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Home›Traditions›Traditional

Traditional Illustrations

The orthodox, historical consensus of biblical interpretation.

Key question: “What is the most widely accepted and historically grounded understanding of this text?”

25,889 sermon illustrations through the Traditional lens

Poetry

Sonnet 149: Canst thou, O cruel! say I love thee not

Canst thou, O cruel! say I love thee not, When I against myself with thee partake? Do I not think on thee, when I forgot Am of my self, all tyrant, for thy sake?

Universal

William Shakespeare

110 words

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Poetry

Home Thoughts, From Abroad

Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England--now!

Universal

Robert Browning

117 words

Poetry

Hope Holds to Christ

. . . . . . . . Hope holds to Christ the mind’s own mirror out To take His lovely likeness more and more....

Universal

Gerard Manley Hopkins

110 words

Poetry

To Wordsworth

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know That things depart which never may return: Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow, Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. These common woes I feel. One loss is...

Laughing Song

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it; when the meadows laugh...

ENDYMION (For music)

The apple trees are hung with gold, And birds are loud in Arcady, The sheep lie bleating in the fold, The wild goat runs across the wold, But yesterday his love he told, I know he will come back to me.

Sonnet 40: Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all

Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all; What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call; All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more.

Song (Go And Catch A Falling Star)

Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me where all past years are, Or who cleft the Devil's foot, Teach me to hear mermaids singing, Or to keep off envy's stinging, And find What...

Sonnet 13

XIII To Mr. Lawes, on his Aires.

Sonnet 5: Those hours, that with gentle work did frame

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell, Will play the tyrants to the very same And that unfair which fairly doth excel; For never-resting time leads summer on To hideous winter,...

Sonnet on Chillon

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty!

Universal

George Gordon, Lord Byron

104 words

Poetry

Phryne.

IMMITATION OF ENGLISH POETS. EARL OF DORSET Phryne had talents for mankind, Open she was, and unconfined, Like some free port of trade: Merchants unloaded here their freight, And agents from each foreign state Here first their entry made.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold...

Praise for Faith

Of all the gifts Thine hand bestows, Thou Giver of all good! Not heaven itself a richer knows Than my Redeemer's blood. Faith too, the blood-receiving grace, From the same hand we gain; Else, sweetly as it suits our case,...

Sonnet on the Nuptials of the Marquis Antonio Cavalli With the Countess Clelia Rasponi of Ravenna

A noble Lady of the Italian shore Lovely and young, herself a happy bride, Commands a verse, and will not be denied, From me a wandering Englishman; I tore One sonnet, but invoke the muse once more To hail these...

Universal

George Gordon, Lord Byron

106 words

Poetry

The Flower

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring; To which, besides their own demean, The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snows in May, As if there were no such cold thing.

On a Distant View of the Village and School of Harrow on the Hill, 1806

Ye scenes of my childhood, whose lov'd recollection Embitters the present, compar'd with the past; Where science first dawn'd on the powers of reflection, And friendships were form'd, too romantic to last; Where fancy, yet, joys to retrace the resemblance...

Universal

George Gordon, Lord Byron

313 words

Poetry

Sonnet 23 - Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead

Is it indeed so? If I lay here dead, Wouldst thou miss any life in losing mine? And would the sun for thee more coldly shine Because of grave-damps falling round my head? I marvelled, my Beloved, when I read...

Universal

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

110 words

Poetry

Fragment, or the Triumph of Conscience

'Twas dead of the night when I sate in my dwelling, One glimmering lamp was expiring and low,-- Around the dark tide of the tempest was swelling, Along the wild mountains night-ravens were yelling, They bodingly presaged destruction and woe!

Children

Come to me, O ye children! For I hear you at your play, And the questions that perplexed me Have vanished quite away. Ye open the eastern windows, That look towards the sun, Where thoughts are singing swallows And the brooks of morning run.

Universal

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

183 words

Poetry

Celestial Music

I have a friend who still believes in heaven. Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God. She thinks someone listens in heaven. On earth she's unusually competent. Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.

Better -- than Music! For I -- who heard it --

Better -- than Music! For I -- who heard it -- I was used -- to the Birds -- before -- This -- was different...

To Florence

when I left the shore, The distant shore which gave me birth, I hardly thought to grieve once more, To quit another spot on earth: Yet here, amidst this barren isle, Where panting Nature droops the head, Where only thou...

Universal

George Gordon, Lord Byron

286 words

Poetry

The City In The Sea

Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest.

Universal

Edgar Allan Poe

263 words