For this joyful day of celebration, we feature a contemporary Easter poem by ESN author and scholar of early modern literature David Parry. We’re honored to be the first publication to share it.
For Easter
The star-crowned glory
of the fallen fair,
the fairly thrown down
thralls of princely hue,
the flaring brightness
shadowed, shadowing the sun,
the circling oneness
shattered, fallen, dulled.
And so, continuing
in procession, proceeding
out of preceding plenty
squandered, abandoned, spent;
proceeding piteously, painfully
encountering the day
with bleeding colours blackened,
beauty battered and bruised.
And then, the star-crowned
glory of the chosen, now
the freely broken beauty
of that brightening sun;
embattled, burning up with
yearning for the dawn
of life, encompassed with
encircling death.
And now, the frozen field
of fallen finds itself fractured,
feels itself opened by a probing
touch of light now rising,
blazing earth’s frigidity
into startled fecundity,
questioning, pushing the seed
to the brink.
Image credit: Bartolo, Andrea di, -1428. Resurrection of Christ, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=55333 [retrieved April 8, 2017]. Original source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andrea_di_Bartolo_-_The_Resurrection_-_Walters_37741.jpg.
About the author:
David Parry currently teaches early modern/Renaissance English literature and practical criticism for various colleges of the University of Cambridge, where he pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies. He greatly enjoyed a year’s postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto before returning to Cambridge, and appreciates the ongoing friendships forged there. He is currently writing a book entitled Puritanism and Persuasion: The Rhetoric of Conversion and the Conversion of Rhetoric, and has published articles on various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century topics. He is an Associate Editor of The Glass, the journal of the Christian Literary Studies Group (UK). He is also involved in the Cambridge University Christian Graduate Society and in Christians in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHAS), an informal group of Christian graduate students and academics interested in relating their faith to their studies. Some of his academic work can be viewed at https://cambridge.academia.edu/DavidParry.
A joy and delight to read and meditate on. I was particularly struck by those ones in the last verse:’ … a probing touch of light now rising, blazing earth’s frigidity into startled fecundity … ‘ . Words to chew on I think.