in him. “Her work illustrates thereby one of the greatest paradoxes of the mortal soul — that is, the difficult coexistence between the eager expectation of eternal life and the painful mourning of the earthly life.

When her tormented soul couldn’t find relief in writing, which was her main outlet, she was regularly assailed by deep emotional crises — or, as her circles called it, “hemorrhages of sensibility” — which forced her to retire from the world and stay bedridden for weeks at a time.”

Her spiritual director,  Father Arthur Mugnier,  known as the “confessor of the whole of Paris”, helped her channel her pain and anxiety to fuel her creative impulse. Initially she perceived her writing as incompatible with her faith. Father Mugnier helped her to see  these misconceptions. Father Mugnier remained a strong supporter of Marie Noël’s poetry until his death in 1944, calling her “our only, our true Christian poet.

She maintained an important correspondence with intellectuals of her time,  among them François Mauriac, Jean Cocteau,  and Colette.

Almost blind, she died at peace on Christmas night 1967. 

She is said to be one of France's greatest women poets and is linked with Claudel, and Peguy (two of my favorite French writers). Hers is a philosophy of hope (Peguy's favorite virtue).

But this morning the Angel stirred the stone,

O You standing in the light,

Resurrected from the dawn to the feet color of time,

You who in the garden met Mary,

What will you do, gardener of Easter in bloom,

To defend me from Spring?

 (last stanza of Holy Saturday)