Understand

Understand

Such mastery! How can I understand
all You have created in just one week?
My eyes see beauty so vast and so grand!

Truly, it could only come from Your hand,
sprung up splendidly as words You did speak.
Such mastery! How can I understand?

From the seas of plenty to the lush land;
everything from lions to the lamb meek;
my eyes see beauty so vast and so grand!

Teach me oh Lord all that You do command.
The narrow, less traveled road shall I seek.
Such mastery! How can I understand?

I will walk with You and in the end stand.
For without You Lord - I am surely weak.
My eyes see beauty so vast and so grand!

And I shall follow Your steps in the sand;
try earnestly to reach that mountain peak.
Such mastery! How can I understand?
My eyes see beauty so vast and so grand!

Villanelle Pronounced "villa-NELL"

         The highly structured villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem's two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2.

         The villanelle has no established meter, although most nineteenth-century villanelles have used trimeter or tetrameter and most twentieth-century villanelles have used pentameter.