Seeing Eternity: How Earlier Poets Can Open Our Eyes to Faith

Abstract

This article explores how poets from the seventeenth century, including John Donne, George Herbert, Gertrude More and Henry Vaughan, can still speak to modern readers with immediacy and vision about matters of faith. In the first two sections, the poets are shown to give voice to such enduring human emotions in response to God as wonder and joy but also as sorrow and frustration, challenging us as readers to experience faith more richly and deeply. In the third section, the poets are shown to be concerned with the same fundamental questions as we are today. Their works remain powerful in their beauty, surprising in their discoveries and reassuring in their humanness before God.