Is thy cruse of comfort failing

Is thy cruse of comfort failing. Elizabeth Rundle Charles* (1828-1896). This was published in Charles’s The Three Wakings, and Other Poems (1859). It was entitled ‘The Cruse that Faileth Not’ in Charles’s Songs Old and New (1887, 1894). It is a poem in eight 2-line stanzas of 15 syllables each. This is the metre of Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’, written 1837-38, and Charles’s poem may have been  written in imitation of that poem. It began: Is thy cruse of comfort failing? Haste its scanty drops to share, And though all the years of famine, thou shalt still have drops to share. Hymnbooks print the text in 4-line stanzas or in 8-line ones, sometimes amended to ‘Is thy cruse of comfort...