Jean Burden writes, “it is a wood to be gone through at night/ with no road to follow, /with no light,” such is life in a way. Patrick Kurp reflects on this, a kind of contrast to the light of Christmas.
Jean Burden writes, “it is a wood to be gone through at night/ with no road to follow, /with no light,” such is life in a way. Patrick Kurp reflects on this, a kind of contrast to the light of Christmas.
When St. Edwin of Northumbria was converting his kingdom, one of the pagans who chose to convert said this:
“The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before of what is to follow we are utterly ignorant.”
Chesterton modified it in The Ballad of the White Horse:
‘For this is a heavy matter,
And the truth is cold to tell;
Do we not know, have we not heard,
The soul is like a lost bird,
The body a broken shell.
‘And a man hopes, being ignorant,
Till in white woods apart
He finds at last the lost bird dead;
And a man may still lift up his head
But never more his heart.
That’s good stuff, Grim. Thank you.