Tag: transfigured

A sudden light transfigures a trivial thing,
a weather-vane, a wind-mill, a winnowing flail,
the dust in the barn door; a moment,- –
and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect;
but it leaves a relish behind it,
a longing that the accident may happen again.
~Walter Pater from “The Renaissance”

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet give you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! –
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins “Hurrahing in Harvest”

The accident of light does happen,
again and again,
but when I least expect it. 

I need to be ready for it; in a blink, it can be gone. 

Yet in that moment,
everything is changed and transformed forever. 

The thing itself,
trivial and transient becomes something other, 
merely because of how it is illuminated. 

And so am I, trivial and transient,
lit from outside myself, winnowed and
transfigured by a love and sacrifice
that I can never deserve.

It was and is no accident.

My heart is readies for earth to be hurled to heaven’s Light.