That's how we got the book, a gift from someone who thought we'd enjoy it. Besides, if she could place that book with someone who'd appreciate it, she'd avoid having to toss it in the waste basket, all that wisdom, all that blessed piety. "So I'll give it to the Schaaps," she thought. "After all, he taught English for all those years. He probably loves poetry."
That's the way it got here, I'm sure.
Now it's ours, One Year Book of Poetry: 365 Devotional Readings Based on Classic Christian Verse (1979--forty years old). Even the title could have used an editor; Tyndale House, Wheaton--the book's hometown is known far and wide for the depth of its Christian virtues.
It's devotional reading all right, and the poetry is too, a genre I might call "devotional" poems, the kind I spent most of my life being snooty about, as if I'd graduated from such gaudy religiosity back in junior high. I'd read T. S. Eliot, for heaven's sake. What need had I of poetry that can't finish itself without some tearful epiphany?
Let me be biblical here. Like Adam, it was my wife who took it off the shelf and nudged in front of me as if it were that cursed apple. I don't remember her saying anything one night after supper, but what she was proposing was giving the sweet gift of a good friend a bit of a trial run. After all, our friend meant so well in bequeathing us One Year Book of Poetry.
Okay, besides January 1 is William Blake, without whom English Romanticism could hardly have stirred into a movement. Typically however, the Blake poem is "The Lamb," which is the innocent twin of its oppose, the fierce and even scary little poem "The Tyger," which is neither there nor mentioned in One Year.
But we've stayed with it. We're well into our second week, and while you shouldn't consider this some kind of recommendation--there's no accounting for taste, after all--that book, that gift, has prompted more than a few smiles. At times, I'll leave the final words out when I'm reading to see how perfectly predictable the rhymes are; my wife fills them in easily.
As you can imagine, the daily/nightly poems are museum pieces that, through the years, one musician or another has determined worthy of a musical setting. Thus, many are likely better known as hymns than poems.
If you're evangelical and no longer a kid, you can guess the vintage of those hymns; they're a genre no one sings anymore, the kind now deeply baked into evangelical boomer consciousness. Last night, Arabella Catherine Hankey's "I Love to Tell the Story." How's that for a golden oldie?
There's more to this story. We have yet another gift gracing our supper table, this one from the here-and-now. Our kids gave us a Google Hub, which kindly flashes pictures, 24/7, of our precious two-year-old granddaughter 600 miles away, and also answers more questions than we could possibly create.
Here's what happens. We read poem and devotional, then ask Google to find a musical setting and play it. It's done well, as a matter of fact. If Google finds one, we listen. I'm well away that kind of behavior would go over well at the Home. Believe me, we'll get there soon enough.
So last night she asked Google to find and play "I Love to Tell the Story" and added the name of yet another old friend, a choral director. Praise Google, for it gloriously broke into a rambunctious setting for that frumpy old hymn, a setting created and directed by an old friend, sung by a choir that included my own ex-students, and dedicated, as you shall hear, to our own now-retired preacher, who also remains a very dear friend.
What a blessing. What I'm saying is, it is well with my soul.
So thank you, all around--even Google.
You got five minutes? You got to hear:
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