Good Friday: The First 12 Stations of the Cross

By |2024-03-28T22:21:19-05:00March 28th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Christianity, Easter, Lent, Malcolm Guite, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

The Stations of the Cross, which form the core of my book Sounding the Seasons,  are intended to be read on Good Friday. We will read the 13th and 14th tomorrow on Holy Saturday and then on Easter Morning we will have the 15th’ resurrection’ station and also a new villanelle that I have written for [...]

“Memory”

By |2024-03-26T18:46:58-05:00March 26th, 2024|Categories: G.K. Chesterton, Poetry|

If I ever go back to Baltimore, The City of Maryland, I shall miss again as I missed before A thousand things of the world in store, The story standing in every door That beckons on every hand. I shall not know where the bonds were riven, And a hundred faiths set free, Where a [...]

Holy Week, Wednesday The Anointing at Bethany

By |2024-03-26T20:16:19-05:00March 26th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Christianity, Easter, Malcolm Guite, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

The Gospel of John (John 12 1-8) tells us of how Mary of Bethany anointed Jesus. I love this intense and beautiful moment in the Gospels, The God of the Cosmos enters as a vulnerable man into all the particular fragility of our human friendships and intimacy. I love the way Jesus responds to Mary’s [...]

Holy Week, Monday: Jesus Weeps Over Jerusalem

By |2024-03-24T21:50:54-05:00March 24th, 2024|Categories: Audio/Video, Christianity, Easter, Lent, Malcolm Guite, Malcolm Guite’s Lenten Sonnets, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

This strange Holy Week has begun in tears: tears of frustration, tears of lament, and for so many who have been cruelly bereaves, tears of grief. It’s hard to see through tears, but sometimes its the only way to see. Tears may be the turning point, the springs of renewal, and to know you have [...]

America’s First Poet, Anne Bradstreet: A Progressive Conservative

By |2024-03-20T05:40:15-05:00March 19th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Literature, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

As a settler in seventeenth-century New England and as a female poet, Anne Bradstreet was a trailblazer. A progressive female poet, she also took delight in her role as wife and mother, while remaining committed to her conservative Puritan theology and beliefs. Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) was a pioneer in two ways: She was a pioneering [...]

The Banner of Trust: The Holy Land

By |2024-03-04T19:49:46-06:00March 3rd, 2024|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Culture, Poetry, Sainthood|

For nearly two thousand years, the pilgrimage to the Holy Land has been the pinnacle of Christian religious experience and a byword for trust in divine providence. There is one place that captivates the pilgrim more than all the rest. Because in the most consequential of lands, it is the most consequential city this side [...]

“God’s Own Descent”: Dante, the Incarnation, & Frost’s “The Trial by Existence”

By |2024-02-06T19:56:27-06:00February 6th, 2024|Categories: Dante, Literature, Poetry, Robert Frost|

“The Trial by Existence” is an example of Robert Frost’s strong and brilliant reworking of Dante’s poetic tradition in his own work. He incorporates many of Dante’s images, but he also pushes past the ending silence of "Paradiso" by making the incarnate Christ the sight at the top of the mountain. But God's own descent [...]

Swimming Against the Stream

By |2024-01-31T18:51:26-06:00January 31st, 2024|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christianity, David Deavel, Poetry, Senior Contributors|

Regina Derieva’s life and poetry were filled with the bleak, the absurd, and the painful. But they do not form the last word in either, for God was her friend. Earthly Lexicon: Selected Poems and Prose by Regina Derieva, translated by various (156 pages, Marick Press, 2019) Images in Black, Continuous, by Regina Derieva, translated [...]

Darwin, Bureaucratese, and the Decline of Poetry

By |2024-01-30T19:17:26-06:00January 30th, 2024|Categories: Poetry|

I want to begin by asking a simple question: Why has poetry descended from being a great delight to a miserable bore for the majority of the populace? This was not always the case. Poet Magaret Randall helps us to see: Poems have been smuggled out of prisons, shared on battlefields, passed from hand to [...]

The Hidden Depths in Robert Frost

By |2024-01-28T20:31:55-06:00January 28th, 2024|Categories: Books, Peter Stanlis, Poetry, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

The conservatism of Robert Frost was rooted in his tendency to view existence as inherently paradoxical. Frost carefully crafted and honed metaphor as a device to express such tensions in suggestive rather than didactic ways, which sometimes resulted in critical misinterpretations that deny the importance of the metaphysical in his verse. Robert Frost: The Poet [...]

A Foray Into Metaphysical Poetry With John Donne

By |2024-01-21T19:11:57-06:00January 21st, 2024|Categories: John Donne, Literature, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

Something about the way in which metaphysical poetry engages the mind is unique to this style of verse. A combination of relatable simplicity with conceptual eclecticism renders it into a form of expression that can be deeply and personally felt by the reader, but only once he works through the poet’s intricate analogies and “metaphysical” [...]

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