John Greenleaf Whittier*

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807—1892) is a poet whose literary ambition, and political aspirations both took a back seat to his dedication to the abolitionist cause — a cause that was not popular in New England. Much of his early verse was written as propaganda for the fight against slavery. He wrote for abolitionist publications, and then eventually became the editor of the influential New England Weekly Review. By 1831 he was a delegate to the national Republican Convention in support of Henry Clay, and then ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1832.

In 1857 Whittier helped found The Atlantic Weekly, which enabled him to publish alongside many of the prominent voices of his day. Even before the U.S. Civil War, his poetry began moving into themes of religion, pastoral life, and a nostalgia for the New England of his youth.

Once his lifelong political cause had been accomplished, his new work led him to become the most popular of the Fireside Poets — alongside such writers as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and William Cullen Bryant.

Sound Over All Waters

Sound over all waters, reach out from all lands
the chorus of voices, the clasping of hands!
Sing hymns that were sung by the stars of the morn,
Sing songs of the angels when Jesus was born!
----------With glad jubilations
----------Bring hope to the nations!
The dark night is ending and dawn has begun:
Rise, hope of the ages, arise like the sun,
All speech flow to music, all hearts beat as one!

Sing the bridal of nations! with chorals of love;
Sing out the war-vulture and sing in the dove,
Till the hearts of the people keep time in accord,
And the voice of the world is the voice of the Lord!
----------Clasp hands of the nations
----------In strong gratulations:
Rise, hope of the ages, arise like the sun,
All speech flow to music, all hearts beat as one!

Sound bugles of battle, the marches of peace;
East, west, north, and south, let the long quarrel cease:
Sing the song of great joy that the angels began,
Sing of glory to God and of good-will to man!
----------Hark, joining in chorus
----------The heavens bend o’er us
The dark night is ending and dawn has begun:
Rise, hope for the ages, arise like the sun,
all speech flow to music, all hearts beat as one!

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about John Greenleaf Whittier: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Philip James Bailey

Philip James Bailey (1816―1902) is a Victorian poet primarily known for his extensive 1839 poem Festus, a version of the Faust legend, which he later revised for a second edition in 1845. Festus was very popular ― gaining admiration from such poets as Tennyson, Longfellow, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning ― but his subsequent books did not sell well. When these further books failed to gain popularity, Bailey tried to incorporate extracts from several of these poems into Festus, wherever he could make the lines fit, which extended the poem with every new edition.

Mischa Willet has edited a new critical edition of Festus (2021, Edinburgh University Press) based on the first American edition of 1845. He explains, “The poem explores themes of love, faith, and redemption, as well as the relationship between God and humanity. It also reflects the tensions between traditional religious values and the emerging scientific and secular worldviews of the time, as well as the social and economic upheavals that accompanied the Industrial Revolution.” This is the first new edition of the work in over a century.

Philip James Bailey travelled extensively in his later years ― living in London and Devon before returning to his birthplace in Nottingham. He was buried in Nottingham Rock Cemetery.

The following poem is from his collection The Angel World and Other Poems (1850).

A Ruin

In a cot-studded, fruity, green deep dale,
There grows the ruin of an abbey old;
And on the hill side, cut in rock, behold
A sainted hermit's cell; so goes the tale.
What of that ruin? There is nothing left
Save one sky-framing window arch, which climbs
Up to its top point, single stoned, bereft
Of prop or load. And this strange thing sublimes
The scene. For the fair great house, vowed to God,
Is hurled down and unhallowed; and we tread
O'er buried graves which have devoured their dead;
While over all springs up the green-lifed sod,
And arch, so light and lofty in its span―
So frail, and yet so lasting―tis like man.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather (1663―1728) is a Boston Puritan minister, and prolific writer, who seems like he was caught between the conflicting perspectives of the times in which he lived. His influence was felt on scientific thought, and within American religious circles.

In his book Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good (1710) he expressed progressive ideas such as having teachers reward, rather than punish, students to motivate them, and for physicians to consider a patient’s mental state as a possible cause of illness. There was violent opposition to his encouragement of the smallpox vaccine, particularly when he inoculated his own son.

On the other hand he was supportive of the old order rule of the clergy, in a day when pioneer hardships were diminishing. He is also mainly remembered for his views on witchcraft, which were influential during the Salem Witch Trials. Many American authors, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe, acknowledged their debt to him.

Go Then My Dove

Go then, my Dove, but now no longer mine;
Leave Earth, and now in heavenly Glory shine.
Bright for thy Wisdome, Goodness, Beauty here;
Now brighter in a more angelick Sphere.
Jesus, with whom thy Soul did long to be,
Into His Ark, and Arms, has taken thee.
Dear Friends, with whom thou didst so dearly live,
Feel thy one Death to them a thousand give.
Thy Prayers are done; thy Alms are spent; thy Pains
Are ended now, in endless Joyes and Gains.
I faint, till thy last Words to Mind I call;
Rich Words! Heavn', Heav'n will make amends for all.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow*

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807—1882) is one of New England’s Fireside Poets, and the most popular poet of his day. He wrote many long narrative pieces, telling stories from mythology and history, such as “Paul Revere’s Ride” and Evangeline, in tightly structured poetic form. Much of his verse was produced for the entertainment of a wide range of people — an aspect of poetry that has been overtaken by less literary forms of writing today — which may explain his bent toward sentimentality.

Although, like most of his friends he was a member of the Unitarian Church, he was fascinated by Jesus and his claims to divinity, which was more in keeping with the beliefs of orthodox Christian denominations. Perhaps it was translating Dante’s Divine Comedy that had particularly influenced him. In 1872 his great work Christus: A Mystery appeared, which includes the Apostles Creed as placed in the mouths of various disciples after the resurrection. This would have been a surprising declaration to those in the Unitarian Church.

My Cathedral

Like two cathedral towers these stately pines
---Uplift their fretted summits tipped with cones;
---The arch beneath them is not built with stones,
---Not Art but Nature traced these lovely lines,
And carved this graceful arabesque of vines;
---No organ but the wind here sighs and moans,
---No sepulchre conceals a martyr's bones.
---No marble bishop on his tomb reclines.
Enter! the pavement, carpeted with leaves,
---Gives back a softened echo to thy tread!
---Listen! the choir is singing; all the birds,
In leafy galleries beneath the eaves,
---Are singing! listen, ere the sound be fled,
---And learn there may be worship without words.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Vittoria Colonna

Vittoria Colonna (1492—1547) the marchioness of Pescara, is the most successful and renowned female Italian writer of her day. At age 19 she married Fernando Francesco d'Ávalos — who within two years was off to fight the French. The couple rarely saw each other, for he was often engaged as a military captain under Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. When he died in 1525, as a result of battle wounds, she immediately tried to join a convent. She dedicated herself to writing poetry, including a series of poems in his memory.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, inspired by the ideal of her grief, wrote a poem which includes the lines:
-------She knew the life-long martyrdom,
---------The weariness, the endless pain
-------Of waiting for some one to come
---------Who nevermore would come again.

She became close friends with Michelangelo in 1536. He made drawings of her, addressed sonnets to her, and they spent a lot of time together. In return, she presented him with a gift manuscript of spiritual poetry.

Colonna was an advocate of religious reform, as demonstrated within her poetry and in the prose meditations she published. Some believe that her popularity began to wane as both she and Michelangelo started expressing the Protestant-flavoured theology of grace.

Although more formal translations exist, I have included Jan Zwicky's more contemporary free translation of the following poem.

from Sonnets for Michelangelo — 31

If this little music, stirring the frail air,
can gather up the spirit,
open it and melt it as it does —
If this mere breeze of sound, this mortal voice,
can lift the heart so,
heal it, startling thought and firing our resolve —
what will that heart do when,
before God in the first and ancient heaven,
it hears the music of all being?
When, struck by truth, it steps forth
in the great wind of that singing?

This post was suggested by my friend Burl Horniachek.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Vittoria Colonna: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri (1265—1321) was a Florentine poet, best known for his masterwork — The Divine Comedy. Often referred to as the greatest work written in Italian, it is divided into three books: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. In these epic poems, Dante is led through hell and purgatory by the Roman poet Virgil, and then through heaven by Beatrice — a girl Dante had briefly met when in childhood, had idolized all his life, and had mourned for when she died decades before the writing of Paradiso.

In this allegorical picture of life after death, Dante was able to comment on life in Florence — particularly on political rivals and the wrongs of his society. One scene in Inferno (Canto XIX) shows errant popes — shoved head-first into holes, with their legs sticking out, and the soles of their feet on fire — punished because they “take the things of God, / that ought to be the brides of Righteousness, / and make them fornicate for gold and silver!”

Since The Divine Comedy was not written in Latin, Dante was able to influence the development of the Italian language as readers of various dialects studied his work. Italian is a particularly easy language to rhyme in (being the original language of the sonnet form). Dante’s epic follows a terza rima rhyme scheme (aba, bcb, cdc, ded, etc.) which is too prohibitive in English. Robert Pinsky, in his 1995 verse translation of Inferno, takes an intermediate approach, using partial rhyme. The translation of The Divine Comedy into English has been taken on many times, including by Longfellow, and by Dorothy L. Sayers. Numerous poets, including William Blake, have been greatly influenced by it.

Dante was caught between striving factions in 1302 and became exiled from his home in Florence, to which he never returned.

from Paradiso--------Canto VII

---------------[M]ankind lay sick, in the abyss------------28
of a great error, for long centuries,
until the Word of God willed to descend
---to where the nature that was sundered from---------31
its Maker was united to His person
by the sole act of His eternal Love.
---Now set your sight on what derives from that.--------34
This nature, thus united to its Maker,
was good and pure, even as when created;
---but in itself, this nature had been banished----------37
from paradise, because it turned aside
from its own path, from truth, from its own life.
---Thus, if the penalty the Cross inflicted----------------40
is measured by the nature He assumed,
no one has ever been so justly stung;
---yet none was ever done so great a wrong,-------------43
if we regard the Person made to suffer,
He who had gathered in Himself that nature.

This is the firat Kingdom Poets post about Dante Alighieri: second post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was the most popular American poet of his time. He wrote extensive stories in verse form, such as Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha, as well as shorter poems. To some he may be best known for his poem “Paul Revere’s Ride”, and to others for “I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day” which has become a popular Christmas carol.

He is considered to be one of the Fireside poets — which include William Cullen Bryant and Oliver Wendell Homes — who were the first American poets whose popularity could rival that of the British.

Longfellow not only wrote his own poetry, but translated poetry from such languages as Spanish, French, German, Danish, and Swedish, and was the first American to translate The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.

God’s–Acre

I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls
The burial-ground God's-Acre! It is just;
It consecrates each grave within its walls,
And breathes a benison o'er the sleeping dust.

God's-Acre! Yes, that blessed name imparts
Comfort to those, who in the grave have sown
The seed that they had garnered in their hearts,
Their bread of life, alas! no more their own.

Into its furrows shall we all be cast,
In the sure faith, that we shall rise again
At the great harvest, when the archangel's blast
Shall winnow, like a fan, the chaff and grain.

Then shall the good stand in immortal bloom,
In the fair gardens of that second birth;
And each bright blossom mingle its perfume
With that of flowers, which never bloomed on earth.

With thy rude ploughshare, Death, turn up the sod,
And spread the furrow for the seed we sow;
This is the field and Acre of our God,
This is the place where human harvests grow!

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca