The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord
A Book-Length Sacred Poem
“How does one describe a work as rare, as priceless, as this? Nourishment for the malnourished soul. Food for those hungry for beauty. Manna in the desert of our postmodern waste land. Lembas for sojourners in Mordor. All we need to do is taste and see that it is good!” — Joseph Pearce
The Hundredfold is a tapestry of hymns, monologues, and short lyrics knit together as one book-length poem in praise of Christ in his startling humanity. Using all the riches of the English poetic tradition―meter, rhyme, music―the poet ponders the mysterious man from Nazareth and the world he came to set on fire with splendor.
Having devoted a career to studying and translating the Italian masters Dante and Tasso, Anthony Esolen puts on the dusty mantle of such English craftsmen as Donne, Milton, and Hopkins in his own book of original contemplative poetry. The Hundredfold includes dramatic monologues set in first-century Greece and Palestine; lyrical meditations on creation, longing, failure, modern emptiness, and unshakeable hope; and twenty-one brand-new hymns, set to such traditional melodies as "Picardy" and "Old One-Hundred-Twenty-Fourth".
And if all that were not enough, the book includes an introduction with diamond-sharp insights about English poetic forms at a time when form is so often misunderstood, if not dismissed. It provides an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and poets themselves, as well as for those who want to read poetry but need help along their way.
I recently took a silent retreat at the spectacular Cloisters on the Platte in Nebraska. I was very selective about the books I took along and The Hundredfold made the cut. It did not disappoint! Doctrine, theology and apologetics are essential, but we must not forget the value of poetry, silence and contemplation.
This one did scare me, because it’s a book of poetry. But…….it’s a book! Start with the introduction, and keep going. A magnificent work, both as spiritual reading and as literature.