Poem
Milton begins his poem by invoking the angels, and he claims that they too would need to cry along with mankind:
- So sweetly sung your joy the clouds along
- Through the soft silence of the list'ning night;
- Now mourn, and if sad share with us to bear
- Your fiery essence can distill no tear
- Burn in your sighs, and borrow
- Seas wept from our deep sorrow; (lines 4–9)
The final lines connect the act of Circumcision to Christ's Passion:
- And that great cov'nant which we still transgress
- Entirely satisfied,
- And the full wrath beside
- Of vengeful Justice bore for our excess,
- And seals obedience first with wounding smart
- This day: but O ere long
- Huge pangs and strong
- Will pierce more near his heart. (lines 21–28)
Read more about this topic: Upon The Circumcision
Famous quotes containing the word poem:
“Stir of time, the sequence
returning upon itself, branching
a new way. To suffer, pains, hope.
The attention
lives in it as a poem lives or a song
going under the skin of memory.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“A poem should not mean
But be.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)