Poem by Philip James Elliot, my father

O Lord, against this bosom-blast

  of coiled and seething feelings,

Batt'ring passions, ebbing yearnings,

  oozing acne of inner man,

Raise Thou the flinty walls of

  stuff of which Thy Son was made-

Yea, build in me the buttressed

          bastions of faith

That shall resist the undersucking

          flow of soulish tide,

And make me to endure this late attack,

I pray,

In Jesus' Name.

-written in 1948, 1 year before graduation from Wheaton