Shylock’s Recantation

Shylock’s Recantation – a sonnet based on themes from “The Merchant of Venice”, considering that only once in the Catholic Church would Shylock have known the Tridentine Doctrine of Concomitance, which would have been his best defence against Portia’s Balthazar…

 

Had I but known the Roman Council’s art—

That Flesh and Blood are held in single bond,

And cannot by a legal blade dispart,

Nor split by cunning of a clever blonde!

For Trent decrees the Blood dwells in the Host;

Where Flesh is given, Blood must surely flow.

Had I then claimed what Rome exalts the most,

I’d kept my ducats and my daughter’s vow.

Instead I swore by Moses and my Law,

Relied on Venice and her narrow scale;

Unknowing that the Church’s doctrine saw

A grace that made my contract’s loophole fail.

Now, forced to bow before the altar stone

I learn the tricks they use to claim my own.

Planned Childhood

This came to me on the plane the other day. It is not really a sonnet as they are supposed to be iambic pentameter, and this is iambic quadrameter, but a verse is a verse for better or worse. See if you like it.

 

To sing a new song to the Lord

And yet include there no strange fire

To take up psaltery and lyre

And sing according to His Word

 

How can the song be new, and yet

Stay in the range that God commands?

Right ways to praise and worship’s bounds,

These God within His Word has set.

 

The Gospel is the song that’s new

New from the cross and empty tomb

This song is new yet ancient too

Planned ere a child had breached a womb.

 

We are the children planned to be

God’s own, a people He set free.

 

Oh yes you were!
Oh yes you were!

Sonnet about David

I search the marches of my mother-tongue, 
A fitting form of sound and sense to find,
And search the vaults of meaning in my mind
To draft a verse that David might have sung.

For David, that sweet psalmist of the Lord,
Was called a man made after God’s own heart,
And this it was that sanctified his art;
That he loved God and dwelt upon His Word.

However clever be the poet’s strain,
The assonance and structure, so sublime,
How fine the rhythm, excellent the rhyme,
‘Twas none but God that gave the poet’s brain.

So let this lesser David also be
After Thine heart, and raising praise to Thee!

(29th November 1988 & 16th April 2000, Hemel Hempstead and Warsaw)