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Poems

Chapter 84: LINES TO THE REV. HENRY DUDLEY RYDER,
By William Anderson
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Poetry

About This Book

This collection gathers lyrical pieces that trace the day's and year's cycles, moving through sunrise, morning, noonday, sunset, moonlight and seasonal scenes. It pairs brief landscape lyrics with sonnets, songs, and occasional narrative ballads, blending vivid natural description—mountains, streams, birds, and coastal views—with meditative reflections on mortality, faith, memory, and poetic ambition. The tone alternates between pastoral celebration and sober contemplation, favoring clear sensory detail, moral sentiment, and accessible stanza forms that foreground feeling and observation over formal experimentation.

LINES
TO THE REV. HENRY DUDLEY RYDER,

On reading his volume, entitled "The Angelicon, a Gallery of Sonnets, on the Divine Attributes, and the Passions, the Graces, and the Virtues."

Thy strains, sweet poet, have the power
To give a solace to the mind,
What time the clouds of sadness lour,—
Like sighs of thine own "lyrëd wind."
For when thy page I deeply trace,
Where thoughts and fancies thickly throng,
It brings to mind free nature's grace,
Where wood-birds tune their mystic song;
And pleasant streams in ways remote,
Where sweetest music loves to reign;
Where solitude gives birth to thought,
And thought is born of thought again;
Visions of earth, the pure and bright,
As poet only hath divined,
When high-toned genius pours her light,
Upon the rapt and feeling mind.
Well hast thou sung the grace and love
Th' Almighty deigns bestow on man,
When seeking mercy from above
By His own sole appointed plan.
And well, too, hast thou shown the sway
The passions have o'er mortal kind,
Avarice, Ambition, Jealousy,
And other turmoils of the mind.
These, like the rays that burst from heaven,
Shine brightly forth in verse of thine,
For the proud gift to thee is given,
To charm, to waken, to refine.
Go on thy way, thy song must claim,
From a dull world its ardent praise;
With saintly Herbert's twine thy name,
And bind with Herbert's verse thy lays.