Tuesday, 9 June 2026
On bones so bold,
On clear display,
The skin does fold,
'Tis sickly grey.
An ounce of gold
For bread won't pay,
And hunger's cold,
In this dread day.
[Echo 1]
The ill favoured and leanfleshed kine
Consumed
The seven well favoured, fat kine.
[Refrain 1]
Is past retold,
Or future hoped?
Can now be told,
Will neck be roped?
But this we hold,
The words they wrote;
The words are old,
But now invoked.
[Verse 2]
The rain's been driv'n,
Far from our eye;
We look to heav'n,
The empty sky,
But nought is giv'n,
Despite our cry,
In time of sev'n,
This day of dry.
[Echo 2]
And the withered, thin and blasted
Devoured
The seven rank and full and good.
[Refrain 2]
Is past retold,
Or future hoped?
Can now be told,
Will neck be roped?
But this we hold,
The words they wrote;
The words are old,
But now invoked.
[Verse 3]
The line we toe,
To scarce survive.
It's hard to know,
Are we alive?
This life's so low,
Yet we still strive.
O where to go
For souls to thrive?
[Echo 3]
The famine over men prevailed
Fields they sold
And so the land became the king's.
[Refrain 3]
Is past retold,
Or future hoped?
Can now be told,
Will neck be roped?
But this we hold,
The words they wrote;
The words are old,
But now invoked.
[Verse 4]
In ash and dust,
We offer tears;
In woes unjust,
Through all these years,
We do what must
To persevere.
We stand, we trust,
In face of fear.
[Echo 4]
As for the people, he removed
To cities
From borders' end to other end.
[Refrain 4]
Is past retold,
Or future hoped?
Can now be told,
Will neck be roped?
But this we hold,
The words they wrote;
The words are old,
But now invoked.
[Verse 5]
When spirits thin
And hearts do grieve,
No hope to win,
But by His leave,
We'll look to Him,
The seed of Eve,
Who owns the wind,
And sea He cleaves.
[Echo 5]
And ye shall know the LORD your God,
Which bringeth
You out from under Egypt's rod.
[Refrain 5]
The past says well,
It gives right scope.
Yes, now we'll tell,
And risk the rope!
No buy nor sell,
But we can cope;
And save from hell,
By words of hope.
[Verse 6]
An end will come,
To days of night;
We'll see the One,
Who makes us right.
Dark days are done,
Now bathed in light.
We'll see the Son,
In all His might.
[Echo 6]
We sing unto the LORD, for He
Hath triumphed:
The horse and rider hath He thrown.
[Coda]
The past is old,
Our future gain;
All now is told,
Who overcame;
A crown we hold,
And new our name.
The Word extolled,
With Him we reign.
Analysis of Time of Seven
Analysis of “Time of Seven”
The poem's title, “Time of Seven,” announces at once its central biblical preoccupation: the seven years of famine foretold in Pharaoh's dreams as interpreted by Joseph in Genesis 41. It is a work self-consciously addressing the present through the lens of antiquity.
Form and Structure
The poem's most impressive feature is its architectural complexity. It is organised into six numbered verses, six biblical “Echoes,” five refrains (of which the fifth is significantly modified), and a concluding Coda. The repeating pattern — Verse → Echo → Refrain — mimics the call-and-response structure of liturgy, or more precisely the antiphonal tradition of Hebrew psalmody, and this is clearly intentional given the poem's deep investment in the Hebrew Bible.
The Verses
Each verse is eight lines of iambic dimeter — two iambic feet per line, giving four syllables — with an unbroken ABABABABAB alternating rhyme scheme running throughout. This is a notably compressed and demanding form. The relentlessness of the alternation, combined with the short line, produces a kind of percussive monotony that is tonally apt: famine is, above all, repetitive and wearing. The elisions throughout (“driv'n,” “heav'n,” “giv'n,” “sev'n”) are not merely metrical conveniences but are consistent with the poem's deliberate invocation of archaic, King James–register English.
The rhymes are largely clean and semantically purposeful. In Verse 1, for instance, “gold” placed alongside “cold” implies the futility of wealth in a time of famine—a compression that is genuinely effective. Each verse sustains its ABABABABAB scheme with integrity: “bold/display/fold/grey/gold/pay/cold/day” in Verse 1; “driv'n/eye/heav'n/sky/giv'n/cry/sev'n/dry” in Verse 2; and so forth. The pairings carry semantic weight beyond mere formal necessity.
The Echoes
The three-line Echoes are the poem's most distinctive structural device. Each is set in italics and drawn from the King James Version of the Bible, arranged as a tricolon in which a central hinge line of one or two words is bracketed by two slightly longer lines. The effect is that of a voice breaking in from the past—or, given the poem's deliberate temporal ambiguity, from timeless Scripture itself. The single-word pivots of the first two Echoes (“Consumed,” “Devoured”) carry remarkable compression: the force of the devouring is borne by a word standing entirely alone, as if that word is all that survives the catastrophe it names.
The Refrain and Its Modification
Refrains 1–4 are identical and function as a sustained hermeneutical question: “Is past retold, / Or future hoped?” The question refuses to fix the poem's meaning to any single historical moment. This is the poem's sharpest intellectual move. It advances a typological sensibility—the claim that the “time of seven” is not merely an episode from Genesis 41 but a recurring pattern in human history, and perhaps a foretaste of eschatological events yet to come.
The rhyme scheme of the refrain is worth examining. The A rhymes (“retold/told/hold/old”) are perfectly consistent, but the B rhymes—“hoped/roped/wrote/invoked”—are not. “Hoped” and “roped” rhyme exactly; “wrote” and “invoked” are only approximate rhymes. Whether this loosening is intentional, representing a weakening of formal certainty before the poem's turn toward hope, cannot be determined from internal evidence alone, but the effect exists regardless.
The fifth refrain is where the poem's argument turns decisively. The questioning tone of Refrains 1–4 is resolved: “The past says well, / It gives right scope. / Yes, now we'll tell, / And risk the rope!” The monosyllabic “Yes” is the pivot of the entire poem. The willingness to “risk the rope”—which in the earlier refrains had been a source of fearful uncertainty—is now embraced as the acknowledged cost of proclamation. This structural decision is among the most effective in the poem.
Biblical Intertextuality
The sequencing of the Echoes reveals careful theological thinking. They trace a coherent narrative arc across four books of the Hebrew Bible and into the New Testament.
Echoes 1 and 2 are drawn from Genesis 41, Pharaoh's two dreams: the seven lean kine consuming the seven fat kine, and the seven withered ears devouring the seven full ears. The KJV language is preserved faithfully (“ill favoured,” “leanfleshed,” “rank and full”).
Echoes 3 and 4 advance to Genesis 47, the social consequences of the famine Joseph had predicted: the people sell their land to Pharaoh, and are relocated to the cities. The narrative has moved from prophetic warning to brutal realisation; Egypt, through Joseph's administration, has consolidated absolute power over a displaced and impoverished populace.
Echo 5 marks the theological pivot. The verse quoted—“And ye shall know the LORD your God, / Which bringeth / You out from under Egypt's rod”—is drawn from Exodus 6:7, God's promise to Moses before the plagues. The word “Egypt” here carries doubled resonance: it is at once the historical Egypt of slavery and the poem's symbol of any political or economic system that reduces human beings to instruments. Crucially, the same Egypt that benefited from Joseph's famine management has become the Egypt from which God must deliver his people—an irony the poem allows the sequence of Echoes to imply, without spelling it out.
Echo 6 concludes with the Song of Moses from Exodus 15:1—the triumphant hymn sung after the crossing of the Red Sea. The movement from Genesis 41 to Exodus 15 is a movement from famine and displacement to deliverance and song.
The Coda then opens into the language of Revelation: the new name (Revelation 2:17), the crown (Revelation 2:10), reigning with Christ (Revelation 22:5), and the identification of Christ as the eternal Word (John 1:1). The typological arc is thus Genesis → Exodus → Revelation: the same divine pattern of judgment, preservation, and ultimate redemption cycling at an eschatological scale.
The Verses in Detail
Verse 1: The Physical Crisis
Verse 1 establishes the literal, bodily reality of famine. Greying skin “On bones so bold, / On clear display” presents emaciated bodies as a spectacle—not hidden but openly visible. The paradox of “bold” bones (exposed, prominent) conveys both physical reality and a kind of terrible dignity. The final couplet—“An ounce of gold / For bread won't pay”—with its nod to Ezekiel 7:19, reduces economic value to absurdity. Wealth becomes meaningless; the poem establishes at once that this is not merely a material crisis but an ontological one.
Verse 2: The Environmental Failure
Verse 2 shifts from bodies to the heavens. “The rain's been driv'n, / Far from our eye” personifies drought as an active force of withdrawal. The “empty sky” becomes the focus of desperate prayer (“We look to heav'n, / The empty sky, / But nought is giv'n, / Despite our cry”), and the title phrase of the “time of sev'n” anchors the catastrophe to the biblical time-scale. The verse establishes that this famine is cosmic in scope—not a local failure but a universal withholding.
Verse 3: The Existential Question
Verse 3 is the poem's turning point toward theology. It opens with the survival narrative (“The line we toe, / To scarce survive”) and then poses the essential question: “Are we alive?” This is not a tautology but a genuine inquiry into whether mere biological existence constitutes life in any meaningful sense. The acknowledgment “This life's so low, / Yet we still strive” is not resignation but a statement of continued persistence despite everything. The closing question—“O where to go / For souls to thrive?”—introduces the language of the soul and pivots the poem toward a spiritual rather than merely material answer. The “O” carries an exclamatory, lamenting quality that suits the emotional register. Crucially, this question is one the poem is structurally committed to answering: the reply arrives in Verse 5 (“We'll look to Him, / The seed of Eve”) and the theological resolution unfolds through Echo 5 and the Coda.
Verse 4: The Communal Endurance
Verse 4 is more austere and less visionary. It emphasises communal persistence rather than hope: “In ash and dust, / We offer tears.” The verse acknowledges injustice (“In woes unjust, / Through all these years”) but does not yet point beyond it. Instead, it states what must be done: “We do what must / To persevere.” The closing couplet—“We stand, we trust, / In face of fear”—is presented as a statement of fact rather than as achieved faith. The trust is declared but not yet grounded in revelation. Echo 4, which follows, shows the social upheaval Joseph's famine administration produced: the people are “removed / To cities,” relocated from “borders' end to other end.” Verse 4 thus sits between the lament of Verse 3 and the theological revelation of Verse 5.
Verse 5: The Spiritual Pivot
Verse 5 transforms the poem's trajectory entirely. It moves from the question “Where do we go for souls to thrive?” to an answer: “We'll look to Him, / The seed of Eve.” This is the poem's most overtly theological moment. The phrase “seed of Eve” refers to Genesis 3:15, the Protoevangelium—the first messianic promise in Scripture, identifying the coming deliverer as one who will crush the serpent's head. By invoking this in the context of a famine poem, the author aligns deliverance from hunger with the cosmic redemption promised from the very beginning. The descriptions that follow—“Who owns the wind, / And sea He cleaves”—compress references to Exodus 14 (the parting of the Red Sea) and the New Testament accounts of Christ stilling storms. The verse establishes that the answer to the question posed in Verse 3 is Christ—the incarnate Word who unites all the salvation narratives from Genesis through Exodus to the eschaton. Echo 5 confirms this with God's promise to Moses: “And ye shall know the LORD your God, / Which bringeth / You out from under Egypt's rod.”
Verse 6: The Eschatological Vision
Verse 6 completes the arc by opening fully into the future. “An end will come, / To days of night” promises resolution. The repetition of “We'll see” twice—“We'll see the One, / Who makes us right” and “We'll see the Son, / In all His might”—anticipates the beatific vision. The movement from “dark days” to light is complete. The reference to the one “Who makes us right” joins the justification aspect of the promised salvation to the already-established physical aspect. Echo 6, drawn from the Song of Moses (Exodus 15:1), celebrates the ultimate triumph: “We sing unto the LORD, for He / Hath triumphed: / The horse and rider hath He thrown.” This echo mirrors the structure of the poem as a whole—the famine narratives of Genesis 41–47 find their resolution in the song of deliverance from Exodus 15.
The Coda: The Crowning Promise
The Coda offers the final word. It returns to a cleaner ABABABAB rhyme scheme (old/told/hold/extolled paired with gain/overcame/name/reign) with a shift from the minor B rhyme sounds of the refrains (“hoped/roped/wrote/invoked”) to the more triumphant “-ain” sound of “gain/overcame/name/reign.” This sonic shift reinforces the thematic triumph. “The past is old, / Our future gain” states the typological lesson: what was is now reinterpreted as promise. “All now is told, / Who overcame” declares that the victory is already (in the eschatological sense) accomplished. “A crown we hold, / And new our name” invokes Revelation 2:10 and 2:17—the promise of a crown and a new name. “The Word extolled, / With Him we reign” identifies Christ as the Word (Logos) of John 1:1 and promises the believer's participation in his reign (Revelation 22:5). The poem thus ends not with hope deferred but with present possession (“we hold,” “we reign”).
Thematic Analysis
The poem's animating argument is typological: the events of Genesis 41–47 are not merely a record of a past famine in ancient Egypt but a “type,” in the theological sense, of any period of civilisational collapse, and ultimately a figure for the eschatological tribulation of Revelation. The poem does not argue this discursively; it enacts it through its formal structure and through the sequencing of its biblical Echoes, refusing throughout to anchor itself to a specific historical moment.
This typological sensibility answers the central question posed by the refrain: “Is past retold, / Or future hoped?” The poem's answer is both. The past is retold not for its own sake but as a pattern; the future is hoped for because that pattern has already been written in Scripture and requires only eschatological fulfilment. The temporal ambiguity of the refrain is resolved by the logic of typology: what happened to Joseph's Egypt is happening now and will happen again at the end of history. The poem thus functions as a kind of spiritual diagnosis and prognosis: it identifies present suffering within the biblical pattern of famine and deliverance, and it locates present hope within the eschatological promise.
The movement of the Echoes from Genesis to Exodus to Revelation enacts this typological reading. The famine of Genesis 41–47 becomes a figure for all famines, all displacements, all moments when economic systems reduce human beings to instruments. The exodus from Egypt becomes a figure for all deliverance. The consummation promised in Revelation becomes the end toward which all intermediate deliverances point.
Weaknesses
The poem is not uniformly flawless. Two minor imperfections warrant mention.
In Verse 5, the grammatical subject shifts somewhat awkwardly. The verse opens with a communal “we”—“When spirits thin / And hearts do grieve”—before pivoting to a description of the deliverer: “Who owns the wind, / And sea He cleaves.” The pronoun “He” does not follow cleanly from “Him” three lines earlier; a reader must navigate the syntactic gap with a small but noticeable effort. The meaning is recoverable, but the construction is not entirely fluent.
The near-rhymes in the refrain's B position—“hoped/roped/wrote/invoked”—persist as a potential weakness, though they may be intentional. “Hoped” and “roped” rhyme exactly; “wrote” and “invoked” are only approximate rhymes. Whether this loosening is a calculated device representing a weakening of formal certainty that precedes the confident resolution of Refrain 5 cannot be determined from the text itself, but the effect is present regardless.
Conclusion
“Time of Seven” is an ambitious and accomplished poem that largely succeeds on its own terms. Its formal architecture—iambic dimeter verses interlocked with italicised biblical Echoes and a repeated refrain whose fifth iteration breaks and resolves the established pattern—is purposeful and well-executed. The selection and sequencing of the Echoes is theologically sophisticated: the movement from Genesis 41 through Genesis 47 to Exodus 6 and 15, concluding in the Revelation-inflected Coda, traces a coherent eschatological argument that the poem's structure reinforces rather than merely illustrates.
The central hermeneutical question—“Is past retold, / Or future hoped?”—is the poem's most durable intellectual contribution. It refuses easy historical localisation and instead advances a typological reading in which ancient Egypt becomes a perpetual pattern, the Exodus becomes a perpetual promise, and the present moment is understood as a type awaiting its antitype in Christ. The poem's resolution, offered through the modified Refrain 5 and confirmed in Verse 6 and the Coda, is that the answer to the refrain's question is not either/or but yes to both: the past is retold as a pattern, and the future is hoped for as its eschatological fulfilment.
The few remaining weaknesses—a slightly strained pronominal reference in Verse 5 and some approximate rhyming in the refrains—are minor relative to the poem's overall ambition and theological coherence. The poem succeeds in doing what it sets out to do: to read contemporary famine (whether literal or spiritual) through the lens of Scripture, to insist that suffering follows a pattern already written in the biblical narrative, and to ground hope not in optimism but in the promise of an end to darkness and a participation in Christ's victory.
