The Hypostatic Union The Word set forth before the world began Wrote out the mournful tune in minor key: The crying of the infant Son of Man. There was no way that they could understand How that small and helpless child could be The Word set forth before the world began. Joseph wondered at… Continue Reading
Scott’s article on Monday seemed a good occasion to make (finally) a brief post that had occurred to me some time ago. Scott wrote the following: [M]usical communication occurs because of . . . natural associations. Combinations of dynamics, tone colors, rhythms, and tempos can combine to mimic the natural way we feel inwardly or… Continue Reading
Wallace Stevens, one of the preeminent poetic voices of the modern period, was one of the greatest American poets, period. Among his chief concerns was the interaction of the mind with reality–the external with the internal–and the seeming inseparability of the two. The poem below, one of several of the “anecdote poems” in his first… Continue Reading
I subscribe to the “poem-a-day” e-mail service from Rattle, a well-regarded and above-average publication. I thought yesterday’s poem, a prose poem, might be of interest to readers of this site, touching, as it does in its way, on notions we frequently consider here. The prose poem is an interesting genre. Technically, it differs only from… Continue Reading
[W]e do not know. We save face by repeating frivolously the popular jargon of science. We harness the mighty energy that rushes through our world; we subject it to fingertip control in our cars and our kitchens; we make it work for us like Aladdin’s jinn, but still we do not know what it is.… Continue Reading
(Note: For anyone who’s been missing them, I plan to return to sharing insights from Tozer over the coming weeks.) Any review of The Cantos‘ visual form, intimately involved with Pound’s acquisition of a typewriter during 1913 or 1914, cannot proceed without examining the letters in their library caches. In the interest of economy, the… Continue Reading
Betrayal The hymn’s last chords resolve to midnight’s calm as Judas goes to meet his guard through streets littered with brittle palms. While Jesus prays his garden allies sleep their watch away, but Judas pleads as well, Let judgment pass! and weeps. Now to the gate where Jesus greets a crowd of soldiers, priests—though… Continue Reading
It is probably impossible to think without words, but if we permit ourselves to think with the wrong words, we shall soon be entertaining erroneous thoughts; for words, which are given us for the expression of thought, have a habit of going beyond their proper bounds and determining the content of thought. “As nothing is… Continue Reading
All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God… The man who comes to a right belief about God is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems . . .but even if the multiple burdens of time may… Continue Reading
I’m currently reading Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy and plan to share some quotes over the coming weeks. From the preface, here is the first. The message of this book does not grow out of these times but it is appropriate to them. It is called forth by a condition which has existed in… Continue Reading
A few weeks before Christmas, my sons and I made repeated visits to a firearms store. Both boys had expressed an interest in hunting, and we had discussed what types of guns are appropriate when pursuing various game—rabbit, bird, deer, and etc. After doing some preliminary research, we then went out to price and heft… Continue Reading
In his answer to the first question in this interview, poet and editor Justin Evans advances the idea that it is a sense of place which makes American poetry distinctly American–a notion given at least anecdotal support by poets from Bradstreet and Whitman to Stevens and Bly, and perhaps most obviously by Frost. If… Continue Reading
If Timothy Dudley-Smith is known to Protestants in the United States, it is more likely as the biographer of theologian John Stott than as a poet. In nations more greatly influenced by Anglicanism, however, he is renowned as a hymnist who has written many excellent texts. Dudley-Smith has stated in various that, although he had… Continue Reading
Malachi 1:6-9 (ESV) reads: “A son honors his father, and a servant his master. If then I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear? says the Lord of hosts to you, O priests, who despise my name. But you say, ‘How have we despised your… Continue Reading
I recently listened to a message delivered by a music pastor at a pastor’s conference on the subject of song selection. He touched on issues related both to text and musical style, but it was an illustration given on the former that I found the most astonishing of the several things he said with which… Continue Reading
Since I’ve been working to improve my writing abilities using fixed forms, I decided my annual Valentine’s Day poem to my wife would be a triolet (pronounced “tree-o-lay”), a form I had discovered in high school but never satisfactorily employed. However, the result of this most recent effort was workable enough, and I was encouraged… Continue Reading
The concept often referred to as the humiliation of God the Son—the notion that the second person of the Trinity emptied himself of the full manifestation of His glorious divinity, left his privileged position in heaven, veiled himself in human flesh, and dwelt among his creatures as one of them—is one of the most wonderfully… Continue Reading
Benjamin Myers Elegy for Trains Village Books Press ISBN Number: 978-0-9818680-6-6 Over the last quarter century, poetry has done some rather public soul . Poets and critics alike have spilled gallons of ink (both actual and virtual) on whether poetry does—or can—still matter and why. Naysayers point out the impact of pop-culture and the plight… Continue Reading