First day of the Somme

1st July 1916 through field glasses

When he swept the rise given the nickname
Heligoland, did his mind move rather
to Herr Gätke’s letters to his father
plotting bird migration, building their fame?

Did those boyhood memories focus his sight
on the Humber marsh - where he took cover
once and saw ten thousand golden plover
rise as one so he could not see the light?

Did his mind dwell on the skylarks which sang
full throat as the barrage came to a stop
with the quake of the sap’s cratering bang?

Did he jolt back from home in some surprise
as men began to move in lines, to drop
as they were trained to do… but did not rise?

John Cordeaux (1831-1899), a clergyman’s son, came to Great Coates in his 20s, soon inherited the tenancy of the largest farm from his mother’s uncle (Richard Taylor), and became Agent for Sutton Estates, Churchwarden of St Nicolas’, and the national expert on bird migration. His notebooks include an account of the golden plover flock disturbed in the marsh in December 1879 (‘I could not see daylight through them’). His papers at the Brynmor Jones Library in Hull include over a hundred letters from Heinrich Gätke (1814-1897), pioneer in North Sea migration studies, who was Secretary to the Governor of Heligoland.

Colonel Edward Kyme Cordeaux CBE (1866-1946), John’s son, was born in Great Coates, and baptised by his grandfather in St Nicolas’. He served through the Boer War and was recalled to the army in 1914 to help form the locally raised ‘Grimsby Chums’ battalion of the Lincolnshire Regiment; he was in command when it saw action on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. He married a daughter of Sir Henry Bennett; a sixth generation of Bennetts runs the family timber business from Great Coates Industrial Estate today.

The account of that day in Peter Chapman’s Grimsby’s Own - The Story of the Chums includes nicknames of local features, Cordeaux’s observation through field glasses, the unprecedented but fruitless bombardment of the German trenches until a few minutes before the action, the earth trembling at the force of the mine intended to wipe out those trenches, the skylarks singing, and an officer admiring the precision of the men falling in line before he realised they were in fact being mown down.

The first first-hand accounts in the Grimsby Daily Telegraph, published on 6^th July, include the following from three of the wounded in hospital in Southampton.    “Never in my life have I seen anything finer than the way successive waves of men marched singing and cheering into the bath of lead.  The more casualties they saw in front of them, the louder they cheered and sang, the harder they pressed forward into it.”     “What I don’t understand is how the devil they could bring all the machine guns into action after the pounding our heavies gave them.”    “I tumbled right on his machine-gun dodge.  The trench was knocked flat, but that made no odds.  Leading forward from his front line lie lines of tunnel going down into a big dug out over 20 ft deep and splendidly shored up and protected.”

This is all part of the material I've written in preparation for an evening on First World War Poetry in St Nicolas' on 3rd July which will mainly led by pupils from Caistor Grammar School.  The picture is of the Gruby family graves in the churchyard, on one of which is commemorated one of the Chums (Reginald Gruby) who never saw the first day of the Somme because he was killed by a sniper four months earlier and who is buried in France.

Ormulum continued

The other thing I wanted to discover was how closely Ormin’s translations follow the Latin of the Vulgate version of Bible he would have known and how far he was expounding rather than translating it.

I simply played with three verses (John 2.3-5) which appeared to show very quickly that he consistently took each Latin phrase of the Vulgate text and expanded it to make one of his own fifteen syllable couplets.

The example I enjoyed most was ‘nondum venit hora mea’ (‘my hour has not yet come’) for which he needed just seven syllables (‘ne comm nohht ȝet min time’ – not come not yet mine tim-e) so he had to preface these with a magnificent eight syllable line all of his own ( ‘abid, abid, wifmann, abid’ - abide, abide, wife-man, abide).

So here are the verses adapted from the handout I generated. First the Latin which Ormin would have known, then the English of the much later Wyclif Bible which tracks the same Latin very closely, and finally Ormin’s couplet.

Et deficiente vino
And whanne wijn failide
[and when wine failed]
& teȝȝ win wass drunken swa
þatt taer nass þa na mare
[… drunk so that there was no more]

dicit mater Iesu ad eum
the modir [mother] of Jhesu seide to hym
& Crisstess moderr comm till Crist
& seȝȝde himm þuss wiþþ worde
[… said to him thus with word]

vinum non habent
thei han not wijn
þiss win iss drunken to þe grund
& niss her nu na mare
[this wine is drunk to the ground/ bottom
and isn’t here now no more]

et dicit ei Iesus
and Jhesus seith to hir
& ure Laferrd [our Lord] Jesus Crist
þuss seȝȝde till hiss moderr

quid mihi et tibi est mulier
what to me and to thee, womman?
whatt falleþþ þiss till me wiþþ þe
wifmann, þiss þatt tu maelesst
[what falleth this to me with thee
woman, this that thou speakest]

nondum venit hora mea
myn our [hour] cam not yit
abid, abid, wifmann, abid
ne comm nohht ȝet min time
[which isn’t quite
Stop, woman, stop;
this isn’t the time or place]

dicit mater eius ministries
his modir seith to the mynystris [servants]
& Sannte Marȝe ȝede anan [straight away]
& seȝȝde to þe birrless [cup-bearers]

quodcumque dixerit vobis facite
what euere [ever] thing he seie to you, do ye
doþ þatt he shall bidden ȝuw
ne be ȝe nohht taerȝaeness
[do that he shall bid you
not be you not there-against].

Be not there against, indeed.

The picture is a random one from our Spanish holiday – Seville Cathedral, I think.

Playing with the Ormulum

‘The earliest poet writing in English in Lincolnshire’ was how I branded an introduction to the Orumulum for a poetry group one evening earlier this month (introduced in this Blog here and here and here).

Mindful of a discussion about the advantages of poetry in translation taking not just the words of the original but also its the structure (in this Blog here), I wanted to give an idea of how its rhythm might fall on a modern ear, so I created something close to a word-for-word translation of a couple of dozen lines while also seeking to follow the eight and seven beats in lines of couplets going

De-dum, de-dum, de-dum, de-dum,
De-dum, de-dum, de-dum-dum.

There are inevitable compromises. For example, the original line ‘haeþene Goddess alle’ must have been pronounced as seven separate syllables (heath-en-e God-es all-e) but the word-for-word translation ‘all heathen Gods’ is only four syllables, so I had to pad the line with ‘whatever’.

Anyway, this is what I came up with; the italics admit each departure from word-for-word translation.

& ȝiff þu cnawesst rihht tin Godd
And if you know your God aright
& herrcnesst hise spelless,
and harken to his story,
& leȝȝesst all þin herrte onn himm
while setting all your heart on him
& follȝhesst himm & buȝhesst,
to follow and to praise him,
& forr þe lufe off himm forrsest
and for the love of him forsake
haeþene Goddess alle,
all heathen Gods whatever,
& arrt te sellf aȝȝ milde & meoc
and are yourself all mild and meek
& soffte, & stille, & liþe,
and soft and still and gentle,
wiþþ lamb þu lakesst tin Drihhtin
you offer to your Lord a lamb
gastlike i þine þaewess,
in spirit by your conduct,
swa þatt itt maȝȝ wel hellpenn þe
so that it may well help you much
to winnenn Godess are.
to win from God his graces.

For lamb iss soffte & stille deor
For lambs are soft and gentle beasts
& meoc, & milde, & liþe
and meek and mild and gentle,
& it cann cnaweenn swiþe wel
and each one knows so very well
hiss moderr þaer ȝho blateþþ
its mother there who’s bleating
bitwenenn an þusennde shep,
between a thousand other sheep
þohh þatt teȝȝ blaetenn alle.
though they all bleat together.
& all swa birrþ þe cnawenn wel
And so it suits you to know well
þin Godd & all his lare,
your God and all he teaches,
& all forrwerrpenn haeþenndom
to keep away from heathendom
& oþre Goddess alle,
from other Gods whatever
swa sum þe lamb fleþ aȝȝ oþre shep
just as the lamb flees other sheep
& follȝheþþ aȝȝ hiss moderr.
to follow just its mother.

What comes across to me, apart from the plodding, is a delicate introductionof the New Testament encouragement to offer spirtual rather than literal sacrifice along with a homely if forced illustration; it could almost be material for a Sunday School  in the 1950s.

The picture is another taken at Lincoln Cathedral a week ago.

Arma Christi - Lancea

I’ve been working on a fourteenth century poem which I discover was a widely used devotional writing.

It intrigued me because it lies behind one of the features of the decoration of many churches today.  One quite often sees items associated with Jesus’ execution displayed on shields or carried by angels or both. There are late thirteenth century examples on St Hugh's shrine in Lincoln Cathedral.  I once posted two 1920s pictures of the dice used to gamble for Jesus’ cloak, one from St Michael’s and one from St Nicolas’.

These are ‘Arma Christi’ – the arms of Christ both in the sense of his ‘coat of arms’ and in the ironic sense of what he armed himself with on his journey to the cross.  It appears there were well established devotions related to gazing on these ‘symbols of the passion’. There are even ‘Arma Christi’ rolls which could be unrolled and held up so that the devotional poem could be read and the symbols seen.

So I bought a reproduction of the 1871 Early English Text Society volume which includes two versions of the poem and pictures, and which may have been a major influence on the revival of the use them in places like this parish fifty years later.

The verse about the spear reads

Lord, the spere so scharpe I-grownde
That in thyn herte made a wownde,
It quenchyth the synne that I have wrowt,
With alle myn harte fulle evle thowt,
And myn stowt pryd also,
And myn onbuxmnes ther-too.

‘Unbuxomness’ is a perhaps the only word which isn’t immediately clear. It appears that ‘buxom’ hadn’t yet acquired the later sense of comely, jolly, plump and vigorous. It still reflected the origin of the word as ‘like an archer’s bow’ - that is with the right amount of both strength and flexibility. The Shorter Oxford offers meek, gracious, obliging and kindly. So, for un-buxom, I’ve offered ‘unyielding’ in a modern English rendering

Lord, the spear so sharply ground
that in your heart made a wound
quenching the sin which I have wrought
by all my heart’s evil thought
and by my stout pride too
and by my unyieldingness also.

I played with each line to begin to develop a contemporary engagement with the text as

Sharpened spear,
weeping wound:
soak my stains;
lance my lewdness;
puncture my pride;
soften my stubbornness.

which might work better with lines re-ordered to

Sharpened spear,
lance my lewdness
and puncture my pride;
weeping wound,
soften my stubbornness
and soak away my stains.

The first illustration comes from a fourteenth century original via the 1871 book and shows both spear and wound. The second is a shield behind the altar at St Nicolas’ which shows both the spear and also the sponge on a stick held up for Jesus’ to drink from.

Playing with the big boys

And girls. Professor Susan Bassnett, one of the four judges for this year’s Times Stephen Spender Trust Prize for poetry in translation writes High on my personal list of fine translations was Peter Mullins' superb rendering of nine short poems from the Orkneyinga Saga.

This doesn’t in fact mean I won one of the three prizes announced on Saturday, nor even achieved one of the six further ‘Commended’ places, but, nevertheless, it is just possibly a comment to which I may return in my own mind from time to time.

The organiser very kindly sent me an e-mail a short while ago to alert me to the fact that I was to be what I now think of as ‘a runner-up to the runners-up’ and to invite me to the Prize event in London tomorrow, which sadly I can’t make.

I’ve posted four of the poems here last year, one on 11th September and three more on 29th December.

One of the others is a strange little piece with possibly onomatopoeic noises to represent the incomprehensibility as well as the shivering of a servant girl whose need Earl Rognvald unconvincingly credits himself alone with grasping.

Professor Judith Jesch's critical edition gives a literal translation

You are sitting round the fire, while Asa – atatata! – is lying in the water – hutututu! Where shall I sit? I am rather cold

and the Penguin Classic version (possibly based on a slightly different original scholarly text) is

You sit steaming, but Asa’s
s-soaked to the skin;
f-f-far from the fire,
I’m freezing to death.

My version attempts to retain the original sounds in the middle:

Storm soaked and freezing
Asa is pleading
with teeth chat-at-atering
and speech stu-ut-utering
for space by the fire
to get herself warm.

A thousand splinters of moon

A thousand splinters of moon

By moonbeam-barricaded
bedsides, shards of crafted light
wait to pierce our naked soles,
yet look left, just off centre
as the heart is, in chaos
a star cluster spews, sprouts, foals,
cloudy-edged, joyous, required
confusion’s wild scattering;

the still pools, the perfect bowls
of your imagination
have been, the moon says, the snare
for jigsaw habited souls:
a thousand splinters of moon
won't piece back together whole.

After Chenzin Jiang’s literal translation for The Poetry Translation Centre (http://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/282/14_•_metaphor/literal) of Chen Yuhong’s poem.

When Ian Crockatt spoke about poetry translation at Nottingham University earlier this year (http://petermullins.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/hermit-crab-poetry.html) he not only put emphasis on reproducing the original structure of the poem (so that the new reader experienced something of the force of the original) but was also very sniffy about those whose primary focus was instead on a literal rendering of the original words. At the time I was a little wary of the way in which, for example, the choice of the English rhyme words demanded by the structure could lead the translator too far from the original ideas of the poem (so the new reader heard too much of the ideas of the translator). But I saw his point more clearly when I came across the Poetry Translation Centre’s website’s literal translations (adjusted and polished by a panel or poet) which are clear and faithful but which, at first reading, seemed to lack some of the poetic sense. So, for what it is worth, my version of Chen Yuhon’s poem has been an attempt to give one of those literal texts a more English poetic structure while aware of the dilemmas involved in doing so.

Having heard Simon Armitage at Lincoln Cathedral a couple of weeks ago, I have been revisiting his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He draws attention to this dilemma in his Introduction. His example is the lines about Guinevere The comlokest to discrye / ther glent with yyven gray (the loveliest to see / seen by gray eyes) where he would see a literal translation as only giving ‘the cold facts’ of her beauty. Instead he takes a hint from a reference to the ‘best gemmes’ in the previous line, and bows to the demand of the alliterative structure, by giving But not one stone outshone / the quartz of the queen’s eye, although the words beginning with q don’t appear in the original. My spews, sprouts, foals (where the literal translation only has a sense of process), and my the still pools, the perfect bowls (where the literal translation does not spell out any content for 'your own confused imagery'), both of which are partly squeezed in to meet the demands for rhyme at these points, are the only places where I’ve named something which Chen Yuhon had not already named, and I hope benefit from ‘the Armitage defence’ despite my wariness.

Meanwhile, the pictures of the mediaeval dovecote at Stoke-sub-Hamdon come from a lunchtime stop there when going down to take services for my Aunt in Yoevil Crematorium and South Petherton Parish Church in the week; we had a five hours drive down there before lunch, and a return journey the following day to be back for my new colleague's licensing in the evening.

Malmesbury Poems

Almost accidentally, I’ve developed part of a sort of sub-George Mackay Brown cycle of poems based on the details in each of the carvings on the south doorway of Malmesbury Abbey.  I suspect I'd need to go back to collect a whole set of pictures, and then spend proper time with them, to develop the cycle any further.


The Creation of Adam
(picture posted on Monday)

Still life-less man,
God draws you from the mud
your feet as yet unformed.


Adam and Eve hide from God
(I have no picture of my own - but see http://www.flickr.com/photos/22274117@N08/3944474517/)

Naked, almost skeletal,
you crouch to conceal yourselves
and double up in shame.


Adam and Eve are given a spade and a distaff
(pictured on Monday)

Free and winged one,
fix their fear and hands
to delving spade, to spinning staff.


The Annunciation

Long sleeved Lady,
are you calm or fearful
with an angel by your chair?


The Holy Family

Rest now, Lady,
beneath the bed spread’s fold and fall
for Joseph watches the child.


The Crucifixion

Closest to him
almost touched by his fixed arms,
you echo the squirm of his body.


The Burial
(pictured on Monday)

Bent, intent in grief,
with your delicate fingers
gently lay the body down.


The Resurrection
(pictured on Monday)

Risen one
gazing ahead, moving forward,
your banner streams behind you.

Hermit Crab Poetry

Poetry translation requires taking forward not just the content but also the form of the original - in the same way that the body of many a creature is just a lot of rotting mush if it does not have its exoskeleton.

This was the case put by the poet Ian Crockatt in a lecture at Nottingham University which I went over for last week. He is working at a much more professional level than me on the poems of Earl Rognvald in the Orkenyinga Saga, and he shared some striking examples of versions which he has produced which reproduced the same skaldic form as the originals (right down to the place and nature of rhymes and half-rhymes in alternate lines); I'll be glad when some are in the public domain to explore further here.

Nevertheless, it was hermit crabs I thought about on my way home. This may just be a defensive reaction, a self justification for the more amateur attempts I have made to give the poems both new words (not the Icelandic originals) and new structures (not the skaldic originals, which I admit would have been a much more difficult task). It seemed to me that to take new language and to borrow a structure / shell from somewhere else might be equally legitimate things to do.

The first of Rognvald’s poems in the Saga is the Grimsby poem which was the first I attempted to translate (and which I posted on 11th September):

We’d wasted five weeks waiting,
our feet festering in filth.
mired in mud in the middle
of Grimsby, grimly grounded.

Now, let loose, we laugh aloud
on the gulls’ moor’s mounds, mounted
on elk-back, bounding breakers,
our bow’s beak set on Bergen.

This has seven beats to each of the eight lines (rather than the skaldic six beats), and where there are internal rhymes they are accidental products of a very English verse approach to alliteration (rather than any deliberate use of the skaldic pattern). And none of the three later poems I posted on 29th December follow even this form - only one even has eight lines - so are several steps further away from the skaldic form.
 
He has made me think. Perhaps the very elusive quality for which I look is not content (although a quite accurate correspondence to the original seems important), nor form (although a poetic structure which means the poem can be proclaimed aloud seems important), but character (catching something of what the original might have been meant to make one feel).
 
In this case, the original has the word megingrimmar (which the critical edition gives as mightily grim) in the second line and meginkaliga (mightily merry) in the sixth, so I’d venture that one essential feature of any new version must be the transition from being depressingly stuck to being joyfully free. If so, even a quite prosaic translation which captures this might be a good poetic translation. And even a skilled skaldic form which doesn’t convey this (perhaps because the search for rhyming words has allowed different pictures to infiltrate) might not be. At least, that is where I’ve got to at the moment.

Poetry progress

David Overton, a local musician, has set my words from the Orumulum (posted here on 6th January 2010) as an anthem, which the choir at Grimsby Minister sang for the first time at a mid-week Evensong before Christmas. It has a lovely mediaeval feeling lilt to it. David’s father was Organist at St Michael’s for many years and I remember visiting him in his Abbeyfield House room soon after I arrived here. David’s own credits include arranging music for James Galway, and he is himself a member of the Minster’s choir.

Meanwhile, I have got about half way through my project of re-telling the three dozen or so poems of Earl Rognvaldr from the Orkneyinga Saga (begun with the Grimsby poem posted here on 11th September 2011).

For example, Prof Judith Jesch’s literal “Here I’ve raised a high cairn to a strong minded ghost in dark Dollsteinshola; in this way I look for rings - I do not know who among the pushers of wave-skis [a kenning for sailors] will go later the long and ugly way, the route across the broad lake” has become

We pile up stones to mask our fear

and keep the cave’s strong ghouls away
who in the deep of Doll’s dark hole
maintain their grip on rings of gold.

We pile up stones to mark our feat:
perhaps some men will skim the sea
and then on this our awful route
will find our cairn already built.

Her “I hang a snake of the bridge of the hawk [a kenning for arm-ring built on a kenning for arm] made round by the hammer on the gallows of the tongs [another kenning for arm]; we reveal the drink of Grimnir of hanged ones [a kenning for poetry built on a kenning for Odin] - The fir-tree of the gleaming-voice of the Gautar of the cave [a kenning for women built on a kenning for gold built in turn on a kenning for giants] has gladdened me so much that I play with my hollows of the backward-bending feller of the lagoon [a kenning for oar built on a kenning for hand]” has become

Hands which swung felled-trees through water
stroke the gold that snakes in loops
where the hunter’s hawk last rested,
stroke the gold once executed
by such hammer wielding hands.

Drink with me, great God of all fate,
sing of one tree-tall-slender,
sing of her bright treasure-bearing,
delight with me at all her splendour,
sing, and to her beauty drink.

And her “Einarr said that he wished to entertain none of the followers of Rognvald except the jarl himself; the roaring sea of Gauter [a kenning for poetry] comes to my palate – I know that [the one] not amiable to men overturned his promises; I went in where the fires of Yggr [a kenning for swords] burned late in the evening” has become

In my speech the storm surge sings
of Einar set to lure me in
at whose farm the forge fire flames
with burning swords and twisting claims.

Mary of the Cross

Sweet Mary, distraught

distraught and keening,

keening at the death,

the death of her child,

her child once taunted

taunted now herself,
herself at the place,

the place wet with blood,
with blood which now stains,
now stains her tears red,
tears red on her breast,
her breast tight with grief,
with grief like none since,

none since, Mary sweet.

I’ve followed up my interest in the Orkneyinga Saga by splashed out on the first published volume of the critical edition of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages - it is Volume VII, published in 2007, and covers Poetry on Christian Subjects. This poem is my first go at writing or ‘translating’ something from it.

The original of the poem is verse 5 of the fourteenth century Heilagra Meyja Drapa (Poems on Holy Maidens) and the literal English rendering in the critical edition (by Prof Kirsten Wolf) preserves something of the way in which a version of the final word of each line is repeated at the beginning of the following line:

Sweet Mary, overcome with weeping
cried at the death of the son;
the conduct of the Jews mocked the woman;
the woman looked at the red cross.

The reddening stream of tears then flowed
and streamed down the mother;
the mother’s chest, tight with grief,

bore the grief like no one since.

A higher gift than grace

‘A higher gift than grace’ is how Blessed John Henry Newman wrote about the incarnation (he puts the words into the mouths of angels in his poem The Dream of Gerontinus). This is how we sing of it when we use the relevant section of the poem as our hymn Praise to the holiest in the height. At least, most of us do.

At the licensing of our new Area Dean last week we sang instead ‘the highest gift of grace’. I heard the two Methodist Ministers who attended the service marvelling afterwards at the confidence of those willing to ‘correct’ Newman in this way. We suspected that the Fathers of the early Councils would have gone along with Newman's indication of the primacy of the physical incarnation over subsequent human experiences of grace, and anathematised a formulation which characterised the humanity of the Lord as if it had been conferred by grace however superlative its degree.

My books shelves and the internet haven’t proved sufficient tools to trace this one backwards. I find one evangelically edited hymn book already had 'the highest gift of grace' in 1982, so the amendment is not new and may well go back much further. I’m reminded that when Elgar set the long poem in 1900 many Anglican Cathedrals wouldn’t allow it to be sung or would only allow adapted versions of the text to be sung to avoid the Roman doctrines in it including that of purgatory, but I’d be surprised if this particular amendment goes back to those adaptions.

Several internet sources suggests a fear that Newman was really on about the Eucharist, which the context shows he patently was not. Certainly I see the official hymns books of the major Free Churches (Methodist and United Reformed) are happy to print what Newman wrote. Perhaps hymns for diocesan services are sourced from on-line hymnals the theological agenda of the editors of which the diocese hasn’t quite spotted.

The picture of the Lord with Mary and Martha is from Blankney Church and is one I took on a walk while on retreat at Metheringham recently.

Strange blessings

... famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love...?

The other Orcadian poet was Edwin Muir (who had tutored George Mackay Brown), and I spent some of my time on Retreat with him. In the process, I rediscovered this restatement of one important feature of the endless debate about the ‘problem of suffering’; it is close to something I’ve thought it important to try to express but have always struggled to do so satisfactorily

The thought cannot be thrown around too cheaply near those most grief-striken, yet in the Queen’s message about the 9/11 attack the line was, I think, ‘grief is the price we pay for love’, and here Muir invites us in to something similar.

The poem is One foot in Eden; the other foot, of course, being in this world as it is, and the two are (as the Gospel parable suggests) totally entwined:

... strange the fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate.
Time’s handiwork by time are haunted,
And nothing now can separate
The corn and tares compactly grown...
Evil and good stand thick around
In the fields of charity and sin...

The poetic invitation is to see not simply that the two cannot now be separated but that eliminating the source of one would eliminate the source of the other.  So he ends

Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from those beclouded skies.

The picture was taken from Broch at Midhow on Rousay.

Retreat sonnet

The Drawing Room, The Old Rectory, Metheringham
now the Community of St Francis’ Chapel

From throws of prayer, it seems ripples are born
which flow through bay window, retaining wall,
and wide expanse of leaf and twig strewn lawn,
to a strong circling boundary of tall trees
rippling in the light behind them, then borne
on to hints of a field, a path peopled
by those walking dogs or else come to mourn
at graves glimpsed beyond, and the setting sun.

The play of light dis-orientates, shorn
of the long grown coat of meaning found in
facing east, weaving something to be worn
facing west: the stone has moved behind us;
we are no longer looking for the dawn
but look across the waves the moving makes.

Kali's song

We’d wasted five weeks waiting,
our feet festering in filth.
mired in mud in the middle
of Grimsby, grimly grounded.

Now, let loose, we laugh aloud
on the gulls’ moor’s mounds, mounted
on elk-back, bounding breakers,
our bow’s beak set on Bergen.

I’ve come up with this version of the earliest poem to mention Grimsby. It comes from the twelfth century Icelandic Orkneyinga Saga, the history of the Jarls of Orkney. We have been reading everything from this to the contemporary poetry of George Mackay Brown - we take our holidays that seriously! It was fun stumbling on a reference (albeit not a totally complimentary one) to our home town.

The original has what I learn are called ‘kennings’, almost crossword clues. So, instead of ‘sea’ we get something like‘the moor of the gulls’, and, instead of ‘boat’, something like ‘beaked elk’ or ‘prowed elk’. I’ve very kindly been offered part of the £163 critical edition of such poetry to check, and the author of the section has even invited me to a lecture on how to translate them in her department at Nottingham University next year.

The challenge is to have an appropriate level of alliteration without artificial diction, and the kennings without total obscurity. I’m quite pleased with it so far, but we’ll have to see what perspective the critical text and then the lecture have.

The first English version (from the nineteenth century) gave:

Unpleasantly we have been wading
in mud a weary five weeks
dirt we had plenty while we lay
in Grimsby harbour
but now on the moor of the seagulls
ride we oe’er the crest of the billows
gaily as the elk of the bowspirits
eastward plough its way to Bergen.

The Penguin Classics version is:

Five weeks we’d waded through wetness and filth,
mud wasn’t missing in the middle of Grimsby:
now our spirits are soaring as our fine ship skims,
its bow bounds, an elk of the billows, to Bergen.

The picture is pointed roughly at Bergen, but from the Brough of Deerness in Orkney.

Matinlight (revised)

I've tightened up the poem so that it now reads:

On rare days, light falls slant though the east window
catching the plain north wall and playing with it:
the leaves of an ash tree almost brush the glass
so dapplings of colour take the breeze’s lead
and pools of liquid light baptise the lime-wash;
then I find that I’ve stopped piling on new words,
like those moments when a phrase in the Psalm
unexpectedly become translucent.

Meanwhile, Anglian Water was digging up the green outside St Michael's yet again yesterday. The workmen told me that it was to do with a meter monitoring the flow of the main pipeline into town.

Matinlight

There is a time of year at Morning Prayer,
when light falling slant though the east window
catches the plain north wall and plays with it.

As the leaves move on the ash tree close by
dapplings of colour take the breeze’s lead
dancing, laughing and weaving together.

Pools of liquid light flow across the wall
splashing it in eddies, ripples and waves,
baptising the flaking off-white lime-wash.

Then I find I’ve stopped piling on new words,
like rare pauses when a phrase in the Psalm
unexpectedly becomes translucent.

The poem builds on my post on 3rd September 2009, when there is a picture of the north wall of the chancel of St Nicolas', Great Coates which doesn't to justice to this phenomenon.

The picture is of the poor exit for water from the Lady Chapel roof at St Michael's, Little Coates discussed in the last post.

The graveclothes

I’m sure we should pay more attention to the graveclothes left behind in Jesus’ empty tomb.

It may seem strange to post an Easter thought just as Passiontide is about to begin, but we began to read John’s story of Lazarus at Matins this morning, and I’m just writing the notes I need to preach about the same passage when it is read again at the main service on Sunday morning, so the graveclothes are again at the centre of my attention.

John does not waste words or images, so it has to be significant that he says both that Lazarus came out of his tomb (from which the stone needed to be rolled away) still bound by the graveclothes and also that Jesus came out of his tomb (from which the stone had already been rolled away) leaving his graveclothes in a neat pile behind him.

At its most simple, the point must be that Jesus’ resurrection is something totally different to the mere revival of a corpse. Something new is happening here which doesn’t relate to any category of thought or reality we’ve ever encountered before. Mary thinks she sees someone else who’d she might expect to find there but she certainly doesn’t jump in surprise at a naked man walking around; it is the risen Lord she encounters and we are in new territory.

I’ve written before at Eastertide: I’m always puzzled by some plodding sorts of evangelical who think the empty tomb simply shows that Jesus got up and walked again. I’m equally puzzled by some sorts of liberal who aren’t bothered to begin plodding because they think other aspects of the story show it instead to be merely a profound spiritual experience of the disciples. Why should we think that our existing frames of reference (whether physical or spiritual) are going to help us cope with this new thing?

So I’ve gone back to a poem I revisit more often than almost any other. R S Thomas’ poem The Answer is about twilight and about the formidable and intractable nature of intellectual puzzles in which human living is embroiled. It finishes with the same image and resolution, lines I have also quoted here before:

... There have been times
when, after long on my knees
in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
from my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in a place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.

The hare is at the foot of the Cowper memorial window, the link being the hares he kept.

A tree and some frost

... I’ll be asked: what helped us to live
When there were neither letters nor any news - only walls,
And the cold of the cell, and the blather of official lies,
And the sickening promises made in exchange for betrayal.
And I will tell of the first beauty I saw in captivity.
A frost covered window...

I’ve just tripped across this poem of Irina Ratushinskaya again. I’ve looked back and find that I referred to it in a post on 8th August 2008. I was only thinking about it the other day. Now I’ve found it again in Being Human, the new third volume in Neil Astley’s Staying Alive series.

When we were in Amsterdam during Half Term we found long queues outside the Anne Frank House, almost next door to the church pictured here. We decided to come back half an hour before opening time the following day and, not needing to read all the background information in the first few rooms, pressed on ahead of the smaller crowd who came in when the House first opened. So we found ourselves on our own in the annexe at the top and back of the house where her family had hidden and lived, about which we’d read so often and which we almost already knew. It was a privileged few minutes.

Just one of the things about the annexe was a skylight window which had in her day framed a horse chestnut tree (which I’ve since discovered came down only recently having been ravaged by the same canker which brought low the horse chestnuts in Bradley churchyard). The House highlighted extracts from her diary in which she takes pleasure in the tree, and that is when I thought of the patterns the frost made on the window of Irina Ratushinskaya’s punishment cell. And now I’m reading her description of it again.

... a blue radiance on a tiny pane of glass,
A cast pattern - none more beautiful could be dreamt.
The more clearly you looked, the more powerfully blossomed
Those brigand forests, campfires and birds...
That upheaval of rainbow ice...

Revesby poem again

This is nearer what I wanted to achieve.

The Mirror of Love

‘Even locals are hazy about mid-Lincolnshire’
was all he meant to say,
but somehow lit upon
‘nobody knows where Revesby is’,

so I had to bite back
‘where I once bought an ostrich egg’,
‘where Aelred wrote Mirror of Love',
‘where Joseph Banks kept his kangaroo’.

Where the Wolds abruptly become the Fens
as if the fold in the map between north and south was visible
just where the world agrees west divides from east;
at the cross hairs of England.

Where there are bumps in the ground above
where Aelred first tested out an Abbot’s role
and might just have written his great work on love
and reflected all he wrote about.

Where, a short way off, near the ostrich farm,
a country house assumed the Abbey’s name
with the first garden planted with antipodean trees and shrubs
which Banks, with Captain Cook, brought home.

Where, equally far from our two homes,
two of us were allowed to unlock the church
to pray for our friend before he died
and look into a glass darkly distorted.

The view is from our bedroom window last week. The land falls away to the Golf Course but the owners of a strip behind the bungalows wants to build four story apartments here and thus help secure the viability of the hotel next door.

Bleating

... as an arch gives stone the power of flight,
the place where faith would give
the clay of flesh its flight...

The image is from an American poet standing in Chartres Cathedral, and it is in his first full-length collection (which comes from an Irish publisher which gives its address improbably as the Cliffs of Moher): Glenn Shea Find A Place That Could Pass For Home Salmon Poetry 2010.

I’ve had the collection with me during our time away in Amsterdam during Half Term and since, and I’ve marked up half a dozen poems in it in particular.

The more important image for him in this poem is not stone but human: a teenager at prayer

... his face hid in his hands, the muddle
of life outside pursuing him here as well...

and later exchanging the sign of the cross with a friend with dipped fingers from the Font, so that the poet too prays in the same muddle

... abject as any man is
in the weight of his faults, scanted
of hope, but who has seen at least the image
of what he desired: another like himself,
whose flesh he might inscribe
with the water of blessing.

I’m still dwelling on images such as this, and that of A Tree on Inishmore bent to permanent west with obeisance its trick for still being able to stand

... It leaves leaning
east against the wind to us.

But what remains with me most strongly is Sheep. He is in a Scottish hotel, aware

... hooves
that tap crossing the paved road
can stamp on fingers and will snap them
in a mothering rage...
... the thousandfold
brainless herd of the skittish...
... all you hear all night are the cries of the sheep,
the mothers and the young penned apart.

So far, so familiar. There are strong echos of the Ormulum (with its standard moral)

... it can cnawen swithe wel
it can know very well
his moder thaer gho blaeteth
his mother where she bleats
bitwenen an thusende shep,
among a thousand sheep
thoh that teg blaeten alle
although they all bleat
& all swa birth the cnawen wel
and so it befits you to know well
thin God & his lare
your God and his law.

Then I turn the page and find a simple connection which on its own made the collection worth buying and may change listening to sheep bleating from now onwards

... and who of us who have carried and buried
in the unnoticed ground of memory
all this miserable century’s images
of fences and separation,
the reaching hands’ failed attempts to touch...

I took the picture of the distant Cliffs of Moher six years ago from one of Inishmore's neighbouring islands.