Poem of the day 43

This is one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets. There is a line within that is well known, but the apocylaptic imagery is less well seen.

Let not anyone say that a Christian cannot think, feel, or do high art.

III

At the round earth’s imagin’d corners blow
Your trumpets, angells; and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scatter’d bodies goe,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall ouerthrow;
All whom warre, death, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine; and you whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never tast death’s woe.
But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space;
For, if above all these my sinnes abound,
’Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace,
When wee are there: here, on this lowly ground,
Teach mee how to repent; for that’s as good
As if thou hadst seal’d my pardon with thy blood.

John Donne.

The idea of the Christian subculture, and that we must remain within the polite realms of that culture, however, limits the poet. Donne is being explicity evangelical in these Sonnets. But he was not always writing on this subject. And the modern tendency to have genre rules limits.

It’s somewhat better in books, because those don’t require as much support, but even so: Left Behind was the Christian cultural phenomenon, but the books were decent at best (I read most of them) and the movies (I haven’t seen) were supposedly terrible. Wright’s the best contemporary Christian fiction author I’ve read (by far) and he’s outside the Christian culture industry. The Christian talent pool is also much smaller, so the likelihood of a spectacular Christian writer is lower. As well, the need many Christians have for works to have an explicit Christian message and to eliminate vice (no swears or drinking) makes subtler and/or realistic stories more difficult, while also severely limiting some genres such as fantasy (ironic, given the predominance of Tolkien and Lewis in the genre, I know) or SF.

Not all writing, however, pious has to be. And if you are writing pieties, like Donne, let the language soar.