Poem of the Day: ‘A Prayer for the Past’
A sense of the generous mercy of God animates these rhymed quatrains.

We know the Scottish writer George MacDonald (1824–1905) as the author of realistic novels, as well as fairy tales and other works of fantasy: “Sir Gibbie,” “At the Back of the North Wind,” “The Light Princess,” “The Princess and Curdie.” We recognize him, too, as an influence on the writing of Lewis Carroll, whose “Atalanta in Camden-town” ran as our comic Poem of the Day last October, as well as an influence on G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. It was Lewis, particularly, who named MacDonald a master of the Christian imagination. In the lineage of modern Christian literature, MacDonald is the acknowledged patriarch.
But he was, in his own time, a figure of theological controversy. A Congregational minister in the Calvinist tradition — though his family was a religious mix which included Catholics, Presbyterians, a priest the Scottish Episcopal Church, and a moderator for the Free Kirk of Scotland — he made himself unpopular in a series of ministerial positions by his preaching. His assertion, for example, that Christ’s work of atonement was meant not to deflect the wrath of God from human beings, but to obviate the cosmic problem of sin itself, scandalized his hearers. Even the wrath of God, he argued, was not an end in itself, a fundamental attribute of the divine nature, but a force of mercy, ordered toward personal sanctification. This wrath, he wrote, “will consume” what people suppose are their “selves,” so that “the selves God made shall appear.”
Today’s Poem of the Day knits MacDonald’s theological considerations to literary ones. A sense of the generous mercy of God animates these rhymed quatrains, with their three tetrameter lines and their trimeter resolution. Here, the crucial aspect of God’s generosity is that it is tied to his position in eternity, outside time, occupying a “day” which “girds centuries about.” It’s not only not futile, but perfectly sensible, the poem argues, to pray for things in the past. The very act of praying means to step out of time, into that eternal day in which “nothing made is lost.”
A Prayer for the Past
by George MacDonald
All sights and sounds of day and year,
All groups and forms, each leaf and gem,
Are thine, O God, nor will I fear
To talk to Thee of them.
Too great Thy heart is to despise,
Whose day girds centuries about;
From things which we name small, Thine eyes
See great things looking out.
Therefore the prayerful song I sing
May come to Thee in ordered words:
Though lowly born, it needs not cling
In terror to its chords.
I think that nothing made is lost;
That not a moon has ever shone,
That not a cloud my eyes hath crossed
But to my soul is gone.
That all the lost years garnered lie
In this Thy casket, my dim soul;
And Thou wilt, once, the key apply,
And show the shining whole.
But were they dead in me, they live
In Thee, Whose Parable is — Time,
And Worlds, and Forms — all things that give
Me thoughts, and this my rime.
Father, in joy our knees we bow:
This earth is not a place of tombs:
We are but in the nursery now;
They in the upper rooms.
For are we not at home in Thee,
And all this world a visioned show;
That, knowing what Abroad is, we
What Home is too may know?
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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.