Your weekly slice of Poetry

Happy Resurrection Day!

Today we take a break from our Poets of History for a focus on the greatest day of the year: Easter. This is a day of light and glory, of dawn and rising. Surround yourselves with joyful, celebratory things and put your worries in their proper place. Christ is risen, and his enemies are being made his footstool.

Easter

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

I came across this sonnet when reading Spenser's poems for the recent edition of the Poets of History, and I thought that I'd save it for Easter day. In proper Easter fashion, this poem praises the majesty of Christ and his triumph over death. Hell is harrowed, captivity is made captive, and we are won, made clean by his blood.

Note that the poem does not simply praise Christ for his Easter victories. It ends in a prayer to God and a call for ourselves: that we would love God and each other with the radical love that was displayed in Christ. The glory of Easter is not one to just be admired and praised from afar; we are to enter into it ourselves, loving as he taught us.

Easter Hymn

Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)

This beautiful poem by Henry Vaughan addressed death directly, informing it of its loss of power, its defeat at the hands of Jesus. It follows the poetic tradition of addressing Death directly, exemplified by Paul himself ("O death, where is your victory...") and made famous by Donne's famous sonnet Death be not proud. My favorite image is in lines 6-7:

Graves are beds now for the weary,
Death a nap, to wake more merry;

The poem is written in tetrameter meter with rhyming couplets. Interestingly, the first half uses the trochaic foot (PACKing) while the second half uses the iambic foot (to HIM). I am unsure why this switch took place, yet both forms prove quite enjoyable under Vaughan's usage.

Easter

George Herbert (1593-1633)

A selection of Easter poems would be lacking were it to not include on by George Herbert. This poem takes cues from many psalms by calling on the heart and the lute to praise "thy Lord." This "high day" demands equally supreme songs, made perfect by the Spirit with his "sweet art."

The poem shifts its form half-way through, switching from a high and musical song to a more reflecting and meditative posture. Again, there is nothing in this world that can compete with the glory of Christ's resurrection. There is no day in the year as luminous as Easter.

Cleave

Abram Newcomer

This is the third Sal that I've written, yet again featuring an array of Biblical symbols and imagery. It seemed appropriate to finish it by Easter since it climaxes when the risen Jesus meets Mary in the garden. The beginning and end of Scripture is marked with marriages, the bride being formed from the man and then being bound back to him in companionship and love.

This Sal is different in that it is written in pentameter lines rather than tetrameter. This alters the flow and feel of the poem considerably, making it (in my estimation) less song-like and more contemplative. The space of the longer lines gave me more freedom to (hopefully) clarify some of the images and connections.

I pray that your day is bright, full of the light of Christ as he shines into our world.