Poetry Wednesday

Sonnet 101 from Fulke Greville's Caelica:

In night when colours all to black are cast,
    Distinction lost, or gone down with the light ;
The eye a watch to inward senses plac'd,
    Not seeing, yet still having power of sight,
Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
    Where fear stirr'd up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offence
    Doth forge and raise impossibility ;
Such as in thick-depriving darkness
    Proper reflections of the error be ;
And images of self-confusedness,
    Which hurt imaginations only see,
And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils ;
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

The last peaceful evening

From Book IV, lines 596-607, of Paradise Lost, the last peaceful evening in Eden. Satan has tricked the archangel Uriel into leading him to God's new creation, where he spies on Adam and Eve and conceives a cunning plan...

Now came still Evening on, and Twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied; for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleased: Now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires: Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

Speaking of Elizabethan poets

here's the 1917 Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse.

You're welcome.

Psalm 1

From one of my multitude of small text-formatting projects, the first of Sir Philip Sidney's Psalm translations:

PSALM I.

Beatus vir.

He blessed is who neither loosely treads
The straying steps as wicked councel leads,
      Ne for bad mates in way of sinners waiteth,
      Nor yet himself with idle scorners seateth;
But on Gods law his whole delight doth bind,
Which night and day hee calls to marking mind.

He shall be like a freshly planted tree,
To which sweet springs of waters neighbours be;
      Whose branches faile not timely fruite to nourish.
      Nor withered leaf shall make it faile to flourish:
So all the things whereto that man doth bend
Shall prosper still with well succeeding end.

Such blessing shall not wicked wretches see,
But like vile chaff with wind shall scattred be;
      For neither shall the men in sinne delighted
      Consist when they to highest doome are cited,
Ne yet shall suff'red be a place to take
Where godly men do their assembly make.

For God doth know, and knowing doth approve
The trade of them that just proceedings love:
      But they that sinne in sinfull breast do cherish,
      The way they go, shall be the way to perish.

Here's the KJV.

The Sidneian Psalms online!

Here's a gem of English psalmody: the 1823 edition of the Psalm translations of Philip Sidney (nos. 1-43), completed by his sister, Mary Herbert, after his death in 1586. John Donne wrote a short poem about their work.

Four thousand winter

Sort of a colloquial Exsultet:

Adam lay ibounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter
Thoght he not too long;

And all was for an appil,
An appil that he tok,
And clerkes finden,
Wreten in here book

Ne hadde the appil taken ben,
The appil taken ben,
Ne hadde never our lady
A ben hevene quene.

Blessed be the time
That appil take was.
Therefore we moun singen
'Deo gracias.'

Why yes, I have been listening to the Mediaeval Baebes.

Poets on the Psalms

Via dylan, an exchange of letters by two American poets, Peter O'Leary and Alicia Ostriker, bewildered by the Psalms even as they're drawn to them. I'm grateful for their mention of John Milton's psalm translations and paraphrases, collected here via google:

• paraphrases of Psalms 1-8 and 80-88
  
• Psalm 114 at age 15
  
• Psalm 135
  
• Psalms 80-89