Sunday, 5 July 2026
Alas, my errant, froward feet,
profaning pride and wayward will!
They lead me from the pasture sweet,
beyond the fence and down the hill
to gullies where I find defeat.
[Sheep's Refrain]
O, You, my Lord, I love You most—
this I state. But
my ways expose an empty boast...
[Shepherd's Refrain 1]
My own child, you roamed far, lonely;
I called you home, your wand'rings over.
[Stanza 2]
The track You carved for me to pace,
to veer not left nor right, nor roam,
but climb the height. I set my face
to flee the road that leads me home,
and choose the dark and lonely place.
[Sheep's Refrain]
O, You, my Lord, I love You most—
this I state. But
my ways expose an empty boast...
[Shepherd's Refrain 2]
My dear child, fearful and weary—
though you veer, you know I am here:
I am nearer.
[Stanza 3]
Imprisoned deep by choking vine;
bush lawyer here decrees. It tears
my skin. This doom is rightly mine.
From mire, can I dare whisper prayers?
To my defeat I must resign.
[Sheep's Refrain]
O, You, my Lord, I love You most—
this I state. But
my ways expose an empty boast...
[Reflection]
Here in the gully's depths,
I cry to You, my Shepherd.
O Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears attend my pleas for mercy.
Should You mark every wandering
—each rebellion—
who could stand?
But with You there is forgiveness
—I tremble!
My soul waits for You, my Lord,
my soul waits...
[Stanza 4]
At last the wand'ring child is spent;
no pasture near, no strength to fight,
no pride to plead, no knee unbent;
in this, the cold and starless night
I break, I weep, and I repent.
[Sheep's Refrain]
O, You, my Lord, I love You most—
this I state. But
my ways expose an empty boast...
[Shepherd's Refrain 3]
My meek child, I see your weeping;
I will not leave you in the deep—
be at peace; I'll be your keeper.
[Stanza 5]
With Your firm crook You pull me back
to paddock safe, to my true flock,
with grace You place me back on track
where I can rest on surest Rock
and nothing needful I will lack.
[Final Sheep's Refrain]
Now I will boast, but it is true:
in all my boast, I speak of You.
[Final Shepherd's Refrain]
My own child, home—be still, and know
I hold you, gathered from the snow;
now rise, and walk the road I chose,
for all the way, my own, we go.
This poem is a reworking of the 1998 version.
The four-monosyllabic words that form the middle line of the sheep’s responses should be read on the stressed beats of an iambic tetrameter line. That is:
rest THIS rest I rest STATE. rest BUT
These rests are indicated in the text by the middle-dot (·) symbol.
These are the guidelines and objectives I have been reaching for when constructing the revised version of this poem.
The Governing Structure
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The poem has two voices: an elevated, penitential sheep and a plain, warm Shepherd. The register shift is justified because it tracks a change of speaker, so it reads as characterisation rather than as inconsistency, and it dramatises that the return is the Shepherd’s initiative.
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The recurring unit runs: an elevated narrative quintain (the sheep’s voice) → the sheep’s fixed refrain → the Shepherd’s growing refrain. This ordering lets the Law expose and the Gospel answer, within each return and across the whole.
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The Law-and-Gospel contrast is carried by the registers but kept oblique — felt, never labelled — and must not harden into a dualism, since the Law here is the Shepherd’s own fence and good pasture, the same Person and the same love heard first under strain and then in comfort.
The Two Refrains
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The sheep’s refrain is fixed and recurs unchanged (except for its final occurrence), serving as the constant pole against which the rising grace is measured; its very recurrence enacts the besetting sin. The settled text is:
O, You, my Lord, I love You most
this I state. But
my ways expose an empty boast.Within it, “state” is preferred over “profess” because its hard, clinical close survives repetition and keeps the middle line to four monosyllabic stresses, each preceded by a rest, so that the iambic pulse is preserved but hollowed out. The deliberate weight of each word, suspended in its rest, sharpens the turn. The Titus 1:16 echo is already carried obliquely by the third line; and the dangling, enjambed “but” is the pivot on which the refrain swings.
That the sheep’s refrain is unchanged after the repentance of the third stanza is deliberate. It points to how even the most sincere repentance is imperfect, and that the sinner is dependent on the Spirit to bring that repentance to completion.
The final sheep’s refrain redeems the boast and acts as a pivot toward the climax: the final Shepherd’s refrain.
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The Shepherd’s refrain is incremental and grows as the poem proceeds, because the Gospel must mount and have the last word; at least three returns are needed for the growth to register as a rising sequence rather than mere repetition. The asymmetry is deliberate: failure constant, grace mounting.
The Shepherd’s Music
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The Shepherd’s refrains assonate rather than rhyme through the body of the poem, because assonance hums open and untroubled (the sound of flowing grace), whereas pararhyme snaps shut on an off-note (the sound of the sheep’s unease); this also sets the Law’s clinched full rhyme against the Gospel’s open vowel as a contrast the ear can feel.
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The assonance must be saturated, sounding the chosen vowel internally as well as at the line-ends, so that it is heard as a binding scheme and not mistaken for free verse.
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The climax resolves into full rhyme — the first time the Shepherd’s voice locks shut — so that the two voices converge at the close, which is felt as a sealing, an embrace closed round, rather than a wound knit up. The final refrain also switches to masculine endings, futher emphasising time closure.
The Vowel Scheme
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The ending is to read as homecoming, so the final full rhyme reprises a vowel already heard rather than introducing a new one, since homecoming is return to a known place and not arrival somewhere new.
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The reprised vowel is the first refrain’s vowel, closing a ring: the sound that first called the sheep is the sound that finally seals him home. Reinforced by the fixed opening address, the final refrain’s “My own child” returns as both a vowel and a phrase.
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The home-vowel is the long /oÊŠ/, chosen because it is the vowel of the home-words themselves, because it is the roundest and most yearning of the long vowels, because it offers a rich field of full-rhyme words for the climax, and because it already sounds on the word “home” at the goal of the sheep’s journey in the second stanza.
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Each refrain otherwise takes its own vowel, with variation between refrains but saturation within each, because a single vowel throughout would read as stasis whereas changing vowels support the phased deepening and make the final fixity mean more. The wandering of the vowels and their final settling quietly mime the sheep’s own journey.
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Unity across the refrains is carried by three constants: the falling, feminine-ended, roughly three-beat cadence; the fixed opening address “My ___ child,” whose adjective announces each refrain’s vowel and carries a phase-appropriate meaning; and the constant syntactic shape of address, then what-was, then what-the-Shepherd-does.
The Phases and the Arc
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The Shepherd’s refrains progress through distinct phases of grace — calling and holding first, preservation through the depths in the middle, leading-onward last — so that the refrains deepen rather than circle, and the commissioning is held in reserve for the end.
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The narrative descent must likewise deepen rather than repeat: each elevated quintain depicts a fresh, distinct stage of one descent, on the model of the Prodigal who leaves once and falls to the bottom once, not a wandering re-described. The test for any new stanza is whether it takes the sheep further down, or, after the turn, further home; if it merely circles, it is cut.
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There is no predetermined length; the poem closes organically when renewed obedience and the softest answer coincide — the sheep not merely soothed in the gully but set walking again, which is both the fuller Gospel and the more satisfying close.
Later addition, July 2026: The Nadir Stanza and the Broken Cycle
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A new quintain is inserted after Shepherd’s Refrain 2 and before the stanza of repentance (which becomes Stanza 4), depicting the sheep’s experience at the very bottom of the gully. This is licensed by the poem’s own rule that a new stanza is admissible if it takes the sheep further down; the old Stanza 3 had compressed the nadir and the repentance into a single quintain, and separating them gives the desolation room to land before the turn.
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This new cycle breaks the established pattern deliberately: the quintain and the sheep’s refrain (unchanged) are followed not by a Shepherd’s refrain but by a reflection on Psalm 130, spoken in the sheep’s voice. This is the poem’s only irregular cycle, and its force depends on that singularity — it must not be repeated elsewhere.
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The break enacts the sheep’s inability to hear the Shepherd at the nadir. This must not be allowed to read as the Shepherd’s actual absence, which Shepherd’s Refrain 2 has assured against in advance (“I am nearer”) and the Shepherd’s third refrain will answer retrospectively (“I will not leave you in the deep”). The absence is the sheep’s felt experience, not the poem’s claim.
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Psalm 130 is chosen over Psalm 22 (too specifically messianic to place in the sheep’s mouth) and Psalm 40 (written in retrospect, from within the good pasture, in the past tense of a deliverance already accomplished — wrong tense for a sheep still in the pit). Psalm 130 was preferred to Psalm 42–43 and Psalm 13 for its penitential character, fitting to the sheep who is a stanza away from repenting outright.
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The reflection must not pre-empt the repentance of the following stanza. Psalm 130’s “if thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, who shall stand?” is an acknowledgement of universal sinfulness and of God’s readiness to forgive, not a first-person confession of particular sin — this distinction is what keeps the reflection short of the repentance that Stanza 4 alone should deliver.
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The reflection should dwell in the psalm’s opening cry and its “who shall stand?” tension rather than moving quickly to the psalm’s own settled hope and confident waiting. Psalm 130 is, in its own right, spoken by someone composed enough to keep speaking and wait in hope, which sits in tension with a sheep meant to feel unheard; lingering in the cry before any turn to hope preserves the nadir’s weight.
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The reflection should be structured to sound distinct from both established voices: not the sheep’s fixed, hypocrisy-declaring refrain, and not the Shepherd’s assonant, address-first refrains. Its formal strangeness is part of what marks this cycle as the exception.
To this end, the relection uses free verse, but preserves the first-person, direct address throughout, and avoids any line that describes the sheep rather than being spoken as the sheep.
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A small verbal link is available between this reflection and the surrounding stanzas: Psalm 130’s “wait for the LORD… more than they that watch for the morning” pairs naturally with the “cold and starless night” already present in the poem, and may be worth echoing lightly to bind the reflection to its context without resolving its tension too soon.
The First Shepherd’s Refrain
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The Shepherd’s first refrain is to a couplet, to leave the most room for growth.
It is confined to the calling-and-holding phase, plants the home-vowel deeply for the later reprise, and keeps its second line smooth to offset the rougher, stress-clustered opening.
Punctuation and Capitalisation
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The governing idea is this: the sheep’s voice is punctuated so that it cannot close itself, and the Shepherd’s voice is punctuated so that it does. The sheep’s refrain is the confession that never resolves under the Law; its pointing should trail and break. The Shepherd’s refrains are the grace that completes; theirs should be firm and fully stopped.
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The initial plan was to have the sheep’s voice be written in majuscule, and use sentence case for the Shepherd’s voice. However, only four line starts were lowercased in the scheme, which would not have been enough for it to stand as an obviously intentional scheme. Therefore, sentence case has been selected for the entire poem; this helps to highlight the intentional puncuation that helps to differentiate the two voices.
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