Two More Poems

Two very unrelated poems. The first is Down by the Salley Gardens, by Yeats. (The Wikipedia blurb about it is interesting.)

Down by the Salley Gardens

William Butler Yeats


Down by the sally gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the sally gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I being young and foolish with her did not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

The second poem is more religious in nature. John Updike, not coincidentally, passed away a couple days ago.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

John Hoyer Updike


Make no mistake: if He rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
Reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft Spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
Eyes of the eleven apostles;
It was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
The same valved heart
That — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
Regathered out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
Faded credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
Grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
Opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
Embarrassed by the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.