Rhoades' Mystic Verse

James Rhoades · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 5 pages

Five pages of poems selected from James Rhoades, opened by a list of his published works running from Poems (1870) through his verse translations of the Georgics and the Aeneid to Words by the Wayside (1915), with the note that his Collected Poems were first published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1925.

The selection is arranged so that each poem states a different form of the same claim — that what matters is not visible. "The Shrine of Truth" asks the reader to sever the substance from the sign and learn that Truth is neither throned in the heavens above nor housed on the earth below, but is found by unlocking the Kingdom within with one's own heart's key, at which point even a barren crag or a hut with a riven roof-tree becomes the House of God and the Gate of Heaven. A sonnet on 1 Corinthians xii, 26 takes the law that if one suffers all are maimed thereby, and asks what would follow if man's pride would stoop to understand it — liberty leaping from land to land, and the earth crowned with peace as with a rainbow. "The Hidden Vision and the Inner Voice" is the most striking of the group: it argues that what men call blindness may be a withdrawal from sense that opens the gates of a diviner dawn, and that in the heart of every unheard sound there is a silence fraught with speech, the sweeter for being unheard — ending on the prayer to be made deaf in order to hear and blind in order to see. "For the Healing of the Nations" closes the selection by conceding how bad things look — earth driven from her true orbit, lust and rapine on her soil, Mammon outfacing God in man's soul — and calling nonetheless on quenchless Hope, mountain-moving Faith and long-suffering Love to let their threefold fountains flow.

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