Twenty Poems to Pray

Gary M. Bouchard is the director of the Gregory J. Grappone Humanities Institute at Saint Anselm College, where he has taught in the English department for over three decades. During those years he also served as department chair and as the college’s executive vice president. A specialist in the field of early modern poetry, he is the author of Colin’s Campus: Cambridge Life and the English Eclogue (2000) and Southwell’s Sphere: The Influence of England’s Secret Poet (2019). Gary is the consulting editor and a Catholic Press Association award-winning writer for Parable, the magazine of the Catholic Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire.

Contents

Introduction ix
I. When Yellow Leaves or None or Few
   Pied Beauty, Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ 2
   September, the First Day of School, Howard Nemerov 7
   Sonnet 73, William Shakespeare 12
II. A Small Thing Always Near
   Hope, Emily Dickinson and Kevin Hadduck 20
   Stray Moments, William Stafford 26
   The Song Opens, Fr. Karol Wojtyla—St. Pope John Paul II 31
III. Gift to This Gift
   A Christmas Carol, Christina Rossetti 38
   The Nativity of Christ, St. Robert Southwell 44
   Ring Out, Wild Bells, Alfred Lord Tennyson 49
IV. To Earth and Ashes
   Sonnet 4, O My Black Soul, John Donne 56
   Hogs and Salvation, Fr. Kilian McDonnell, OSB 60
   The Litany, Dana Gioia 65
   All Creation Wept, Melissa Range 70
V. To Carry Him With Us
   Emmaus: Christ Between, Rev. Rowan Williams 76
   St. Peter and the Angel, Denise Levertov 81
   Love III, George Herbert 86
VI. Let the Day Come In
   A Prayer in Spring, Robert Frost 92
    Bicycling to Heaven, Claire Nicolas White 97
    Dear World, Sister Mary Faith Schuster, OSB 101
    Genesis 1:1, Gary Bouchard 106
Acknowledgments 111
Notes 113