Angelus News | July 31-August 7, 2020 | Vol. 5 No. 21

soul-cleaving power of love; or they are political slogans, as
ephemeral as last week’s newspaper, though not so good for
lining a bird cage.”
The old hymns, from the early Fathers of the Church to
the early 20th century, “were always talking about the Trinity.
They were always talking about the Word made flesh,”
Esolen says. “It’s pretty high theology. It never focuses on the
feelings of the singer. That would have struck them as kind
of beside the point.”
Here’s hymn IV, for which Esolen suggests the tune
“Picardy.” (You may know the tune as “Let All Mortal Flesh
Keep Silence.”) He writes his hymns to fit the tunes, and
once you’ve read — or sung — this hymn to this haunting
tune, any other way will feel wrong.
“From the desert came the sages,
Crossed the Jordan in the cold,
With the star of Judah gleaming,
Making straight the way foretold;
Found the Child and gave in homage
Frankincense and myrrh and gold.
From the desert of Judea
Came the prophet’s piercing cry,
Calling sinners to the waters
Of the Jordan rushing by,
That they might be found preparing
For the Savior drawing nigh.
Unto John then came our Savior,
In the fire of righteousness;
Dove-like, brooding on the waters,
Fell the voice from heaven to bless;
Then the most beloved Messiah
Fasted in the wilderness.
Come to us then in the desert,
Where Thy sheep have lost their way,
Lost the pasture by the river,
While the lion stalks his prey;
In the trackless night, O Savior,
Be Thyself our break of day.”
In the Bible, a
hundredfold refers to
receiving in return
much more than has
been given, sown,
or invested. Esolen
wants us to rediscover
our powerful birthright
of poetry — that
dynamite! — and
experience the hundredfold
return of joy
and faith. He wrote
this book “as a first
salvo in the Christian
reclamation of the
land of imagination
and song.”
“I am not so much showing what I can
do as showing what can be done, and
what might be done by people with
greater skill than mine. I want not emulators
and imitators but people who will
charge past me in blood and triumph.
I am a battered old soldier on bad knees,
who knows that the hill must be charged
and who knows of one or two ways it
might be done. He takes up the torn
standard of the cross and hobbles up
the first reaches of that height, crying
out instructions that he himself has not
the strength to fulfill, teaching more by
audacity and exposure than by success,
willing to look like a fool, to be shot
down in the first volleys, but knowing
that unless he or someone like him does
this, the hill will remain always in the
fist of the enemy.
So he goes.”
Jane Greer edited and published “Plains Poetry Journal” and
is author of “Bathsheba on the Third Day.”
T
NE
30 • ANGELUS • July 31-August 7, 2020