Poet LLC, the largest U.S. corn- based ethanol producer by installed capacity, established a joint venture with Royal DSM NV to produce cellulosic ethanol and license the technology to other plants in the U.S. and globally.

The companies will each own 50 percent of the joint venture, named Poet-DSM Advanced Biofuels LLC, Poet said today in a statement. Its headquarters will be in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where closely held Poet is based.

The venture will let Poet build one of the first cellulosic ethanol plants in the U.S. and decline a $105 million U.S. loan guarantee. Wider adoption of the technology is needed for oil companies to meet federal requirements to blend 16 billion gallons (61 billion liters) of the fuel with gasoline by 2022, said Chief Executive Officer Jeff Broin.

“We have the raw material to make it happen,” Broin said today on a conference call with reporters. “There’s more than one billion tons of biomass available every year in the U.S. that could be used to produce enough cellulosic ethanol to replace a third of America’s gasoline.”

Initial capital expenditure by the venture will be $250 million, which will be invested in Poet’s Project Liberty facility in Emmetsburg, Iowa. The funding makes it unnecessary for Poet to take advantage of the $105 million loan guarantee the U.S. Energy Department offered in September, and it will be declined before any funds are drawn, Broin said.

Project Liberty
The Emmetsburg plant is expected to begin production in the second half of 2013 and will convert corn cobs and other crop residue into 25 million gallons of ethanol a year. The venture intends to deploy the technology at Poet’s 26 other U.S. corn ethanol plants and license the technology to other producers globally.

DSM is contributing its enzyme and yeast technologies, which complement Poet’s processes and make the company “an excellent strategic partner,” Broin said. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that as many as 400 new biorefineries must be built by 2022 in order to produce the 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuel required under the agency’s regulations, Poet said.

As much as 1 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol could be produced annually at Poet’s 27 plants if the technology is deployed at all of them, according to the statement.

‘Quick Build-Out’
“I think you’ll see a pretty quick build-out of the cellulosic industry once it’s proven,” Broin said. “I think the dollars will be available, and I think this product will be very important to our country becoming more independent from foreign sources of oil.”

DSM and POET expect the venture to be profitable in 2014 and to deliver “substantial revenues” and an “above-average” contribution to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in the medium to longer term.

Based on Project Liberty’s expected initial capacity of 20 million gallons, and current average prices, annual sales may reach $100 million, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Feike Sijbesma of Heerlen, Netherlands-based DSM told reporters on the call. Sales may grow by another $100 million or more depending on licensing deals, he said.

Prices for ethanol have dropped 30 percent from the 2011 high of $3.068 a gallon on the Chicago Board of Trade. Poet’s cost to make its cellulosic fuel is “just under $3” now, Broin said. --With assistance from Mario Parker in Chicago and Maud van Gaal in Amsterdam. Editors: Will Wade, Charles Siler.

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Chinese writer and activist Zhu Yufu was charged with publishing a provocative poem this past week (the official charge was "inciting subversion of state power"). Zhu's poem is entitled "It's Time," and here it is in translation:

It's time
It's time, Chinese people!
It's time,
The square is ours,
The feet are ours,
It's time to use our feet to go to
the square and make a choice.

The charge comes a year after Zhu was arrested as part of a crackdown against the so-called Jasmine Revolution, a protest movement inspired by the Arab Spring (Zhu's lawyer asserts that Zhu's poem was not connected to the movement). The movement called on people to take "strolls" at certain points in the major Chinese cities, in the hopes that avoiding obvious signs of protest would protect them from arrest.

This is the third time Zhu, who is 58 years old, has faced jail time. He was previously locked up for seven years after a 1999 conviction for helping to start the "Opposition Party" magazine, and for two years in 2007 after pushing a police officer during an arrest.

Zhu's advocates doubt that authorities will go any easier on him this time. Sarah Schafer, an expert on China for Amnesty International, told the AFP, "We are not optimistic that Zhu Yufu will get off easily. We hope that the court realizes this man has not committed a crime and therefore should be released." Zhu's lawyer is similarly pessimistic. He told the press that while he will defend Zhu's freedom of expression, his chances of success are "very slim." He added, "You can't be optimistic about anything in China. In this country, he'll be punished harshly."

Zhu is a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC), part of the PEN American Center, a group that fights for freedom of expression worldwide. The group, which has closely followed the plight of Chinese writers in recent years, notes that Zhu is just the latest in a series of high-profile Chinese dissident writers to be targeted. The most notable, of course, is Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner sentenced to eleven years in prison in 2009 (I've previously written about Liu and his poetry here).

And just last week, Yu Jie, the former vice president of the ICPC, fled with his family to the United States. In a press conference on Wednesday, he talked about the years of harassment he endured in China, and detailed how he was tortured the day before Liu's Nobel Prize ceremony. During the press conference, Yu quoted a passage from Macbeth,

I think our country sinks beneath the yoke;
It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds.

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[In constructing an assemblage of “outsider” poetry there is a point finally at which the work of contemporaries has also to be considered. I have felt constrained here by a determination not to confuse “outsider” with some sense of the “marginal” or “alternative” as defined in contrast, say, to another assumption of “mainstream” or “normative” or even (god help us) “canonical.”

Here, it seems to me, one principal characteristic (but only one) of outsiderness, as I’ve come to understand it, is a difference of mind or body that results in a range of differences in language & poetic forms that might otherwise be hard or impossible to come by. It is in this sense too that “outsider art” and by extension “outsider poetry” has had as one of its anchors what Dubuffet & others defined as art brut & brought into prominence the work of artist/poets such as Adolf Wölfli & Aloise Corbaz. In line with that I can imagine the place among outsiders of “canonical” or near-“canonical” figures such as Blake & Smart, Hölderlin & Artaud, whose skewered view of language & poetic form was both a cause & consequence of their historical isolation.

Coming closer to the present, however, I have hesitated to bring the work of my contemporaries & acquaintances into play. With Hannah Weiner (1928-1997), as a key instance, the turning in her work followed an extreme perceptual shift in which words & letters appeared to her in air & on the surfaces of objects & people, to be incorporated into the written works she was then composing. In her own well known accounting: “I SEE words on my forehead    IN THE AIR    on other people    on the typewriter   on the page   These appear in the text as CAPITALS or in italics”  The results of that, through her own efforts, were nothing short of extraordinary.

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She is a writer, educator and a dreamer. Aditi Rao who won the last Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize says she started writing even before she knew that she wanted to write. “I don't have a real answer for why. It started out because I saw it as play and fun; in some ways it still is. But it's not towards a goal of publishing as such. It keeps me sane and rooted,” she says. However she cannot judge commercial writing, she clarifies, “I don't write commercially, but that doesn't mean that other writers shouldn't. The filtering process happens at the readership level and it's best left to them to choose what kind of writing they want to read.” She feels that there is a lot of reading material out there. Usually people don't read all the books written by one author. She says that reading is a “mood-based thing”, you might not always want to read a serious book that will take up a lot of your time. Commercial and fun-reads come in handy then.

Writing happened to her because she loves the language. “It's the story you're telling and the way you're telling. Like Kiran Desai, the music of the language, the way it flows, the play of the words matters. Writing should be enchanting,” feels the Delhi-based poet. What really inspired her poetry was a summer spent in Latin America. “All the writing I did then was inspired by the place; the people I saw and met there started showing up in my poems, becoming characters. My poetry took a giant leap.”

Aditi says that she is new to the world of publishing. In a world that's dominated by bestsellers and reader domination, how difficult is it to not fall into the rut of writing for an audience? “I love the process of writing and there was a disconnect between that and publishing which is after all a business. I saw that writers often shaped their work according to what sells, I saw that in my creative writing programme as well and it didn't sit well with me. Until I was sure of finding my own voice, I felt vulnerable and didn't want to publish. I feel ready now.

I can tell when I am being honest and when I am writing to please somebody,” she says. A personal connect with the readers is more important to Aditi than prizes and awards. Poetry she says is a more concentrated art form, “You're packing in emotions and imagery in a small space,” she says.

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This was announced by Peshawar University Vice-Chancellor Dr Azmat Hayat Khan at a function held in connection with Faraz’s birth anniversary at the auditorium  of Sir Sahibzada Abdul Qayum Museum in the varsity on Tuesday.

“Faraz Chair will be established at the Institute of Urdu and Persian Languages and Literature,” Dr Khan said, adding that all archives relating to the life, works and collection of books and research on the revolutionary poet would be documented. It would be later converted into a research institute.

He said Ghani Khan Chair would be established at the Pashto Department to research the life and work of the great Pashto poet, painter and intellectual. Both the poets were great sons of the soil and establishing chairs in their name would be an honour for the university, Dr Khan remarked.

Speaking on the occasion, Mehboob Zafar, a friend of the poet, said Faraz’s poetry was kaleidoscopic and passionate and his personality was clearly reflected in his thoughts. “Faraz is the most prolific Urdu poet and melody is dominant in his poetry.”

Majeed Riaz also touched upon the dimensions of Faraz’s poetry and said it was matchless for its flow and depth. He said Faraz revived ghazal when it was losing its charm after partition for being a remnant of colonial and feudal legacy.

The poet’s son, Shibli Faraz said they have set up an Ahmed Faraz Trust to document the poet’s works and its ultimate aim was to establish Faraz Museum by 2013. He was a born poet who believed in optimism and never bothered about the consequences, he added.

Dr Sadia Tariq, Shahid Zaman, Nishat Sarhadi, Aziz Ejaz, Mehboob Zafar, Sajjad Babar, Nazir Tabassum, Riaz Majeed and Iftikhar Khan also addressed the function. They said Faraz was a timeless poet as he always raised his voice against injustices.

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Amy Levy was the first Jewish woman to attend Newnham College, Cambridge. Still more impressively, she published her first collection of poems, Xantippe and Other Verse, at the age of 20 (in 1881). She went on to produce three novels, two further poetry collections, and a number of stories, essays and shorter journalistic pieces. Like a later gifted and troubled Amy, she suffered an untimely death, aged 27. While no literary superstar, Levy enjoyed some success during the 1880s. Her reputation dwindled after her death, but has since revived. Read in various theoretical contexts – feminist, socialist, Jewish, lesbian – her work yields intellectual rewards, but Amy Levy deserves also to be read for pleasure, as this week's Poem, "Philosophy", demonstrates.

There's a slightly doggerel-ish air to the first stanza. The skipping iambic tetrameter – potentially the most predictable of meters – suggests triteness when the diction and rhyme are as flat as here, though there's a nice little jolt to our rhythmic expectations in the third line: "Mid summer roses in summer weather." The fourth line hardly seems to pull its weight, unless the reader is already attuned to double-meaning. Then, as Levy surely intended, "pleasant times" becomes an understatement for raunchier goings-on.

The poem soon finds its mischievous poise. The tone is deliberately droll and, a little like Philip Larkin listing, in "I Remember, I Remember", all the things his childhood was not, Levy wants to mine an apparent vein of unromantic realism. But the double meaning is always gleaming through. "We were not Phyllis…/And Corydon" says not only that this affaire is no pretty pastoral, but that it's no heterosexual romance, either.

That the narrator of "Philosophy" avoids being exclusively couple-centred and looks around her with the eye of a comic novelist is an attractive quality. The two "advanced" young women gain depth and pathos by being framed against the "Philistine and flippant throng". An establishing shot shows the couple literally superior, perched at the top of the stairway and watching the crowd below. Perhaps the setting is a ball: this might account for the mention of champagne. The reference to Mrs Grundy suggests ultra-conservative disapproval of girls just wanting to have fun. It opposes the erotic nature of the friendship, which the women have tried to hide: "Not friends, not lovers (each avers) …" and adds a further mark against them, no doubt: their disreputable passion for intellectual debate.

Levy cleverly turns the tables on the couple's sense of superiority by describing the unthinking throng almost sympathetically: "less rigorous/ It had no scorn at all for us." Proud, youthful defiance is being recollected in amused maturity. And yet Levy was very young when she wrote "Philosophy". The wisdom of the perspective could be that of a poet twice or three times her age.

The tripping rhythm turns out to be entirely apt for the poem's humour. It helps us imagine the excited to-and-fro of the conversation. The rhymes ring out the couple's mental and physical concord. A final exhortation to the "dear Friend" not to deem the poet "light" is sheer irony: the poem's lightness is part of its magic, and its point.

The irony intensifies. The friends know the "pure delights of brain" and their conversation is elevated. But, at the same time, they represent the subversion of pure intellect and "masculine" objectivity. The speaker has to smile at "thoughts of our Philosophy", not because ideas themselves are foolish, but because, coded by the abstract noun (meaning "love of wisdom"), is a relationship that's the reverse of "sexless" and "safe". This is the delicious secret at the core of the irony.

The poem brilliantly exploits its own reticence. The interruption of stanza seven half-way through is like a comical hushing gesture. It's a tiny but bold and well-judged innovation. The couplet seems conclusive, but it isn't. The last stanza, a sudden, personal address, makes the perfect envoi.

Levy was never coy in ascribing the feminine gender to the lovers who inspired her poetry. She wrote with a freshness and clarity of emotion exceptional in her day. Many of her poems, influenced by Heine and German Romanticism, are short lyrics of disappointed love and hinted death-wish. In some writers this would simply be juvenile poetic posing but Levy, in so many ways an outsider, must have had to struggle more than most to be true to her complex self while navigating the "flippant throng" – whether of academic Cambridge or literary London.

The motive for her suicide is still unclear. She was becoming deaf. Her novel, Reuben Sachs: A Sketch had proven controversial with the Jewish community because of its satirically-portrayed protagonist. She suffered from depression, and, allegedly, made a suicide pact with Olive Schreiner (the older writer later changed her mind).

In Levy's long monologue, "Xantippe", the often-maligned wife of "Sokrates" rages at her exclusion from the male philosophical elite. It perhaps indicates the poet's own frustrations, and the self-doubt undermining her sense of achievement.

Levy died by inhaling charcoal fumes. "Why stand ye so in silence?" Xantippe challenges her maids, "Throw it wide,/ The casement, quick, why tarry? – give me air – O fling it wide I say, and give me light!" Of course, these lines are intended metaphorically, though, with hindsight, they prophesy their author's horrible death by asphyxia. It's immensely sad that Levy died before she could completely fulfill her extraordinary talents. "Philosophy" allows us at least to glimpse her best writerly and human qualities - her mischievous wit, realism and psychological insight – and the smile that was, perhaps, in real life, too rare.

Philosophy

Ere all the world had grown so drear,
When I was young and you were here,
'Mid summer roses in summer weather,
What pleasant times we've had together!

We were not Phyllis, simple-sweet,
And Corydon; we did not meet
By brook or meadow, but among
A Philistine and flippant throng

Which much we scorned; (less rigorous
It had no scorn at all for us!)
How many an eve of sweet July,
Heedless of Mrs. Grundy's eye,

We've scaled the stairway's topmost height,
And sat there talking half the night;
And, gazing on the crowd below,
Thanked Fate and Heaven that made us so;--

To hold the pure delights of brain
Above light loves and sweet champagne.
For, you and I, we did eschew
The egoistic "I" and "you;"

And all our observations ran
On Art and Letters, Life and Man.
Proudly we sat, we two, on high,
Throned in our Objectivity;

Scarce friends, not lovers (each avers),
But sexless, safe Philosophers.

* * * * * * *

Dear Friend, you must not deem me light
If, as I lie and muse to-night,
I give a smile and not a sigh
To thoughts of our Philosophy.

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1
Sour milk, lard scum, skillet scrapings,
sweet potato peels, eggshells, tobacco leaf,
pipe ash, coffee, cornmeal, burnt crusts,
moldy biscuits, water from a dishpan,
spilt pot likker, ash, dust, and kitchen sweepings—

in the evenings Webster lifts the slop bucket
from the kitchen floor, sloshing its weight
down the back step, past the chicken coop
and smokehouse to the wide yard
with its lean-to and wooden trough,

calling Swee Swee Swee-ah!
Heah pa-g Heah-Heah!

Hearing his voice, the mud rises
on dainty hooves.

                             Be careful,
he warns the child beside him,
a girl-child slanted on tip-toe, watching
the mud-plastered humps.

Be careful, he says.
The child listens and understands the danger,
listens to the snorts, grunts, knocking snouts,
smacks and squeals of piggish maws
buried in a trough of leavings and gone bads:
they eat it all and leave nothing.

Sows and shoats raise snouts, clotted
with slops, to sniff and watch the bucket
(empty now), the man (in no hurry),
and the girl (tagging-along) before lowering
their rumps into mud and sleep.
 

2
To root (verb): to dig,
ferret, burrow, to search out.
The mind roots, grubs. The past forages.

Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman
buried in an earthen dam, a dark rain,
dark rain, Lord, a dark rain in Neshoba County.

Thompson said the young men screamed
so loudly that their voices reminded him
of "pigs squealing."
 

3
         She said
They hung the hog by its heels
from a scaffolding and slit the belly
with a butch a knife: blood everywhere.

         She said
They had two large cast iron pots filled with water
and a fire going under both pots. Said
they scalded the pig and scraped off its hair.

         She said
The pig blood spilled everywhere:

         The kudzu vines drank deep and ran wild,
         swallowing everything in their green maw.

         The cotton drank deep, cotton bolls dry
         and sharp as tusks.

         The earth drank deep, blood-sopped, blood-quenched.
         There was red dirt, blood dirt, everywhere, everywhere.

         She said
She never would forget.
 

4
Wallow (verb): immerse or revel.
The mind wallows. Sunlight, sun-slop
sun-likker spilling over a magnolia blossom.

from W Gmc. *walwojan, ... "to roll"
(see vulva). Figurative sense of "to plunge
and remain in some state or condition."

In the front yard, a child digs a hole, fills it
with tap water, and steps into it: oozy
soap-slick of squish, toe puddin', toe soup.
A mud bath for her feet and her ankles.
A mud child, the mud's child, a child in mud, wallowing.
 

5
She watched Webster (long ago) slop sows
and shoats. Listened to Anna's stories
about hogs and the slaughter of hogs.
Now she sits, looking into the night's trough.

The past is leavings and make do and salvage,
the moldy scraps and remnant, a swill—
what she has, what she's offered.

Be careful, Webster said.
Did he mean appetite? Did he mean desire?
Be careful.

She tips her chin to take both in,
swallowing goneby and mightbe.

How hopeful pigs are,
how satisfied, as if there were always
some sweetness, as if they would always rise,
lift themselves from the mud.

In the dark, she hears Webster's step,
the pigs' grunts and snorts, the way they eat
whatever they are offered, always seeking more,
squealing, squealing, squealing all the way home.

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Exalted life
                     this

not because you know
slavish attention
                              or sit

bathed in the royal jellies
    and rarer distillates

nor because it commences
            backlit all

by droning buzz and the mellow

              scent of lilac
 

                   but for your ignorance of desire

                   for your cloistering, Liege

Never wondering
              what tastes abound
          in distant clusters

                                            so rich is your interior
                                                      your fecundity

                    your multiple dark imaginings

Never saying
                    as I do
          Why         and again               Why

Never saying
                    as I do
                    to the world of surrounding combs

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It's a beautiful day
the small man said from behind me
and I could tell he had a slight limp
from the rasp of his boot against the sidewalk
and I was slow to look at him
because I've learned to close my ears
against the voices of passersby, which is easier than closing
them to my own mind,
and although he said it I did not hear it
until he said it a second or third time
but he did, he said It's a beautiful day and something
in the way he pointed to the sun unfolding
between two oaks overhanging a basketball court
on 10th Street made me, too
catch hold of that light, opening my hands
to the dream of the soon blooming
and never did he say forget the crick in your neck
nor your bloody dreams; he did not say forget
the multiple shades of your mother's heartbreak,
nor the father in your city
kneeling over his bloody child,
nor the five species of bird this second become memory,
no, he said only, It's a beautiful day,
this tiny man
limping past me
with upturned palms
shaking his head
in disbelief.

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Henry Vaughan, born in Breconshire in 1621, began his literary career as a bright young secular poet of the Tribe of Ben. And then, after two unremarkable collections, a transformation occurred. His next book, Silex Scintillans, reveals a major Metaphysical poet: to borrow his own metaphor, the stone heart has been struck and ignited, to become the "fiery flint" that transforms suffering into creation.

This week's poem, "They Are All Gone into the World of Light!" is one of the loveliest stars of the collection. As metaphysical poetry goes, it possesses an appealing simplicity, and reminds us that the word has two parts, "meta" and "physical". There's often a down-to-earth aspect to Vaughan's imagination. George Herbert, to whom he was distantly related, is his acknowledged mentor, but Vaughan remains a different kind of writer, one who almost casually picks up spiritual images from the natural world he loves. You can feel this longer stride in the rhythms of his work, as in the steady-paced metrical patterning of the lines here. Vaughan's equivalent of Herbert's "Temple" is found in the woods, hills and skies of his native countryside. His poem-prayers are often less oratory than observatory.

An Anglican and Royalist, Vaughan was cursed and blessed to live in interesting times. Perhaps we could even justify calling him a war poet. His religious flowering is not the result of a sudden conversion; it grows out of the complex response to a battery of personal and political horrors: experience in the field during the English Civil War; the execution of Charles I and declaration of the Commonwealth; the death of Vaughan's first wife and his younger brother. His much-loved Brecon was devastated by the Roundheads, and his twin brother, the clergyman, alchemist and philosopher Thomas Vaughan, suffered the confiscation of his Llansantffraed parish, followed by prosecution for debt. The Puritans banned the Book of Common Prayer and Vaughan's imagination almost goes "samizdat" to invent, under pressure of religious persecution, its own poetic offices.

The pronoun that opens the poem, "they" – soon to be underlined by "all" – suggests both intimacy and reticence. The poet may be commemorating saints and prophets, lost kings and soldier comrades, minor figures known and unknown. So, like an unseen congregation, the poem's readers are invited to share the act of mourning, fill out the pronoun with names of their own. The first line summons the elegiac impulse that drives the entire hymn. That this line is also a personal cri de coeur may be implied by the exclamation mark at the end.

Seen "walking in an air of glory", the ascended souls form a mystical vision. But they are hardly ethereal: they produce a light so weighty it "tramples" on the poet's days. This unexpected verb seems to plough the speaker into his landscape.

Clearly a particular location is present. As the above link describes, Vaughan was in the habit of climbing Allt yr Esgair, the hill behind his house, to examine the night sky through a "perspective glass" (telescope). Both the poet and the dead are abroad in the night, walking together, though painfully far apart.

The poem is a Milky Way of words associated with light: "glows", "glitters", "glimmering". Vaughan shows us what he must have seen through his perspective-glass: the big but frustratingly fuzzy and still-distant stars. And we feel the frustration, too, of getting close, but not, of course, close enough to really "see". There is another sort of "glimmering", perhaps, in stanza three, where Vaughan connects "mere glimmerings and decays", sliding the image of angelic light into the gaseous flicker of corruption.

Vaughan has two metaphors for evoking the concealed post-mortem mysteries. One is inventive and artificial, that of the star locked in a tomb – possibly representing the Resurrection. The other belongs to the natural world. The vacated birds' nest is a simple object which he must have frequently seen on his walks. Both figures are effective, and play different roles, but the image of the nest is the one most surprising and haunting. The nest, after all, is a home emptied of its life.

Another element of Vaughan's originality is his use of alliteration. It's as if his work shone a light towards Gerard Manley Hopkins, also a poet for whom the marriage of the visionary and organic takes place in a Welsh landscape, and who sometimes sets the chimes of cynghanedd resonating in our ears.

They Are All Gone into the World of Light!

They are all gone into the world of light!
  And I alone sit ling'ring here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
    And my sad thoughts doth clear.

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
  Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is dress'd,
    After the sun's remove.

I see them walking in an air of glory,
  Whose light doth trample on my days:
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
    Mere glimmering and decays.

O holy Hope! and high Humility,
  High as the heavens above !
These are your walks, and you have show'd them me,
    To kindle my cold love.

Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just,
  Shining nowhere, but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
    Could man outlook that mark!

He that hath found some fledg'd bird's nest, may know
  At first sight, if the bird be flown;
But what fair well or grove he sings in now,
    That is to him unknown.

And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams
  Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
    And into glory peep.

If a star were confin'd into a tomb,
  Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when the hand that lock'd her up gives room,
    She'll shine through all the sphere.

O Father of eternal life, and all
  Created glories under Thee!
Resume Thy spirit from this world of thrall
    Into true liberty.

Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
  My perspective still as they pass:
Or else remove me hence unto that hill
    Where I shall need no glass.

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