Thursday, October 7
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Such glorious words from the pen of that deskbound wild knight!
A happy Lepanto Day to our esteemed blogging confrere Don Juan Victorio, whose namesake was the heartthrob Hapsburg love-child commander of the Holy League forces in that noble battle. See also here, where he is listed as a "famous Hispanic," which, though I should love to claim him as one of my own, is surely stretching it since his dad Charles V was a native speaker of Flemish. Peruse Lepanto facts from the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia. Beautiful photographs of the harbor of Nafpaktos, off which the battle was fought. And of course, no feast of the Holy Rosary would be complete without a reading of G.K. Chesterton's poem, the subject of an essay I wrote while in Rome.
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