https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50583/our-god-our-help
“Our God, our help,” is a ballad that consists of nine, heroic four-line stanzas. The opening quatrain establishes the consistent style of the consonance and assonance dramatic pose.
“Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home:”
Sources Cited: “Our God, Our Help By Isaac Watts”. Poetry Foundation, 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50583/our-god-our-help. Accessed 22 Feb 2019.
The central image in, “Our God, our help” is christened within the denomination, God. The poet, Isaac Watts, who was an influential seventeenth-century writer, poet, and preacher, masterfully utilizes symbolic and metaphoric lyrics to accentuate God’s eternal, sovereign, aesthetic nature.
“Before the hills in order stood,
Or earth received her frame,
From everlasting thou art God,
To endless years the same.
Sources Cited: “Our God, Our Help By Isaac Watts”. Poetry Foundation, 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50583/our-god-our-help. Accessed 22 Feb 2019.
However, in the following denotations, and barbaric diction, Watt’s evokes the biblical account of Noah’s flood in order to juxtapose God’s infinite power, sanctity, and holiness by consequentially illuminating and contrasting it with humanity’s defiant, transient, bound, heedless, and willfully depraved disposition despite God’s dire warnings for the fallen to repent and return to Him.
“The busy tribes of flesh and blood,
With all their lives and cares,
Are carried downwards by thy flood,
And lost in the following years.”
Sources Cited: “Our God, Our Help By Isaac Watts”. Poetry Foundation, 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50583/our-god-our-help. Accessed 22 Feb 2019.
Furthermore, Watt’s attempts to conversely present conceptions of time through the eyes of God and compare it with man’s through a thought-provoking simile in order to greatly expand upon our vast diverse idiosyncrasies.
“A thousand ages in thy sight,
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.”
Sources Cited: “Our God, Our Help By Isaac Watts”. Poetry Foundation, 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50583/our-god-our-help. Accessed 22 Feb 2019.
The “all-at-oneness” found in “Our God, our help,” is embodied in the anaphoric ode found at the beginning and end of the poem. Which is also a metaphor for the Almighty because He is the Alpha and the Omega.
“Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.”
Sources Cited: “Our God, Our Help By Isaac Watts”. Poetry Foundation, 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50583/our-god-our-help. Accessed 22 Feb 2019.
Sources Cited: “Our God, Our Help By Isaac Watts”. Poetry Foundation, 2019, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50583/our-god-our-help. Accessed 22 Feb 2019.
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