Poems for Lent

 

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Each Lent, I venture through a book of poems to help me pause each day to reflect and let the season shape itself in my soul. Usually it is Malcolm Guite's The Word in the Wilderness, which I highly recommend and use year after year. This year a new book emerged out in the world, Hearing God in Poetry, compiled and with reflections by the former bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries. I am a sucker for collections of poetry, especially the old poems from before the twentieth century. There is so much depth to explore in older poems that may seem simple, or may be quite complex in nature, but visiting with them offers an insight from the past into something we might feel today.

The form of poetry is that much more is said in a significantly smaller space. Lines often don't even reach the right margin of the page! So you often need to sit with it for a while. Let the rhyme and the meter set the pace and musicality of the reading and then read it again. Words are carefully selected in poetry, so ask yourself why the poet chose that word or phrase. What might he or she be eluding to, or wishing to evoke?

We do fairly well at remembering Easter, but the whole season of Lent is often so overlooked as time to be reflective. Poetry helps me do that. Sometimes people give things up for Lent, in an effort to remember when they miss that thing, I believe the good news of Easter cannot be fully comprehended if there is nothing preceding it. How did we get to Easter? What leads up to it? Why was it necessary? There are all kinds of questions and ponderings that we should take time to explore. 

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson