In this way he was unlike his near contemporary, the American poet William Alexander Percy (1885-1942), who suffered a similar moral conflict between his love for boys and his deep Christian convictions, and who found his solace in the Roman Catholic practice of the confessional and absolution. It is significant that De Mérode's first large poetic project after his release from prison was a verse retelling of the story of the repentance and forgiveness of the Prodigal Son and his homecoming in De verloren zoon (The lost son, 1928). At the same time, his last openly published poems to a boy, the sonnets in the series "De Rouwtoorts" (The mourning torch, written 1926), written to a dead boy--or one now "dead" to him--opened his collection De lichtstreep (The shaft of light) in 1929.

A full analysis of how the themes of boy-love and Christianity play out in De Mérode's work is beyond the scope of this note, but we might briefly look at just one of the strongest poems in which that theme finds expression, "De Page, II" (The Page, II), from De overgave. The sonnet sets up a parallel between the relation of a Christian to his God and the relation of a medieval or renaissance page to his master--a relation that we know, silently, to have often had an erotic or boy-love dimension (and which was also central to a number of W.A. Percy's poems).

In the first line of De Mérode's sonnet the young page "luistert naar zijns heeren hooge wil" (listens to his lord's supreme will). The antiquated Dutch genitive construction "zijns heeren" is not merely a conscious throwback to the grammar of earlier times, helping to establish the atmosphere of the poem.  Because genitive constructions of this sort persist in Dutch even today in solemn religious usage for God (not unlike the use of the otherwise obsolete forms Thee and Thou in English), it also creates the first step in the parallel between the human relationship in the poem and that of the Christian and God.

The parallel between the two relationships is further developed in the first quatrain as we are told the page listens "without understanding the wisdom of his [the master's] plans" (even as God's wisdom is beyond human understanding).  Furthermore, the page does so "his eyes...shining large and calm," in the trust that also characterizes a Christian's relation to God.

In the second quatrain we are told that it is the gracious will of "zijns heeren" that on the morrow the page will no longer be "the small, dear companion, but may, as an equal, stand next to his master" in the coming battle, side by side with the man to whom he looks up. In the third quatrain, De Mérode writes, "Now comes the great time of conflict and courage, sacrifice and cheerful giving...in a supreme endeavor," language as fitting for Christian calling as for the battlefield (or, by the presence of "cheerful giving," almost more fitting).

Yet, after this stirring reveille, in a note of painful reflection that increasingly comes to characterize De Mérode's meditations on the cost to be paid when God lays his hand upon his servant, but also both reflecting on the page's future as he leaves boyhood behind, and explicitly closing the parallel, in the final couplet he concludes,

O, knapentrouw is zuiver en is goed,
Maar mannen dienen bitter met hun lven.
[O, a boy's trust is pure and good,
but the wages of a man's life are bitter.]

The feeling of the poem is connected with that of, for instance, John 15:14 and its surrounding discourse, of our becoming not servants but equals with Christ in his Kingdom, and yet of what the cost of that Kingdom will be for us--as of course the bitterness of the Cross also looms over the whole of the discourse, a bitterness we share when we take up our cross.

Unlike much of the British "Uranian" and American "Catamite" poetry from the same period, a work like this cannot be dismissed as "boy-love propaganda." Its subject is not boys themselves, or the boylove relation itself, but rather it uses the experience of the boy's trust and admiration for the man and the man's nurture and care for the boy to illuminate the experience, the exaltation and pain, of the deepest religious faith and commitment.

Donald Mader is assistant pastor at the Pauluskerk (St. Paul's Church) in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and is a doctoral candidate in Literature at the University of Amsterdam.  He has written numerous articles on Christianity and sexuality, and is a regular contributor to Paraklesis.