Notes on the ‘Lent Rondel’

Long-suffering readers may have noticed the blog tradition of reposting every Ash Wednesday a short poem I wrote a few years ago, the ‘Lent Rondel’.  This gives me the chance not only to inflate my blog statistics by regurgitating old material, but also once again to fail to resist the temptation to fiddle around with the poem a little bit more.  One kind and especially long-suffering reader, my friend Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh, poet and author of the Irish Papist blog, suggested that I explain the thinking (which he presumed there had been; I told you he was kind) behind the original composition of the poem and these subsequent yearly tinkerings.

Well, here goes.  I think most poets would agree that a poem is not something one sets out to write, as one sets out to write a letter or a diary entry.  A poet does not get up in the morning and say, ‘Today I shall write an Ode to Spring’ and have it all down by 5 p.m..  It is all usually much deeper, stronger and more mysterious than that.  A poem begins, as far as I can tell, with a tiny moment of germination: a spark of realisation or conception, a recognition that a poem ought to exist — or even that it already exists, and that the task at hand to work out its exact form — or ‘find out’, as the ‘famous men’ do in that wonderful passage of Ecclesiasticus.

But a poem seldom arrives in a single brilliant flash of inspiration, leaping whole and sound into the mind and onto the page.  I think a lot of people these days have forgotten this — especially people who think they aren’t interested in poetry.  A poem is made by a combination, even a dance, of inspiration and craft, one taking over whenever the other momentarily runs out of steam.  Robert Frost said, ‘A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.’  The bad news is that writing poetry therefore often involves hard work.  But the good news is that it is not just the preserve of a chosen few; I am sure that most people could write a decent poem if they put their mind to it.  There is nothing Calvinist about it: it is a matter of both grace and works.

The sensation of writing a new poem is rather like trying to remember an existing poem that is just out of reach of the memory — and of course there is no anthology in which to look it up.  In this sense, it is also like a crossword puzzle whose solution lies not on the back page or in tomorrow’s edition but in the heavens somewhere, taking form on the page only after a good deal of thought and discernment.  It is also like prospecting a mine, working one’s way down likely seams in the hope of striking gold.

It is also comparable to the work of a sculptor, in that the finished product is to some extent there all along.  Just as a sculptor gets rid of all the extraneous stone around the work’s true form, the poet has to get rid of the extraneous words, trying and retrying different phrases or with verbs conjugated differently, putting words in end-on or trying slightly different meanings, until, ideally, the perfect marriage of form and meaning is found, everything fitting as soundly and naturally as plain speech, and having the ring of truth. 

For this reason, one thing the poet feels is the need to get out of the poem’s way.  A true poem has a force and a life of its own, pushing itself into the world, asserting its existence; it has to be written, weighing on a poet’s conscience until it has emerged (and thereafter lifting blissfully from the shoulders, leaving euphoria behind).  As Charles Causley said, ‘If I didn’t write poetry I think I’d explode.’  This is consistent with one measure of all the truest and greatest art, which is that life feels unimaginable without it.  Imagine a world without Handel’s Messiah; imagine no Wordsworth, no Dickens, no Constable.  Remember the sight of Notre-Dame de Paris in flames; how unbelievable it seemed that it might cease to exist.  

Now I hasten to clarify that I am not making such claims as this for my rondel.  My point is that most poets feel that their poems have a life of their own, insisting on their own existence.  A true poem is no work of mere ego; it is called out of you by forces beyond yourself; the words ‘discernment’ and ‘vocation’ come to mind.  Even so, it can be tough going.  You never really rest until it is finished, and you always know at some level if it is not, however you may wish to deny it: this or that line or phrase doesn’t quite ring true; this or that word sits oddly or lumpishly.  You always hope for the winds of inspiration to save you from too much craftsmanship.  ‘Will you choose,’ as Edward Thomas cried, ‘choose me, you English words?’.  Or, in the words of Yeats:

A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these […]

So, as far as this Lent Rondel is concerned, the original ‘spark’ that I remember arose from noticing the rhyme of the words ‘Lent' and ‘repent' (which I can hardly have been the first to do).  This nagged away at me until the tell-tale sequence of thoughts arrived: ‘those words are interesting — that would make a good poem — ah yes, it probably is a poem, and I have to find out it what it is’.  What came into my mind was a picture of a short, bracing message of encouragement at the start of Lent.  The briskness of rondel form would fit, I felt, and this at least gave me a ready-made shape for the poem — rather like the grid of the crossword-puzzle.  I then hit on the phrase ‘hold fast’ (which is what I think of as a ‘twin-truth’ — a double meaning whose two senses reinforce, not contradict, each other) and thought a good refrain would come from this.

Now, looking at my notes, I am about to undermine everything I have just said about poetry being long, arduous work, as by my own standards I seem to have got the first draft of this down startlingly quickly — ‘within an hour, between 10 and 11 pm on 13 February 2018’ (once an archivist, always an archivist).  Most of my efforts generally take me months.  Even so, every Ash Wednesday since I have dithered over the refrain and the punctuation.  Originally it was the slightly purple-tinged ‘O followers of Christ, hold fast’, but I soon settled on this:

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast;
Be not afraid; keep faith; keep Lent. 

Something still didn’t feel right, though, and I fiddled around with it several times, including with the punctuation (like Oscar Wilde, taking all morning to put in a comma, and then taking it out again in the afternoon):

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.
Be not afraid; keep faith, keep Lent: […]

But this year I decided that the second line needed to run more freely, and recast it entirely —

All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast;

Fear not these desert days of Lent. 

— which I hope is an improvement.  It feels right to begin with the salutation (‘All friends’…), and to put the two ‘hold fast’s next to each other since, after all, they are saying something slightly different.  After all this trying to be clever, the second line is simpler and does not overload the refrain.

So far, so much dithering.  Yet the first round after the refrain, ‘…all people pent / in pleasure’s prison, bravely cast / Your senseless sin aside at last’ came to me almost whole and entire, and I have always been happy with it.  The only later alteration I made was from the original ‘needless sin’ to ‘senseless sin’, with its serpentine and sin-suggestive sibilance, but that sort of ‘tightening up' is par for the course.  I was also pleased at the way we land on the line ‘Believe the Gospel and repent’ (which hopefully call to mind the priest’s words as he smears our foreheads with ash, ‘Repent and believe the Gospel).  That fell into my lap like a gift (as per Edward Thomas’s appeal).

The part that was hardest to write at first was, in fact, the part that is a also little more awkward for the reader, the lines beginning ‘For by God's Son, who underwent / The Cross…'.  This perhaps makes sense in that something slightly more complicated is being said, and of course I had only just enough rhymes for this very tight poem: it’s no good having a set of three very good rhymes (‘Lent’, ‘repent’, ‘pent’) if you can’t reach a total of five at all.  However, I am satisfied enough of having avoided anything contrived even with these lines.  (And perhaps it is no bad thing if a mention of the Cross should cause a slight stumble in the rhythm).  I have altered very little about it, except that ‘thirst and hunger’ was originally ‘hunger’s hardness’: sometimes — and perhaps especially in a Lenten poem — plainer is better.

So there we are: a simple guide to writing a Lent Rondel, and agonising over it for four years.  

In response to Maolsheachlann’s request, I have dug the different versions out again and found to my surprise that the changes were less significant than I remember.  I really was fiddling around with colons and semi-colons for several years, unable to work out what was wrong with the refrain until this year’s re-casting.  (One of my questions was whether you have two colons in the same sentence?…)

2018–2019

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:

Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent.

All grunged-up souls, all people pent

In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast

Your needless sin aside at last:

Believe the Gospel and repent.

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:

Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent:

The thirst and hunger will not last,

For by God’s Son, who underwent

the Cross, we know that we are meant

For endless life when pain is past.

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.

2020

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:

Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent.

All grunged-up souls, all people pent

In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast

Your needless sin aside at last:

Believe the Gospel and repent.

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:

Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent:

The thirst and hunger will not last,

For by God’s Son, who underwent

the Cross, we know that we are meant

For endless life when pain is past.

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.

2021

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.

Be not afraid; keep faith, keep Lent.

All grunged-up souls, all people pent

In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast

Your senseless sin aside at last:

Believe the Gospel and repent.

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast;

Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent:

The thirst and hunger will not last,

For by God’s Son, who underwent

The Cross, we know that we are meant

For endless life when pain is past —

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.

And here again for good measure is the current and, I hope, final version!

All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast;
Fear not these desert days of Lent. 
All grunged-up souls, all people pent 
In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast 
Your senseless sin aside at last: 
Believe the Gospel and repent. 
All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast;
Fear not these desert days of Lent.
The thirst and hunger will not last, 
For by God’s Son, who underwent 
The Cross, we know that we are meant 
For Heaven’s home when pain is past — 
All friends of Christ, hold fast, hold fast.

Wishing all readers a very blessed Holy Week.