Rise, heart: Two poems for the first week of Easter

Let “Easter” by George Herbert and “Black Swallowtail” by Mary Oliver help you swim the this-changes-everything tide of Easter.

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Easter is not a day. Easter is an entire season—50 days of steeping ourselves in the truth and reality of Jesus’s resurrection. A resurrection which makes possible our adoption as sons and daughters of the King. In the resurrection, fact and mystery combine. And this is why poetry matters, because it helps us to seek both at the same time. Below are two poems to help you swim this glorious Eastertide. I’m considering posting a poem or two each week of Easter, but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.

First off, here is “Easter” by George Herbert.

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen.  Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.

Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long;
Or since all musick is but three parts vied
And multiplied;
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

I got me flowers to strew thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sunne arising in the East,
Though he give light, and th’ East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.

Lots to dig into here, but I will refrain from unpacking. Read it out loud a few times and see what comes to mind after each subsequent reading. I love the opening sentence, though. It’s the leader in the clubhouse for my epitaph.

Next is Mary Oliver’s “Black Swallowtail.” This poem has been a companion of our family’s this school year. The kids memorized it in the fall, and we returned to it last week. As part of Lily’s kindergarten curriculum, we bought one of those at-home butterfly kits. Five painted lady caterpillars arrived in a cup. They ate for several days, then hung upside down on the lid for several days. When they moved to the lid, hanging from their J-shaped cocoons, we moved them into a cylinder-shaped net enclosure. Then they emerged. Lindsey and the kids released them in our backyard a few days before Easter Sunday.

The caterpillar,
interesting but not exactly lovely,
humped along among the parsley leaves
eating, always eating. Then
one night it was gone and in its place
a small green confinement hung by two silk threads
on a parsley stem. I think it took nothing with it
except faith, and patience. And then one morning

it expressed itself into the most beautiful being.

Resurrection is not metamorphosis. Those painted lady caterpillars did not die and come back from the dead. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that within resurrection—Jesus’s resurrection, in time-and-space—a kind of metamorphosis occurs. A glorious transformation does take place. What is sewn perishable rises imperishable. In Jesus’s case, our risen Lord really is “the most beautiful being.” And one day we’ll have a new body like his in our forever home. All we need is faith and patience.