I could not believe that I ever should grieve,
That I ever should suffer again.
I rode in the sky (freely justified I),
Nor envied Elijah his seat;
My soul mounted higher in a chariot of fire,
And the moon it was under my feet.”
Distracting Figures and Forms of Expression.
Other poems are so full of imagination, so crowded with unusual and almost bizarre figures of speech, that they fail to be the natural expression of the religious emotion of an assembly of religious people. George Herbert wrote a great many religious poems whose beauty and charm are only enhanced by their quaint and unusual imagery. Occasionally a hymnal editor ventures on a selection, but it is so foreign to the methods of thought and expression of the churches as not to appeal to their taste and feeling. Take the beautiful poem on the Sabbath day, “O day most calm, most bright.” The first line is spontaneous, expressive, and musical, and appropriate for a hymn. The second line, “The fruit of this, the next world’s bud,” with its antithetical structure, is already somewhat formal and forced. But when the third and fourth lines,
“The indorsement of supreme delight,
Writ by a Friend and with His blood,”