Poetry of the Father’s forgiveness

During my study of the subject of forgiveness in the New Testament book of Philemon, I was captivated by the following poem included in John MacArthur’s commentary. It makes me think of my son and my heavenly Father, and it makes me sad that we don’t forgive as we should.

“The Toys” by Coventry Patmore, a nineteenth-century English poet (citied in The MacArthur New Testament Commentary on Colossians & Philemon, 1992, Moody Bible Institute of Chicago)

My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
–His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of [tokens] and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there
with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray’d
To God, I wept and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with [tranquil] breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou has moulded from the
clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
“I [forgive] their childishness.”