Status Updates From Love, Remember: 40 Poems of...

Shelley inviting Keats to stay with him as he recovered his health. I love his perspective on caring for his rival!

“Indeed Shelley, always generous in his judgement, perhaps because he was condemned as harshly by his own contemporaries as Keats had been, wrote: ‘I am aware indeed that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure.’”

Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since Thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.

Bitter-Sweet by George Herbert

If he says, Let not your hearts be troubled, it is not because he doesn't understand how troubled our hearts actually are, or doesn't feel that trouble too. On the contrary, it is because he feels and knows it only too well that he wants to heal it for us. It is not his will that death should do this to us or that our hearts should always be troubled, for he has come not only to share the trouble but to deal with it

You know too well this trouble in our hearts,
Your heart is troubled for us, feels it too,
You share with us in time that shears and parts
To draw us out of time and into you.
I go that you might come to where I am
Your word comes home to us and brings us home.

From “Let Not Your Hearts be Troubled” by Malcolm Guite

If we have ever felt, as the poet does in the first stanza (Our Prayers Break on God), that God and his heaven are on some distant shore where the first heave and surge of our grief can only break in tiny wavelets, then the second stanza brings us to the gospel truth that God is close, indeed closer to our pain than we are, that he suffers under the hammer blows of our troubles and our gnawing grief gnaws at him too.

“Open our clenched fists Heaven, to receive The touch of mercy, mercy in the depths.
Open your wound in us, the wound that heals...”

Earth by Malcolm Guite

“I am not mad: too well, too well I feel
The different plague of each calamity…”

- King John - Constance’s Speech by William Shakespeare. On grief’s overwhelming realities.

“I hope that the poems in this part acknowledge and speak into our questions, our shock and con-fusion, not perhaps to answer them immediately, for the deepest answer may be a longer time coming, but at least to honour them, helping us to realise that even as we feel that we are a dead lake, a sinking ship, a staggering invalid, we are not alone.”

Malcolm’s words are consistently beautiful. Grateful.

“Sewing up the seams as words
grow into sentences, verbs don’t fit,
fall into place. Nothing proceeds
according to plan. There isn’t a plan.
I perform confusion instead of composition.”

On lament:

“Such remembrance is tender in the full sense of that word; tender in its loving but also tender to the touch, like an open wound, and yet the memory that opens the wound is also searching it, cleansing it and healing it.”

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

C.S. Lewis

“I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.”

In Memorial by Lord Tennyson
Section V