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

The Tester Above the Shinre of St. Cuthbert
in Durham Cathedral.
Designed by Sir Ninian Comper
Source: Liturgical Arts Journal

While the O Antiphons are often chanted, they should not be mistaken for "songs".  Rather, they are an Advent prayer tradition.  In fact, these particular antiphons -- derived from the Book of Isaiah (as has been mentioned in the last several posts) -- are prayers of/to/about the seven names, or attributes, for the expected Messiah, declared by the prophet long before the given name of Jesus was known.

So far this week we have reflected and prayed on these names: Wisdom, Sacred Lord, Root of Jesse, and Key of David.  Today...Oriens or 'Radiant Dawn' -- the One who brings light to those who dwell in darkness:

O Oriens*

First light and then first lines along the east
To touch and brush a sheen of light on water
As though behind the sky itself they traced

The shift and shimmer of another river
Flowing unbidden from its hidden source;
The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.

Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice
Are bathing in it now, away upstream…
So every trace of light begins a grace

In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam
Is somehow a beginning and a calling;
“Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,
Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking."

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

To hear the Antiphon chanted and the sonnet read aloud by the poet, click HERE.

*Scriptural sources: Isaiah 9:2; 42: 6-7; John 1:5.