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Articles by James WIlson
Breaking through: Grace lures us out of our little worlds
“The Pool” is typical of her best work. We are given a precise description of the lithe “flex and spin” of a fish as it leaps to catch and consume a dragonfly, which hums just above the surface of a mountain pool. This pool is the fish’s world, whose horizon expands and shrinks with the seasons; it is always in a state of “change” but, to the fish’s perceptions, seems essentially stable.
We're the hallelujah chorus
As she floated above me in the painted heaven of the ceiling, I was taken back to a winter’s night 20 years earlier, when I had first become enthralled by the art of poetry. One of the causes of that love was John Dryden, who showed me, in his “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687” that human speech could approach music in its beauty.
A poetic allegory for the weary soul wrestling with faith
The scenario is as simple as a bedtime story. God has poured out every blessing on mankind, his creation. We have many gifts, but one, “Rest,” clings like a soggy cornflake to the bottom of God’s bowl. Let it be so, says God, for if we could rest in the gifts of nature, then we creatures and “the God of Nature … both should losers be.” While Herbert was still a youth, St. Francis de Sales wrote of our human condition as a spiritual combat.
Of hearth and sea
Longfellow reminds us that we have a responsibility to the world, one which includes contemplating its sorrows. The volume in which this poem first appeared was “The Seaside and the Fireside” (1849) and its title speaks of Longfellow’s greatest concerns. The poet worked and wrote for the abolitionist cause. He feared, as a poem from the volume notes, lest the “Ship of State” that was the Union should be ruined on the shoals of the cause of slavery.
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