Nielsen’s Nook

On earth men dream, therefore, while they’re awake,
Some in good faith, and some deceitfully;
Of guilt and shame the greater share these take.

Ye on the earth, in your philosophy,
Are not for long content to tread one path,
Enamoured of vain show and subtlety.

Yet even this in Heaven stirs less wrath
Than when God’s holy Word is misconstrued,
Or when supremacy it no more hath.

Ye little think how great the cost in blood
To sow it through the world, how pleasing he
Who humbly bides by Scripture as he should.

All men, to show their ingenuity,
Contrive their own inventions — these they preach;
The Gospel is passed over silently.

…

So that the silly sheep, all unaware,
Come home from pasture fed on emptiness;
No harm they see, no less of guilt they bear.

Christ His Apostles did not thus address:
Go forth, preach idle stories to all men,
But taught them His true doctrine to profess.

Forth with His shield the Apostles sally then,
None other than His word their lips escapes,
This only is the lance they wield amain.

But nowadays men preach with jokes and japes,
And if they raise a laugh, their crowd cowls all swell
With pride - they ask no more, the jackanapes.

…

That’s how St Anthony doth feed his pig,
And many others too, more pig-like still,
Paying with currency not worth a fig.

…

The Primal Light the whole irradiates,
And is received therein as many ways
As there are splendours wherewithal it mates.

Since, then, affection waits upon the gaze
And its intensity, diversely bright
Therein the sweets of love now glow, now blaze.

Consider well the breadth, behold the height
Of His eternal Goodness, seeing that o’er
So many mirrors It doth shed Its light,

Yet One abideth as It was before.

__________

Dante, Alighieri. The Divine Comedy III: Paridiso, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds (London: Penguin Books, 2004), Canto XXIX, lines 82-145, pages 311-13.