Poetic angels

Angel from Angels window in St Chrysostoms Church

National Poetry Day and the Feast of the Guardian Angels coincided in 2014.

Now there’s a wonderful challenge! Have you a poem about Angels you’d nominate as special to you? Well I’d have to mention Edmund Sears’ It Came upon the Midnight Clear  not wonderful poetry but evocative, well known and easy to remember.

So apt for our world (though in rather gender specific language) are the lines:

And man, at war with man, hears not

The love-song which they bring;

O hush the noise, ye men of strife,

And hear the angels sing.

 

A nomination to fit both categories for today is Rabrindanath Tagore’s The Child Angel. Again apt for our world today, echoing the Gospel account of Jesus placing a child in the midst of  arguing people, the poem also encourages us to find insight in the humble child in the everyday world around us.

 

THE CHILD-ANGEL

 

They clamour and fight, they doubt and despair, they know no end to their wranglings.

Let your life come amongst them like a flame of light, my child, unflickering and pure,

and delight them into silence.

 

They are cruel in their greed and their envy,

their words are like hidden knives thirsting for blood.

Go and stand amidst their scowling hearts, my child,

and let your gentle eyes fall upon them like the forgiving peace of the evening over the strife of the day.

 

Let them see your face, my child,

and thus know the meaning of all things; let them love you and thus love each other.

Come and take your seat in the bosom of the limitless, my child.

 

At sunrise open and raise your heart like a blossoming flower,

and at sunset bend your head and in silence complete the worship of the day.

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