By Melissa Schubert

If you’ve never encountered the poetry of Richard Wilbur, one of the most distinguished living Christian poets in the U. S., you might consider picking up his recently published Collected Poems 1943-2004. While much of twentieth century poetry contemplates the anxieties of our age or confesses the tumult of the individual psyche, Wilbur’s lyrics are often marked by a delight that is neither sentimental nor superficial. One of his earliest poems, the sonnet Praise in Summer, caught my eye recently.

     Obscurely yet most surely called to praise
     As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
     The hills are heavens full of branching ways
     Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
     I said the trees are mines in air, I said,
     See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
     And then I wondered why this mad instead
     Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
     Such savour’s in this wrenching things awry.
     Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
     The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
     Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
     That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
     And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?

Wilbur opens by turning the world topsy-turvy with metaphors, emphasizing in his reversals the way things are not. He proceeds to reproach himself for this, asking sharp questions of his imagination, aspiring to purify his praise. And in his final lines, as resolution, he offers a celebration of things as they are.

Click here for the full article.

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest, -
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mighiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway, -
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,
When mercy seasons justice.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Those holy fields
Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet
Which, fourteen hundred years ago, were nail’d
For our advantage on the bitter cross.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Nothing can vex the Devil more
Than the name of him whom we adore.
Therefore doth it delight me best
To stand in the choir among the rest,
With the great organ trumpeting
Through its metallic tubes, and sing:
Et verbum caro factum est!
These words the devil cannot endure,
For he knoweth their meaning well!
Him they trouble and repel,
Us they comfort and allure,
And happy it were, if our delight
Were as great as his affright!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

“Et verbum caro factum est” is Latin for ”And the Word became flesh.” 

This isn’t death - it’s glory!
It is not dark - it’s light!
It isn’t stumbling, groping,
Or even faith - it’s sight!
This isn’t grief - it’s having
My last tear wiped away;
It’s sunrise - it’s the morning
Of my eternal day!

This isn’t even praying -
It’s speaking face to face;
Listening and glimpsing
The wonders of His grace.
This is the end of pleading
For strength to bear my pain;
Not even pain’s dark memory
Will ever live again.

How did I bear the earth-life
Before I knew this rapture
Of meeting face to face
The One who sought me, saved me,
And kept me by His grace!

Martha Snell Nicholson  

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life:
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us - to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Chisel in hand stood a sculptor boy
   With his marble block before him,
And his eyes lit up with a smile of joy,
   As an angel-dream passed over him.

He carved the dream on that shapeless stone,
   With many a sharp incision;
With heaven’s own light the sculpture shone, 
   He’d caught that angel-vision.

Children of life are we, as we stand
   With our lives uncarved before us,
Waiting the hour when, at God’s command,
   Our life-dream shall pass over us.

If we carve it then on the yielding stone,
   With many a sharp incision;
Its heavenly beauty shall be our own,
   Our lives, that angel-vision.

George Washington Doane (1799-1859)

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy’or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

John Donne (1572-1631)

I saw a flower fade and die,
Upon my garden wall;
I turned away with futile sigh,
And left it - that was all.

I gasped the desert alkali,
I reeled by whitened bones;
The water-hole I found was dry,
I fell upon its stones.

A skylark sang above my trench,
I hear him calling still;
But ‘neath him was the battle stench
And crosses on the hill.

I loved a maiden wonderous fair,
And clasped her to my breast;
I left her in the cold grave there,
And weeping is the rest.

I came upon an empty cross,
An open tomb beside;
He whispered to my pain and loss,
“I conquered - Death has died.”

Daniel A. Poling