Is not this enough for moan
To see this babe all motherless --
A babe beloved -- thrust out alone
Upon death's wilderness?
Out tears, fall, fall, fall -- I would weep
My blood away to make her warm,
Who never went on earth one step,
Nor heard the breath of the storm.
How shall you go, my little child,
Alone on that most wintry wild?
It's called To Joy, which sounds like sheer bitterness until you know that "Joy" was the name of one of Blunden's daughters, who died when only forty days old. It's his lament for a child who was very beloved indeed, and motherless only in the sense that death had made her so.
But I also read it a different way: as Christ's lament for the millions of unborn children who have died in America by the abortionist's arts.
Read it again, with that perspective in mind. How much more true even than its original meaning is it to call those children "motherless": rejected and abandoned by the one person on whom they should be able to rely, when all others reject and abandon them? How true it rings to note the deathly winter chill of a world where so many mothers cast their babies out upon "that most wintry wild."
And how true it rings that Christ would weep His blood away to keep the warm breath of life in them -- if the Father had left that task to him.
But he didn't. He left it to us.
