Your weekly slice of Poetry

Welcome back to another selection of poems. I hope these find you well and that they provide some color to your January days.

Virtue

George Herbert (1593—1633)

This poem follows the George Herbert fashion of being concise, beautiful, and incredibly rich in meaning. A theological truth is clothed in nature imagery, as with many poems that we read. The first three stanzas set the pattern where there is 1) a description of something beautiful and 2) the inevitability of that thing's death. Each stanza ends with a shortened line (of two feet instead of four) to emphasize this feeling of something good being cut short in death. The final stanza is then the turn, where the pattern is broken and we learn of something that won't ever perish: a virtuous soul.

My two favorite lines, poignant and imaginative, are the following:

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,
...
Thy root is ever in its grave,

As a good poet, Herbert is reminding us that all of nature is saturated in the truths of Scripture. He is teaching us how we ought to look at days, flowers, and seasons.

You can hear a recording of this poem sung by the Voces8 group here.

For Annie

Edgar Allan Poe (1809—1849)

This is another one of my favorites when it comes to Poe's poems. It is incredibly rhythmic and a very smooth reading. You can tell this is the case because you can read it steadily without stopping or getting tripped up. In this way, it is a very easy poem to read, so much so that you can easily read it without thinking about what is being said.

He achieved this by, you guessed it, sticking to a fairly strict meter. The poem mainly features the anapest (short-short-long: "I am SHORN"), and it does this in very clever ways. You may have noticed that some lines end with a short (unstressed) or only start with a long (stressed). Even though he mixes this up a bit through the poem, he still keeps it anapestic by ensuring that there are almost always 2 unstressed syllables between every stressed syllable. This can be seen below where I've marked out the short (-) and long (/) syllables for a few lines.

- / - - / -
Thank Heaven! the crisis,
- / - - /
The danger, is past,
- - / - - / -
And the lingering illness
- / - - /
Is over at last—

This is clever because it makes the poem have a very natural look to it. The meter changes from line to line, but the poem as a whole still retains a metrical rhythm.

Also, in typical Poe fashion, he repeats lines and rhymes to further accentuate that rhythmic feeling. Most of the stanzas have six lines, and typically lines 4 and 6 end with the same word. It's difficult to end lines with the same word without it sounding boring or amateurish; Poe is a master of this to a wonderful effect.

Sonnet 106

William Shakespeare (1564—1616)

As with almost all of Shakespeare's sonnets, this one features a description of someone beautiful beyond comparison. All the writings of the past are simply prophecies of this subject. What's interesting is that he references these older writings as "prefiguring" his subject much the same way that we speak of Christ being prefigured in the Old Testament. This is incredibly rich language that Shakespeare uses skillfully. It may be dramatic, but should we not all view our loved ones with the same conviction?

Righteous Lot

Abram Newcomer

This sonnet was started in September of last year and finished just recently. Lot is such an interesting character in the Bible; definitely not one to emulate or admire. Yet, when reading about him, I find it hard to not see myself in him. He's too lenient with sin and values the pleasantness of the land over the wickedness within it. He is helpless against the forces of the world and helpless against the wrath of God. Much like me, he needs someone to intercede for him, someone to kill his enemies, and someone to drag him out of the condition that he chose for himself. How comforting it is that he is called "righteous" in 2 Peter, someone to demonstrate that "the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials."

Thanks for reading and have a great week!