The works of Richard Church have gone out of print, and they are quite difficult to find in today's world. His relative obscurity, however, does not imply that his works are unimportant or unworthy, neither of which could be used to describe his poetry in any sense.
Following a strange mystical experience that convinced Church that space and time were not absolute, he began to write about the dominance of the will over physical limitation: "mind over matter," to appropriate a colloquialism. His following literary output ranged from poetry to autobiography, although he is most famous now for the latter. His poetry is an interesting blend of Romanticism and Realism; in his earlier years, his work is reminiscent of the Romantics, but later on he began to take on realist subjects, as seen through his poems "Twentieth Century Psalter" and "A Moment's Escape."
"The Flood of Life and Other Poems" was his first published work, and it is one of the only ones still available online. In it, Church dedicates most of the poems to the cycle of life, which he describes by proxy of nature and the changing seasons. The first poem, "The Flood of Life," is a fourteen-part work that celebrates the omnipresent beauty of changing life, ending in a recapitulation of life and a challenge to find meaning while it still endures.
"The Pond" is another early poem of note. It describes a frozen pond in winter, addressing it as the second-person subject of the poem, likening it to the soul of a man who has been abandoned by his friends (like the cold detachment of winter's atmosphere) and now stands proud and haughty, heart frozen like the surface of the lake. This comparison plays into one of Church's most notable themes: the appreciation of nature for what it demonstrates about man, as well as life as a whole. Unlike several of the Romantics, Church appreciated nature for the value it reveals about truth beyond itself, and this comes to light in his poetry.
"Sonnet" is another important poem in his first collection: it warns the reader of Death and its revelation of the true nature of things on Earth. It is an exhortative poem: it condemns the vain pleasure-seeking of man, instead demonstrating the value of appreciating life that transcends death.
Church's poetry, although scarcely to be found today, is a good reminder to the astute reader of the beauty of life and the transcendence of the mind and the intellect beyond the merely physical.
