Remembering

Remembering that it happened once,

We cannot turn away the thought,

As we go out, cold, to our barns

Toward the long night’s end, that we

Ourselves are living in the world

It happened in when it first happened,

That we ourselves, opening a stall

(A latch thrown open countless times

Before), might find them breathing there,

Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,

The mother kneeling over Him,

The husband standing in belief

He scarcely can believe, in light

That lights them from no source we see,

An April morning’s light, the air

Around them joyful as a choir.

We stand with one hand on the door,

Looking into another world

That is this world, the pale daylight

Coming just as before, our chores

To do, the cattle all awake,

Our own frozen breath hanging

In front of us; and we are here

As we have never been before,

Sighted as not before, our place

Holy, although we knew it not.

    —Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

Annunciation & Nativity

2. Annunciation 

Salvation to all that will is nigh; 

That All, which always is all everywhere, 

Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear, 

Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die, 

Lo! faithful Virgin, yields Himself to lie 

In prison, in thy womb ; and though He there 

Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He'll wear, 

Taken from thence, flesh, which death's force may try. 

Ere by the spheres time was created thou 

Wast in His mind, who is thy Son, and Brother; 

Whom thou conceivest, conceived; yea, thou art now 

Thy Maker's maker, and thy Father's mother, 

Thou hast light in dark, and shutt'st in little room 

Immensity, cloister'd in thy dear womb. 

3. Nativity

Immensity, cloister'd in thy dear womb, 

Now leaves His well-beloved imprisonment.  

There he hath made himself to his intent  

Weak enough, now into our world to come.  

But O! for thee, for Him, hath th' inn no room? 

Yet lay Him in this stall, and from th' Orient,  

Stars, and wise men will travel to prevent  

The effects of Herod's jealous general doom.  

See'st thou, my soul, with thy faith's eye, how He  

Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?  

Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,  

That would have need to be pitied by thee?  

Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,  

With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.  

—John Donne, from La Corona, The Holy Sonnets 

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn. Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,   

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.   

Now they are rising together in calm swells   

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear   

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving   

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden   

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

                                             

The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries, “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits, keeping their difficult balance.”

—Richard Wilbur

The World is too much with Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

    
 —William Wordsworth

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

   
—Wendell Berry

Sonnet: I thank you

I thank you, kind and best beloved friend,
With the same thanks one murmurs to a sister,
When, for some gentle favor, he hath kissed her,
Less for the gifts than for the love you send,
Less for the flowers, than what the flowers convey;
If I, indeed, divine their meaning truly,
And not unto myself ascribe, unduly,
Things which you neither meant nor wished to say,
Oh! tell me, is the hope then all misplaced?
And am I flattered by my own affection?
But in your beauteous gift, methought I traced
Something above a short-lived predilection
And which, for that I know no dearer name,
I designate as love, without love’s flame.

    —Henry Timrod