Lent with Herbert Day 17: Bliss

After pausing for St. Patrick’s Day, we resume our Lenten Journey through Herbert’s poem Prayer, using the sonnets in my new book After Prayer, Today we complete Herbert’s beautiful ascent back into joy, a joy which is all the more secure and real because it has passed through and transmuted sorrow. Herbert signals this in a single line:

Softness and peace and joy and love and bliss

The final step on Herbert’s ladder of ascent, which we have been climbing together these last five days, is Bliss. It may seem odd to be contemplating Bliss amidst all the sorrow and fear that surrounds us in this present crisis, but this is precisely the time when we need to lift our eyes to the Heavens, and contemplate that full and final bliss for which we are made. Herbert knew this well and of course his generation had to deal with several severe plague seasons, withdrawing from the fulness of their usual lives and sequestering themselves away, but such a time of crisis is just when faith deepens and just where the poetry comes from!

Like joy, bliss is almost impossible to write about, to put into words, it is beautiful, fleeting, not to be seized or grasped, or even sought, but only received as a sudden gift. As Eliot says of the experience ‘Quick, now, here, now, always/ a condition of complete simplicity’. In my poem I tried to evoke my own experience through particular glimpses and moments and to be true both to its brevity and its promise. For even the smallest moment of bliss seems to promise something more. As I came to compose the poem I found myself remembering one of Milton’s rare uses of this beautiful word in his Ode On Time, lines he wrote to be engraved on a clock. The poem begins ‘Fly envious Time till thou run out thy race’ but the lines that went to my heart, and which I was remembering when I wrote this poem were:

Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss;
And Joy shall overtake us as a flood,

I loved that juxtaposition of the eternal and the personal, the infinite and the intimate, and I hope something of that comes across in my poem too.

As always you can hear me read the poem by clicking on the title or the ‘play’ button

Bliss

Softness and peace and joy and love and bliss,

Love made this way, and lifts us up each stair,

Our maker knows that we were made for this:

The utter bliss that Heaven loves to share.

We glimpse it sometimes in another’s eyes,

We taste it sometimes on the tongues of prayer

It takes us wholly, takes us by surprise,

But grasping it, our arms clasp empty air.

 

Our bliss has vanished with a word of promise,

A sweet come-hither wave that offers more,

Each ecstasy has been a farewell kiss

That left us weeping on the hither shore.

Yet every passing moment whispers this:

Eternity shall love us into bliss.

Blake Jacob’s Ladder ‘Love made this way and lifts us up each stair’

A Song for Valentine’s Day

Playing Maggie’s song in the BBC studios

This time last year I was a guest on Sue Marchant’s Big Night In radio show  and took the opportunity to play this song live and dedicate it to my wife Maggie in time for Valentine’s day! I wrote it for her a few years ago and its on my new CD Dancing Through the Fire. Ironically its the only song of mine in which the movie industry has ever taken an interest, And for a while it looked as if it might be part of the sound track of a romantic movie. but the movie never got funding and the plans were dropped so I guess the title of the song turned out to be true after all!

I hope you enjoy it.  You can hear an early take with Oli Smith’s wonderful sax solo by pressing the play button or clicking on the title and the lyrics are posted below. The full CD version also includes wonderful harmony vocals by Rob Groves:

Movies s3 t3 m2

They Don’t Make Movies (Out of Love Like This)

All those people in the movies look so healthy young and tanned

And I know there’s nothing that they wouldn’t sell.

I can see their words of promise run like water into sand

So I draw my water from a deeper well.

When we wake up in the morning you can hardly face the day

And I see the courage other people miss,

As you spend yourself for others, as you keep the dark at bay,

But they don’t make movies out of love like this.

 

Bridge:

                 

There’s no glamour like the magazines, no glitter like the stars,

No putting on the make-up to impress,

But we still stand together love, for all our battle-scars,

We hold each other’s hearts and still say yes.

 

 

You can’t photograph fidelity, or merchandise restraint,

Your inner beauty wont be selling soap.

And sometimes from the outside it might seem that love grows faint

On the inside its renewed each day in hope.

So there’s nothing on the surface to attract a stranger’s gaze

There’s not photo-genic posed romantic bliss,

Just two people staying faithful through the darkest winter days,

But they don’t make movies out of love like this.

 

Bridge:

And its been a long day’s journey just to get us up to bed,

But we’re not too tired to share a loving  kiss,

And the truest and the deepest things are more than can  be said,

And they don’t make movies out of love like this.

A Song for Valentine’s Day

Playing Maggie's song in the BBC studios

I was a guest on Sue Marchant’s Big Night In radio show the other day and took the opportunity to play this song live and dedicate it to my wife Maggie in time for Valentine’s day! I wrote it for her a few years ago and its on my new CD Dancing Through the Fire. Ironically its the only song of mine in which the movie industry has ever aken an interest, And for a while it looked as if it might be part of the sound track of a romantic movie. but the movie never got funding and the plans were dropped so I guess the title of the song turned out to be true after all!

I hope you enjoy it.  You can hear the full CD version with Oli Smith’s wonderful sax solo by pressing the play button or clicking on the title and the lyrics are posted below:

Movies s3 t3 m2

They Don’t Make Movies (Out of Love Like This)

All those people in the movies look so healthy young and tanned

And I know there’s nothing that they wouldn’t sell.

I can see their words of promise run like water into sand

So I draw my water from a deeper well.

When we wake up in the morning you can hardly face the day

And I see the courage other people miss,

As you spend yourself for others, as you keep the dark at bay,

But they don’t make movies out of love like this.

 

Bridge:

                 

There’s no glamour like the magazines, no glitter like the stars,

No putting on the make-up to impress,

But we still stand together love, for all our battle-scars,

We hold each other’s hearts and still say yes.

 

 

You cant photograph fidelity, or merchandise restraint,

Your inner beauty wont be selling soap.

And sometimes from the outside it might seem that love grows faint

On the inside its renewed each day in hope.

So there’s nothing on the surface to attract a stranger’s gaze

There’s not photo-genic posed romantic bliss,

Just two people staying faithful through the darkest winter days,

But they don’t make movies out of love like this.

 

Bridge:

And its been a long day’s journey just to get us up to bed,

But we’re not too tired to share a loving  kiss,

And the truest and the deepest things are more than can  be said,

And they don’t make movies out of love like this.