Dies Irae

Continuing our poetical theme, an offering from Anthony Esolen:

Day of wrath, O day of mourning!

Earth to ashes now returning!

Gather, by the millions, burning!

Cleansed at last by cataclysm

Butchered rhyme and battered rhythm,

Neopagan narcissism!

On that day, Lord, when thou comest,

And our dreadful hymnals thumbest,

Smite the ugliest and dumbest.

Smite them, Lord, yet of thy pity

Take their songsters to thy city:

Even Haugen, Haas, and Schutte.

Spare them on the stern condition

That they feel a true contrition

For the Worship III edition.

Doom them not to loss and ruin

While the darker storm is brewing!

They knew not what they were doing.

On that day when Palestrina

Dare not touch a celestina,

What will Sister Ballerina?

With thine eyes that pierce like lances

Still her silly heathen dances

And her flirting with Saint Francis.

Purge us of the prim and prissy,

Ditties fit for Meg or Missy,

Not for Francis, but a sissy.

Cantors who thought nothing grander

Than a sheaf of propaganda

Writ like office memoranda,

Raise them to thy room to bide in

Where their hearts and ears may widen

To the strains of Bach and Haydn.

Let their hearts within them falter,

Hearing, as they near thine altar,

Seraphs sing the Scottish Psalter.

Seize those devils set to pen a

Hymnal neutered of its men -- ah,

Fling ’em back to black Gehenna!

Fling them one and all to mangle

Their pronominals, and wrangle

Lest a participle dangle!

Who held manhood in derision,

Preaching double circumcision,

Suffer now their own revision.

Though the songs of Hell are naughty,

None by Handel or Scarlatti,

At the least they’ll have castrati.

Pitch, O Lord, the bald and raucous

Slogans of a leftist caucus

Down to Sheol, or Secaucus!

Save their singers, though: restore ’em

To a silent sweet decorum,

Saecula per saeculorum.

Various are the throngs of heaven:

Some were lump, and some were leaven,

Some as lame as six and seven.

When the demons hear thy curses,

And this world’s dense fog disperses,

Heal the hobbled -- not their verses.

Hush me, too, Lord, when I grumble:
In thy mercy make me humble,

Lest On Turkey's Wings I tumble.

Though Haugen sing “Hosea” evermore,

Save me I pray -- but keep me near the door. Amen.