Time and Christmastide

Yes, indeed, Happy Christmas to one and all!  I hope both readers are keeping a merry Feast.  

What is it, I wonder, that Christmastide does to our sense of time?   For time in these twelve days does not seem only linear and horizontal, as it does usually.  There is a strange sensation that, as we pass through this diamond in the ring of the year, time is distorted and refracted so that ancient things feel much closer than normal.  And there is that slanted sunlight, T.S. Eliot's 'midwinter spring' and the 'glare that is blindness in the early afternoon', that shines as if out of the past.  Peter Hitchens has written simply and beautifully here of 'the feeling of the world holding its breath, the bells, the haunting light from the low sun, the sensation of the past being mixed up with the present', whose effect he describes as being weaker now than in the 'austere Protestant Britain' of his youth.

To some extent this has to do, of course, with ringing the old year out and the new in.  I think, however, that the mystery of time is bound up with the very heart of Christmas, rather than the New Year.  Every year we churchgoers mark a chronological conundrum.  The central and fathomless mystery is, of course, that God, who is timeless, made a direct intervention in human history, clambering through the narrow doors of time to live on earth beside us.  Even as we consider this moment, though, we must look at once backwards and forwards.  We cannot understand it fully without knowing that it had already been foretold by prophets; neither can we understand it without the Cross in the backs of our minds, as the gift of myrrh (for embalming) and several carols remind us.  Nor can we contemplate Christmas without turning to the mystery of the future, towards which the whole faith points.  So we look backwards to a past event, then we look both further backwards, then slightly forwards again, and finally turn right around in order to look forwards properly.  Christmas is perfect, pluperfect, future in the past (if that is the right term) and future.

This sensation is so strong that it has survived, even if weakened as Peter Hitchens says, into the secular world.  Is this not the only time of year when we leave our twenty-first century cynicism aside to take up old customs again without critiquing or scoffing, when we exchange cards depicting scenes of choristers and snowed-on English spires, when supermarkets play old-fashioned music in earnest, when, as Betjeman observed in a moment of dryness, 'girls in slacks remember Dad / And oafish louts remember Mum', or when we decorate our houses and wear party-hats without knowing why, except that an invisible but benevolent force obliges us to?  

The more I look for evidence of this overlapping and mingling of time past and time to come with the present moment, the more I find.  There is the famous example of Dickens' three ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future in A Christmas Carol.  It is in T.S. Eliot's poem The Cultivation of Christmas Trees.  His portrait of Christmas as seen by a child — a child

For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel 
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree 
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.

and who

wonders at the Christmas Tree: 
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder 
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext [...]

— turns seamlessly to a contemplation of the eve of life, still hanging upon that line 'Let him continue in the spirit of wonder', 

So that the reverence and the gaiety 
May not be forgotten in later experience, 
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium, 
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure [...]

So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas 
(By "eightieth" meaning whichever is last) 
The accumulated memories of annual emotion 
May be concentrated into a great joy 
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion 
When fear came upon every soul: 
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end 
And the first coming of the second coming.

And here it is in these words of the Queen during her Christmas address:

At this time of year, few sights evoke more feelings of cheer and goodwill than the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree.  The popularity of a tree at Christmas is due in part to my great-great grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. After this touching picture was published, many families wanted a Christmas tree of their own, and the custom soon spread.

Thus Her Majesty draws our attention to two heirlooms which continue, almost miraculously it might seem, to bind us in 2015 to the Victorian age: the Christmas tree and her own British crown.  Her words, which we are invited to bear in mind for the coming year, make the past feels much nearer and more familiar.  (By the way, what presidential address could say anything like this?).

I can hear it too in this carol, the 'other' setting by Harold Darke of Rosetti's carol In the Bleak Midwinter, which seems to be being sung longer ago than 2000, and further away than Cambridge...

Perhaps we might expect to be frightened by this confusion of time.  I feel only wonder and enchantment, and so I willingly answer the Queen's invitation to be 'grateful for all that brings light to our lives', and echo her quotation from St John's Gospel: 'The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it'.

Glory to God in the highest...

... and on earth peace to people of good will.

A little infant once was he, 
And strength in weakness then was laid 
Upon his virgin mother's knee, 
That power to thee might be conveyed.

The choir of King's College, Cambridge sing Wither's Rocking Hymn: words by George Wither (1588-1667); music by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

Merry Christmas to one and all!

Advent calendar - a late recommendation

Here is something that I ought to have mentioned much earlier than this: Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh, the 'Irish Papist', has turned his blog into an Advent calendar all in verse.  Every day there is a new quatrain leading us nearer to the stable at Bethlehem.

One of the latest can be read here.

As I have explained here, the rest of the blog is worth a read as well.  There are not many blogs that I think can be recommended with confidence (not only in the quality of what has been written so far, but in what might be written in future), but this is one.

The Permanent Way (and the Truth and the Life?)

'The line to heaven by Christ was made,

With heavenly truth the Rails are laid,

From Earth to Heaven the line extends
To Life Eternal where it ends.'

On a tablet in the southern porch of Ely Cathedral is inscribed a poem called 'The Spiritual Railway', written in memory of William Pickering and Richard Edger, who lost their lives in a railway accident on Christmas Eve, 1845.  That year was only a decade and a half after the opening of the first modern railway between Liverpool and Manchester, but England had already gained two and a half thousand miles of track.  The 'Railway Mania' construction boom of the 1840s, gathering pace all the time, had reached Ely the previous July, when the Eastern Counties Railway opened the first route from London to Norwich.  The elegist saw a homiletic opportunity in the transport revolution, and the fruit of his labour has survived, even if, to us, it sometimes seems strained by his determination to make the analogy work and the verse scan:

'God's Word is the first Engineer

It points the way to Heaven so clear

Through tunnels dark and dreary here,

It does the way to Glory steer.'

This poem may sound ripe for a round of twenty-first century scoffing, and easy to dismiss as a rather contrived effort.  But the idea of a bond between religion and the railway is more compelling than it might seem.  For two bodies with such apparently different purposes there seem to be a surprising number of similarities, of all kinds, between them.  I find myself as determined as the poet to make something of it!

For instance, to set off along one track, there is the disproportion of railway enthusiasts among the clergy.  An obvious example is the Revd. W. V. Awdry, author of the 'Thomas the Tank Engine' books.  But there is also Eric Treacy, Bishop of Wakefield from 1968-1976 and a prolific railway photographer, who incidentally died at Appleby station on the famous Settle-Carlisle line, having gone to photograph a steam-hauled excursion.   Then there is the Revd. H. D. E. Rokeby's collection of photographs of British railway stations.  Others have noticed this phenomenon, especially with regard to model railways:  Paul Roberts, himself a 'Restless Rector' with a model railway in his garage, has written an interesting blog-post here, and there is an article by Christopher Howse here, which includes a reference to Canon Tony Chesterman's  ferroequinological reading of a verse from the prophet Isaiah: 'I saw the Lord… and His train filled the temple… and the temple was filled with smoke'...  

Both these authors consider the idea that the appeal to clergymen lies in order, without which no railway could be run properly.  One of Howse's sources makes a suggestion (upon which he actually ends up pouring cold water) that the clergy seek in the model railway an 'antidote to the often more nebulous realm of theology'.  The Restless Rector imagines that, for many, the antidote would be rather to the 'stress of parish life and... awkward people that one sometimes has to deal with'.  Railways appeal to him because of their 'order and communication', and he also wonders whether 'building and running a model railway [might reflect] something of the creativeness of God, and his fatherly care'.  A model railway is an ideal world, built on a blank slate, cut off from the world's chaos.  Even the real railway forms its own self-contained system, even its own world.  It is run from signalling centres as if its signals, track-circuits and points were isolated from the elements.  That world is broken into by trees falling onto the line and lorries colliding with bridges, but, still, there is a sense that the railways, needing a higher level of order than other transport systems, give themselves a better chance of running as they ought by sealing themselves off from the outside world and having as little as possible to do with it.

I would agree with both writers that order is indeed the main link between railways and churches, but would go further.  My contention is that, far from being an antidote to parish life and still less to theology, the appeal of the railway is that it actually resembles the church.   The order of a railway is a mirror of the divine order of the Church.  Naturally I am not suggesting that we should all go on pilgrimage to Clapham Junction, and will all reach Heaven by way of Kensal Green.  But it seems that a railway — precisely by being reasonably cut off from the world — can be seen as a kind of model or proto-Church, or in which ideas unappealing to modern man, such as assent to doctrine, or discipline, or self-sacrifice, can be shown to be necessary, rewarding and ennobling.  

'From Earth to Heaven the line extends...' 

This idea becomes especially interesting when compared with other forms of transport: for example, with the motorway.  It is not a coincidence that, in a secular, self-centred and ungentle culture, this should be the foremost means of national transport.  In both construction and operation, motorways permit us to languish in chaos, whereas railways impose an order on everyone who uses them.  Here is an example.  Victorian engineers had to thread their railways through difficult terrain, obliged to avoid too sharp a curvature in the track and gradients steeper than 1 in 100.  These rules made the work more difficult but the result more beautiful, just as the constraints of rhyme and metre, understood properly, make poetry ring with beauty, and just as there can be no tennis without a net.  Railways fit into the landscape; often they even embellish it, exactly as churches do.  But since motor-cars can deal more readily with gradients and curves than can trains, the builders of the motorways could be much freer.  They simply planted their highways virtually unrestrained across the countryside, or carved straight through the landscape, as at Stokenchurch in Buckinghamshire, and they threw up concrete flyovers wherever they pleased.  My perhaps rather controversial theory is that, just as railways fitted in perfectly with the Victorian revival of church architecture and indeed church-going, so do motorways with the profane self-indulgence of modern Britain.  It is not a coincidence that the Victorian age, for all its flaws, produced London's St. Pancras station, while the motorways have nothing to match (the sole exceptions, to my mind, being the Humber Bridge and first Severn Crossing).

I think the same pattern applies to the way each mode of transport works, too.  For instance, a railway journey explicitly requires discipline, and rewards it.  Between railway passengers there is an unspoken contract: without realising it, they all agree to turn up at a given place, at a given time, in order to travel together more efficiently and reduce each other's costs.  With this contract comes the risk of missing the train, as painful experience teaches us, but those who do catch it should enjoy relatively rapid, comfortable, spacious, relaxing and (importantly) safe transport.  Motorists face no such obligation and no such discipline.  No arrangement exists, even between those making similar journeys.  They have the freedom to set off whenever they like, with the result that a thousand individual cars, most containing only one or two people each, burn countless gallons of fuel in order to achieve the same result.  Moreover, the freedom of the motorway is selective.  The flexibility it offers the motorist comes at the cost of swathes of countryside, of further untold swathes of silence around it, the freedom of nearby residents to live in peace and quiet, the freedom to go freely across the land on foot, and so on.  Railways, by comparison, take up far less space and make far less noise.

Railways are formative; we are the better for them.  Passengers looking out at the landscape gain a geographical understanding of the journey.  They will pass the Chilterns, then Cannock Chase, then undulating Cheshire; they will see the Forest of Bowland to the east and Morecambe Bay to the west.  Their picture of the country will be built up by passing directly through its towns and cities: Peterborough, Grantham, Newark, Retford, Doncaster, York.  Road travel, however, is not really experienced as movement through a landscape that could be learned, recognised or loved.  It is not a journey but a process, and often a dull one at that.  Driver and passengers are strapped into their seats, and progress is less intuitively apparent, not sliding past sideways but flickering and enlarging in the windscreen.  Anonymous numbered junctions diverge and merge from left and right.  The landscape can barely be seen beyond the crash-barriers, the sheer breadth of the carriageway and the far rim of concrete.  It is possible to make a road journey without any reference to the points of the compass or any sensation of having travelled anywhere.  Motorways do not even fit the landscape.  The road-signs and furniture have no human scale.  No art there; only artifice.

A minor motorway sign is still perhaps eleven feet tall and wide: compare its scale to the footpath on the left!

Railways have dignity and majesty.  Whenever a train calls at a station, particularly on inter-city services, there is still ceremony and custom, even this long after the age of steam.  A familiar voice announces a platform, a litany of cities is read, the signal changes, the train draws solemnly in, passengers alight or board, the doors slam, the whistle is blown and the train heaves itself into motion again.  Procedures introduced solely for safety's sake take on the vestures of ritual. But roads have no time for ceremony; motorists are in no mood for custom.  Clutch in, accelerator down.

Railways leaven society.  Passengers on a railway journey often fall into conversation, discover common interests and keep common courtesy alive.  They are encouraged to have consideration for others in order to share a common space.  They must stand clear, move aside, open doors, lift down luggage, move down inside the carriage and mind the gap.  These are all things in which many people fail, but they are more likely to learn from these social encounters, in which people actually meet face-to-face, than they are on the road, where we are all shielded from each other by walls of metal which must be made ever thicker and Darwinian as the manners for which they are substitutes decline.  Cars offer us two temptations: to intoxicate ourselves with power and to blind ourselves to others.  So many people give into these temptations so habitually, and to the point of such callous selfishness, that a road journey in modern Britain is now nearly impossible without a near-accident.

I think my theory stands even in the realm of law and obedience.  Many motorists tend to react to the rules of the road by pushing them as far as they will go: speed limits are regarded as a target to be hit; vehicles push in without right of way; traffic lights are just squeezed past at amber.  The Highway Code becomes surprisingly elastic when there are a few extra seconds to gain: I think I will go so far as to say that this is moral relativism in full operation.  Meanwhile, safety on the railway is quite a different affair.  The rules are absolutes; nobody is above them.  Every action made by a modern train driver is recorded electronically and might be inspected at any point.  If the line speed (speed limit) is exceeded by even three miles an hour, a formal warning can be issued.  It must never be disobeyed.  A train must never enter a section of single track without a token.  A signal must never be passed at danger without permission.  Everything must be done to prevent any accident.  Many of these rules seem over-zealous and fussy at first, but there is often a death or serious injury behind them.  All railway staff have to do something that is very unfashionable these days: to profess their obedience to an authority higher than themselves.  The result, on British railways and elsewhere, has been an excellent safety record.

Lincoln Central station and 11th-century church of St Mary le Wigford.

My refrain, often repeated to long-suffering friends, is that rail travel is the most civilised means of transport known to man.   Railways have an improving and uplifting effect upon those who run them and use them, even on those most in need of redemption, such as London commuters.  But car culture seems to corrupt drivers by the tens of thousands.  And what better evidence of the fundamental benevolence of this invention of the railways than the instinctive delight taken by children — who have a perceptive, if imperfect, grasp of good and evil — in railways and the trains they carry, even the nondescript electric trains of suburban south London?  Children love railways; they do not love motorways.

Fundamentally benevolent?

Just as the railways dignify and uplift us, so does the Church.  Just as motorways wear us down with false freedom, so do many aspects of secular society.  The Church, like the railway, has its illogical aspects, and the failures of both are used by their opponents to call for their abolition in their entireties.  Motorways, like secular society, make too much sense: that is because they are seen only from one perspective, that of the self.  Motorways and secularism promise freedom at a low price, but turn out to deaden the spirit.  Railways and the Church ask for self-sacrifice, self-restraint and self-discipline, and give in return beauty, order, ceremony and majesty.  (The railway cannot quite manage the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body or the life everlasting, of course).

I don't know whether any of this enormous tract sounds at all convincing to any reader patient enough to have trawled through it...?  To me the comparison seems to work consistently enough for there to be something in it.  If nothing else, I can appeal to the story told by Michael Flanders about the lady who said, 'If God had intended us to fly, he would never have given us the railways'!  (If only she had made that remark in reaction to the development of motorways).  Incidentally, I do not really think that modern British car culture can easily be defeated, nor that the railways will again come to be seen as the country's principal means of transport, even though passenger numbers at the time of writing are at their highest for about fifty years.  Perhaps all that can be done is to persuade some poet to write a verse, entitled 'The Spiritual Motorway', describing souls hurtling around the M25 of secularism until they all end up snarled up in a traffic-jam?

Ely Cathedral, with station in the foreground, seen across the river Great Ouse. 

Music's Patroness

It is the feast-day of St. Cecilia; she is the patron saint of music and musicians.  In these days of mass-produced and mass-broadcast music, the age of the microphone, the loudspeaker and the re-wind button, it is very easy to take music for granted.  Yet it is important to give thanks for music, as our ancestors did who had to make their own if they wanted to hear any.  Curmudgeons like me also pray that St. Cecilia can do something to improve the standard of most modern pop music and give us some fare that is easier on the ear!

Orazio Gentileschi — St. Cecilia with an angel.

Here is a hymn to St. Cecilia by Herbert Howells, setting words by Ursula Vaughan Williams (incidentally Ralph Vaughan Williams' wife).  The words are rather good — I like the phrase 'Sing ... in words of music', which captures exactly the character of an utterance that good music has.  The same phrase could also be taken as a definition of poetry: that makes me like it even better because, I think, the two worlds are very close in purpose.  It is fascinating that, even though the practice is quite different (there are no Conservatoires for poets!), composers and poets alike have the same calling to hammer out their works, however great the struggle. St. Cecilia is also a patron of poets — I am very glad of that!  Ursula Vaughan Williams and her husband (who twice read the complete works of Shakespeare to each other) probably thought it fitting as well.  

We who are left...

The 'clay poppies', one for every fallen soldier of the Great War, surrounding the Tower of London. 5th November, 2014.

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun, or feel the rain,
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly, and spent
Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?

 from 'Lament' - Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962).

John Masefield Exercises the Prerogative of his Office

The Associated Press and British Movietone News have both recently uploaded, onto YouTube, more or less their entire film archive.  They had previously been available electronically via a more convoluted route, but this development makes them freely available.  (And they can now be embedded in blogs!).

It has certainly added a lot of fascinating material to the Internet.  For example, in a clip from a reel of (I think) 1930, here is John Masefield, then Poet Laureate, reciting from one of his poems (or, as the subtitle puts it, 'exercising the prerogative of his office').  The poem is one of his better-known lyrics, 'The West Wind'.

The subtitle is not all that strikes me as unusual about this film.  I wonder if any reader is surprised by Masefield's voice and diction?  I actually found it more difficult to enjoy than I had expected, for all that Masefield is probably my favourite poet, and I have not come across any recording of his voice before.  Marvellous though it was to hear him speak, there is no hint from this son of Ledbury of any Herefordshire accent, nor, really, the slow gentleness that I think dwells in most of his poems, even if surreptitiously.  He is declaiming, really, rather than speaking.  At the 1.20 mark, for instance, he might even have been singing.

Yet, if I struggle with this recitation, several factors enforce the conclusion that the problem lies with me and not with Masefield.  His highly readable biography describes his conviction that poetry is best met read aloud, a conviction that led him to involve himself in setting up and running the Oxford Recitations, competitions in verse-speaking held annually from 1923.  His keen ear is also borne out by the very ease with which his poems run off the tongue.  

Moreover, this way of speaking is precisely how poets and verse-lovers recited poetry.  For example, in this recording of Alfred, Lord Tennyson himself reading 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', the poet's recitation takes almost no heed of the sense of the words.  (Incidentally, the original wax cylinder survived being left for a time next to a radiator... we are lucky to have it!).  That it has been something of a surprise to discover this is a reflection on the disappearance of poetry and verse-speaking from everyday life.

Even with gentler poems this declamatory approach was taken.  For instance, John Drinkwater's dreamy Moonlit Apples is a poem I always imagine being read as if in the very attic described, and would have said that nobody could read the line 'in the corridors under there is nothing but sleep' any louder than a whisper!  Yet the poet himself declaims this poem like this:

Again I struggle to enjoy it, and yet again I must acknowledge that, as an actor and playwright it was John Drinkwater's business, too, to know how to speak verse.  Indeed, there is a lecture by him, entitled 'The Speaking of Verse', uploaded by the same YouTube user (It is in two halves: one here; the other here).  What is the problem, then?  Why are my modern ears thus tone-deaf?  

A simple reason might be the disappearance of poetry from everyday life in England, and also from everyday speech.  Most of us, even poetry-lovers, are simply unused to words of this weight at all.  Masefield's poetry was once read in pubs: these days it is almost inconceivable to use those two words in the same sentence.  Then, among the new poetry that is being written, there has been the abandonment of traditional metre and rhyme, which has lifted any musical quality from much modern poetry.  When it is read aloud, it is intoned, rather than declaimed.

Almost as significant, I think, is the development of the microphone, a revolutionary invention that is surprisingly seldom discussed in those terms.  It has completely transformed public speech and speaking, so that clear vowels and meticulous enunciation are no longer indispensable to make oneself heard.  Indeed, such things survive now only in a few places, such as in the loudspeakerless chapel of King's College, Cambridge, where the modern ear is again surprised by unaccustomed speech like this (though I must say that I enjoy this reading tremendously):

How do I think poetry ought to be read, then, if I'm so clever?  The aim I would say is not really in question: to bring out the beauty the poet has put there.  And I don't think my view about going about this, in theory, actually differs much from Masefield's or Drinkwater's.  For example, most of what Drinkwater says in his lecture above makes sense to me:

Nine-tenths of the great poetry of the world is perfectly clear in its meaning, and we do not want the speaker to explain it to us... In speaking a poem, let us first get the rhythmic movement clearly fixed in our minds.  By following this, we shall give to each word the exact emphasis intended by the poet, and so avoid those inflections that are designed to brace up the nerveless speech of conversation.  The right pace of a poem will suggest itself quite readily to any sensitive mind... Let us say the poem without feeling ourselves called upon to interpret it, and we shall do all that is necessary.'

In other words, the speaker should be content to be a vessel through which a well-built and well-scanned poem — and thus indeed the poet — should literally speak for itself.  All I wish to add to Drinkwater's view is that this ought to resemble more closely the playing of music. Composers count upon the musician's skill to play their music beautifully, and not merely neutrally.  Likewise, there ought to be some room for intonation and shape in the speech.  I think the voice should sound somewhere between ease and effort, as if it is shouldering a light burden, just like a musician.  I also believe that in place of declamation (one voice speaks to a multitude) the impression ought to be given — and microphones can help with this — that in fact one heart speaks to another, as Cardinal Newman might say.  This lady's rendition of 'Moonlit Apples' more or less hits the mark for me:

The idea that the poet still speaks when his verse is read also reminds me of another powerful aspect of poetry, and that is memory.  Poetry does not really work in the ear but in the heart, and often has its greatest beauty when words that have lingered there lighten up unexpectedly.  Just as 'blue remembered hills' are dearer than plain ordinary hills, old remembered words can overwhelm the heart.  Hence the above lady's 'treasury of remembered verse'.  Or, for instance, out on an autumn Sunday woodland walk, with undiminished aptness, into the mind might drop the words 'And the Sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams'.  This can also work, mysteriously, with new and unfamiliar poems: Robert Frost actually describes the delight of reading a poem and finding himself 'remembering something I didn't know I knew.... there is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows' (The Figure a Poem Makes, 1939).  So, to paraphrase Robert Bridges, the audience's impression, with time-hallowed poetry at least, will be that old words have come to them by the riches of time.  Verse-speaking cannot really respond to this, I don't think: it all works in the heart, too mysteriously and too intimately to be for any pretentious blog-post to deal with!

Ten Poems for National Poetry Day

Since it is National Poetry Day, there is no excuse not to compile a list (though inexhaustive) of some favourite poems that I think are worth sharing.  I think they might also appeal to any readers who consider themselves new to, or unfamiliar with poetry... or even 'averse to verse'!  If they can be read online, I have given links to them.  Here they are:

1. 'Moonlit Apples' — John Drinkwater.  A poem to be whispered at midnight... 'And quiet is the steep stair under.'
2. 'Paddington: Mother and Son' — John Masefield.  Perhaps the simplest and the greatest war poem I know; its whole weight rests on the slow and remorseless beat of the four final words.  It is not online but is included in this anthology; a good local library ought to have a copy.
3. 'The Trees' — Philip Larkin.  Why is it that only Larkin's sour poetry ever seems to be quoted?  He was capable of sincerely beautiful poetic utterances: this is an example.
4. 'In Memoriam: Easter, 1915.' — Edward Thomas.  Another war poem whose weight rests upon a few words, 'left', 'should' and 'never', and whose meaning drops into the mind slowly but catastrophically.  I have written about it more here.
5. 'A Chorus' — Elizabeth Jennings.  This poem sets off with great momentum and soaring majesty but gradually lowers its voice until, in the last lines, both its subject matter and its register are intimate and almost confessional.
6. 'The Old Liberals' — John Betjeman.  It can be read about half-way down this page.  I find this poem very moving, even though I still don't completely understand it and am not sure how seriously to take it.  'Sad as an English autumn, heavy and still' is one of the truest lines of poetry I have ever come across.  And there is something about the easy conversational glibness of saying 'Ask at the fish and chips in the Market Square' that is also powerfully sorrowful.
7. 'Pilgrimages' — R.S. Thomas.  It is about Bardsey Island, the 'island of twenty thousand saints', just off the edge of the Lleyn Peninsula at the tip of N. Wales.
8. 'Love bade me welcome' — George Herbert.  Another intimate poem: its gentleness has survived intact for nearly four centuries.  'But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack / From my first entrance in...' is a line so light and so even that its gentle beauty could easily go unnoticed.  And neither has time diminished the anguished remorse and disbelief in the protest 'I, the unkinde, ungratefull?'.  Ralph Vaughan Williams also set it to music.
9. 'Woolgathering' — Wilfrid Wilson Gibson.  It can be read halfway down this page.  A whimsical utterance in plain English which can easily be learnt by heart.
10. 'A Gable Wall' — Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh.  This poem, full of movement, lifts up ordinary life in order to celebrate it, as does most of his poetry.  I always enjoy, and strongly recommend, the rest of his blog as well.

There are many other poems that I could have mentioned... doubtless I will find an excuse to post them in the future!

Observations rhônalpines

It was wonderful to go away to France again the other week.  It had been two years since my previous trip, and I had been missing it!  A friend from school and I cooked up a plan to split a week between Grenoble and Lyon, and to take the new Eurostar service which runs directly from St Pancras station in London to Lyon Part-Dieu (Or did we go to Lyon just in order to use the new Eurostar service?).

Grenoble depuis la Bastille

We looked down on Grenoble from the Bastille fortress to see how the city is set among the Alps ; in Lyon we saw the cathedral, took the funicular up to the basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière (an old devotion re-invigorated after Lyon was spared violence in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870), wandered at will around the Roman ruins and met a friend who is just beginning a year teaching at the ENS.  We also made a day trip to Pérouges, a remarkable medieval village perched neatly on a hill-top like a board-game.  (It even sounds like a board-game - 'who fancies a game of Pérouges?').

Your turn... up the stairs or down the street?

As well as great monuments there were also smaller things to see: lesser elements of ordinary French life which struck me as being (sadly) absent from Britain.  There was the quite calm, quite relaxed, quite sensible, quite self-unconscious group of young Grenoblois, about twelve or thirteen years old, on their way somewhere on a warm afternoon; there was the six- or seven-year-old boy perched on a climbing-frame in the Jardin Public, reading a bande déssinée (comic book).  There was the game of boules in progress in the same garden.  There was the man carrying six baguettes home on the funicular from Vieux-Lyon.  There was the children's library in Grenoble which, though adjacent to the main library, is advertised as a distinct 'bibliothèque de jeunesse' with its own clientèle.   

Another aspect of French life unavailable in Britain...

This reverie might have been brought to an abrupt halt by the concession to pragmatism of new automatic checkouts in the local Monoprix, but then I saw an assistant directing the customers to the nearest free machine, steadfastly observing the old custom by which about shopkeepers and 'chers clients' greet each other in shops with a 'Bonjour, Monsieur' and – more significantly still – part with a 'Merci, Monsieur, bonne soirée, au revoir'.  I went on to see quiet but sincere patriotism in the Musée des Troupes de montagne (Museum of French Alpine troops), where the explanatory notes refer to these troops' defence of 'notre patrie' ('our homeland').  And sincere faith, too: I found out about the 'pari sur une confiance totale' made by the bishop of Grenoble, Guy de Kerimel, who has put a great effort into revamping his diocesan youth service.  Isèreanybody (a pun on Isère, Grenoble's département, and a slightly literal English translation of the French 'il y a quelqu'un?', 'is anybody there?'), provides students and young professionals with their own chaplain and parish church, and maintains a vibrant presence on the new media, exactly as Benedict XVI asked.

There was the language too, of course: though they miss out on hearty Anglo-Saxon words like 'stealthier', 'brought' or 'haven', it is almost music.  Here are the beginnings of a list of some of my favourite French words:

1. gourmandise (f) – greed, gluttony, a plump and well-fed word.
2. orgueilleux – proud (in the sinful sense), a word that is puffed out like the chest!
3. fierté (f) – pride (not sinful!), a dignified, defiant word.
4. grenouille (f) – a frog.
5. plouf – splash (a different sound, but you end up just as wet)
6. pamplemousse – grapefruit... a luscious, juicy word.  Letters will run down your chin if you are not careful!
7. moelleux – no translation!  Soft, gooey, dark, molten, mellifluous.  The best definition is the moelleux au chocolat (not to be clicked on during Lent).
8. mie (f) – no translation here either!   Bread's doughier interior, which in France contrasts with the crumbling golden crust...
9. veiller – to keep watch.  A lovely, quiet, unobtrusive but steady word.  There is a beautiful concision to the reply given by Frédéric Langlais, the hero of Paul Berna's 'Le Carrefour de la Pie' ('Magpie Junction'), to his father when asked what he is doing up in the middle of the night: 'Je veillais, chuchota Frédéric' ("I was keeping watch", whispered Frédéric).  That is more poetry than prose.  Paul Berna, a French children's author who wove befriendable characters into realistic and beautifully-written books, ought to be much better known.
10. lugubre – bleak, dim, gloomy, dismal.
11. s'introduire (dans) – simply 'to enter', 'to let oneself into', but the French has a deliciously surreptitious and stealthy undertone.  The subject of the sentence is definitely up to no good... 'S'introduire dans les lieux'... to let oneself into the premises...

Do any French or Francophile readers have favourite French words of their own?  You are welcome, as always, to comment...

Un individu s'est introduit dans les lieux...

'Queen indeed over a Kingdom worthy, the World's wonder...'

Today our Queen Elizabeth becomes the British throne's longest-reigning monarch,  surpassing her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria's reign of sixty-three years and two hundred and sixteen days.  With John Masefield's Laureate Coronation lines in my mind, I wonder whether we have deserved her, for all that this country might, as I still believe quietly, be in with a shout of being the 'World's wonder'.

May God save the Queen, and bring forth Masefield's hoped-for 
'...season of the springing seed

Of all a People one in an endeavour

To make our Sovereign lady Queen indeed

Over a Kingdom worthy, the World's wonder.'

Lux aeterna

Today (6th September) is the eightieth anniversary of the death, at the age of nine, of Michael Kendrick Howells.  A form of polio or meningitis felled him in only three days; his father Herbert Howells, in the nearly fifty years by which he outlived his son, never overcame this loss.  

Herbert Howells had been, before the Great War, a promising young composer of mainly orchestral work; he was Stanford's favourite at the Royal College of Music and shone among the brightest in that fascinating constellation, darkened forever by the 1914-1918 war, of Edwardian and Georgian composers and writers with some connection to Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire or the Marches.  He was a close friend of Ivor Gurney and the poet F.W. Harvey; all three had Gloucester connections.  During the war he had narrowly avoided death not in the trenches but from Graves' disease, and become the first person in the country to undergo radium treatment.  Afterwards his career had flagged rather, especially after the unfavourable reception of his (sublime!) second piano concerto, about which more here.  His son's death in 1935 silenced him utterly.

Only his daughter Ursula was able to persuade him to compose again; she suggested that he 'write something for Michael'.  The work that resulted remained untouched for thirty years, before Herbert Sumsion and Ralph Vaughan Williams found out about it and persuaded him to allow it to be performed at the Three Choirs Festival.  Hymnus Paradisi is a monumental work, a Requiem with various additions from the Psalms and the Sarum Book of Hours.  It is performed rarely mainly because it calls for two soloists, an enormous orchestra, two choirs and organ, but these were mustered during the Proms in 2012, and I was very fortunate indeed to be there in the Royal Albert Hall to hear it.  I will never forget looking up from the arena to see a wall of singers rise up to sing, nor feeling the organ's low bellow through my feet, nor indeed the thirty seconds of silence before Martyn Brabbins lowered the baton and unfettered the applause, during which he held the score aloft for us to applaud.

Howells is one of those composers whose work, listened to the first time, often seems to be thoroughly difficult and complex but for a few striking moments which demand a second listen, and then a third, and so on, until its beauty can be heard properly.  This might be said of Hymnus Paradisi, but even a first hearing cannot miss the crescendo of grief just before the three minute mark, nor the audible light which brightens and brightens until it fills the whole work from the Sanctus (22 min) onwards: 

The loss of his son is generally regarded as a clear rupture in Howells' compositional career as well as in his life.  The music he wrote after 1935 was almost all intended for the Anglican choral tradition (in all he wrote twenty settings of the Evening Canticles), more melismatic and often more searing.  However, Howells did occasionally return to the past for material.  The Hymnus Paradisi itself draws heavily on the Requiem that he had already written.  And I have an idea that the final movement (Holy is the True Light, and passing wonderful...), which begins like this:

...might be a more magnificent, a heavier, yet also a more luminous version, in which wistfulness has hardened into grief, of the opening of the old Howells' Piano Quartet of 1916 (itself perhaps a response to death, since Howells himself was gravely ill at this point)?

While I am on the subject, I wonder if the second theme of the 'Shropshire Lad' rhapsody of George Butterworth (killed in action in 1916)...

... is quoted in the 1925 piano concerto, by the clarinet once only, at the point below?

To return to this post's original subject, I would like to record another thought about Hymnus Paradisi: all the luminous chords, the massed choirs and the thundering organ were summoned all for the sake of a child of nine years.  It is too easy to forget, not least in a Britain which I find hardly heeds children, that this is entirely fitting; that is a lesson for us all.

Further reading and listening: 

• B.B.C. Radio 3's 'Composer of the Week' programme on Herbert Howells.
• An article by Simon Heffer about Hymnus Paradisi