I Died: I Died

I dreamt I died that night, 

And all my grief 

Full coincided with His own. 

The thought, of course, is madness. 

One drop of His would
More than destroy 

All that I have and am, 

And render me beyond the pale 

Of reconstruction.
 

Of course, I died, 

And that’s the whole 

Of all I knew. Full grief 

Took me to depths 

From which is no recall. 

In the annihilation 

That grief Divine brings 

To a human being 

Is irreversible decease. 

A man cannot enter the Divine 

And feel His grief. 

Holiness is His love 

And not a man’s.

True God feels grief 

From His own holiness, 

But from it man feels death.
 

And so I died. 

I died down to my depths, 

Disintegrating 

In the welter of the Love 

That, lone, knows grief; 

Not universal grief, 

Not grief en masse, 

But holy grief of love 

In intimacy with each 

Of whom it made, 

For that gone dark 

Within the essence of itself.
 

I cannot tell the death— 

It was a long and depthful sleep— 

And when I woke I lived. 

I had been dead before I died 

But dying in His grief 

Did not destroy. The grief 

Destroyed the pain 

In all my filaments and fibres, 

And every granule wholly purged 

Rose to a coruscation 

Of sheer upholiness. 

His multi-coloured joyfulness 

Surged through my resurrection— 

Such coruscation!
 

I did not long to sleep again, 

To die, to live again, 

To know fresh grief. 

I said my grief full coincided 

With all His own. I know not. 

I only knew the grief of love 

Purifies from death. I died, 

And now I live again
Who never lived in truth 

Before.



From All Things of the Spirit, by Geoffrey C. Bingham, pp. 154-5