O Come, O Come Emmanuel Verse 7

The seventh and final verse.  I'm going to have to decide to go to Christmas carols or stick with Advent songs after this.

O Come, Desire of nations, bind

In one the hearts of all humankind

Bid thou our sad divisions cease,

And be thyself our Prince of Peace.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to Thee, O Israel. 

Oh of the many fabulous things about my master's in Shakespeare and the first semester's education it gave me is a profound appreciation of enjambment (I have a funny story that almost no one can appreciate about enjambment.  It's a sad state of affairs.).  That's when a phrase or idea is split between multiple lines of a poem.

When I teach about enjambment to my students, I always tell a story on a friend of mine who likes to tell LONG stories.  And it's not always clear when she's finished with the stories.  So she developed a strategy that I would swear is intentional. She only takes a breath in the middle of a sentence.  Sometimes, for clarity, she breaks for breath mid-phrase or cliche.  And that's enjambment -- take a breath or a break in the midst of the thought.

In Shakespeare's verse it can mean a lot of things, and it's a very natural way that people talk. We do it naturally all the time.

But when it's purposefully chosen in a poem, it means something.

Here what I think it means is pretty cool.  For six verses, we've been praising the past and to some degree the future of God's promise.  We've been meditating on what it would be like to wait for Jesus the first time and how it will be different from now when He comes again.

This verse is the exuberance of celebrating that time.  It's not the waiting or the past -- this verse just lets loose imagining how wonderful and great it will be.  So great it doesn't even fit on a verse line!  So great that one thought flows into the next and everything and everyone is connected and no longer separated by these arbitrary divisions -- poetic and otherwise.

Peace and a joining of mankind -- that's what I see in that overflowing first line of the poem.  And in the crowded lines that follow it -- shoving more syllables into each line of the verse than any of the previous verses.  So much to say about how wonderful peace will be.  How we will all be together.

For anyone who's afraid of losing too much personhood or free will or dark subtlety or indulgent venial sins or everything else we use to keep ourselves from living fully in God and letting it change our lives so profoundly.  There are unimaginable, overflowing compensations for each of these losses to come.  And I won't put the word "losses" in quotes like they aren't real losses.  They are.  And they will probably even hurt.  Maybe a lot.

But the grace that will come in their place will fix all the things we can't.  The beauty and love and peace --- so much more than we can imagine or a single verse line can contain.