“Have mercy on me, a poet!” To many, the vocations of the poet and the monk seem incompatible. The young Thomas Merton, having had a taste of each, considered the former immanent, worldly, and vain, whereas the latter was “transcendent”, sacred, concerned with the “reality of God”. But there are many poets, even of a secular cast, whose ethos bears striking similarities to the ancient mystical practice of hesychia, or stillness. If these similarities are more than coincidental, why are there so few hesychast-poets? Could there be such a thing as a deliberate hesychastic poetics? If so, what would its praxis look like? If not, is that all the worse for poetry, or for monasticism?

What’s become of the peanut-eyed snowman?

The sights, textures, scents and sounds of the world we encounter as children become parts of us, pegs on which memories are hung for a while – before they quietly fade and are lost. In this poem, at a familiar schoolyard after a lifetime away, they surface once more...

Plato

Today, Sir Henry is remembered as one of the nineteenth century's most important legal historians: his conception of contractual association as the distinguishing mark of Modernity remains an instructive lens through which to reflect on who we are and where we come from. But, at least in his undergraduate days at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he also proved himself to be both a poet and a Platonist of sorts; and one result was this tribute to the Master, which he submitted in 1843 in an (alas, unsuccessful) bid for the Chancellor's English Medal.

Calamity Again

The Ukrainians' ongoing struggle to save their troubled, post-Soviet civil society and to defend their sovereign land against Russian aggression has deep roots: although possessed of a national identity for centuries, they have enjoyed only few and fleeting periods of independence. In this brief but poignant poem, one of their greatest bards gives voice to his grief at yet another outbreak of violence in his beloved homeland.

The Polish Ideal

In the 1790s, the once-great Polish Commonwealth had been carved up by the neighboring empires of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. But, in spite of the long century of repression that followed – a time when Siberia was known as the "Polish Golgotha" – the Poles' chivalric spirit and love of their homeland survived. In the 1920s, shortly after the victory of the newly independent Republic of Poland over Lenin's expansionist Soviet Union, G.K. Chesterton himself travelled to the country. And, filled as ever with the joy of discovering truths at the bottom of apparent paradoxes, he found poetry in their cavalry.