Michigan Stained Glass Census

This three-panel Pringle Memorial Window at Metropolitan United Methodist Church illustrates three well-known poems that include references to religious faith. The left panel contains scenes depicting lines in "The Cotter's Saturday Night" by Robert Burns. (A cotter was a peasant who lived in a humble cot, or cottage, for which he gave labor instead of rent.) The central scene of the panel shows the "toil-worn" cotter reading the Bible to his family on the "night his weekly toll is at an end," illustrating Burns' lines, "The priest-like father reads the sacred page/How Abram was the friend of God on high." The central panel depicts John Greenleaf Whittier's poem, "My Trust," which opens with the lines, "A picture memory brings to me/I look across the years and see/Myself beside my mother's knee." The central scene of this panel shows a child kneeling before his mother, whose "gentle hand" and "chastening love" guides him in knowing right from wrong. The panel at the right illustrates scenes from "The Village Blacksmith" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. At the bottom of the panel we see the mighty smithy hard at work "under a spreading chestnut tree." In the center of the panel, "He goes on Sunday to the church/And sits among his boys." The scene above represents the lines, "He hears his daughter's voice/Singing in the village choir . . . "It sounds to him like her mother's voice/Singing in Paradise."

Designed by architect William E. N. Hunter in the English Gothic style, Metropolitan United Methodist Church was completed in 1926. Its windows were created by the Willet Stained Glass Studios, which designed this window in 1938. To view other windows by the same firm, see the Windows of the Month for June 1999 and April 1999.

Metropolitan United Methodist Church of Detroit was registered in the Michigan Stained Glass Census by Ernest G. Aruffo, Jr. of Northville (MSGC 93.0034).

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The Michigan Stained Glass Census is supported in part by the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs