Publisher's Synopsis
"Eternal Moment on a Calm Palm Sunday Morning" is a blank verse narrative poem of nearly 500 lines. Blank verse is a type of poetic meter, unrhymed iambic pentameter, each line containing five iambic feet. The iambic foot is one of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. Blank verse is found in the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and other writers.
The Passion of Christ provides the poem's argument. The speaker of the poem is one who attends a Palm Sunday service, where events of the Passion, as recorded in St. Matthew's Gospel, are dramatized in nave of the church, with clergy and congregants participating in the liturgy for the service.
While listening to the Palm Sunday liturgy, the speaker finds himself carried--in visions, dreams, and imagination--into the past, caught up in moments of this crucial week as they transpire. Not merely a narrator or passive observer, he becomes an actor, along with the others standing in the nave, in those awful hours which brought the Savior to His death.
The speaker, not a reverential and pious actor in the drama, instead expresses anger and rage toward Christ, not fully certain at first why this anger is there, and almost gleefully surrendering himself to his hostility. But he is one with a divided mind and, reflecting on his thoughts and actions, he begins to question why he despises this one who is called the Savior. As events of the poem unfold, he may find the answer.
