On the Transfiguration of Our Lord
by Laurent DrelincourtGreat God! Am I on Earth, or am I in the Skies?
My heart is transported by a pleasure ineffable.
The Saints, old and new, are present to my eyes
and I hear their voices in concert admirable.I see, by the millions, the Angels glorious,
and of their Divine King the Person adorable,
whose brilliant robe and radiant brow
efface the Sun's brilliance incomparable.The Holy Spirit on Jesus seems to me to rest:
The Father in the Son shows his majesty,
and the Son is marked out by the Father's oracle.But if I contemplate you -- O Monarch of Kings! --
Bloody, disfigured, dying on Calvary,
I admire you much less on Tabor than on the Cross!
My rough translation. Laurent Drelincourt was a seventeenth century Calvinist. He seems to be most famous today for his Marian poems; some early Calvinists had a 'High Christology of Mary' (it was an argument going back to John Calvin that the Catholic view of Mary was too low, although Calvin himself doesn't put a lot of emphasis on this argument). This fell out of favor over time, but Drelincourt is one of the resources modern Reformed theologians go back to when they are trying to reclaim that particular early strand of the Reformed tradition. In any case, many of his other devotional sonnets are quite good.
