A spiritual eviction notice arrives in the imperative voice: “It seems you must give up your long-term lease / On being right and wronged, righteous and hurt.” Hans Ostrom’s “Making the Soul’s Re-acquaintance” is a sonnet about the difficult, unglamorous work of abandoning self-righteousness. Its central idea is that the soul cannot reacquaint itself with genuine gratitude or prayer until the ego has been dispossessed. The poem stages that dispossession as a move from a large, defended property into a small cottage, where faults are kept like preserved food and even the walls must be asked for forgiveness.
The poem extends a real-estate metaphor with quiet wit. The speaker tells “you”—a voice that pulls readers into the confession—that the old residence is a “long-term lease” on being both “right and wronged,” a pair of postures that trap a person in righteous victimhood. The land is “haughty,” and someone else might like to “lord over” it; the poem half-mocks the status we attach to our grievances. Against that estate, the second quatrain sets “a cottage of humility,” with “cross-breezes” and a “pantry full of jars / That hold your faults, preserved for scrutiny.” The homely image is deliberately unromantic. Faults are not thrown away; they are stored and examined, like preserves in glass, as evidence of what one actually is. The line “Live with the wretchedness of who you are” sounds harsh, but in the poem’s logic it is the prerequisite for honesty, not an invitation to self-loathing.
Formally, Ostrom follows the Shakespearean sonnet pattern—three quatrains of alternating rhyme and a closing couplet—mostly in iambic pentameter. The rhymes quietly do thematic work. “Lease” chimes with “pleased,” linking possession to satisfaction; “hurt” finds its rhyme in “Earth,” grounding emotional injuries in worldly pride. Later, “assumptions” is answered by “resumption,” as if releasing old certainties makes renewal possible, and “wall” expands into “all,” connecting the small act of asking forgiveness to a total reorientation. The enjambment across “resumption / Of basic gratitude” mimics the gradual return it describes. The title’s “re-acquaintance” is similarly awkward and deliberate: the soul is meeting itself again after a long estrangement, and the hyphen marks the effort of reintroduction.
The third quatrain turns to manual, physical labour. To “chop kindling from the stump of your assumptions” is to dismantle the dead remains of former certainties and turn them into fuel—something useful for warmth rather than a monument to one’s own opinions. The instruction to “ask forgiveness from each simple wall” is startling because it personifies the cottage; it suggests that humility extends even to the inanimate details of an ordinary life. After this small repentance comes the poem’s quiet reward: “basic gratitude for life, for all.” The word “basic” matters. The poem distrusts grand spiritual gestures. What returns is not ecstasy but a plain thankfulness.
The final couplet lands with wry tenderness. “Of course you’ll want to pray again, poor sod. / But keep it basic: pray there is a God.” The phrase “poor sod” is both affectionate and deflating, cutting against any sense of spiritual achievement. The prayer is deliberately minimal—not a doctrine, not a list of requests, but the hope that there is something to pray to. That uncertainty makes the poem significant for a contemporary audience; it treats faith not as certainty but as a modest, almost sheepish reacquaintance. The soul’s renovation is unfinished, but the cottage, with its cross-breezes and honest jars, is a place where a basic, livable faith might stay.