Today I bring you another Advent sonnet from Malcolm Guite. The title O Oriens translates as ‘O Dayspring’ and the line from Dante means ‘I saw light in the form of a river’. Malcolm writes movingly about the background to this sonnet on his blog here.

View across the Mawddach estuary, Snowdonia. Picture by Benjamin Dobson

O Oriens

E vidi lume in forme de riviera Paradiso XXX; 61

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

Cowbar Nab, north Yorkshire. Picture by Julian Dobson