Henry Charles Beeching, ed. (1859–1919). Lyra Sacra: A Book of Religious Verse. 1903.
By John Henry Newman (18011890)The Elements
A Tragic Chorus MAN 1 is permitted much | |
To scan and learn | |
In Nature’s frame; | |
Till he well-nigh can tame | |
Brute mischiefs, and can touch | 5 |
Invisible things, and turn | |
All warring ills to purposes of good. | |
Thus as a God below | |
He can control | |
And harmonise what seems amiss to flow, | 10 |
As severed from the whole | |
And dimly understood. | |
But o’er the elements | |
One Hand alone | |
One Hand has sway. | 15 |
What influence day by day | |
In straiter belt prevents | |
The impious Ocean, thrown | |
Alternate o’er the ever-sounding shore? | |
Or who has eye to trace | 20 |
How the Plague came? | |
Fore-run the doublings of the Tempest’s race? | |
Or the Air’s weight and flame | |
On a set scale explore? | |
Thus God has willed | 25 |
That man when fully skilled | |
Still gropes in twilight dim; | |
Encompassed all his hours | |
By fearfullest powers | |
Inflexible to him; | 30 |
That so he may discern | |
His feebleness, | |
And even for earth’s success | |
To Him in wisdom turn, | |
Who holds for us the keys of either home, | 35 |
Earth and the world to come. |
Note 1. Most of Newman’s poems previous to the “Dream of Gerontius” were written on a voyage to the Mediterranean in 1833 in company with Hurrell Froude. They appeared under the title of “Lyra Apostolica” in the British Magazine with poems by Keble, Froude, and a few other writers, and were afterwards collected into a volume bearing the same name. An edition with an introduction by Canon H. S. Holland, and a critical note by the present editor, has appeared in the “Library of Devotion” (Methuen). One of the most beautiful of Newman’s poems, which is too personal to take its place in a “Lyra Sacra,” may be quoted here. It refers to the comfort he received when sick and weary at Palermo by frequenting the Roman churches.
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