Creation, Power and Awe
Explore how acts of creation, powerful life, and unknown forces evoke wonder, fear, and moral questioning.
17 items
OVER hill, over dale
A fairy servant tells of wandering everywhere swifter than the moon's sphere in the fairy queen's service, and departs to seek dew-drops to hang on the cowslips.
Poetry · PoemA Hymn to God the Father
Three stanzas ask forgiveness for successive kinds of sin, each closing with the admission that God is still not done because more remains, until the fear of perishing at death is answered by a demanded oath and the refrain can end.
Poetry · PoemEaster
The speaker gathers flowers and boughs to strew the Lord's way but finds Him already risen before daybreak with His own sweets, and concludes that a heart, though late, can still make this day the date of his life.
Poetry · PoemDiscipline
The speaker repeatedly asks God to throw away rod and wrath, pleads a willing though stumbling obedience, and argues that love, armed like an archer, will do what anger cannot.
Poetry · PoemA Dialogue
Man and Saviour speak by turns: man calls his soul worthless and resigns the whole design, the Saviour replies that the reckoning is not his to make and recalls the glory freely parted with for him, and man breaks in to stop the speech, saying it breaks his heart.
Poetry · PoemLove
Love welcomes a guest who draws back as unworthy, and answers each objection in turn until the guest agrees to sit down and eat.
Poetry · PoemBermudas
A boat rowing past the remote Bermudas is overheard singing praise to the God who led them there, stocked the island with oranges, pomegranates, figs and cedars, and framed a temple in the rocks, while the oars keep time to the song.
Poetry · PoemReeds of Innocence
A piper in the valleys meets a child on a cloud who has him pipe, then sing, then write his songs down, after which the piper makes a reed pen and writes the songs for every child to read.
Poetry · PoemThe Little Black Boy
A black child repeats his mother's teaching that bodies are only clouds shading the soul while it learns to bear the beams of God's love, and imagines shading an English boy in heaven until that boy loves him.
Poetry · PoemHear the Voice
A summons to hear the Bard who has heard the Holy Word walking among ancient trees, followed by that Word's own call for the fallen Earth to rise and turn back before daybreak.
Poetry · PoemThe Tiger
Six stanzas of unanswered questions forge the tiger through hammer, chain, furnace, and anvil, ending by asking whether its maker also made the lamb.
Poetry · PoemCradle Song
A lullaby over a sleeping infant traces soft desires, secret smiles and morning-like smiles stealing over its face, then turns to the cunning wiles creeping in the sleeping heart and warns that when that heart wakes a dreadful night will break.
Poetry · PoemEvening on Calais Beach
A sonnet in which the holy quiet of a seaside evening is likened to a nun breathless with adoration, before the speaker calls the listener to hear a mighty Being awake whose eternal motion makes a sound like thunder, and then turns to the child walking beside him to say that her seeming unconcern makes her nature no less divine.
Poetry · PoemThe World
The sonnet complains that getting and spending have laid waste our powers and left us out of tune with sea and wind, and the speaker declares he would rather be a pagan of an outworn creed if that let him glimpse Proteus and hear Triton's horn.
Poetry · PoemNight
The speaker urges Night, personified as a star-inwrought spirit who weaves dreams by day, to cross the western wave and blind the eyes of Day, recalls sighing for her from dawn to dusk and refusing the offers of her brother Death and her child Sleep, and asks only that she come soon.
Poetry · PoemFragment of an Ode to Maia
The speaker asks in what manner he may sing to Maia, wishes for the old vigour of poets who died content leaving great verse to a small circle, and hopes his own song may die away unheard except by a primrose and a few ears.
Poetry · PoemOn first looking into Chapman’s Homer
The speaker likens years of reading to travel through golden realms and western islands, says he never breathed the pure air of Homer's domain until he heard Chapman, and compares the moment to an astronomer sighting a new planet and to explorers staring silently at an unknown ocean.