Hi, Jayne—

Thanks for sharing your response to my poem. Let me share my thoughts on each of your three points:

1. I chose “protecting” rather than “protective” to emphasize that it is an ongoing action on God’s part rather than simply a quality of the shell or mansion in which the N hopes to dwell.

2. The rhyme scheme is a variation of the rubaiyat form used by Robert Frost in his poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Frost’s poem is in iambic tetrameter and mine is in pentameter. It seems to me to be a form well-suited for eschatological musings. The rhyme scheme in Frost’s poem is AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD. The four rhyming lines in the last stanza signal the end of the meditation.

3. I think you make a good point about the inversion. I fixed it with a revision.

I appreciate your helpful critiques.

Glenn

This isn't working for me, and I love tons of Christian poetry even though I am not and have never been Christian. George Herbert rocks! But Herbert's poems aren't sermons, but the musings and reflections of a flesh-and-blood person who thinks and strives and ponders and believes and doubts, i.e., a human confronting the meaning of life and existence. Your poem doesn't reveal the human being at its heart, it seems to me, and simply paints by numbers.

Hi, Roger—

Thanks for weighing in. I appreciate your time and effort.

Doesn’t the rain also fall on those who don’t struggle to choose faith instead of lust.
This is a weak spot. “Faith” and “lust” are not precisely what I intended. What I wanted to say was that God makes grace available to everyone while they are alive, whether they struggle to know and obey Him or reject Him. I made some adjustments to S1L2-3.

This sounds like you are at death’s door, looking death in the face. But why is it “soon?”
The N is simply remarking that life is short and he should consider the state of his soul, as the title suggests.

I don’t think that people’s deeds are revealed to “all” when they die. Do you?
Yes, I do. See my earlier post #8 to Julie Steiner.

The word “shove” seems forced to me. Who is doing the shoving?
Fair criticism. I think of damnation as something we do to ourselves by choosing to reject God, so the one shoving the N into hell should be the N himself. I will try to find a way to make this clear. You are right that, as it is, it is not clear. Some possible shovers are Christ, an enemy of the N, or the N’s conscience. The N is imagining that he might “perhaps” be shoved into hell, so his own conscience seems to me to be the likeliest shover. Maybe it is best not to clarify this and let the reader decide which shover best fits his or her own beliefs.

”The jaws of Hell” is a cliché, and a metaphor that doesn’t mesh with anything else in the poem.
“The Jaws of Hell” is an image borrowed from medieval morality plays. At the end of such plays, like Everyman, the sinful characters were marched to a huge mouth decorated with painted flames and thrown into it to the delight of the groundlings. I linked it to the image of the sinner trapped in a mirrored cage devouring himself “from age to age” (i.e. “forever”).

God will be merciful because he knows you so well? Sounds a bit boastful.
God knows how hard the N has tried, not always successfully, apparently, to please Him. The N is counting on God’s mercy because, as he has already confessed, his damnation would be “well-earned.”

A shell sounds like a diminutive and restricted area. . . .I don’t think of heaven as a shell, do you? Also I don’t think of heaven as a place where you need protection.
I hoped the reader would notice that heaven and hell are very similar in design. Both are confined spaces. Christ describes heaven as having “many mansions.” The only difference is that in hell, God is absent because He has been rejected, so the damned soul is left to look at himself in the “mirrored cell” for eternity and to devour himself by remembering and regretting his badly lived life. In heaven God’s loving presence allows the saved soul to share the Beatific Vision, including the fallen angels and Satan from whom he is protected by God.

Glenn

Hello!

The first stanza matches the likes of Dante's cruelty in posing every caste, from the pope itself to a low life thief, to the penalties of divinity after death, and in the poem's case, the preceding step of death (rain) falling without distinction on any type of mortal the soul had once led is a direct parallel of Dante's rhetoric. To your merit, it's a faithful and honest depiction of what comes to all of us.

From then on I noticed the fact that the narrator could really care mostly about his own deeds being shown to other mortals instead of god (for some interpretations), but I, already with the prior analysis in mind, instead chose to focus on a somewhat similar pattern I found with the Divine Comedy as a whole.

Firstly, that 'book of deeds' is the accountable evidence of what you have committed in your real life, and instead of being shown to man, it will be shown to god, and based on having insulted eternity, eternal will your punishment be, based on how you insult him. This ties with the verses 10 - 12 in your third stanza in which the mirrored cage could technically reflect Dante's dictum of self responsibility, and a proportionate punishment towards yourself as a mirroring of the insult you committed.

For example of the above, in the 7th Infernal Circle, second section, of Violence, in what I like to call 'Suicide - Forest', those who committed violence upon their body to cause death are bereft of their body by god, and instead turned to trees, forever stagnant, and in a certain way, having a reflective mirror being posed in front of them in which they can endlessly ponder, in their own infernal forest cage, the punishment they receive, much like the narrator of your poem.

'Chè non e giusto aver ciò che'om si toglie.'

- Dante, Inf. Canto XIII, V. 105.

Another example from the Divine comedy could also be found in the 2nd Circle of gluttony, where, as a mirroring of their appetites being so grand but in an opposite light, souls are forced to revel in excrement and filth for the rest of eternity. Once more, another example which can fit, though in an opposite lens, into your verses in which the damned is put in front of a mirror; horrified of his sins and what they brought him, and therefore horrified by himself and the punishment he brought upon himself. In hell, everything is a reflection of you.

Not to mention how "Devouring myself to the last age" could also be a direct fit for the 5th Circle of Rage, in which souls are forced to swim forever in raging waters, literally drowning in their rage, as the narrator here devours himself out of rage for being thrown down to hell.

And of course, if we skip Purgatory, and instead believe that for some divine concession made by god for "Knowing me so well", that he would be benevolent enough to pick you up from hell, the "Guide me home to Heaven, where I will dwell-" would suggest a similar linkage with the idea of Dante and the 'Diritta Via' being the correct path of virtue to take in an upwards vertical manner, guided by Beatrice, his own form of God, towards the abode of where the actual creator lies, true perfection, and his endless wish, as the one of your narrator, to dwell in that non effected paradise.

Your poem is good, and the fact that it lets someone craft such interpretations stresses the blessed subjectivity in it, and its free leasing imagination. Good Job! (I hope this comment made sense :D)

Hi, Alessio—

Thank you for sharing your detailed critique. I did indeed have Dante in mind. The verse form is similar to the terza rima in the Divine Comedy, but with four lines per stanza instead of three to reinforce the idea of the four last things. If the first line of each stanza is removed, it becomes terza rima.

With such a small canvas, I did not try to capture the complex retributive justice developed by Dante for the dozens of different sins. It seems to me that pride, as the mother of sins, is what ultimately leads the damned soul to reject God and to set himself up as an idol to be contemplated and worshipped for eternity. Thus, the mirror (a common allegorical symbol for pride) presents the sinner to himself eternally with all his imperfections. I used only this single Dantesque device to suggest “hell” in S3. Devouring is also a much repeated image in the Inferno to represent remorse (whose Latin root means “to bite back”). I would not presume to try to compete with Dante, il miglior fabbro.

I appreciate your generous comments and am glad you enjoyed the poem.

Glenn