Sonnets and Other Poems Chiefly Religious by Joseph John Murphy |
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MARY MAGDALENE ON THE
MORNING OF THE RESURRECTION.
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 | Sonnets and Other Poems Chiefly Religious |  |
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MARY MAGDALENE ON THE MORNING OF THE RESURRECTION.
A Recollection of Herbert's Picture of that Subject.
“As the light of the morning, when the sun riseth,
A morning without clouds;
When the tender grass springeth out of the earth,
Through clear shining after rain.”
2 Sam. xxiii. 4.
A morning without clouds;
When the tender grass springeth out of the earth,
Through clear shining after rain.”
2 Sam. xxiii. 4.
I
The morning star is burning in the sky,The dawn is grey above the eastern hill;
The guilty city lieth calm and still
As sleeping innocence; while passeth by
The Magdalene, with sad though lustrous eye,
Bearing a vase with spice and ointment sweet,
Prepared to render burial honours meet
For Him who deigned upon the cross to die.
Soon shall arise the light of cloudless morn;
The tender grass is waiting to be born
Through the clear shining after summer rain.
No longer flows the fountain of her tears,
And in her eyes a fearful hope appears
That Jesus has not lived and died in vain.
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II
And thus I read her musings: “We were fain,”She says within herself, “to trust that He
Was the Deliverer, born to make us free,
And on His father David's throne to reign:—
And He has died in shame and bitter pain!
Died with the vilest!—He who raised the dead—
He before whom the spirits of darkness fled!
And where of all His life is now the gain?
'Tis here at least;—though all on earth seem loss,
And though the Lord has died upon a cross,
The powers of hell confess His victory;
The demons that from me His word expelled
Return not, by His deathless might withheld:—
Himself He saved not, yet He saveth me!”
| Sonnets and Other Poems Chiefly Religious | |