A Divine Spark: 'Poetry As Sacrament'

. . . My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, -- the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
The Windhover

                                 2

                I did say yes

            O at lightning and lashed rod;

        Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess

            Thy terror, O Christ, O God;

    Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:

    The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod

        Hard down with a horror of height:

 And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

                               3

                The frown of his face

            Before me, the hurtle of hell

        Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?

            I whirled out wings that spell

    And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.

     The Wreck of the Deutschland

“… when in the winter of '75 the Deutschland was wrecked in the mouth of the Thames and five Franciscan nuns, exiles from Germany by the Falck Laws, aboard of her were drowned I was affected by the account and happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and, though my hand was out at first, produced one. I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realized on paper."

The result is an ode of thirty-five eight-line stanzas, divided into two parts. The first part, consisting of ten stanzas, is autobiographical, recalling how God touched the speaker in his own life....