Faith poems
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Incense
© Vachel Lindsay
Think not that incense-smoke has had its day.
My friends, the incense-time has but begun.
Creed upon creed, cult upon cult shall bloom,
Shrine after shrine grow gray beneath the sun.
The Thorn Forest
© Dante Alighieri
Then dark with dripping blood it gave a howl
and cried again: "Our damaged branches ache!
Your pillage maims me! Can't you feel at all?
Tears At The Grave Of Sir Albertus Morton (Who Was Buried At Southampton) Wept By Sir H. Wotton.
© Sir Henry Wotton
Silence (in truth) would speak my sorrow best,
For, deepest wounds can least their feelings tell;
Yet, let me borrow from mine own unrest,
But time to bid him, whom I lov'd, farewel.
The Queen of Bubbles
© Vachel Lindsay
The Youth speaks: :
"Why do you seek the sun
In your bubble-crown ascending?
Your chariot will melt to mist.
Your crown will have an ending."
Heart of God
© Vachel Lindsay
O great heart of God,
Once vague and lost to me,
Why do I throb with your throb to-night,
In this land, eternity?
The Pilgrim's Vision
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
The trees all clad in icicles,
The streams that did not flow;
A sudden thought flashed o'er him,-
A dream of long ago,-
He smote his leathern jerkin,
And murmured, "Even so!"
The Hope of the Resurrection
© Vachel Lindsay
Though I have watched so many mourners weep
O'er the real dead, in dull earth laid asleep
Those dead seemed but the shadows of my days
That passed and left me in the sun's bright rays.
General William Booth Enters into Heaven
© Vachel Lindsay
Booth died blind and still by Faith he trod,
Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.
Booth led boldly, and he looked the chief
Eagle countenance in sharp relief,
Beard a-flying, air of high command
Unabated in that holy land.
The Ideal
© Charles Harpur
Spirit of Dreams! When many a toilsome height
Shut paradise from exiled Adams sight,
The Perfect Marriage
© Vachel Lindsay
I hate this yoke; for the world's sake here put it on:
Knowing 'twill weigh as much on you till life is gone.
Knowing you love your freedom dear, as I love mine
Knowing that love unchained has been our life's great wine:
Our one great wine (yet spent too soon, and serving none;
Of the two cups free love at last the deadly one).
Prologue to "Rhymes to be Traded for Bread"
© Vachel Lindsay
Those were his days of glory,
Of faith in his fellow-men.
Therefore to-day the singer
Turns beggar once again.
Rondel of Merciless Beauty
© Geoffrey Chaucer
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.
To Richard Wagner.
© Sidney Lanier
"I saw a sky of stars that rolled in grime.
All glory twinkled through some sweat of fight,
To J.R.
© Robert Fuller Murray
Last Sunday night I read the saddening story
Of the unanswered love of fair Elaine,
The `faith unfaithful' and the joyless glory
Of Lancelot, `groaning in remorseful pain.'
An Exotic
© Henry Timrod
Not in a climate near the sun
Did the cloud with its trailing fringes float,
Whence, white as the down of an angel's plume,
Fell the snow of her brow and throat.
The Wild Knight
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
_A dark manor-house shuttered and unlighted, outlined against a pale
sunset: in front a large, but neglected, garden. To the right, in the
foreground, the porch of a chapel, with coloured windows lighted. Hymns
within._
When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted
© Rudyard Kipling
And only The Master shall praise us, and only The Master shall blame;
Andd no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!
The Creeds Of The Bells
© Anonymous
How sweet the chime of the Sabbath bells!
Each one its creed in music tells
