WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Short Flights cover

Short Flights

Chapter 26: CARDINAL NEWMAN.
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

The collection gathers short lyrical poems and sonnets that meditate on seasonal change, love and its vicissitudes, friendship and parting, aspiration and disappointment, and quiet domestic and natural scenes. Many pieces favor intimate first-person reflection, blending pastoral imagery—gardens, birds, waves, and twilight—with moral and spiritual concerns about faith, striving, and memory. Varied short forms, occasional rondeau and sonnet sequences, produce compact musicality and a tone alternating between wistfulness and gentle affirmation, while recurring motifs of journey, secret longing, and consolation knit the individual lyrics into a unified contemplative arc.

CARDINAL NEWMAN.

To the last I never recognized the hold I had over young men.”—Apologia pro Vita Sua.

NO more the sun may know the strength it hath

To stir the bark in spring with quickening blood:
No more a storm controlleth its great wrath,
Or doleth out the measure of its flood!
There is a quality of lasting youth
That knoweth not the force that gave it birth;
Some souls God pointeth subtler ways of truth,
As highest tribute to their lasting worth.
He hath in souls like thine deposited
A quenchless flame as calm and strong as dawn;  
Across the world thy potent fire is shed,
Born of the “kindly light” that leadeth on!