From a London garden

Chapter 2: TRANSFIGURED

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About This Book

A collected series of lyrical poems moves between urban and rural imagery to reflect on love, mortality, time, memory, and moral growth. The poet uses concise, imagistic language and varied meters to meditate on human experience: longing and loss, pride and humility, the rhythms of city life and quiet country scenes, the passage of days and seasons, death and consolation. Voices range from personal confession to philosophical observation, with elegiac tones, religious reflection, and celebration of steadfastness. Recurring motifs—light and shadow, dawn and evening, gardens and streets—bind individual pieces into a contemplative portrait of inner life amid modern surroundings.

TRANSFIGURED

Love took the sordid clay

And pierced its grossness as with lustral fire,

Fashioned a spirit from the common earth,

And crowned him lord and king with tears and mirth:

Love took the sordid clay

And shaped it to the god of her desire.

Then, ere he could resign

His white divinity and fall away

From that ineffable, ideal height

Whereto he had been lifted by Love’s might

Ere he could so resign

His godhead and return again to clay,

Death took the god of Love—

The god that was but man ashine with gleams

From inner fires that Love’s own hands supplied—

And made him deathless who might else have died:

Death took the god of Love

And throned him in the heaven of her dreams.