Analysis of The God Who Waits
Leslie Coulson 1889 – 1916
The old men in the olden days,
Who thought and worked in simple ways,
Believed in God and sought His praise.
They looked to God in daily need,
He shone in simple, homely deed;
They prayed to Him to raise their seed.
He sowed on mountain side and weald,
He steered the plough across the field,
He garnered in their harvest yield.
And if He gave them barren sod,
Or smote them with His lightning rod,
They yielded humbly to their God.
They searched the record of their days
To find and mend their evil ways,
Which made the wrath of God to blaze.
And if no evil they could find,
They did not say, 'Our God is blind,'
'God's will be done,' they said, resigned.
So played the old their humble part,
And lived in peace of soul and heart,
Without pretence of Reason's art.
But we have lost their simple creed
Of simple aim and simple need,
Of simple thought and simple deed.
Their creed has crumbled as their dust,
We do not yield their God as just,
Now question holds the place of trust.
Faith blossomed like the Holy Rod,
So grew the old men's faith in God.
We cannot tread the path they trod.
We were not born to anchored creed
That measures good and evil deed -
A guide to those who guidance need.
The God the old men hearkened to
We left, and in our image drew
And fashioned out a God anew.
That iron God, who still unfed,
Sits throned with lips that dribble red
Among the sacrificial dead.
Belching their flames between the bars,
Our fires sweep out like scimitars
Across the Eden of the stars.
And souls are sold and souls are bought,
And souls in hellish tortures wrought
To feed the mighty juggernaut.
The dripping wheels go roaring by
And crush and kill us where we lie
Blaspheming God with our last cry.
Man's cry to man the heaven fills;
We hear not in our marts and mills
The silent voices of the hills
The message of the breathing clay,
Calling us through the night and day
To come away, to come away!
For though old creeds, had we the will,
We cannot, lacking faith, fulfil,
The God above all creed waits still.
For still beyond the city gate,
The fallow fields eternal wait
For us to drive our furrow straight.
Scheme | AAA BBB BCC DDD AAA EEE FFF BBB GGG DDD BBB HHH BII JAJ XKK LLL MMM NNN ONO PPP |
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Poetic Form | Etheree (33%) Tetractys (20%) |
Metre | 01100101 11010101 01010111 11110101 11010101 11111111 11110101 11010101 11001101 01111101 11111101 11010111 11001111 11011101 11011111 01110111 111110111 11111101 11011101 01011101 011111 11111101 11010101 11010101 11110111 11111111 11010111 11010101 11011101 11010111 10111101 11010101 01111101 0101111 110010101 01010101 1101111 11111101 0100101 10110101 10101111 01010101 01110111 01010101 1101010 01011101 01011111 1111011 11110101 111010101 01010101 01010101 10110101 11011101 11111101 1101011 01011111 11010101 0110101 111110101 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 2,068 |
Words | 405 |
Sentences | 21 |
Stanzas | 20 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3 |
Lines Amount | 60 |
Letters per line (avg) | 28 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 83 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 20 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 2:02 min read
- 94 Views
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