The Miracle Songs of Jesus

by Wilson MacDonald

THE MIRACLE SONGS
OF JESUS

BY WILSON MACDONALD

Copyright 1921
By Wilson MacDonald
Published November, 1921
All rights reserved

FOREWORD

Mr. Wilson MacDonald is already well-known to students of Canadian verse through his volume The Song of the Prairie Land, published in 1918, and also through various poems which have appeared from time to time in magazines in Canada and abroad. The poem, The Miracle Songs of Jesus, hitherto unpublished, shows Mr. MacDonald's distinguished gift in a new form, and will be welcomed as an important contribution to religious verse.

THE MIRACLE SONGS OF JESUS

Jesus, the poet of Galilee,
Fashioned the light in His lyric hands,
And held it up for all men to see:
The Publican and the Pharisee,
The merchant rich and the robber bands
On the outcast fringe of Galilee.
But all of the wise men sneered at Him;
And the gay young fellows jeered at Him;
And only a fisherman fool or two
Looked up at the Light with its liquid hue
And drank its beauty of red and blue.

Jesus, the poet of Galilee,
Sang that the weary might be free;
Sang of the lilies—how their glory
Shamed the best at a king's command;
Sang His truths in a lyric story
Even the poor could understand.
And the wise men heard and they tried to scan
The rhymes of the poet Son-of-Man.
But, every time that He sang, they found
Some cherished rule of their pedant school
Was killed in his poem's strange, new sound.

And Jesus, the poet, grew sick at heart
And fled from the halls where learning kills;
And took His verse from the fear of art
To the bold delight of the rain-washed hills.
And the songs He sang to the desert sea
Were far too sweet for the ears of men;
But the gray-white dunes of Galilee
Have blown with a fairer flower since then.