Category Archives: Poetry

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
      Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
      To be redeemed from fire by fire.

      Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
      We only live, only suspire
      Consumed by either fire or fire.

T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets, Little Gidding, IV

Forebear to deem the Chronicler unwise,
Ungentle, or untouched by seemly ruth,
Who, gathering up all that Time’s envious tooth
Has spared of sound and grave realities,
Firmly rejects those dazzling flatteries,
Dear as they are to unsuspecting Youth,
That might have drawn down Clio from the skies
To vindicate the majesty of truth.
Such was her office while she walked with men,
A Muse, who, not unmindful of her Sire,
All-ruling Jove, whate’er the theme might be,
Revered her Mother, sage Mnemosyne,
And taught her faithful servants how the lyre
Should animate, but not mislead, the pen.

William Wordsworth
from Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837

‘Launch out into the deep,’ Christ spake of old
      To Peter: and he launched into the deep;
      Strengthened should tempest wake which lay asleep,
Strengthened to suffer heat or suffer cold.

Thus, in Christ’s Prescience: patient to behold
      A fall, a rise, a scaling Heaven’s high steep;
      Prescience of Love, which deigned to overleap
The mire of human errors manifold.

Lord, Lover of Thy Peter, and of him
   Beloved with craving of a humbled heart
      Which eighteen hundred years have satisfied;
Hath he his throne among Thy Seraphim
   Who love? or sits he on a throne apart,
      Unique, near Thee, to love Thee human-eyed?

Christina Georgina Rossetti
before 1893

                    1

The irresponsive silence of the land,
     The irresponsive silence of the sea,
     Speak both one message of sense to me:—
‘Aloof, aloof, we stand aloof; so stand
Thou too aloof bound with the flawless band
     Of inner solitude; we bind not thee;
     But who from thy self-chain shall set thee free?
What heart shall touch thy heart?
What hand thy hand?’—
And I am sometimes proud and sometimes meek,
     And sometimes I remember days of old
When fellowship seemed not so far to seek
     And all the world and I seemed much less cold,
     And at the rainbow’s foot lay surely gold,
And hope felt strong and life itself not weak.

Continue reading “The Thread of Life”

A bitter wind gusts in the face,
skritching leaves along the walk.
Soak-sodden pants whip at the legs
of the dying man who balked
at love and faith throughout his life.
Now with his final gasped breath born,
unknown, unwept, unloved, unmourned,
no child, no friend, no loved wife,
and regretting lost days gone,
but most his waste of time and place,
he falls his way to that clayey home,
bereft entire of both love and grace.

O Lord, when Thou didst call me, didst Thou know
     My heart disheartened thro’ and thro’,
     Still hankering after Egypt full in view
Where cucumbers and melons grow?
                                        —’Yea, I knew.’—

But, Lord, when Thou didst choose me, didst Thou know
     How marred I was and withered too,
     Not rose for sweetness nor for virtue rue,
Timid and rash, hasty and slow?
                                        —’Yea, I knew.’—

My Lord, when Thou didst love me, didst Thou know
     How weak my efforts were, how few,
     Tepid to love and impotent to do,
Envious to reap while slack to sow?
                                        —’Yea, I knew.’—

Good Lord, Who knowest what I cannot know,
     And dare not know, my false, my true,
     My new, my old; Good Lord, arise and do
If loving Thou hast known me so.
                                        —’Yea, I knew.’—

Christina Georgina Rossetti
Before 1893

Lord, grant us wills to trust Thee with such aim
     Of hope and passionate craving of desire
     That we may mount aspiring, and aspire
Still while we mount; rejoicing in Thy Name,
Yesterday, this day, day by day the Same:
     So sparks fly upward scaling heaven by fire,
     Still mount and still attain not, yet draw nigher,
While they have being, to their fountain flame.
To saints who mount, the bottomless abyss
     Is as mere nothing, they have set their face
     Onward and upward toward that blessed place
     Where man rejoices with his God, and soul
With soul, in the unutterable kiss
     Of peace for every victor at the goal.

Christina Georgina Rossetti, before 1893

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

William Butler Yeats, 1914

The sylvan slopes with corn-clad fields
Are hung, as if with golden shields,
Bright trophies of the sun!
Like a fair sister of the sky,
Unruffled doth the blue lake lie,
The mountains looking on.

And, sooth to say, yon vocal grove,
Albeit uninspired by love,
By love untaught to ring,
May well afford to mortal ear
An impulse more profoundly dear
Than music of the Spring.

For that from turbulence and heat
Proceeds, from some uneasy seat
In nature’s struggling frame,
Some region of impatient life:
And jealousy, and quivering strife,
Therein a portion claim.

This, this is holy;—while I hear
These vespers of another year,
This hymn of thanks and praise,
My spirit seems to mount above
The anxieties of human love,
And earth’s precarious days.

But list!—though winter storms be nigh,
Unchecked is that soft harmony:
There lives Who can provide
For all His creatures; and in Him,
Even like the radiant Seraphim,
These choristers confide.

William Wordsworth
September 1819

Golden-winged, silver-winged
     Winged with flashing flame,
Such a flight of birds I saw,
     Birds without a name:
Singing songs in their own tongue—
     Song of songs—they came.

     One to another calling,
          Each answering each,
     One to another calling
     In their proper speech:
High above my head they wheeled,
          Far out of reach.

On wings of flame they went and came
     With a cadenced clang:
     Their silver wings tinkled,
     Their golden wings rang;
The wind it whistled through their wings
     Where in heaven they sang.

     They flashed and they darted
     Awhile before mine eyes,
Mounting, mounting, mounting still,
     In haste to scale the skies,
Birds without a nest on earth,
     Birds of Paradise.

     Where the moon riseth not
     Nor sun seeks the west,
     There to sing their glory
     Which they sing at rest,
     There to sing their love-song
     When they sing their best:—

     Not in any garden
     That mortal foot hath trod,
Not in any flowering tree
     That springs from earthly sod,
But in the garden where they dwell,
     The Paradise of God.

Christina Georgina Rossetti
14 November 1864