Two or Three Angels

Edvard Munch

Girls On the Jetty

Two or Three Angels

Two or three angels

Came near to the earth.

They saw a fat church.

Little black streams of people

Came and went in continually.

And the angels were puzzled

To know why the people went thus,

And why they stayed so long within.

~ Stephen Crane ~

The Garden of Love

Caspar David Friedrich

Cloister Graveyard in the Snow

The Garden of Love

I laid me down upon a bank,

Where Love lay sleeping;

I heard among the rushes dank

Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,

To the thistles and thorns of the waste;

And they told me how they were beguiled,

Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut

And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;

So I turned to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires.

~ William Blake ~

The Bulls

Benjamin Palencia

Toros

The Bulls

Six bulls I saw as black as jet,

With crimsoned horns and amber eyes

That chewed their cud without a fret,

And swished to brush away the flies,

Unwitting their soon sacrifice.

It is the Corpus Christi fête;

Processions crowd the bannered ways;

Before the alters women wait,

While men unite in hymns of praise,

And children look with angel gaze.

The bulls know naught of holiness,

To pious pomp their eyes are blind;

Their brutish brains will never guess

The sordid passions of mankind:

Poor innocents, they wait resigned.

Till in a black room each is penned,

While from above with cruel aim

Two torturers with lances bend

To goad their fieriness to flame,

To devil them to play the game.

The red with rage and mad with fear

They charge into the roaring ring;

Against the mockery most near

Of human might their hate they fling,

In futile, blind blood-boltering.

And so the day of unction ends;

Six bulls are dragged across the sand.

Ferocity and worship blends,

Religion and red thirst hold hands . . .

Dear Christ! 'Tis hard to understand!

~ Robert William Service ~

Psalm 23

Paul Gauguin

The Spirit of the Dead KeepsWatch

Psalm 23

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

He leadeth me beside still waters.

He restoreth my soul:

He leadeth me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil; for thou art with me;

thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:

thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Odium Theologicum

Albrecht Dührer

The Four Holy Men

Odium Theologicum

1
They met and they talked where the crossroads meet,

Four men from the four winds come,

And they talked of the horse, for they loved the theme,

And never a man was dumb.

The man from the North loved the strength of the horse,

And the man from the East his pace,

And the man from the South loved the speed of the horse,

And the man from the West his grace.
So these four men from the four winds come,

Each paused a space in his course

And smiled in the face of his fellow man

And lovingly talked of the horse.

Then each man parted and went his way

As their different courses ran;

And each man journeyed with peace in his heart

And loving his fellow man.

2
They met the next year where the crossroads meet,

Four men from the four winds come;

And it chanced as they met that they talked of God,

And never a man was dumb.

One imagined God in the shape of a man.

A spirit did one insist.

One said that nature itself was God.

One said that he didn’t exist.
They lashed each other with tongues that stung,

That smote as with a rod;

Each glared in the face of his fellow man,

And wrathfully talked of God.

Then each man parted and went his way,

As their different courses ran;

And each man journeyed with wrath in his heart,

And hating his fellow man.

~ Sam Walter Foss ~

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Winter, Spring,

Summer, Fall

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

To everything there is a season,

And a time to every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die;

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose;

A time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew;

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate;

A time of war, and a time of peace.

The Laws of God, The Laws of Man

Hieronymous Bosch

Garden of Earthly Delights

The Laws of God, The Laws of Man

The laws of God, the laws of man

He may keep that will and can;

Not I: let God and man decree

Laws for themselves and not for me;

And if my ways are not as theirs

Let them mind their own affairs.

Their deeds I judge and much condemn,

Yet when did I make laws for them?

Please yourselves, say I, and they

Need only look the other way.

But no, they will not; they must still

Wrest their neighbor to their will,

And make me dance as they desire

With jail and gallows and hell-fire.

And how am I to face the odds

Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?

I, a stranger and afraid

In a world I never made.

They will be master, right or wrong;

Though both are foolish, both are strong.

And since, my soul, we cannot fly

To Saturn nor to Mercury,

Keep we must, if keep we can,

These foreign laws of God and man.

~ A. E. Housman ~

Christ in the Universe

Raphael

The Sistine Madonna

Christ in the Universe

With this ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us. These abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the young Man crucified.
But not a star of all
The innumerable host of stars has heard
How He administered this terrestrial ball.
Our race have kept their Lord¿s entrusted Word.
Of His earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.
No planet knows that this
Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,
Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,
Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.
Nor, in our little day,
May His devices with the heavens be guessed,
His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way
Or His bestowals there be manifest.
But in the eternities,
Doubtless we shall compare together, hear
A million alien Gospels, in what guise
He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.
O, be prepared, my soul!
To read the inconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

~ Alice Meynell ~