We have come to the meeting of the ways.
The book is laid aside,
That deep book, an ancient tale,
Of a favoured son of God, Lord of Egypt.
Then, in the ancient days,
The way of a man of God was wide,
And his goal was wide and filled with a light
Which melted the edge of the earth
Which mind made.
And in the light, and of the light,
And the light,
Was the Great God, indefinable.
And Joseph, where that page lies open,
Speaks before Pharaoh,
Cunningly and wisely,
And their two minds search in heaven
And grope in the misty
Equivocal stuff of God.
The coals are fading. My lamp glows;
My book rests open on a couch.
I think of one poet
Whose lamp glowed in a tower,
Who wrote of the herald angel
On Christmas Eve
Through the world’s clouds down-steering;
And of another
Whose subtle words
Searched behind the picture
For the dry thought
Drifting on the quick void
Where love and imagination
colour the dark
Which is the nearest we might get to Truth.
And their labours set me the scene:
The way of ancient man
Who knew the spiritual
And lived in God,
Cowardly and terrified.
That way is closing again
Like rays of light that are like rapiers.
The rays strike,
And shining alone in the darkness
Is the one way,
The way of the timeless God
Who has pierced and entered Time.
To mark the first anniversary of the death of poet Thomas Kinsella, we publish a poem dating from the beginning of his writing life in the early 1950s and which has not appeared in any of his collections. In the year before his death he worked on a few final poems and revised earlier, uncollected poems. These, including Christmas Eve 1950, will appear in Last Poems to be published by Carcanet in February
The book is laid aside,
That deep book, an ancient tale,
Of a favoured son of God, Lord of Egypt.
Then, in the ancient days,
The way of a man of God was wide,
And his goal was wide and filled with a light
Which melted the edge of the earth
Which mind made.
And in the light, and of the light,
And the light,
Was the Great God, indefinable.
And Joseph, where that page lies open,
Speaks before Pharaoh,
Cunningly and wisely,
And their two minds search in heaven
And grope in the misty
Equivocal stuff of God.
The coals are fading. My lamp glows;
My book rests open on a couch.
I think of one poet
Whose lamp glowed in a tower,
Who wrote of the herald angel
On Christmas Eve
Through the world’s clouds down-steering;
And of another
Whose subtle words
Searched behind the picture
For the dry thought
Drifting on the quick void
Where love and imagination
colour the dark
Which is the nearest we might get to Truth.
And their labours set me the scene:
The way of ancient man
Who knew the spiritual
And lived in God,
Cowardly and terrified.
That way is closing again
Like rays of light that are like rapiers.
The rays strike,
And shining alone in the darkness
Is the one way,
The way of the timeless God
Who has pierced and entered Time.
To mark the first anniversary of the death of poet Thomas Kinsella, we publish a poem dating from the beginning of his writing life in the early 1950s and which has not appeared in any of his collections. In the year before his death he worked on a few final poems and revised earlier, uncollected poems. These, including Christmas Eve 1950, will appear in Last Poems to be published by Carcanet in February
