Alice Meynell: “the heart shattering secret of His way with us”.

One of my favourite poems from the gloriously eclectic Oxford Book of Mystical Verse, D H S
Nicholson and A H E Lee (Eds.), (Oxford 1917), 463-4. This anthology has never been revised or updated so has little in it of the 20th Century. But there are a lot of poems like this one, by minor or near forgotten poets.

This kind of poem pushes
the boundaries of thought and theology, and whatever else prevents that
devotional reductionism by which we try to eliminate mystery and ‘the
heart-shattering secret of His way with us.’ There are lines in this poem that are worth a while of anyone's time to contemplate – maybe alongside the great Christocentric hymns of the New Testament in Colossians, Ephesians and John chapter 1.

Christ in the Universe, Alice Meynell.

With this ambiguous earth

His dealings have been told us. These abide:

The signal to a maid, the human birth,

The lesson, and the young Man crucified.
      

But not a star of all        5

The innumerable host of stars has heard

How He administered this terrestrial ball.

Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.
      

Of His earth-visiting feet

None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,       10

The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,

Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.
    

No planet knows that this

Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,

Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,       15

Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.
      

Nor, in our little day,

May His devices with the heavens be guessed,

His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way

Or His bestowals there be manifest.       20
      

But in the eternities,

Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

A million alien Gospels, in what guise

He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.
      

O, be prepared, my soul!       25

To read the inconceivable, to scan

The myriad forms of God those stars unroll

When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.