God. Real. Right.

Sowers, sowers, sowing seeds
Little black birds scattering
Rue and thistle
Cure and weed
Some strewn with ambition
Some mislaid carelessly

Cement scrapers tearing virgin skies
Bear spoiled fruit from sterile thighs
The lights, bright suns of wind spun strength
Ignite the night’s quiet suffering

Each desire, each created thing
Bows submissive at a throne
At inheritance’s intoxicating persuasive drone
The losers win and the winner dies
And make light in their respective prize

Royal royalty of life
Are masked in willful compromise
Of denial, “restraint,” pity, heartbreak, and neglect.

Life is the kingdom of the disposed and averse.

Philip Creamer, 2008

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To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
1918

Comment:
I know of no more illuminating analogies of the Christ event than the ones unified by Hopkins in this poem: the majestic and diving falcon, the rescuing knight/horseman, the broken ground, and the glowing broken coals fallen from a fire.

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by Robert Frost

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
1942

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Publishing this poem accomplishes the goal it states in the ante-penultimate (a great term for “third from the end”) line. The poem itself reflects the take-and-give attitude with which all followers follow Jesus. And, yes, Herbert deliberately wrote the shape into the poem as he did with at least one other, “Easter Wings.”

c. 1633

Most importantly, notice what kind of altar is raised (more…)

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This poem became my favorite when I first read it in college. It has remained so since. Ignore the numbers, of course. They are only provided to relate line-for-line with the paraphrase which follows. The paraphrase is an interpreted, applied, reading which may help clarify the sonnet for those who struggle a bit with Donne’s still-Elizabethan English. But no paraphrase can even approach catching the many subtleties Donne writes into the fourteenth of his Holy Sonnets. Click “read the rest of this entry” to see the paraphrase. Readers should know that in his youth and early poetry, before his personal commitment to Christ, Donne was indiscreet to say the least. So his pleadings come from an earnest humility and a desire to be transformed.

Holy Sonnet XIV

1. Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
2. As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
3. That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
4. Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
5. I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,
6. Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
7. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
8. But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
9. Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
10. But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
11. Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,
12. Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
13. Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
14. Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

c. 1609

(more…)

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