Sunday Sonnet.

This is a cycle of five sonnets, on despair, hope and duty. Lewis wrote them, but he refers to the old masters: to Dante. In this, nature is our broken, defeated self, not the beauty that reflects the glory of God. Both exist: this time is fallen.

IV.
Pitch your demand heaven-high and they’ll be met.
Ask for the Morning Star and take (thrown in)
Your earthly love. Why, yes; but how to set
One’s foot on the first rung, how to begin?
The silence of one voice upon our ears
Beats like the waves; the coloured morning seems
A lying brag; the face we loved appears
Fainter each night, or ghastlier, in our dreams.
“that long way round which Dante trod was meant
For mighty saints and mystics not for me,”
So Nature cried. Yet if we once assent
To Nature’s voice, we shall be like the bee
That booms against the window-pane for hours
Thinking that the way to reach the laden flowers.
--C.S. Lewis