greykit.poetry — #religion
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame
Everything mortal does one thing — selves, goes itself, cries What I do is me — and the sestet turns that on the just man, in whose limbs and eyes Christ plays in ten thousand places.
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1918
[gerard-manley-hopkins]
Carrion Comfort
One of the terrible sonnets: a refusal to feast on despair, and a wrestling match with a lion-limbed God that the speaker only afterwards realises he was cheering — that night, that year of now done darkness, I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
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1862
[christina-rossetti]
A Better Resurrection
No wit, no words, no tears; a heart like a stone, a faded leaf, a broken bowl — each stanza handing the ruin over to be remade: cast in the fire the perished thing, and melt and remould it.
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1673
[john-milton]
Sonnet XIX: When I consider how my light is spent
Blind before half his days are done, the poet asks whether God exacts day-labour of a man he has left in the dark — and patience answers before the question is finished: they also serve who only stand and waite.
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1633
[george-herbert]
Easter Wings
A pattern poem whose lines thin to Most poore and Most thinne and then widen again, so that each stanza is printed in the shape of a wing: the fall itself furthers the flight.
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1633
[john-donne]
Holy Sonnet X: Death be not proud
Death is addressed to its face and steadily demoted — from dreadful power to a slave of fate and chance, no better than poppy or charms at bringing sleep — until the last line kills it outright.
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1633
[john-donne]
Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter my heart, three person’d God
A prayer that asks God to stop knocking and start breaking: the speaker is a usurped town whose viceroy reason has proved untrue, and only being imprisoned can free him, only being ravished can make him chaste.
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1633
[george-herbert]
Love (III)
Love keeps house and the guest keeps refusing — guilty of dust and sin, unworthy to look, fit only to serve — and every refusal is quietly answered, until: So I did sit and eat.
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1633
[george-herbert]
The Collar
A tantrum in verse — the speaker strikes the board, swears he will abroad, and rages at his rope of sands in lines that break their own metre — until one word, calling Childe, ends it: And I reply’d, My Lord.
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1633
[george-herbert]
The Pulley
God pours every blessing on man but keeps back rest, so that weariness itself will do the work goodness might not — a restlessness engineered to toss him at last to God’s breast.
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1633
[george-herbert]
Vertue
Day, rose and spring are each praised and then sentenced in the same breath — for thou must die — until only the seasoned timber of a virtuous soul is left standing when the whole world turns to coal.
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1609
[william-shakespeare]
Sonnet 146: Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth
The body as a costly mansion on a short lease, gaudily painted while the soul inside starves; the remedy is to let the flesh pine and feed the soul on its loss, buying terms divine — and so feed on Death, that feeds on men.