Season 4 - Episode 18
O Oriens
Jon Limmer
January 7, 2025
To listen to an audio version of this post, visit www.covenantchurch.ca/podcasts/covenant-weekly.
In this first Covenant Weekly of 2025, I share with you a poem that I feel goes well with a new year, longer days, and the theme Become that we are engaging with this year. It is a sonnet by the contemporary English poet-priest Malcolm Guite called O Oriens. This is a short Covenant Weekly for January 7, 2025.
O Oriens*
First light and then first lines along the east
To touch and brush a sheen of light on water,
As though behind the sky itself they traced
The shift and shimmer of another river
Flowing unbidden from its hidden source;
The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.
Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice
Are bathing in it now, away upstream . . .
So every trace of light begins a grace
In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam
Is somehow a beginning and a calling:
'Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream
For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,
Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking.'
*Guite, Malcolm. Sounding the Seasons: 70 Sonnets for the Christian Year. Canterbury Press, 2013.