Poems for the spiritual journey
The Heart's Time by Janet Morley gives a poem a day for Lent and Easter. And it's a good resource for spiritual reflection in Holy Week.
My favourite poem is 'I am the great sun' which draws upon the Reproaches of Holy Week and the 'I Am' sayings of John's gospel.
Anyone else got a good recommendation?
"I am the great sun
From a Normandy crucifix of 1632
... [heavy edit to rectify copyright infringement] ...
Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me"
Charles Causley.
Edit: copyright. Link will follow
My favourite poem is 'I am the great sun' which draws upon the Reproaches of Holy Week and the 'I Am' sayings of John's gospel.
Anyone else got a good recommendation?
"I am the great sun
From a Normandy crucifix of 1632
... [heavy edit to rectify copyright infringement] ...
Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me"
Charles Causley.
Edit: copyright. Link will follow
Comments
*like the honour of "DFC and Bar"
Now I am glad that I read that poem: 'I greet Him the days that I meet Him and bless when I understand.' Yes.
Please note: it is absolutely a terrible way to make the Baby Jesus and Admins and Cthulu and Who Knows Who Else cry to quote slabs of poetry still in copyright. For safety's sake I suggest the poet needs tohave been dead since Moses was a baby for it to be okay to print his/her words. The actual law, generally, across the globe, is the copyright expires approximately fifty years after the author's death ... but even that can sometimes be extended.
Basically then .. a line ... a link ... then go and cradle happy thoughts in the bath or somewhere.
Copyright infringements will be dealt with severely
/Hosting
PS ... the OP poem can be seen at https://stmargaretsprestwich.wordpress.com/2017/05/29/i-am-the-great-sun-charles-causleyjussi-chydenius/ ... and it's predawn here in the antipodes so I would need more coffee to that link look sleek and sexy
Probly not and certainly in Another Country
Another thing that makes the Baby Jesus (or at least the Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman) cry is to refer to him as "GM Hopkins".
We were introduced to Pied Beauty and God’s Grandeur at school at the age of nine. Yes, really! I’m not sure whether sprung rhythm makes learning by heart any easier or not at that stage, especially when part of said requirement was to copy it out from memory, commas, semicolons and all!
It’s not dampened my love of Hopkin’s poetry, thankfully, even if it had taken many years to get to that point.
Really love some of his poems. Great for sermons, too.
With reference to the Grandeur of God. Years ago I used to listen to an anthem on an old cassette tape of a cathedral choir singing to the words of this poem. Except I didn't know what they were singing: I kept hearing the words: The world is charged with a glandular God, a glandular God....' In a funny way I think Hopkins would have approved.
Now's the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild
If Mary had been full of reason
There'd have been no room for the Child.
She identified the losses well as I felt them: "Sorrow like a ceaseless rain
Beats upon my heart.
People twist and scream in pain, --
Dawn will find them still again;
This has neither wax nor wane,...." (Sorrow). First Fig from Figs and Thistles from the same pen made me believe I might live again. If my candle must "out, out" like Macbeth says I will effing light it brightly.
Sonnet XIV strikes me with this:
At this time of year I'm also partial to: from La Corona - Crucifying.
And finally, if this is not read at my funeral I will haunt everyone present for eternity...I hope I have some chains.
Do you like The Spiritual Canticle of St John of the Cross?
Stanza XI
Reveal your presence,
and may the vision of your beauty be my death;
for the sickness of love
is not cured,
save by your very presence and image.
Thank you for bringing it to mind. I gave away my books before I moved over here last year...I think I need to replace my copy or find a webpage source.
When I unpacked here five months ago I found I had three copies of Hopkins’ poetry. Perhaps I needed to replace a misplaced copy so bought another. Twice.
I love the imagery and colour of Stewart Henderson’s poetry. The writing of the late lamented John O’Donahue and much of the output of the Iona Community have also played a significant part in my spiritual journey.
James Weldon Johnson. :notworthy:
https://gratefulness.org/resource/an-african-elegy/
I found it in Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry, an incredibly well-chosen collection to this perhaps-naive reader.
The anthology also looks quite good. There’s only one or two changes I’d make, not that I know anything, but thanks for the recommendation!
So pleased to see Geoffrey Hill mentioned. I found his Mercian Poems and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy in my 20s and have read him ever since, although I have't yet tackled his last work The Book of Baruch.
He reminds me at times of a more cerebral, ironic even despairing George Herbert. His later poems are much happier than his early work, but I prefer the early poems.
Here's a favourite of mine from the Poetry Foundation website, Tenebrae.
For some time I've been working through issues to do with the poetics of disability and questioning what I believe I am doing when I pray for healing in intercessory prayer. For some years now, I have lived with visual disability, with numerous sight issues and complete blindness in my right eye (rubeotic glacoma). I don't pray for healing of my own disability because I have found that acceptance of this limitation is more helpful for me. And I don't feel less than whole because of being partially sighted.
Larry Eigner wrote over 3 000 poems on a manual Royal typewriter with the thumb and index finger of his right hand. Disabled by a forceps injury at birth, Eigner lived with cerebral palsy his whole life. His poems are unsentimental, oblique, tough-minded. Larry Eiger's great preoccupation was motion observed from a place of not moving, how to respond and interact without being able to get up and go to someone, reach out a hand or dance with a loved one.
Larry Eiger's to make myself a world
George Herbert is another perennial favourite, and I have a soft spot for John Keble's Christian Year in its "Wordsworth-and-water" way. A couple of Wilfred Owen's poems - Abraham and S.I.W. have remained etched on my brain since I was 17.
Other than that poetry is a reasonably hopeless cause with me.
I loved his "The Windhover (to Christ our Lord)" for the sheer sound of it.
Not it is not particularly Christian nor is much of Mary Oliver's work but it speaks to my journey.
David Jones deserves to be constantly mentioned, as often as possible, and the Anathemata particularly so. My taste aligns very much with yours on this.
There's s brief biographical mention of how he survives the Somme and is dodging about during a lull in bombardment collecting firewood and looks into a small cattle byre hoping for dry wood. Inside he sees a Catholic priest saying Mass with ammunition boxes for an altar, silent men kneeling in the cramped darkness. For Jones, this glimpse of an act that would not end the war or win the war, that was unnecessary and 'useless' except in a symbolic sense, would be the impulse leading to his conversion and insight into what is 'set apart' as art and sacrament, what will continue on through war and the collapse of civilizations, the need for worship.
The poem I thought about when I heard Mary Oliver had died was The Summer Day with its famous closing lines:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
And because I grow tomatoes from seed in egg boxes each spring, I know all about the trepidation of nurturing tiny seedlings facing frost or mildew...
The fact that it is a succession of quite short statements with stopping stresses makes the flow of ‘But swear by thyself…’ run like a fanfare before coming home to rest in ‘I fear no more.’
Link to radio article: https://cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-for-november-3-2019-1.5344138/the-luminous-companionship-of-william-blake-1.5344173