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Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 34: Religion.
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About This Book

A collection of verse that shifts between brisk depictions of modern life—motor races and city heat—and intimate lyrical sonnets exploring love, memory, and devotional longing. Classical and medieval references recur alongside pagan pastoral fantasies that imagine escape to woodland Hesperides, while formal experiments include songs, sonnets, ballades, rondeaux and a pantoum. A seasonal sequence maps moods across spring to winter, and a concluding suite treats mortality through elegy and dark humor. The poems balance energetic narrative scenes with reflective, sometimes elegiac meditations on desire, nature, and death.

Religion.

FROM that crude savage who, on Libyan sands,
Graves his barbaric god, and kneels thereto;
From those mysterious, matriarchal bands,
Eating strange flesh their spirit to renew
With fabled ancestors; from Austral lands
To Hyperborean solitudes, each age
Hath sought to fend its head from God’s dull rage
And stay the cosmic circling with clasped hands.
Yea, we no less! Doth man dare look away
Bravely as fits a man? With fear-sealed eyes,
Filling the spheres with vast, vague mysteries,
Man still must hearken some great angel’s wing,
Still bow to man-made God, still seek to stay
With claspèd hands the cosmic circling...