Poetry Wednesdays: "The Dark Wood"

(I'll come up with a better title for this later)

Poetry is important, it is one of things, along with friendship which C.S. Lewis describes as making life worth living. Coleridge tells us it can help remove the film of familiarity and allow us to see reality more clearly. So, I’m adding a new weekly post here at It All Begins in Wonder. Every Wednesday, I’m going to be sharing a poem of mine with a brief explanation. This week, I’m sharing the first poem from my most recent collection, The Love that Moves the Sun and Other Stars.

Dante in the Dark Wood by Gustave Doré

“The Dark Wood”
Inferno Canto I

And I have also lost the mountain path
And fallen in the forest dark and grim,
Enduring what so often feels like wrath

But is just Love that’s boiling over the brim.
Falling off the Mountain of Delight,
The Sun still rising and not yet growing dim,

My sinner’s eyes are blinded by its Light.
So I must find another path to tread,
A path of hellish darkness and of fright,

Yet one that will bring life back to the dead.

Dante’s Divine Comedy has been a constant companion of mine for over a decade. I first read it during my PhD because it showcased both the importance of poetry for the Christian life, and showed how engaging in it can help make us more like God. In my book, I wrote 100 poems in terza rima (Dante’s own poetic style) reflecting on each canto of the Divine Comedy.

In this first poem, I try to evoke the poem’s own beginning in medias res, in the middle of things. So it begins with a conjunction as though already part way through a sentence. When the pilgrim begins his journey, he has fallen off the true path to heaven due to his sin and is now desperately looking for the way back to it. So, I put my poem in that same place. For just like the pilgrim I frequently, often daily, fall away from the true path. And yet, as the pilgrim comes to learn, even God’s wrath is just his love as it is experienced by sinners. He hasn’t changed, I have, and so how I experience him changes too, it hurts. But, and this is essential, the story doesn’t end here. It begins.