Poetry Tuesday: "I Met the Master Face to Face"
- 4 days ago
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From Rest Promised to Rest Found
“I Met the Master Face to Face”
I first knew this poem from my father’s recitation in the 1950s, when it circulated as an anonymous devotional verse.
In later years, the name “Lorrie Cline” has been attached to it, though I have not been able to find firm biographical evidence for that attribution.
Like many such poems, it seems to have lived first on the lips and in the hearts of believers, rather than on the printed page.
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We have come to rest at the end of Edmund Spenser’s Cantos of Mutability. The argument has been heard. The sentence has been spoken.
Change has been judged, and rest has been promised. Spenser ends his life’s work not with a conclusion, but with restraint — a silence that gestures beyond poetry itself.
Before we turn to another great epic, it is fitting to pause.
Large poems train our vision. They teach us how to see the world whole — its order, its fractures, its destiny.
But the Christian life is not lived only on the scale of history and cosmos. It is lived face to face, heart to heart, one soul at a time.
Master of the Moment
The speaker comes assured, even certain — confident that she understands herself and her faith. But the meeting does not unfold as she expects. Christ does not debate or instruct. He simply looks at her.
He looked at me with loving eyes, /And smiled — I could not speak;/My foolish words all seemed so vain,/My strength so very weak.
Nothing dramatic happens. There is no rebuke, no argument, no explanation. And yet everything changes. In the presence of Christ, self-assurance dissolves. What remains is truth — received quietly, humbly.
By the end of the poem, the encounter has reversed the speaker’s understanding of herself and of Him:
I met the Master face to face —How small my life had been!How much of His I had not known,How little I had seen!
Where Spenser gestures toward rest beyond time, Cline brings that rest into the present moment. The Lord of history becomes the Shepherd of the soul. The One who stands at the end of all change meets the believer personally, gently, and truthfully now.
This is the necessary bridge between Spenser and what comes next. Before we descend with Milton into the drama of the Fall in Paradise Lost, we are reminded why that descent matters at all. Theology, at its best, leads not merely to understanding, but to encounter.
These quoted lines give us the shape of the poem, but not its fullness. “I Met the Master Face to Face” is best read slowly, in one sitting, as a personal meditation. The full poem may be read here:https://wordinfo.info/unit/4493
After the stillness of Mutability, this poem brings us home — not to abstraction, but to Christ Himself.
The One who says: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”
if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. - Jesus in Revelation 3:20
Next week, refreshed and steady, we will begin a new long journey together with Paradise Lost. For now, we pause — and meet the Master face to face.
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Hallelujah! I have found Him-
whom my soul so long has craved!
Jesus satisfies my longings;
through His blood I now am saved.
2 Feeding on the husks around me
till my strength was almost gone,
longed my soul for something better,
only still to hunger on. [Refrain]
3 Poor I was, and sought for riches,
something that would satisfy;
but the dust I gathered round me
only mocked my soul's sad cry. [Refrain]
4 Well of water, ever springing,
Bread of Life, so rich and free,
untold wealth that never faileth,
my Redeemer is to me. [Refrain]
-- All my life I had a longing
Author: Clara Tear Williams (1875)
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