BigCityLit - New York Edition

Light and Questions Through the Window:
Masters of Christian Devotional Poetry

Introduction
by Nicholas Johnson
Senior Poetry Editor

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
-- W.B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium" (1928)

Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt?
Anonymous

Jesu, Lord, Welcome Thou Be
Anonymous

Jesus' Wounds So Wide
Anonymous

The Corpus Christi Carol
Anonymous

The General Prologue
Chaucer
(from The Canterbury Tales)

My Galley
Sir Thomas Wyatt

Sonnets (VII)
William Shakespeare

Holy Sonnets (I)
John Donne

Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness
John Donne

The Windows
George Herbert

When I Consider How My Light is Spent
John Milton

To the Accuser who is the God of This World
William Blake

It Is a Beauteous Evening
William Wordsworth

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
Sept. 3, 1802
William Wordsworth

The World Is Too Much With Us
William Wordsworth

On seeing the Elgin Marbles
John Keats

Invictus
William Ernest Henley

Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins

I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Judgment Day
Rainer Maria Rilke

The Kingdom of God
"In No Strange Land"
Francis Thompson

The Footsteps
Paul Valéry

Easter Hymn
A.E. Housman

Ash Wednesday (VI)
T. S. Eliot

The darkness drops again, but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle . . .
-- W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming" (1921)

~ ~ ~

Light and Questions Through the Window:
Masters of Christian Devotional Poetry

The term, "devotional," particularly as understood from the Donne tradition, includes both the sacred and the profane, songs of praise and of damnation, prayers and renunciations. Devotionals include a reverence for Nature, art, sexual and religious love. Their counterpart, possibly blasphemous, is succinctly expressed in William Blake's quip about Milton: "A true poet and of the Devil's Party without knowing it."

While religious belief offers comfort, hope in the worst of times, it does not preclude us from a rage "against the dying of the light." It does not stop atheists, true believers, or agnostics aswing in their hammocks, from asking the recurring, painful questions.

The Christian collection begins with "Were beth they biforen us weren?", a question children asked long before this anonymous 13th Century lyric was composed. It is no accident, no poetic device, that charges the physical world, where we abide, with substantive meaning; the change of season, the cycle of day and night, are not lost on us. We close with "Suffer me not to be separated. / And let my cry come unto Thee" from Eliot's "Ash Wednesday". We have framed the collection with two excerpts from Yeats, whose heart "fastened to a dying animal" is at once "sick with desire" for the divine and yet resigned that the second coming brings the Beast.

In this short selection of devotional poems, we clearly view the well-known strain of melancholia which runs through all of English literature, alongside its celebratory aspects and poems of thanksgiving. (Not solely English, we do include Rilke's "Judgment Day" and Valéry's "Footsteps".)

All of us know, "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land." We have heard Hopkins ask, "What is all this juice and joy?" We remember Cummings's exuberant "when the world is puddle-wonderful," and, among the many recurring questions, this one, "And shall the earth / Seem all of paradise that we shall know?" from Stevens's "Sunday Morning". These poems, without being preachy about it, illustrate what it means to be both window and "brittle crazy glass", [Geo. Herbert] and to look through windows to those who came before us.

-- NJ

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
-- W.B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium" (1928)

Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt?
Anonymous (c. 1275)

Were beth they biforen us weren,
Houndes ladden and havekes beren
And hadden feld and wode?
The riche levedies in hoere bour,
That wereden gold in hoere tressour,
With hoere brightte rode?

Eten and drounken, and maden hem glad;
Hoere lif was al with gamen ilad;
Men kneleden hem biforen;
They beren hem wel swithe heye;
And, in a twincling of an eye,
Hoere soules were forloren.

Were is that lawing and that song,
That trayling and that proude gong,
Tho havekes and tho houndes?
Al that joye is went away,
That wele is comen to "Weylaway!"
To manie harde stoundes.

Hoere paradis they nomen here,
And nou they lien in helle ifere;
The fuir hit brennes hevere.
Long is ay, and long is o,
Long is wy, and long is wo;
Thennes ne cometh they nevere.

Jesu, Lord, Welcome Thou Be
Anonymous

Jesu, Lord, welcome thou be,
In form of bread as I thee see.
Jesu, for thine Holy Name,
Shield me today from sin and shame.
As thou were of a maide born,
Thou let me never be forlorn.
Ne let me never for no sinne
Lese the joy that thou art inne.
Thou, rightwise King of all thing,
Grante me Shrifte, Housil and good ending,
Right beleve beforn my ded day,
And blisse with thee that leste shall ay.

Jesus' Wounds So Wide
Anonymous

Jesus' wounds so wide
Ben wells of life to the goode,
Namely the strond of his side,
that ran full breme on the Rode.

Yif thee list to drinke,
To flee fro the fiends of helle,
Bow thou down to the brinke,
And meekly taste of the welle.

The Corpus Christi Carol
Anonymous

Lully, lulley, lully, lulley,
the faucon hath borne my make away.
He bare him up, he bare him down,
He bare him into an orchard brown.
In that orchard there was an hall,
That was hanged with purple and pall.
And in that hall there was a bed,
It was hanged with gold so red.
And in that bed there lieth a knight,
His woundes bleeding day and night.
By that bedside kneeleth a may,
But she weepeth both night and day.
And by that bedside there standeth a stone,
Corpus Christus written thereon.

The General Prologue
Geoffrey Chaucer
(from The Canterbury Tales)

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrymages,
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kouthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.

My Galley
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503? - 1542)

My galley, charged with forgetfulness,
Through sharp seas in winter nights doth pass
'Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas!
That is my Lord, steereth with cruelness;
And every oar a thought in readiness,
As though that death were light in such a case.
An endless wind doth tear the sail apace
Of forcéd sighs, and trusty fearfulness;
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain,
Hath done the wearéd cords great hinderance,
Wreathéd with error and eke with ignorance.
The stars be hid that led me to this pain.
Drownéd is reason that should me comfort,
And I remain despairing of the port.

Sonnet VII
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Lo, in the orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty;
And having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage;
But when from highmost pitch with weary car,
Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,
The eyes, 'fore duteous, now converted are
From his low tract and look another way:
So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,
Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son.

Holy Sonnets (I)
John Donne (1633)

Thou hast made me, and shall Thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday.
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh.
Only Thou art above, and when towards Thee
By Thy leave I can look, I rise again;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me
That not one hour myself I can sustain.
Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And Thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.

Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness
John Donne (1635)

Since I am coming to that holy room
         Where, with Thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made Thy music; as I come
         I tune the instrument here at the door,
         And what I must do then, think here before.

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
         Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
         That this is my southwest discovery
         Per fretum febris, by these straits to die,

I joy, that in these straits, I see my West;
         For, through their currents yield return to none,
What shall my West hurt me? As West and East
         In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,
         So death doth touch the resurrection.

Is the Pacific Sea my home? Or are
         The Eastern riches? Is Jerusalem?
Anyan, and Magellan, and Gibraltar,
         All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them,
         Whether where Japhet dwelt, or Cham, or Shem.

We think that Paradise and Calvary,
         Christ's cross, and Adam's tree, stood in one place;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
         As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
         May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.

So, in his purple wrapped, receive me, Lord
         By these his thorns give me his other crown;
And, as to others' souls I preached Thy word,
         Be this my text, my sermon to mine own;
         Therefore that he may raise the Lord throws down.

The Windows
George Herbert (1633)

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
         He is a brittle crazy glass,
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
         This glorious and transcendent place
         To be a window, through Thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
Making thy life to shine within
The holy preacher's, then the light and glory
More reverend grows, and doth more win;
Which else shows wat'rish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colors and light in one,
         When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
         Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
         And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

When I Consider How My Light is Spent
John Milton (1652?)

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
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 mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

To the Accuser who is the God of This World
William Blake (1757-1827)

Truly, My Satan, thou art but a Dunce,
And dost not know the Garment from the Man.
Every Harlot was a Virgin once,
Nor can'st thou ever change Kate into Nan.

Tho' thou art Worship'd by the Names Divine
Of Jesus & Jehovah, thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Night's decline,
The lost Traveller's Dream under the Hill.

It Is a Beauteous Evening
William Wordsworth (1802)

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the sea:
Listen! the mighty being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder--everlastingly.
Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worship'st at the temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
Sept. 3, 1802
William Wordsworth

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

The World Is Too Much With Us
William Wordsworth (1806)

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.

On seeing the Elgin Marbles
John Keats (1795-1821)

My spirit is too weak--mortality
         Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep
         And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
         Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep
         that I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
         Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
         That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of Old Time--with a billowy main--
         A sun--a shadow of a magnitude.

Invictus
William Ernest Henley (1875)

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1877)

Glory be to God for dappled things--
         For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
                  For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
         Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plow;
                  And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
         Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
                  With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                           Praise him.

I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1885)

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours, I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Judgment Day
From the Writings of a Monk
Rainer Maria Rilke (1906)
(excerpt)

They will all arise as from a bath
out of their yielding graves;
for each believes in last reunion,
and awful, graceless, is their faith.

Speak softly, God! One might think
Your kingdom's trumpet sounded;
next to its tone no depth is deep:
with all the ages rising from the stones
and all the vanished reappearing
in rumpled linen and fragile bones
misshapen by the weight of sod.
It shall be a marvelous returning
to a marvelous home and hearth;
even those who never knew You will cry out
and clamor for a portion of Your glory:
like bread and wine.

. . .

...How else do You expect to bear this day,
longer than the length of every day combined,
with its horrendous hushed-up singing,
and when the angels press about You,
like so many questions,
with their dreadful flap
of wings?

. . .

And if the old men with the ample beards
who attend You in Your greatest triumphs,
merely sway their whitened crowns,
and if the women who fed Your son,
and those he led astray, the comrades,
and all the virgins who swore him troths:
the lucid birches in Your darkened garden,--
who would help You, if they all fell mute?

. . .

Son!
Would You, Father, then command Your issue,
in the quiet company of Magdalene,
to descend to those
who wish to die again?

This would be Your final edict,
the final dispensation and the final scorn.
But then everything were over:
heaven, judgment day and You.
The wrap about the world's enigma,
enshrouded for so long,
falls away with this one clasp.

. . .

The Kingdom of God
"In No Strange Land"
Francis Thompson (1913)

O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air--
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!--
The drifts of pinions, would be hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;--
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many splendoured thing.
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry;--and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry;--clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

The Footsteps
Paul Valéry (1922)

Your footsteps, issue of my silence,
slowly make their hallowed way
chill and soundless to the bed
where I've kept constant vigil.

Oh, Pure One, Shadow Divine,
how soft Your tread in memory!
Gads! Every blessing, I've surmised,
has come to me on these bare feet!

If with lips inclined
You mean to satisfy
the tenant of my mind
by feeding it a kiss,

don't rush this tender grace imbued,
sweet state of being and not being.
For I have lived awaiting all of you,
my heart but imprint of your many feet.

Easter Hymn
A.E. Housman (1936)

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

Ash Wednesday
T. S. Eliot (1930)

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

~ ~ ~

The darkness drops again, but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle . . .
-- W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming" (1921)