In keeping with the tradition of previous Easter editions of the Saturday Night Theologian, I want to focus on the arts an inspiration during this season of the church year. This year I will look at selected poems that speak to me about themes related to Easter.
"I have loved you with an everlasting love," says the Lord through Jeremiah. Jesus' death on the cross is the greatest example of love that the world has ever known, and love is the most powerful of emotions that humans have. Maybe that's why poets write so many lines on the subject.
We will look at samples of love poetry from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and, of course, the Bard himself. Lest some protest that poetry that speaks of love between two people offers a poor analogy for the love between God and humanity, I invite them to read the Song of Songs in the Bible, or the letters of Abelard and Heloise.
Indeed this very love which is my boast,
And which, when rising up from breast to brow,
Doth crown me with a ruby large enow
To draw men's eyes and prove the inner cost,--
This love even, all my worth, to the uttermost,
I should not love withal, unless that thos
Hadst set me an example, shown me how,
When first thine earnest eyes with mine were crossed
And love called Love. And thus, I cannot speak
Of love even, as a good thing of my own:
Thy soul hath snatched up mine all faint and weak,
And placed it by thee on a golden throne,--
And that I love (O soul, we must be meek!)
Is by thee only, whom I love alone.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Sonnet #12 (From the Portuguese)"
Butterflies are white and blue
In this field we wander through.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Death comes in a day or two.
All the things we ever knew
Will be ashes in that hour:
Mark the transient butterfly,
How he hangs upon the flower.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Suffer me to cherish youy
Till the dawn is in the sky.
Whether I be false or true,
Death comes in a day or two.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Mariposa"
Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their bodies' force,
Some in their garments though new-fangled ill:
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse.
And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest,
But these particulars are not my measure,
All these I better in one general best.
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be:
And having thee, of all men's pride I boast.
Wretched in this alone, that thou mayest take
All this away, and me most wretched make.
William Shakespeare, "Sonnet #91"
The Lord is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation." The resurrection of Jesus Christ symbolizes God's deliverance of the human race from the mire of sin and despair. If only we would take full advantage of God's marvelous gift!
In the poems below, Walt Whitman express his anguish at the death of Abraham Lincoln, whose guidance through the Civil War and emancipation of the slaves made him a secular savior in the eyes of many; Whitman's lament over Lincoln is probably similar to the emotions the disciples must have expressed to one another on that first Good Friday. Next, Lord Byron draws on the biblical story of the miraculous demise of Sennacherib's to describe divine deliverance. Finally, Francis Thompson describes a modern Qoheleth pursued by the Hound of Heaven who will not let him go.
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Walt Whitman, "O Captain! My Captain!"
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed:
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!
And there lay the steed with his nostrils all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride:
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.
And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail;
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!
Lord Byron, "The Destruction of Sennacherib"
I fled Him down the nights and down the days
I fled Him down the arches of the years
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind, and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped and shot precipitated
Adown titanic glooms of chasm-ed fears
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase and unperturb-ed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat--and a Voice beat,
More instant than the feet:
"All things betray thee who betrayest Me."
I pleaded, outlaw-wise,
By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
trellised with inter-twining charities;
(For though I knew His love who follow-ed,
Yet was I sore adread
lest having Him, I should have nought beside )
But, if one little casement parted wide,
The gust of his approach would clash it to.
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clang-ed bars,
Fretted to dulcet jars
and silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.
I said to dawn---Be sudden; to eve---be soon--
With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over
From this tremendous Lover!
Float thy vague veil about me lest He see!
I tempted all His servitors but to find
My own betrayal in their constancy,
In faith to Him, their fickleness to me,
Their traitorous trueness and their loyal deceit.
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue,
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind,
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue,
Or whether, thunder-driven,
They clanged His chariot thwart a heaven,
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn of their feet,
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
Still with unhurrying chase and unperturb-ed pace ,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following feet, and a Voice above their beat---
"Nought shelters thee who wilt not shelter Me."
I sought no more that after which I strayed
In face of man or maid;
But still within the little children's eyes
Seems something, something that replies,
They at least are for me, surely for me!
But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair,
With dawning answers there,
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.
"Come then, ye other children, Nature's---share
with me, said I, your delicate fellowship;
Let me greet you lip to lip,
Let me twine with you caresses,
Wantoning
with our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses,
Banqueting
with her in her wind-walled palace,
Underneath her azured dais,
Quaffing, as your taintless way is,
From a chalice, lucent weeping out of the dayspring."
So it was done:
I , in their delicate fellowship was one--
Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies,
I knew all the swift importings on the wilful face of
skies;
I knew how the clouds arise,
Spum-ed of the wild sea-snortings.
All that's born or dies,
Rose and drooped with,
Made them shapers of mine own moods, or wailful, or divine---
With them joyed and was bereaven.
I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day's dead sanctities.
I laughed in the morning's eyes.
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,
Heaven and I wept together,
and its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine.
Against the red throb of its sunset heart,
I laid my own to beat
And share commingling heat;
But not by that, by that was eased my human smart.
In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.
For ah! we know what each other says,
these things and I; In sound I speak,
Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.
Nature, poor step-dame, cannot slake my drougth;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue-bosomed veil of sky, and show me
The breasts o' her tenderness:
Never did any milk of hers once bless
My thirsting mouth.
Nigh and nigh draws the chase,
with unperturb-ed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
And past those nois-ed Feet,
A Voice comes yet more fleet:
"Lo, nought contentst thee who content'st not Me."
Naked, I wait thy Love's uplifted stroke!
My harness, piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
And smitten me to my knee,
I am defenceless, utterly.
I slept, methinks, and woke,
And slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours,
And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
I stand amidst the dust o' the mounded years---
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst like sunstarts on a stream.
Yea, faileth now even dream the dreamer
and the lute, the lutanist;
Even the linked fantasies in whose blossomy twist,
I swung the earth, a trinket at my wrist,
Have yielded, cords of all too weak account
For earth, with heavy grief so overplussed.
Ah! is thy Love indeed
a weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?
Ah! must---
Designer Infinite!
Ah! must thou char the wood 'ere Thou canst limn with it ?
My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust;
And now my heart is as a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
From the dank thoughts that shiver
Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
Such is. What is to be?
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind ?
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds,
Yet ever and anon, a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity,
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimps-ed turrets, slowly wash again;
But not 'ere Him who summoneth
I first have seen, enwound
With glooming robes purpureal; cypress crowned:
His Name I know, and what his trumpet saith.
Whether man's heart or life it be that yield thee harvest,
Must thy harvest fields be dunged with rotten death ?
Now of that long pursuit,
Comes on at hand the bruit.
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
"And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
Strange, piteous, futile thing;
Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He said),
"And human love needs human meriting---
How hast thou merited,
Of all Man's clotted clay, the dingiest clot?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee, I did'st but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come."
Halts by me that footfall;
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee who dravest Me."
Francis Thompson, "The Hound of Heaven"
"Seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God." If the crucifixion demonstrates God's immanence, the resurrection demonstrates God's transcendence. What is there in the world around us that causes us to think about God?
Federico Garcia Lorca offers a prayer of thanksgiving to God for the inspiration that he finds in an unlikely place, a dead bird. John Milton could have rejected the God who made him blind; instead, he sees in his blindness a reminder that God requires of us faithful service, in whatever capacity we can serve. The last poem in this group describes a young pilot's ecstasy at soaring in the clouds; John Gillespie Magee died in an airplane crash only months after writing his poem, which continues to inspire many today, pilots and non-pilots alike.
Thank thee dear distant
God & Father mine
who gives me unimagined lessons in poesis.
Oh holy holy holy
who does show the godly
hour of death,
unveiled, unto my soul!
Give me the dignity
this dear bird had, the rhythm
of its open wings
before the dark.
Oh holy holy holy
whom I ask this night to grant me
water for my eyes, & oh
thy shadow for my cry.
Federico Garcia Lorca, "Thanksgiving"
When I consider how my light is spent
E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and waite.
John Milton, "On His Blindness"
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew.
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee, "High Flight"
"Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said." The amazement and wonder that the first disciples felt upon learning of Jesus' resurrection continues today among modern disciples of Jesus. The resurrection is the central divine mystery of the Christian faith.
Khalil Gibran, in his epic poem The Prophet, describes religion as a mystery that permeates all of life and affects every action. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, explores the mystery of the divine transcendence that is revealed through divine immanence in the world around us. Finally, John Clare, an English poet who spent his adult life battling with mental illness and was confined for years in an asylum, expresses his conviction that despite his illness, God cares for him.
And an old priest said, "Speak to
us of Religion."
And he said:
Have I spoken this day of aught else?
Is not religion all deeds and all reflection,
And that which is neither deed nor reflection,
but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul,
even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?
Who can separate his faith from his actions,
or his belief from his occupations?
Who can spread his hours before him, saying,
"This for God and this for myself;
This for my soul,
and this other for my body?"
All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.
He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.
The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.
And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.
The freest song comes not through bars and wires.
And he to whom worshipping is a window, to open but also to shut,
has not yet visited the house of his soul
whose windows are from dawn to dawn.
Your daily life is your temple and your religion.
Whenever you enter into it take with you your all.
Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute,
The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight.
For in revery you cannot rise above your achievements
nor fall lower than your failures.
And take with you all men:
For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes
nor humble yourself lower than their despair.
And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.
Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.
And look into space;
you shall see Him walking in the cloud,
outstretching His arms in the lightning
and descending in rain.
You shall see Him smiling in flowers,
then rising and waving His hands in trees.
Kahlil Gibran, "Religion"
The sun, the moons, the stars, the seas, the hills and
the plains--
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?
Is not the Vision He? tho' He be not that which He seems?
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?
Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why;
For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel 'I am I?'
Glory about thee, without thee; and thou fulfillest thy doom,
Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendour and gloom.
Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet--
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.
God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice,
For if He by law the thunder is yet His voice.
Law is God, say some: no God at all, says the fool;
For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool;
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;
But if we could see and hear, this Vision--were it not He?
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Higher Pantheism"
I am: yet what I am none cares or knows
My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self-consumer of my woes--
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied, stifled throes--
And yet I am, and live--like vapors tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best,
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes, where man hath never trod,
A place where woman never smiled or wept--
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.
John Clare, "I Am"