Poems of the Spirit

 From Gaudy Night 

by Dorothy L Sayers

Here then at home, by no more storms distrest,

Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone in dizzying circles hurled
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.
Lay on thy whips, O Love, that we upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stopping, fall dumb and dead,
And, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

The Penalty of Love

Sidney Royse Lysaght 

If love should count you worthy, and should deign

One day to seek your door and be your guest,

Pause! ere you draw the bolt and bid him rest,

If in your old content you would remain.

For not alone he enters: in his train

Are angels of the mists, the lonely quest,

Dreams of the unfulfilled and unpossessed.

And sorrow, and life's immemorial pain.

He wakes desires you never may forget,

He shows you stars you never saw before,

He makes you share with him for evermore,

The burden of the world's divine regret

How wise were you to open not --and yet,

How poor if you should turn him from the door.

This World is not Conclusion

By Emily Dickinson

This World is not Conclusion.

A Species stands beyond

Invisible, as Music

But positive, as Sound

It beckons, and it baffles

Philosophydon't know

And through a Riddle, at the last

Sagacity, must go

To guess it, puzzles scholars

To gain it, Men have borne

Contempt of Generations

And Crucifixion, shown

Faith slipsand laughs, and rallies

Blushes, if any see

Plucks at a twig of Evidence

And asks a Vane, the way

Much Gesture, from the Pulpit

Strong Hallelujahs roll

Narcotics cannot still the Tooth

That nibbles at the soul

Love

George Herbert

LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

 From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack’d anything.

‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’

Love said, ‘You shall be he.’

‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,

I cannot look on Thee.’

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

‘Who made the eyes but I?’

‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.’

‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’

‘My dear, then I will serve.’

‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’

So I did sit and eat.

Epiphany

By Joanie Mackowski 

A momentary rupture to the vision:

the wavering limbs of a birch fashion

the fluttering hem of the deity’s garment,

the cooling cup of coffee the ocean the deity

waltzes across. This is enough—but sometimes

the deity’s heady ta-da coaxes the cherries

in our mental slot machine to line up, and

our brains summon flickering silver like

salmon spawning a river; the jury decides

in our favour, and we’re free to see, for now.

A flaw swells from the facets of a day, increasing

the day’s value; a freakish postage stamp mails

our envelope outside time; hairy, claw-like

magnolia buds bloom from bare branches;

and the deity pops up again like a girl from

a giant cake. O deity: you transfixing transgressor,

translating back and forth on the border

without a passport. Fleeing revolutions

of same-old simultaneous boredom and

boredom, we hoard epiphanies under the bed,

stuff them in jars and bury them in the backyard;

we cram our closet with sunrise; prop up our feet

and drink gallons of wow!; we visit the doctor

because all this is raising the blood’s levels of

c6h3(oh)2chohch2nhch3, the heart caught

in the deity’s hem and haw, the oh unfurling

from our chest like a bee from our cup of coffee,

an autochronous greeting: there. Who saw it?

The Noble Nature

Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

It is not growing like a tree

in bulk, doth make Man better be;
or standing long an oak three hundred year,
to fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere;

A lily of a day
is fairer in May,
although it fall and die that night-
It was the plant and flower of Light.
In small proportions we just beauties see:
and in short measures life may perfect be.

Eden Rock

by Charles Causley

 
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. Sauce bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,

They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, 'See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’

I had not thought that it would be like this.

Fragment - fraility of Words

As long as words a different sense will bear,

And each may be his own interpreter,

Our airy faith will no foundation find;

The word's a weathercock for every wind.

John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther (1687), Part I, line 462–465.