O Oriens

O Dayspring,

splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:

Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

(Picture found here)

O Oriens

E vidi lume in forme de riviera Paradiso XXX; 61

First light and then first lines along the east

To touch and brush a sheen of light on water

As though behind the sky itself they traced

The shift and shimmer of another river

Flowing unbidden from its hidden source;

The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.

Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice

Are bathing in it now, away upstream…

So every trace of light begins a grace

In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam

Is somehow a beginning and a calling;

“Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,

Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking”.

~Malcolm Guite