From Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday, Malcolm Guite shares a sequence of sonnets for Holy Week. They are taken from his collection, Sounding the Seasons (Canterbury Press).

For the first podcast, he reflects on and reads his sonnet, “Palm Sunday.”

“In composing these sonnets, I had in mind that mysterious and beautiful phrase in the Psalms about the man in whose heart are the highways to Zion (Psalm 84.5),” he says. 

“I wanted to develop the hint offered in that phrase that there is an inner as well as an outer Jerusalem, and that therefore the events of Holy Week are both about Jesus’s outward visible and historical entry into Jerusalem, and what he did there, and also about his entry into the inner Jerusalem, ‘the seething holy city’ of our own hearts.” 

The Revd Dr Malcolm Guite is a Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, and writes the weekly Poet’s Corner column for the Church Times.

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