Robert Herrick*

Robert Herrick (1591―1674) is now considered one of the most important English poets of the 17th century, although this is a recent perspective. He was not well-known in his own lifetime, was almost forgotten in the 18th century, and has only risen in the esteem of scholars in the late 20th century. He produced just one extensive poetry collection: Hesperides: Or, The Works Both Humane & Divine (1648).

He was a member of the Sons of Ben, a group of poets and playwrights influenced by the writing of Ben Jonson; other poets associated with this group include, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, and Thomas Carew. Jonson and his followers regularly met in various London taverns.

Herrick took holy orders and was ordained into the Church of England in 1623, and in 1629 he became the vicar of Dean Prior in Devonshire.

His Wish to God

I would to God, that mine old age might have
Before my last, but here a living grave;
Some one poor almshouse, there to lie, or stir,
Ghost-like, as in my meaner sepulchre;
A little piggin, and a pipkin by,
To hold things fitting my necessity,
Which, rightly us'd, both in their time and place,
Might me excite to fore, and after, grace.
Thy cross, my Christ, fix'd 'fore mine eyes should be,
Not to adore that, but to worship Thee.
So here the remnant of my days I'd spend,
Reading Thy bible, and my book; so end.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Robert Herrick: first post, second 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.

A.F. Moritz

A.F. Moritz has authored more than twenty poetry collections, including Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1999, Brick Books), The Sparrow: Selected Poems (2018, Ananasi) and As Far As You Know (2020, Anansi). From March 2019 until May of 2023 he served as Poet Laureate of Toronto. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Toronto, and in 2009 he received the Griffin Poetry Prize.

When CBC Radio asked him why he writes poetry, and why it is significant, he spoke of his childhood journey with poetry, and continued,
-----"As I got a little older, I realized and prized that I’d been
-----fascinated by poetry from much earlier, from well before I could
-----read. I connected Poe and the other poetry I soon was reading to
-----the poetry I had heard, from nursery rhymes adults read me out of
-----books, to children’s traditional street and play rhymes, to the
-----Catholic liturgy which, of course, contains some of the world’s
-----great poetry. For instance, I can remember clearly that the
-----suffering servant song of Isaiah was both searing and dear to me
-----from before my ability to read, probably from a couple of years
-----before, although times are impossible to recall precisely in that
-----period of life just emerging from the childhood amnesia. Anyway,
-----this poem has always remained as a chief basis of my work, as
-----something that I remember constantly, and probably don’t have to
-----'remember': by now it simply is me. So too with the psalms, passages
-----of Paul, and the like."

The following poem is from his collection The New Measures (2012, Anansi).

The Grand Narrative

The waters of the pool were troubled
each day, but only at the certain hour,
evening, when the angel entered―
when light, newly reaching
the beginning of its fading,
was most powerful, least dazzling, wholly
absorbed in colors. The water
cured every sickness in the first who touched it
and the blind man stretched out close by
and no one ever told him
the turbulence had come and the city
was darkened, the end had passed
but not yet fallen. No one
so much as kicked him so he tipped
into the boiling, into the seeming
the flat dusty pond was about to be
a fountain. Teacher, he shouted once,
when he heard the teacher had come,
there’s no one to carry me to the pool,
and the man answered him: Here
Here is an inexhaustible
troubling. It’s yours now. You can
see and walk. Remember me
next time you’re lame, blind, gnarled,
stuck in anemia or filth. Enter
the memory and see
the world shine
hating you, filling you
with beasts and birds, trees and flowers,
the growing distant
gabble of many friends, and walk
to unjust death in this city, this
happiness of living and moving again.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This post was suggested by my friend Burl Horniachek.

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.

Micheal O'Siadhail*

Micheal O'Siadhail is Poet-in-Residence at Union Theological Seminary. He is an Irish poet whose poetry is characterized by formalist structures. After having already published more than a dozen previous collections, he set for himself ambitious tasks with his recent books.

His Testament (Baylor University Press, 2022) is O'Siadhail collection of 150 psalms, plus 50 more poems that connect with the stories of the gospels ― a book which numbers 230 pages of poetry.

Even more ambitious is The Five Quintets (Baylor, 2018) ― which is described by Jeremy Begbie as, “…the culmination of an extraordinary life’s work…vast in scope. O’Siadhail attempts nothing less than an exploration of the predicaments of Western modernity as they appear in five fields of human endeavor: science, arts, economics, politics, and philosophy and theology.” This 350-page poem dialogues with such poets as Dante, Donne, Milton, Baudelaire, and T.S. Eliot, but also with dozens of significant historical figures such as Bach, Chagall, Karl Marx, and Margaret Thatcher.

I want to highlight this significant poet at this time, as Micheal O'Siadhail will be the guest of Imago for a reading at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church in Toronto on September 20th, 2023 accompanied by jazz pianist Mike Jansen: (learn more!)

The following submerged sonnet is from the larger work.

From The Five Quintets

John Milton, I admire your self-belief
That you’re another Dante London-born
To set the ways of God in high relief―
I know the cost of what delights you scorn.
Although fame-spurred you live laborious days
With Providence still in the common grain;
To want to prove God’s ways itself betrays
Enlightenment that thinks it must explain.
Rebirth all earned, for you no grace comes free,
Afraid you’ll hide your talent in the earth
While your taskmaster watches from above;
Your judging carpenter from Galilee
Keeps measuring in virtue and self-worth.
How could we justify a God of love?

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Micheal O'Siadhail: 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.

Edward Shillito

Edward Shillito (1872―1948) is an English poet and writer who was born in Hull, and was educated in Manchester and Oxford late in the 19th century. He served as a Congregational minister in many places across England, including in London coming up to and during the First World War. He served as a chaplain in the trenches, but was dismissed from service due to injuries he received on the battlefield.

Some of his poetry collections include: The Omega and other poems (Blackwell, 1916) Jesus of the Scars and other poems (1919, Hodder and Stoughton), and Poetry and Prayer (SCM, 1931).

I discovered this poem in an anthology called A Treasury of Christian Verse (SCM Press) which a friend of mine Anne Laidlaw found in a UK bookshop.

The following poem might be better understood by considering what Shillito must have witnessed during WWI, and the pain that that war and its aftermath caused.

Jesus of the Scars

If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;
Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;
We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow,
We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars.
The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;
In all the universe we have no place.
Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?
Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars, we claim Thy grace.
If, when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,
Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;
We know today what wounds are, have no fear,
Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign.
The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.

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.

Jean Janzen*

Jean Janzen is a Canadian-born Mennonite poet, who has lived her adult life in the United States, primarily in Fresno, California. She is the author of such poetry collections as The Upside-Down Tree (Windflower Communications, 1992) and Tasting the Dust (Good Books, 2000).

She has taught at Fresno Pacific and at Eastern Mennonite University, and has served as a minister of worship at the College Community Mennonite Brethren Church in Clovis, California. She has written hymn texts, which have been set to music and are included in several hymn books, including “Mothering God, You Gave Me Birth.”

The following poem is from her collection What the Body Knows (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia Publishing House, 2015).

What the Body Knows

Maybe it’s the ocean’s rhythmic tug
that helps me sleep, my body’s own
surge remembering its deepest pulse.

Think of those Celtic monks who
scaled the slippery rocks carrying
vellum and inks while the sea broke

and battered beneath them. High
in a crevice, a hidden stone hut
with cot and candle. The scribe

dips and swirls his quill to preserve
the story—Luke’s genealogy,
name after name, letters shaped

like birds in every color, a flight
of messengers released into history.
Each word unfurls the promise,

like Gabriel kneeling. The body
knows that wings, like waves,
can break through walls and enter,

that the secret of the story
is love, that even as we sleep,
its tides carry us in a wild safety.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Jean Janzen: 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.

Jason Myers

Jason Myers is a Texas poet and Episcopal priest who, this year, is a participant as a writer in the Artist-in-Residence program at Acadia National Park on the coast of Maine. His debut poetry collection Maker of Heaven & has just appeared from Belle Point Press. His A Place for the Genuine: Reflections on Nature, Poetry, and Vocation will be published by Eerdmans in 2024. He is Editor-in-Chief of EcoTheo Review.

Jericho Brown has written "Maker of Heaven & is a book of wonder, and in it Jason Myers suggests that what we wonder can indeed be made into art as God must have felt wonder when making the cosmos…”

The following poem first appeared in Diode.

Women Praying

In the oak-dark darkness becoming
light under the phosphorous exclamations of a magnolia tree
three men work.
They solder steel, sparks amber & orange shoot & spit
& hang, for the briefest moment, little bits
of fire on the now-blue, now-gray air.
It’s cold out there, on the other side
of the windows, & I have no idea
what those men are really doing,
or how dangerous it is.
In here, in the hospital cafeteria,
I’m eating spinach & eggs when
two women at the table next to mine
begin to pray.
Who or what their concerns are escapes
earshot, but I hear that sweet name, Jesus, sail
the lake of their lips,
& every few seconds
one or the other
raises an affirmation
Yesss
Yehhhssss
here three measures,
here more,
like they are reassuring God
as well as themselves,
like they are rocking
a baby to sleep
the words slip
out & over the room & sing,
Mary’s arms wrapped
around her boy,
first an infant
delicate & unfathomable as those on the NICU,
then a man
covered in blood
like the woman
on the gurney
in the trauma bay
who’d been bludgeoned
about the face
by her boyfriend’s
baseball bat.
I don’t know
who these women are
praying for
but I will take
their Yehhhhhss
word become chant become river
of sound
sound most close to silence
near to music
nearer my God to thee
I will take it, Lord,
spread it across
my day
my life
like balm
like globes of fire
soldering us together.

Posted with permission of the poet.

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.

Thomas Chatterton

Thomas Chatterton (1752―1770) is a poet from Bristol who was a forerunner and inspiration to such Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, and Keats ― all of whom commemorated him and his tragic death in their work.

Obsessed with the fifteenth century, Thomas Chatterton wrote inventive forgeries he claimed had been written by a fifteenth-century monk he called Thomas Rowley. He even produced complete manuscripts using techniques to distress the pages to make them appear old ― far more convincing than when children soak paper in tea for school assignments to make them look like old documents.

After he moved to London, he made little money. He wrote satires of well-known writers under a pseudonym, and often went without eating, although neighbours tried to have him join them for a meal. All of this led to his untimely death, and his mystique.

In many ways the myth of Chatterton mattered more to the Romantics than whatever might or might not be true. As a little-known poet, long-dead, who allegedly committed suicide shortly before his eighteenth birthday, he was held up as the Romantic ideal: literally a young, starving artist, who was misunderstood and ignored; some now suggest his death may have been from an accidental overdose of medication. Unfortunately, it seems he did not live up to the determination he expressed in the following poem.

The Resignation

O God, whose thunder shakes the sky,
Whose eye this atom globe surveys,
To thee, my only rock, I fly,
Thy mercy in thy justice praise.

The mystic mazes of thy will,
The shadows of celestial light,
Are past the pow'r of human skill,—
But what th' Eternal acts is right.

O teach me in the trying hour,
When anguish swells the dewy tear,
To still my sorrows, own thy pow'r,
Thy goodness love, thy justice fear.

If in this bosom aught but Thee
Encroaching sought a boundless sway,
Omniscience could the danger see,
And Mercy look the cause away.

Then why, my soul, dost thou complain?
Why drooping seek the dark recess?
Shake off the melancholy chain.
For God created all to bless.

But ah! my breast is human still;
The rising sigh, the falling tear,
My languid vitals' feeble rill,
The sickness of my soul declare.

But yet, with fortitude resigned,
I'll thank th' inflicter of the blow;
Forbid the sigh, compose my mind,
Nor let the gush of mis'ry flow.

The gloomy mantle of the night,
Which on my sinking spirit steals,
Will vanish at the morning light,
Which God, my East, my sun reveals.

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.