Blessed Are the Timid
“Blessed are the timid hearts that evil hate
that quail in its shadow, and yet shut the gate;
that seek no parley, and in guarded room,
though small and bate, upon a clumsy loom
weave tissues gilded by the far-off day
hoped and believed in under Shadow’s sway.”
[J. R. R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia]
Poetry is fundamental language. Prose is fallen poetry; poetry is not decorated prose.
Holy Wood, Intelligible Winepress
“Blessed are you, Holy Wood, intelligible
winepress!
In you was crushed the heavenly bunch
of grapes,
sufficient for gladdening the heavenly
and the earthly.”
[David the Invincible, “An Encomium on the Holy Cross of God,” in Vigen Guroian, Inheriting Paradise, 68]
Love Is That Liquor
“Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood, but I, as wine.”
[George Herbert]
A Tree So Noble
“Faithful cross, a tree so noble
Never grew in grove or wood;
Never leaf or blossom flourished
Fair as on thy branches glowed;
Sweet the wood and sweet the iron
Bearing up so dear a load.
Ah! relax thy native rigor,
Bend they branches, lofty tree!
Melt, O wood, in tender mercy!
Christ, the King of Glory, see!
Veiled in human sin and sorrow,
Slain, from sin the world to free.”
[Fortunatus, “Pange Lingua,” in Vigen Guroian, Inheriting Paradise, 66]
The truth is that no man—
however generous
in gifts, however
bold in youth, however brave,
however loyally
his own lord may attend him—
is ever wholly free
in his seafaring from worry
at what is the Lord’s will.
Poetics Alone Can Convey It
“In turning from apologetics to romance, he did not exchange a more complex for a simpler genre. If anything, the change was from simpler to more complex. Lewis was of the opinion that rational argumentation was too rudimentary for the task of conveying Christian truths, that there were ‘great disadvantages under which the Christian apologist labours. Apologetics is controversy. You cannot conduct a controversy in those poetical expressions which alone convey the concrete. … And this means that the thing we are really talking about can never appear in the discussion at all.’’
[Michael Ward, Planet Narnia, 219]
