Stars sundry and allwhither
Planets pompous and distant;
But the Moon is only always
Goddess excellently bright!
Fairy Queen rides in her chariot,
Ghosts rejoice in the moonlight
Nature basks in moonbeams;
I revel at sight wonderous
Goddess excellently bright!
Speaking to the Heart: 100 Favorite Poems by Wendy Beckett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Sister Wendy was an erudite and delightful cloistered art historian in a veil who knew that Poetry is a song of the heart from a mind spring of sense and sensitivity, not to be burdened with a weight of reason. The result is a lovely apple-picking of her favorite poems in her pretty poetic orchard to share the beauty with the universal reader whose heart intoxicated and the spirit exalted in ethereal ecstasy. Her selection of poems manifests the finer tissues of her heart and the higher octaves of her spirit. Reading the entire book creates empathy for the sensitive minds of the poets so physically poignant that the reader senses the pain and the longing of the poets vis-à-vis.
Sister Wendy, also known for her long-time BBC documentaries on the history of art, speaks her heart through the poems of her choice colored in the spectrums of human emotions, ranging from longing to wonder, hope to sorrow, and anger to love. Even the subject of Faith becomes alluring due to Sister Wendy’s magical transformation of the matter into fairy-like ideation with sensually diaphanous wings as pagan as could be. Her interpretations speak on the poet’s behalf as an individual soul at the utter solitude, not as a literary artificer whose achievement merits the name in the canon of literature. In doing so, Sister Wendy brings out the poet’s true sentiment under a forage of words and shines her mystic perspectives on the poet’s reading in a splendid but straightforward way.
The reader will find famous, not-so-famous, and obscure poems from Elizabethan England to 20th century America in this lovely book. Sister Wendy is both discriminating, and non-discriminating in the human emotions poured into the world of poetry. She is discriminating in the sense that she has a “Third Eye” that sees the poet’s soul and understands the sentiment nuanced in the poem, including wrath and despair, poisons to the mind. Non-discriminating in a way, she values poems spirited in the heroic but straightforward endurance of existential malaise in everyday life written in the plebian language. From Shakespeare’s ‘Fidele’ to John Harris’s ‘Feral’ and many more, the reader will feel ennobled to walk the gardens of the poetic Elysium with Sister Wendy introducing you to each of the poets’ greeting and smiling.
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The skies they are blue and boundless
The stars they are serene and sightless
The stars they are many and sightless;
It is the day that invades the brilliance of the night
With the glare of the fiery sun haughty downright;
It is dreary with no menagerie of heaven’s beasts,
Afloat in the abeyance of immemorial pasts
It is gloomy with no festivals of ancient legends,
Aglow in a heaven’s theater at their best acts.
The first ray of light from heaven dispels
The gray silence of night lost with lusters
With pale hues of the sun in the soft sweetness
Lingering in a lake of shimmering waters.
Iris unfolds the wondrous seven colors
Weaved into an arch of dreams and hopes
Always new and fresh in never-ending grace
That fills with pleasure the hearts of beholders.
Aurora releases dewdrops from crystal buds
Made of moonbeams, stardusts, and starlights
Kept from a visiting moon and traveling stars
Washing the faces of earth with heavenly pearls.
The devil came upon a poor miller
In exchange for wealth with luster
And wanted his daughter’s hands
Though it pained her in blood and tears.
Now the girl without hands wandered off
Day and night with her tears washing off
The pain she suffered from the promise
Her father made with the devil for riches.
The girl without hands came upon a garden
Where Tree of Fruits of Grace seemed to beckon
with the susurrus of leaves coaxing her
And she saw a besotted king approaching her.
The girl without hands became a queen
But the devil returned with a scheme
To kill her and her son for their pure souls
As bounty for his region against angels.
The girl without hands fled with her son
Deep into a forest where seven years began
Until the king found them in Angel’s Hut
And the girl with no hands was no more.
She, with her wings clipped in shackles
Sees the light above the high altar
Through the dusk of leaves and boughs
Beneath the dome of boundless skies
Without spires and stained glass within.
But why else when nature has it all
Sermons in trees, brooks, and skies?
From the haunt of life’s vicissitudes
rests herself under the pillars of trees
As the choristers of hummingbirds begin
The hymns of hope in nature’s cathedral.
Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh 
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