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Article: Charles Kingsley: divine love, divine order.
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- September 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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My mother, when vexed by some family misfortune, was wont to console herself by murmuring: "Men must work, and women must weep, and the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep." It never occurred to me, until I was fully grown, to seek out the original of those words. They come from a poem, "The Three Fishers," by a Victorian country parson, Charles Kingsley. The poet had spent his late childhood in the little fishing hamlet of Clovelly in North Devon, where his father, also a country parson, was rector of the church. Fishing was perilous work, and it was not unusual for men of the village to be lost at sea.
In the poem, three fishermen go sailing "away to the ...