I'm including a poem entitled Love's As Warm as Tears. I read this in a Lent devotional earlier on in the week and was blessed by it, so I wanted to share it here. This well done piece goes to the heart of both our human loving and the divine and costly love revealed on the cross.
Love's as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.
Love's as fierce as fire,
Love is fire:
All sorts - Infernal heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyrics desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.
Love' as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering 'Dare! Dare!'
To sap, to blood,
Telling 'East, safety, rest,
Are good; not best.'
Love's as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.
What I love about this is how he has cleverly woven the four elements, and even more faintly the four seasons into these verses.
We begin with water. Love is 'as warm as tears'. He describes tension at the throat that comes before long held back tears and them moves to an image of floods that come.
Next, we meet love as fire. He speaks of 'infernal heat' perhaps hinting at human love but ends with the Divine love or 'empyreal flame' whence all loves came.
Third is the element of air evoking spring. The imagery here speaks to sounds and smells of spring and dares us to give to sacrifice in love.
Lastly, we meet love as earth. This is the last and lowest of the elements. Here the verse achieves one of the things that poetry does best, which is to take a cliche, 'dead language that won't lie down', wake it up and breath new life into it. The cliche is 'hard as nails'.
Love's as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (with all that is)
Our cross, and His.
These short, sharp sounds of blunt, thick, and hammered and the accuracy of 'medial nerves' keep the crucifixion visceral and incarnate. Through this, Lewis moves a theology of both creation and atonement, simply and beautifully expressed.
Since the beginning of Creation, God had forseen the sorrow our misused freedom might bring, and chose, from the beginning to share with us the consequences of our own mistakes, that he might redeem us from them.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16 ESV