Humble Virtue and “The Lambs of Grasmere”
However humble and dull our daily exercise of virtue may seem, it is worthy of praise, because it reflects the love of Christ.
March 10, 2025
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However humble and dull our daily exercise of virtue may seem, it is worthy of praise, because it reflects the love of Christ.
In this poem, Rossetti rightly sets forward Christ’s suffering and death as the Christian’s highest help in temptation and trouble.
Herbert lets the title of the poem lead in two different directions—to point both to the time of the Resurrection and to the mourner’s dawning realization of the significance of Christ’s rising.
And the receipt shall be / My Saviour’s blood: whenever at his board / I do but taste it, straight it cleanseth me, / And leaves thee not a word; / No, not a tooth or nail to scratch, / And at my actions carp, or catch.
’Tis the spring of souls today: Christ has burst His prison And from three days’ sleep in death As a sun has risen
The brave old plant, in its lonely days, shall fatten upon the past: For the stateliest building man can raise, is the Ivy’s food at last.
Who more can crave than thou hast done? That gav’st a Son, to free a slave, first made of nought; with all since bought.
You only get to die once. Practice scorning death now so that you regard it with the proper contempt when the time comes.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdue, our love shall live, and later life renew.
The sonnet form gives the poet precisely 140 syllables in which to make a point. One might think this would be limiting. Quite the opposite.