Remembering the Christian Poetic Tradition

In an age of canon destruction, definition confusion, and dragging corpse writers out of their graves for new judgments, contemporary Christian readers require some way to preserve the best Christian literature of the last two millennia. In the early days of the Internet, we might have been optimistic, saying the new constant archiving world would preserve this for us, but we know different by now. Without some form of official anthologizing, our great authors are actually in danger of fading away into the mist of mediocrity. Thankfully, a few different anthologies have appeared within the last few years to fill this need: Edward Short’s Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse, Micah Mattix and Sally Thomas’s Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology, and—one of my favorites, the book I am reviewing here—Burl Horniachek’s To Heaven’s Rim: The Kingdom Poets Book of World Christian Poetry, Beginnings to 1800, in English Translation.

Horniachek’s goal is, most certainly, loftier than the other two books, which I chose as examples. While Saint Mary’s Book of Christian Verse is meant as a primer for school children, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 intends to uncover a rich contemporary tradition of New World religious poetry. Horniachek’s anthology (from Cascade Books in the Poiema Poetry Series which also includes D.S. Martin’s The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry) is a collection of poetry from the earliest days of Christian song to the last days of the eighteenth-century, covering no less than fifteen hundred years of religious verse from around the globe. The collection begins with St. Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymns on Paradise XII and ends with Ann Griffiths’s “Full of Wonder.”

Full of wonder, full of wonder for angels,
Faith can see great wonder in this—
Giver of being, abundant sustainer,
Governor of all that is,
In the manger a swaddled baby
Without a home to lay him in,
And still the bright hosts of glory
Are even now adorning him.

(From Ann Griffith’s “Full of Wonder,” translated from the Welsh by Tony Conran)

To Heaven’s Rim brings together a wide variety of translations, providing us with some of the best religious translators—from the sixteenth-century’s Josuah Sylvester to many of today’s best, including Christopher Childers, Maryann Corbett, Anthony M. Esolen, Rhina P. Espaillat, A.E. Stallings, Jan Zwicky, and Horniachek himself. These translators are, for the most part, literary rather than academic, and they are necessary for the collection, because Horniachek has here attempted to represent every significant European language in addition to any language where there were considerable numbers of Christians writing explicitly Christian verse during the first eighteen hundred years of Christianity. Anyone who reads and enjoys To Heaven’s Rim ought to pursue further work from both the authors included in the anthology and the translators.

To get a taste of how Horniachek focuses on bringing his readers literary pleasure through the translated poems rather than academic coldness, consider Wu Li’s “Singing of the Source and Course of the Holy Church” part twelve, which is translated from Chinese by Jonathan Chaves:

The flower of the twelvefold heavens
     ornaments the colored clouds,
crown jewel for a new knit robe
     worthy of the Holy Mother.
The hues have been bestowed
     from the midst of light with no beginning;
the fragrance has been absorbed
     from the love of the primordial womb.
Miraculous, that a single Virgin
     should give blossom to this precious bloom;
glorious that ten thousand saints
     should throng towards the splendid audience!
What day will we receive the blessing
     of entering His court,
His beauteous visage ourselves to see,
     each face suffused with joy?

As Horniachek’s collection excellently displays, the Christian church has been producing rich poetic literature from its earliest days and has never stopped. Lines of lamentation, thankfulness, humility, and praise are sung by humans toward Heaven. To Heaven’s Rim finds those voices singing in history and in harmony—in Europe, Syria, Armenia, Ethiopia, China, the Philippines, Mexico, and more.

O overbrimming grace whence I presumed
to gaze upon the everlasting Light
so fully that my vision was consumed!
I saw the scattered elements unite,
bound all with love into one book of praise,
in the deep ocean of the infinite;
Substance and accident and all their ways
as if breathed into one: and, understand,
my words are a weak glimmer in the haze.
The universal Being of this band
I think I saw—because when that is said,
I feel the bliss within my heart expand.

(From Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, Paradise, Canto 33, translated from the Italian by Anthony M. Esolen)

Horniachek includes here, of course, Christian poets known well by English readers, such as the anonymous “Dream of the Rood” poet, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Petrarch, Martin Luther, and St. John of the Cross, but he also includes poets foreign to English readers who are nonetheless considered some of the greatest poets in their native tongues: Ethiopian hymn writer St. Yared, the Armenian poet St. Gregory of Narek, the French poet Francois Villon, the Polish courtier Jan Kochanowski, the Hungarian soldier Balint Balassi, the Mexican nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and the Filipino priest Gaspar Aquino de Belen, among others.

As if this scope is not already expansive enough, Horniachek has also sought to illustrate the many poetic ways in which Christians lift their songs. He brings together didactic verse, drama, and dream visions of mystics, epic poems, hymns, short lyrical poems, and psalms. The subjects range from Jesus, Mary, and biblical figures to theological pondering and philosophical debate(s). The poets communicate through both laughter and tears, and the poets themselves are oftentimes saints. Through all of this, there is one goal: to sing to Heaven.

There sprang up within me a query
     that troubled my thoughts;
I wished to make enquiry,
     but was afraid of being importunate.
But the moment God perceived
     what lay in my thoughts
He enveloped with His wisdom
     this question of mine,
and thus I felt assured
     that in all that He told me
He had accepted my wish
     and encompassed it for me within His own words.

(From St. Ephrem the Syrian’s Hymn on Paradise XII, translated from the Syriac by Sebastian P. Brock)

To Heaven’s Rim’s ambition and execution makes it a necessity for any Christian’s shelf, especially for the shelf of anyone who is interested in the history of poetry. This is an easily digestible collection, and it ought to be well-used, dog-eared, and reread. Like with David Kern’s recent 30 Poems to Memorize (Before It’s Too Late), readers would do well to commit many of these poems to memory, to carry with them through life as an act of love.

To Heaven’s Rim is grand in scope and ecumenical in purpose. To my knowledge, there is not a volume like it. In the collection, Horniachek has tied together many threads of Christian tradition—theological, philosophical, mystical, intellectual, literary, academic—and has shown how they are one in religious poetry and in spiritual song. Moreover, he has put this together in a package that contemporary readers can understand and appreciate, taking considerable pleasure. To Heaven’s Rim is nothing short of an achievement worthy of the Christian tradition.

To Heaven’s Rim: The Kingdom Poets Book of World Christian Poetry, Beginnings to 1800, in English Translation
Edited by Burl Horniachek
Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2023; 310pp

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