The white bellies of dead fish
loom among duckweed and rushes.
Crows have wings to enable them to escape death.
There are times I know that God
is most concerned with the fate of snails.
He builds them houses. We are not His favorites.
At night, the bus taking the football team home
leaves a white trail of dust.
The moon shines in the willow herb,
in concert with the evening star.
How near you are, immortality—in the wings of bats,
in the pair of headlights
nosing down the hill.
– Günter Eich, Angina Days: Selected Poems (trans. Michael Hofmann; Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 45.
A little grim, but redeemed by the delightful line about the snails! :)
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Jason,
I loved English Lit as an Irish boy and teen, and later I was in the land of the “English”, i.e. greater London. I really liked Yeats, but his later stuff was out there. Anyway, I think you like literature more than me. In high school however, I fell in love with Christian philosophy, and that was one of my precursors to my Evangelical conversion. But still with Augustine all the way! :)
I have a book you would like to see, if you don’t have it already? It is called, A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, edited by David Lyle Jeffrey. It is Eerdmans 1992.
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Robert, thanks for the heads up about that book. I’m unfamiliar with it, and it certainly sounds intriguing.
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