Three Strong Women and Three Feeble Men (II)

Three Strong Woman and Three Feeble Men(II)
JUDGES 5:1- 31a

The other Sunday we sang the hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” whose second verse begins, “Here I raise my Ebenezer.” I asked if anyone knew what this referred to, and hardly anyone did. (The answer is in 1 Samuel 7.) I knew the answer to that question, but on another recent Sunday we sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which includes lines such as “in the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,” and I have a harder time working out what that means, or in holding in my head the combinations of imagery that it incorporates. 0This is the nature of poetry. It takes up imagery that enlivens the poet and/or that will resonate with people reading the poem and packs it together into a dense whole that requires slow reading. The very power with which it speaks in its own context makes it hard for the poem to have the same impact in another context...