Poetry for the Last Week of Advent: The O Antiphons - Part III

O Radix Jesse

This O Antiphon reflects on words from the prophet Isaiah about a shoot coming up from "the root of Jesse" (who was the father of David)...and Jesus is that 'shoot' who was (as the carol goes) "born of David's line".  Here is priest and poet Malcolm Guite's sonnet, reflecting on this Antiphon:


O Radix*

All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,

Rose from a root invisible to all.

We knew the virtues once of every weed,

But, severed from the roots of ritual,

We surf the surface of a wide-screen world

And find no virtue in the virtual.

We shrivel on the edges of a wood

Whose heart we once inhabited in love,

Now we have need of you, forgotten Root

The stock and stem of every living thing

Whom once we worshiped in the sacred grove,

For now is winter, now is withering

Unless we let you root us deep within,

Under the ground of being, graft us in.

-- Malcolm Guite, Sounding the Seasons, Canterbury Press, 2012

To hear the poet read this aloud, click HERE.  Note that this reading is preceded by a chanting of the Antiphon in English and followed by a chanting of it again -- in Latin.

*Scriptural sources: Isaiah 11:10 and 45:14; Romans 15:12.

A Shoot from the Stump of Jesse
(C) M. Blank, 2019