Tag: sonnet

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)