Christina Rossetti*

Christina Rossetti (1830—1894) is one of the Victorian age’s most significant poets. Besides poetry she also wrote fiction and devotional reflections. From 1870 to 1872 she was dangerously and violently ill with Grave’s Disease, which caused her hair to fall out, and for her to lose consciousness.

After she recovered, Rossetti published six volumes of devotional prose. According to the Poetry Foundation: “In these devotional writings readers can find explicit statements of themes treated in the poetry of previous decades, and in many instances Rossetti discusses natural and biblical images, virtually glossing favorite poetic symbols.” In the first of these books Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year, Founded on a Text of Holy Scripture (1874) she shared 366 meditations, each of which includes a passage from scripture followed by a collect beginning with an invocation to Christ.”

In 1892 Rossetti published her book The Face of the Deep — an in-depth meditation on the Book of Revelation which included many poems. The following poem is her response to the opening verses of Revelation 5:
---“Then I saw in the right hand of him who sat on the throne a scroll
---with writing on both sides and sealed with seven seals. And I saw
---a mighty angel proclaiming in a loud voice, ‘Who is worthy to break
---the seals and open the scroll?’”

None Other Lamb

None other Lamb, none other Name,
None other hope in Heav’n or earth or sea,
None other hiding place from guilt and shame,
None beside Thee!

My faith burns low, my hope burns low;
Only my heart’s desire cries out in me
By the deep thunder of its want and woe,
Cries out to Thee.

Lord, Thou art Life, though I be dead;
Love’s fire Thou art, however cold I be:
Nor Heav’n have I, nor place to lay my head,
Nor home, but Thee.

*This is the fifth Kingdom Poets post about Christina Rossetti: first post, second post, third post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

A.F. Moritz*

A.F. Moritz is one of Canada’s leading poets. Even so, I heard him reading from his new collection last month — to a slight Saturday afternoon gathering of poetry lovers — at a tiny independent bookstore in London, Ontario — coincidentally called Little Wren Books.

His 24th poetry collection (depending on how you count) The Wren is a bit of a departure for him, in that this writer of longer, long-lined poems has deliberately created a book of short poems. More than sixty of the poems are shorter than sonnets, and some even shorter than haiku. What this offers, in my view, is a stripped-back collection that affords greater accessibility, and personal interaction with the poems. Novelist Michael Helm has said “In The Wren we meet essential poetry. The address is direct, the lines narrow, poems short. With subtle, turning movements the book offers arrival and furtherance, findings and beautiful modifications toward ideas and figures of rare exactness…”

The following poems are from The Wren (House of Anansi, 2026)

The Central Moment
(Homage to William Blake)

Troubles must come but woe to those
through whom they come. Better to have a millstone
fastened around your neck and be flung into the sea
than to disturb the faith of even one
of these little ones. So said angry love and peace—
what we might call the real real. And now
I am the little ones lolling, white and diseased
In ever-repeated questioning, and I am
the one who injected it into me. I am the neck
and the millstone. I am thrown from myself.
I am perpetually suffocating in the glory
or is it the horror of the shoreless sea.

Faithfulness

Time will run out on you,
they say. No. Time never
runs out.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the third Kingdom Poets post about A.F. Moritz: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow*

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) is a poet who achieved international success before other American writers had. He supported the abolitionist cause through his slim 1842 book Poems on Slavery, which he allowed the New England Anti-Slavery Tract Society to reprint and distribute free of royalties.

His verse romance Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847), written in Virgilian dactylic hexameter, expounds the legend of Acadian lovers separated on the day they were to be wed when the English expelled French Canadian Acadians from Nova Scotia. The book won admiration on both sides of the Atlantic, and became the most celebrated American poem of the century.

The following poem, published in 1838, is one of several from Longfellow widely shared in classrooms and anthologized in school textbooks — making it well known to a wide readership. It appeared in his early collection, Voices of the Night (1839).

Longfellow is honoured in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, which few other Americans have been.

A Psalm of Life

What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
---Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
---And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
---And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
---Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
---Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
---Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
---And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
---Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
---In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
---Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
---Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
---Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
---We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
---Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
---Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
---Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
---With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
---Learn to labor and to wait.

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

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.