The sacred consciousness of the “huge trusted power” which “moves in the muscle of the world/ In continual creation” (“A Chorus”) lights up the experiences of many of the poems in Moments of Grace and Celebrations and Elegies. Jennings writes in “Rescued,”: “Call that power God,/ As I do,” referring to the “primal power” that lie beneath the poets experience of creative power and her poignant recognition of the vagaries of love , two themes brought together in Moments of Grace. In this reference Dick David opines that “the moments of grace of Elizabeth Jennings’s title are intimations of a peace glimpsed beyond the fret and frustration of daily existence” (Davis 157).Jennings presumes the voice of a visionary poet or a priestess in these poems and she relates their search for transcendence of imaginative power to the search for “moments of grace,” the grace which perfects nature. While she makes plain in many of the poems the way in which she has assimilated the poetics of the romantic symbolist era, she emphasizes the particular relevance for her poetry of her faith in the reality of a spiritual world which is both immanent and transcendent. In the essay “Movement Poetry and Romanticism” by Michael O’ Neill,he points out that although the Movement writers like Wain and Jennings have …show more content…
Jennings provides the determining symbolism for this poem by linking ideas derived from the poetics of inspiration to ideas associated with the experience of love. In the opening lines of the first two tercets, the speaker carefully describes the intense joy she experiences following a period of profound grief. She says:“I have come into a sudden sunlit hour.” These lines induce the ideal of epiphany, the delighted moment of inspiration and the experience of sudden regeneration which is found in the poetry of