Sherry Chandler

…from Molly Peacock’s How to Read a Poem:

The English sentence has a habit of constructing positively. In fact, to create negativity in English, we have to invert positive statements…create a ghost of the positive in every negative. For example, what image does “no plums” conjure up? First, plums perch on an imaginary plane; then you remember that they aren’t supposed to be there, so you dissolve them. The word “no” gave us the plums, then immediately took them away. Yet they remain in ghostly outline. The language of “no” mourns what it once had.

I’ve always thought of Cotton Mather as a fairly monstrous individual, because of the witch trials, but there is power in this poem:

The Rain gasped for

Oh Father of the Rain, Look down
    Upon us from on high;
If thy land be not Rain’d upon,
    What Lives on it will Dy.

Lord of the Clouds; In thee we hope;
   Thine all the Bottels are;
Except Thou open them, a Drop
    won’t fall upon us here.

If thou make Heav’n as Brass, and burn
    From thence the groaning Field
Thy Earth will soon to Iron turn,
    And no Production yield.

Oh let thy Seasonable Rain
    Drop Fatness on our Soyl;
And grant to most unworthy Man
   The Harvest of his Toil.

But, O my SAVIOUR, in a Showre
    Of Righteousness descend:
Gifts on me, with thy SPIRIT poure;
    And Life that cannot End.

Yea, come upon a World forlorn,
    And with a Quickening Dew,
Make thou Mankind, of Water born,
    Tho’ Dead, their Life Renew.

In the mean time, thy Ministers,
   As Clouds, how Fat and Bright!
May they upon Salvations Heirs,
    Distil Things Good and Right.

— Cotton Mather, from American Religious Poems