"The Martyr's Hymn"
While I came up short on poetry about Reformation martyrs (or short stories, for that matter), today's trip through some annuals did yield a representative example of popular religious poetry. The anonymous author is "A Clergyman."
OH, no! we may not whisper now
The name by hosts ador'd;
No more we chant in choral song
Our dear redeeming Lord!
They drag us slow with bleeding feet
To many an idol shrine;
They bid us taste the offer'd meat,
Or quaff the offer'd wine:
They strive with slow reluctant fires
Our constant souls to break;
They spread the charms the world admires--
But, oh, 'tis death to take.
For neither bright Apollo's bow,
Nor Daphne's laurel grove,
Nor shades of joy, nor sights of wo,
Can swerve our holy love.
Yet, if perchance by sorrow tried,
Some sighs our bosoms heave;
They bid us leave the Crucified--
But we will never leave!
Oh, no! the quivering limb may throb,
May start the furtive tear:
For crown of steel and fiery robe
Are hard for flesh to bear:
But heavier was the robe of scorn
The Man of Sorrows wore
And sharper, sharper was the thorn
On bleeding brows he bore;
And He can cool the torrent wave,
Can stop the oppressor's joy--
Oh! stronger is His arm to save
Than theirs is to destroy.
They tell us He is buried now,
And all our hopes are gone;
They saw not how in vest of snow
He mounted to his throne!
And chains may bind, and prisons dim
Our fetter'd limbs control--
Our souls, like eagles, fly to Him,
They cannot bind the soul.
The waves that wash our prison wall,
The winds that hurry by,
The sweat, the gall, are records all
Of love that cannot die.
A Clergyman. "The Martyr's Hymn." The Christian Keepsake, and Missionary Annual. Ed. William Ellis. London & Paris: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1836. 122-23. (Reprinted in the US, without the elisions, in 1847.)
What can we say about this poem, besides the fact that it's in common meter (alternating iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter)?
The collective speaking voice can just barely be grounded in the earliest age of the church, thanks to the classical references in the fourth quatrain, the "idol shrine" in the second, and Christ's apparently recent death in the ninth. But the poet has left his readers the opportunity to interpret the poem allegorically; the idols, for example, could just as well be worldly temptations or even "false" (i.e., non-Protestant) forms of Christianity, just as the physical tortures in stanza three could easily become psychological. In effect, the poem both celebrates historical martyrs and provides a blueprint for early-Victorian Christians to interpret their own (perhaps far more petty) sufferings as minor martyrdoms in their own right. The reader speaks with the poem's "we."
But that collective "we" is important for another reason. The first quatrain emphasizes the loss of the worshipper's voice, both individually ("whisper") and as a group (the "chant"). A Christian community defined in the act of speaking and singing Christ's name gives way in quatrains two and three to one rendered entirely passive, subjected to the commands of the unnamed (but presumably pagan) "They." "They" seek to reabsorb the collective speaker back into themselves, to contaminate the speaker (with pleasures of the flesh or of false worship) so that the distinctive difference of his/her voice vanishes. Nevertheless, the fifth quatrain triumphantly reasserts the collective speaker as an agent, thanks to his/her appropriation of the verb "leave" from that evil "they." It's no accident that the same quatrain returns to the figure of Christ--whom the speaker was initially forced to leave unnamed.
Once Christ reenters the poem, the apparently binary opposition (they vs. us) gives way. While the sixth quatrain offers the poem's most graphic images of suffering, underlined by the eye rhyme (tear/bear), the poet introduces them only to subordinate them to Christ's ultimate suffering. In turn, the poet immediately juxtaposes Christ's passion to His limitless power--Christ as, in effect, the verb to end all verbs. With that in mind, the ninth quatrain introduces a new split between the speaker and "they," based on witnessing: "their" language ("tell") relegates Christ to the past, a claim that inverts the lost acts of worship in the first quatrain; but "we" saw Christ's ascension. The speaker's triumphant witnessing therefore sets up the final two quatrains, which celebrate the victory of soul over body and of "we" over "they." But the final quatrain makes an even stronger claim: some of the most ephemeral elements of both the body and the nature become, paradoxically, a permanent historical record of perfect Christian love (a paradox emphasized by the internal rhyme on gall/all in the penultimate line). Instead of being silenced, then, the martyr's celebration of Christ voices itself eternally.