Holy Spring
Holy Spring - meaning Summary
Light and Desperate Solitude
The poem depicts a speaker caught between destruction and a fragile, sacred renewal. Images of war, wounds, and ruin press in, while a contradictory holy spring—fertile, radiant, and solitary—offers a difficult consolation. The speaker feels isolated, seeking confession or guidance but finding none, and accepts an uneasy, lone gratitude for a final, ambiguous redemption amidst upheaval. The poem juxtaposes violent loss with a stubborn, solitary hope.
Read Complete AnalysesO Out of a bed of love When that immortal hospital made one more moove to soothe The curless counted body, And ruin and his causes Over the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army And swept into our wounds and houses, I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only That one dark I owe my light, Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none To glow after the god stoning night And I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun No Praise that the spring time is all Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful Out of the woebegone pyre And the multitude's sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall, My arising prodgidal Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire, But blessed be hail and upheaval That uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing Alone in the husk of man's home And the mother and toppling house of the holy spring, If only for a last time.
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