[Julie Steiner]

Hi, Glenn! Aha, you're toying with Frost's interlocking rubaiyat structure for "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" again....

I don't agree 100% with the narrator's belief system here, which is fine — I can still appreciate a religious poem without necessarily agreeing with its theological thesis. I do, however, need a poem to deliver the sorts of things that poems can, but prose cannot. I don't just mean the skillful use of rhyme and meter, but the creation of a poetic experience, opening out to vivid sensations and possible meanings.

This piece gives me the impression that the narrator is saying pretty much what the poet wanted him to say, with minimal inconvenience posed by the tricky form; that's impressive, but maybe the technical mastery makes things just a bit too straightforward, without leaving much room for discovery or startling insights. As Robert Frost said, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

I also wonder who the intended audience is for this. The title suggests familiarity with the Catholic tradition of referring to death, judgment, hell, and heaven as "the Four Last Things," and L1 expects familiarity with Matthew 5:45. But isn't a reader who is already familiar with those prerequisites likely to be even more familiar with the dogmatic concepts mentioned in the poem? So why rehash all this stuff?

Is the narrator trying to convince himself of God's mercy, but can't quite bring himself to believe what he wants to? He seems to be hoping that other semi-believers will be able to relate to his anxiety, and I'm sure some readers will. But those readers who have already either accepted or rejected the Good News (i.e., the idea that God Is Not A Merciless, Power-Tripping Asshole) might not feel that there is much payoff for us in these 16 lines of fear and trembling.

More specific quibbles:

S1: Is lust really the only sin dividing the just from the unjust? A Pass/Fail grading system of mortal sins, which places a single instance of masturbatory relief on the same Hell-earning level as torture and murder, is not my idea of perfect justice, even if it floated St. Thomas Aquinas's high-functioning autistic boat to categorize sins that way.

S2: The narrator claims "my Judgment will come from Christ above," but within two lines of that statement he seems more concerned about the judgments of others: "The book of deeds I wrote on earth, each page, / will then be seen by all." Does the narrator actually fear people's judgments of him more than God's? If so, that's the most interesting thing in this poem, and I'd far rather read more about that than about the less surprising stuff that follows.

Also in S2: Referring to "the Father, Son, and Dove" strikes me as a touch too flippantly irreverent, if the narrator is seriously worried about his odds of ending up in Hell.

S4: In the final line, the afterlife seems awfully late in the game for God to suddenly "keep me in His love’s protecting shell." What does someone already in Heaven need protection from? And where was that same "protecting shell" when it actually would have been helpful, i.e., when the anxious narrator was back on earth, so worried sick "devouring himself" with fear and self-loathing (as evidenced by the poem's existence) that he might as well have already been in Hell long before death?

Final thought (which need not be answered in this poem) — It puzzles me that musings about Heaven and Hell, such as this one, tend to ignore the idea of resurrection completely. If bodies are irrelevant, and matter doesn't matter after death, then what was the point of Easter? Don't most versions of the Final Judgment envision the dead getting bodies again BEFORE going to either Heaven or Hell (or Purgatory, strangely not mentioned among the Four Last Things)?

I hope some of these ramblings are helpful.