I choose Robin Robertson’s poem Three Ways of Looking at God because of how it evolved over time. It starts off being about nature, but soon changes to a deep analysis of the Christian faith. Being a devoted Christian myself, the title gave me reason to unpack this poem more than any other. Having a connection through faith was the motivation I needed to commit to fully understanding this complex poem. When I first looked at this poem the title stood out to me. Three Ways of Looking at God sounded like a personal narrative where the author tells the reader about his faith. Looking over the format, I could see three stanzas, all numbered. Each stanza appeared to be an independent statement, each being one example of God. This made me treat
…show more content…
I started by looking for imagery that related to Christianity. The most obvious being in the second stanza when Robertson mentions lambs and the First Communion. Lambs were scarified in the time before Christ is hopes of God forgiving their sins. Jesus is considered the Lamb of the Gods because he made the ultimate sacrifice when he died for our sins. The First Communion relates to Jesus’s last supper before he is crucified. This lead me to the impression that this stanza is about the Son of God, which is one of the way that we see God before us. The flood in third stanza also relates to the bible. In the story of Noah’s Ark, God floods the world and spares the lives of Noah’s family and all the animals. This was like a cleansing of the world’s sin. Looking at the poem from a broader perspective, it has three stanzas. This reminded me of the Holy Trinity, an important part of the Christian faith. Each stanza also has seven lines, a number followed by six more lines of text. Seven is a holy number because it is the number of days it took God to create the world in the book of Genesis. These didn’t require interpretation; most Christians could have found these after a few readings of the poem. After deliberately searching for the Christian references, they become
I started by looking for imagery that related to Christianity. The most obvious being in the second stanza when Robertson mentions lambs and the First Communion. Lambs were scarified in the time before Christ is hopes of God forgiving their sins. Jesus is considered the Lamb of the Gods because he made the ultimate sacrifice when he died for our sins. The First Communion relates to Jesus’s last supper before he is crucified. This lead me to the impression that this stanza is about the Son of God, which is one of the way that we see God before us. The flood in third stanza also relates to the bible. In the story of Noah’s Ark, God floods the world and spares the lives of Noah’s family and all the animals. This was like a cleansing of the world’s sin. Looking at the poem from a broader perspective, it has three stanzas. This reminded me of the Holy Trinity, an important part of the Christian faith. Each stanza also has seven lines, a number followed by six more lines of text. Seven is a holy number because it is the number of days it took God to create the world in the book of Genesis. These didn’t require interpretation; most Christians could have found these after a few readings of the poem. After deliberately searching for the Christian references, they become