Finding Adlestrop

Yes.  I remember Adlestrop —

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly.  It was late June.

In fact it was the twenty-fourth of June: today is the anniversary of the ‘afternoon of heat’ that inspired this much-loved poem.  On this day in 1914 Edward Thomas was aboard the London to Hereford express, climbing up over the north Cotswolds, on his way to the poets’ colony at Dymock in Gloucestershire.  It was, as he recorded in his journal —

[…] a glorious day from 4:20 am and at 10 tiers above tiers of white cloud with dirtied grey bars above the sea of slate and dull brick by Battersea Park — then at Oxford tiers of pure white with loose large masses above and gaps of dark clear blue above haymaking and elms.

Then we stopped at Adlestrop, through the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12:45 and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam.

Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willowherb and meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel — looking out on grey dry stones between metals and the shining metals and over it all the elms willows and long grass — one man clears his throat — greater than rustic silence.  No house in view.  Stop only for a minute till signal is up. 

Another stop like this outside Colwell [Colwall, just west of the Malverns?] on 27th with thrush singing on hillside above on road.

I hope I do Edward Thomas no disservice in observing that it is as much because of circumstance as the poem’s beauty in itself that this poem is so fondly and firmly remembered.  Within three months of that afternoon Britain was at war; three years later Thomas was dead, killed by a shell at Arras.  In March 1963 they came for the station as well: if you turn in your copy of Richard Beeching’s ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’ part 1, section 3, to page 109, the list for England of ‘Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ — a list which reads, Ian Hislop has observed, ‘like the names on a war memorial’ — there it is, the fifth item from the top, ‘Adlestrop’, in cold dispassionate print between Addingham and Ainsdale: so callously tin-eared, so ruthlessly bureaucratic and ignorant, so bone-headedly inevitable, that there is something actually poetic and tragic about its presence on this list.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Thomas recorded the event because he knew it was fleeting, one of those in-between moments that we so seldom remember to remember — but did he realise how fleeting how much of it was?  For it is not only the moment that is now lost, but the country, the world in which it was possible.  Not only ‘that minute’ but most of what was in it and around it: the locomotive, the station, the silence aboard stationary carriages; no doubt most of the birdsong too.  The Dymock colony, the whole reason for the journey — the whole set of circumstances upon which it was contingent.  The railway survives — Brunel’s ‘Cotswold line’ from Oxford to Worcester is still one of Britain’s loveliest —  but of the station, other than the stationmaster’s house, nothing is left but the sign, mounted on a bus stop in the village  — only the name.  

The poem itself seems in retrospect as fragile and precious as the moment it is describing: written just in time, in the last years when such a poem could be made, by Thomas or anyone else.  This one vignette of a single signal-check has been pressed and hardened by the tremendous historical forces around it into a tiny treasured gem, standing not only for itself, but for all those other unwonted moments of ‘extraordinary silence’ that were possible, and about which poems could have been written, in that old world before the war.  Almost by accident, then, we have this snapshot from a time, perhaps the last time, when Deep England could still make a riposte to the modern world, could conspire to bring a modern express train to a grinding halt and ambush its passengers with her shocking stillness.  Thomas’s sketch — which even in finished form retains the jotted-down freshness of his original journal entry — is now as strangely dizzying as one of those old autochrome photographs, so real we can scarcely believe it.

The site of Adlestrop station is between Kingham and Moreton-in-Marsh stations on the climb to Chipping Campden summit; the precise coordinates are 51.9360°N 1.6591°W, immediately north-west of the overbridge carrying the road from Adlestrop to Oddington.  On this cab-ride video of the journey from London Paddington to Hereford, the site can be seen just after the bridge at 1h 16m seconds.  (The former stationmaster’s house can just be glimpsed on the left).

Thomas was absolutely correct, by the way, to speak of ‘Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’ — the county boundary crosses the railway less than a mile from the station in the up direction. (Its rough position is indicated by a caption on the cab-ride video at 1h 14m 40s; the line it takes is rather convoluted but it makes its final crossing of the railway at the end of the wall of tall trees on the right).  Thomas’s last line was as accurate as it was evocative.

What does it mean, I wonder, that at the poem’s centenary in 2014, a special train was organised to recreate the ‘unwonted stop’, slowing down at the old station so that the lines could be read over the loudspeaker?  Here is a video taken from aboard the train —

— and here is another from the overbridge itself, where the poem was also read as the train rounded the curve.

I cannot help feeling that something deep and beautiful is happening here.  These people have come to a particular place at a particular time — in other words, come on pilgrimage — for the sake of a much-loved, long-remembered poem.  Poetry often seems to be at its strongest when it works through the memory, and this poem, in touching not only our minds and hearts but the English landscape and time itself, has become a kind of memorial — one not of marble or granite, but made up of all four of those elements: minds, hearts, landscape, time.  Thus, just as the poem has come to stand for a whole vanished world, so this remembrance of the poem was a remembrance of that world.  To remember Adlestrop is to remember England.  And, even though it has been blotted out of the landscape and is no more than a memory, Adlestrop station still persists; it still somehow belongs to the English landscape, and the poem keeps it there. 

So for that minute a lost world lived again, proven still to abide in many minds and hearts; and poetry sustained it, poetry summoned it into sight.  Poetry is deeper than we know; it is as deep as England, as history, as life itself.

‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ at full strength once more

The feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated last Thursday in Poland (where indeed it is a national holiday), and in the south-eastern city of Rzeszów there was the welcome return in its full form of one tradition: ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’, ‘Of One Heart, Of One Spirit’, the great annual outdoor hymn concert.  (I have written more about these concerts here, and this year’s edition, which I’ve been catching up with, can be watched in full here).  

These past two years the concert has of course been constrained by various pandemic restrictions — though the organisers heroically put together an online concert in time for Corpus Christi in 2020, and then organised two live concerts with reduced audiences in September 2020 and Corpus Christi 2021.  This is the first time that it has been possible to relax a little more about the virus, and to enter more freely into its old mood of joyful, prayerful togetherness — a mood which persisted in spite of a terrific rain-storm whose arrival coincided squarely with the beginning of the concert!  Amid the wind and the rain it was nice to see some by now familiar faces once again: Hubert Kowalski conducting the orchestra, Joachim Mencel playing the hurdy-gurdy, Jan Budziaszek the percussionist and one of the main founders, and the various Pospieszalskis and Posieszalskas: Marcin, Lidia, Barbara…

This has also, of course, been the first edition of the concert since the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine.  Rzeszów is only fifty or so miles from the western Ukrainian border, and it is this part of Poland which has been at the forefront of the country’s heroic response to the refugee crisis.  And of course, although Russia’s wrath is now mostly concentrated in eastern Ukraine, her forces have proved themselves capable of firing missiles well into the west, with seemingly gratuitous strikes on the city of Lviv and military positions only ten miles from Poland’s border.  So to the musicians and the concert-goers the war will be and remain an immediate and pressing concern.  And it only reinforces a paradox at which I have wondered before: that this hymn-concert, one of the most hopeful, joyful sights in Europe, has grown up in a part of our continent which has seen some of its worst and longest suffering.

It was as right and just as it was to be expected that some Ukrainian musicians were invited to contribute to the music. The band ‘Kana’ are already regulars at the concerts, but there were also some bandura players from Lviv, bringing to the stage a haunting sound that was new to me.  As well as these there were the old favourite of course: a big orchestral number at the beginning followed by Paweł Bębenek’s ‘Dzięki Ci, Panie’ (‘Thank you, Lord’); the exuberant ‘Jezus zwyciężył’, ‘Jesus has triumphed’, which is the cue for the multitude to go wild; and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.

The flavour of the concert seems in recent years to have been moving in more of an American-style ‘praise-and-worship’ direction, but what I have always preferred and looked forward to most are the home-grown orchestral arrangements and jazzings-up of favourite Polish hymns.  Several of these seem to appear every year — I’m never sure who is responsible for them but I think usually either Marcin Pospieszalski or Hubert Kowalski are the culprits — and at least one of them always strikes me as a real gem.  This year I was rather taken with a setting of lines from a much-loved poem by the Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584):

Czego chcesz od nas, Panie, za Twe hojne dary?
Czego za dobrodziejstwa, którym nie masz miary?
Kościół Cię nie ogarnie, wszędy pełno Ciebie:
I w otchłaniach, i w morzu, na ziemi, na niebie.

Tyś Pan wszytkiego świata.  Tyś niebo zbudował
I złotymi gwiazdami ślicznieś uhaftował.
Tyś fundament założył nieobeszłej ziemi
I przykryłeś jej nagość zioły rozlicznemi.

Tobie k woli rozliczne kwiatki Wiosna rodzi,
Tobie k woli w kłosianym wieńcu Lato chodzi,
Wino Jesień i jabłka rozmaite dawa,
Potym do gotowego gnuśna Zima wstawa.

Here is a translation (from StaroPolska.pl,
http://www.staropolska.pl/renesans/jan_kochanowski/czego_chcesz_Panie.html):

What do You want from us, Lord, for Your lavish gifts?
What for the benefactions, which have no limits?
The Church will not contain You; You are everywhere:
On the earth, in the depths, the sea, the open air.

You are the Lord of the whole world, You built the sky,
And embroidered it splendidly with gold stars high.
Of the earth untraversed You lay the foundation
And covered its bareness with rich vegetation.

By Your will Spring brings flowers, in abundance born,
By Your will Summer wears wreaths made from ears of corn.
Autumn gives out wine and apples of various kinds,
Idle Winter rises, when ready meal she finds.

The melody of the song in the concert was composed by Jacek Sykulski (1969–), a beautiful setting which has become a popular hymn —

— but Mateusz Pospieszalski — brother of Marcin, the bass-guitarist and Jednego Serca stalwart — has given it a lavish arrangement, jazzing it up with a syncopated five-time rhythm, a clever lyrical part for strings, a refrain which proves delightfully contrapuntal, and some irresistible ripplings from the harp.  I don’t think they needed to change key halfway through, but otherwise I thought it a very affecting rendition, and loved especially the low, clear, pure tone of the upper voices in the second verse.  By the way, the soloist on the left, Barbara Pospieszalska, is Mateusz’s niece.

So, as I have had occasion to say before, there are plenty of good things going on in Poland.  New music with old roots, spontaneous youngsters dancing the conga, ladies with flowers in their hair, thousands of voices singing hymns in the rain…  Niech żyje Polska!  Long live Poland, and happy Corpus Christi!

Beacons: a poem for the Jubilee

to Her Majesty the Queen, on the occasion of her Platinum Jubilee

After the fanfare the beacons flare 
Out in the dusk and the still June air; 
Thousands of parishes blaze brave light 
Loyally into the nearing night, 
And on the hillside a quiet prayer 

Lifts, though the words are hard to find, 
Up from the heart; because, behind 
These great festivities, we know 
There are some deeper thanks we owe —
Thanks for deep faith, the quiet kind; 

Faith shown in small things that fulfil 
Great vows of youth; that sows good-will; 
Faith that has long encouraged us; 
Faith without faltering or fuss, 
Plain as a beacon on a hill. 

This long example that you have set 
Shows us, Your Majesty, how we yet 
May find eternal jubilee: 
We see, we understand and we 
Will not forget, will not forget. 

   Pentecost Sunday, 5th June, 2022.

The Jubilee Beacon, St. Helier, south London, 2nd June 2022.

Happy Jubilee!

Well, the moment is here.  Wishing a very happy Jubilee holiday to one and all, but most of all to our beloved Queen Elizabeth, who has reigned over us so long and so well, and whose example has been unfailing.  May God bless her and keep her always.

A new portrait by Ronald Mackechnie

“I cannot lead you into battle; I do not give you laws or administer justice; but I can do something else: I can give you my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.”

— from the Christmas Broadcast of 1957

The Elizabeth line: more pictures

Of course, I haven’t been able to resist some more rides on the Elizabeth line in its first week of operation.  On Friday I ventured to Liverpool Street station, whose new platforms are so long that at their western end there is a direct connection to Moorgate station.  Similarly, the eastern end of Farringdon has a connection with Barbican on the Metropolitan line.  That gives an idea of the colossal scale of this project — as do, I hope, the pictures below.  All show the Moorgate exit at Liverpool Street.

Perhaps, too, I will withdraw my previous comment about the trains feeling narrow and dull… on subsequent trips they have seemed much more spacious than I first thought.  The lighting is subtle, rather than dull.  And they are British-built (by Bombardier in Derby) too.

The Elizabeth Line is Open

London’s long-awaited new railway, the Elizabeth line, or Crossrail, is open at last.  Three colleagues and I could not resist going down yesterday lunchtime for a ride on its first day, and found our newest underground railway just as impressive as I had hoped.  The first impression — conveyed mainly by the ambience of the stations — is extraordinary.  They are immensely spacious — goodness knows how much earth they have brought up out of them — and the arches and vaults are of cathedralline proportions.  Their gentle contours, combined with the clever up-lighting of the arched ceilings, produce a remarkably soft, calming effect.  The acoustics, too, are soft, almost homely; neither echoing nor claustrophobic.  There were plenty of people around, but they were being absorbed effortlessly into the space.  There is a clear intelligibility and straightforwardness to the layout, and therefore to navigation.  There seems to be far less of the disorientation that one can find in the narrow corridors of the old Tube.

Farringdon station

The platforms are similarly wide and generous.  As on the Jubilee line extension (a different line for a different Jubilee!), a long row of glass doors protects waiting passengers from arriving trains —  and it is along this structure, not the ceilings or walls, that the departure boards are mounted.  This is another factor in the remarkably clean, uncluttered atmosphere — there is a clear line of sight right down the long, dead-straight platforms.

At Paddington

The class 345 trains, too, are excellent.  By comparison to the stations they feel a little narrow and less brightly-lit, and the platform barriers add to a slight sense of stepping into the unknown, but I think this was bound to be the case by comparison, and it should not take long to get used to.  Beyond question, though, they are very sleek, very fast, very smooth, and very quiet.  The line speed must be something like 40–50mph, but it would be hard to tell this either by the noise or the vibration; indeed, the ride quality is superior to that of some inter-city trains!

Farringdon

‘Space-age’ is YouTube personality Geoff Marshall’s verdict, and I think he is quite right: not only in its architecture and atmosphere, but also in the way it warps space and time.  I had expected the excitement of seeing the new line, but I did not anticipate another, deeper, sensation that came on gradually during the first journey, and which still has not fully subsided: a kind of semi-euphoric vertigo, a disbelieving wonder at the change; not just at the new infrastructure in itself but the change it has brought to London as a whole.  To see the name ‘Tottenham Court Road’ appearing through the window when I had only just got on at Farringdon seemed impossible, as if some rule of physics had been broken; it was a little like seeing water flowing uphill.  My known city has been remoulded and remade, its entire east-west dimension shrunk or tightened by an elastic belt.  Back on the surface I found myself struggling slightly to believe that it had all been real, and not some cheese-sandwich-induced lunchtime daydream.  It was a feeling exactly opposite to my disbelieving horror at the fire at Notre-Dame in Paris: a struggle to comprehend to a new reality, though in this case the change is altogether welcome.  

Farringdon

This sensation has probably been intensified by its rarity.  One way and another, I am used to bracing myself against dismay at most major events or developments in today’s Britain, including most construction projects.  Yet in contrast to so many dispiriting new developments, with their chunky and plasticky intrusions into our city-scape, this line is, as Mary Harrington points out in a new article, beyond question ‘something London wants and London needs’.  It is an unambiguous and unequivocal contribution towards our common good.  What is more, down underground, with no well-weathered or hand-made surroundings to clash with, its modernist and futuristic architecture not only makes sense but works in practice.  Here, then, for once, is something new that still corresponds to my Britain as I imagine it.  A new 50-mph underground line named after the Queen is something I myself might have dreamt of, something I would have had built if I were in charge!  Somehow, in spite of everything that has gone wrong in our poor country, we have got this right.  The air of excited discovery among the first-day passengers, our delight at the transfigured city — even the smiles, a rare sight indeed on the Underground! —  is surely testament to this.

Farringdon

The new line has summoned up the spice of excitement, the thrilling realisation that bold things really are possible; that it is possible to change a city — to change the fabric of the world! — for the better.  It is a rare taste of the Victorian age, or alternatively of what it is like to be French.  But the overall impression of sleekness and effortlessness belies how hard-won this triumph has been.  It has been a gigantic and complicated task, completed against considerable odds.  

This is a historic day for London and indeed the whole country.  The Elizabeth line may have suffered severe delays to its opening, but it has worked out all right as it now constitutes a magnificent Jubilee present for us all.  It is a superb addition to Britain’s railways, and worthy of the name it bears.

Farewell to the 455s

Through Mitcham Eastfields on a Horsham train, 10 August 2011

This coming Saturday, 14th May, sees the withdrawal from the suburban routes of the South Central Division — the tangle of railways running out of Victoria and London Bridge into south London — of the class 455 electric multiple units that have held sway in these parts for nearly forty years.  Their siblings on the South Western lines out of Waterloo will apparently follow in the next few months.

Basking in the sun at Victoria, 28 August 2013

Few ordinary passengers are likely to mourn them.  They are not glamorous, nor were they built to be, though I think better care could still have been taken of their interiors in recent years.  They were designed for mass short-distance transport, to lug commuters around the Hills and Commons of the southern boroughs; to venture to climes no more exotic than Crystal Palace, Epsom Downs, Caterham or Dorking.  I doubt they have averaged more than around twenty miles per hour over the course of their working lives.  But they have worked solidly, clocking up thousands upon thousands of rush-hours since the early 1980s.

Rumbling across the South Circular overbridge into Tulse Hill, bound for the Wimbledon loop, 11 April 2019

I am among those who will miss them.  It was against the backdrop of these faithful workhorses, plying their way up to London or down to Dorking, their acceleration distantly, enticingly audible over the suburban rooftops, that my rail enthusiasm was first contracted and swiftly found to be incurable.  The aforementioned South Western sister-class ran right past my grandmother’s garden, and I used a 455 as my subject for the centre-piece of a school art project (because I knew I could draw trains and buildings, but not people!).  More recently — until the pandemic in fact — my train into work was reliably formed by one of these units.

A Victoria-bound semi-fast accelerating through Mitcham Eastfields, 4 January 2011

Like the slightly younger 319s (themselves a familiar sight around South London until a few years ago) and their cousins the recently-scrapped two-car 456s, the 455s were built at York by British Rail Engineering Limited, as lettering on the step-plates proudly declared.  However, in contrast to the 319s — which were more souped-up trains, designed for Luton and Gatwick routes, for people with flights to catch, always seeming cramped by the chords and spurs of suburban south London, itching for the open stretches of the Brighton or Midland main lines — the 455s seemed gentler and more sedate, more suited to the way we do things here, south of the river, in the land of the electrified third rail.  To a 455, with its seldom-attained top speed of 75 mph, it did not seem to matter if we got to Ewell East now or some time next week.  They trundled their way around, taking their time about everything.  No point rushing this curve or that junction; there’ll only be something else to brake for around the next bend.  

Through the window onto dawn-lit commuterland, 1 October 2018

Adding to the dreamy aura of these trains were the various reassuring sounds they made: the chirruping of the brakes and the soft sigh on their release, the warble-piping of the original door alarms, the clunk of the camshaft on departure, and the leisurely thrumming of the brake compressors, this last being the sound I will miss the most.  Then there were the motors, matching the register of a cello, rising from a growl from a standstill to the very top of the tenor range if given the chance to stretch their legs.  The only alarming sound was the occasional crunch of electricity arcing from the third rail. 

Arriving at Streatham Hill on the 1617 to London Bridge, the once-daily parliamentary service via the Leigham Spur and Tulse Hill, 25 April 2019

The motors themselves are worth remarking on, for they are actually recycled.  Incredible as it may sound, they are over eighty years old, and more than twice the age the trains they have been powering.  The early Eighties, when these units were built, were not an easy time for British Rail, which, struggling under persistent inadequacies in government subsidy, had constantly to make do and mend with their scarce resources.  Their solution in this case was to fit the new trains with not only second- but third-hand motors built originally by the Southern Railway for its electric units in the 1930s.  Though now into their ninth decade and effectively dating from the electrification itself, the motors still seem perfectly sound to my ear.  Whatever the reason is for the withdrawal of these trains, I doubt it has anything to do with the traction equipment.

A down train draws into Wandsworth Common, 9 December 2018

I am not the only one sad to see them go.  ‘South London is [going to] feel weird without them,’ said one contributor to the ever-perusable Rail Forums.  Another chap, a driver who also films the modern railway scene and has a presence on YouTube, told me in an exchange in the comments, ‘These were the trains I grew up on, the trains that took me on all sorts of adventures and when I passed out [i.e. qualified] as a driver became my core traction.’

Epsom train rounding the curve south of Mitcham Junction, 4 February 2022

There is always a pang to see the clearing out of the furniture of our beginnings, however ordinary these things may be.  Perhaps, in fact, the more ordinary and the more constant they have seemed, the sharper the pang.  Bit by bit, the railscape of my childhood is disappearing (the analogue signals, the bell at Eastfields level crossing, the late Phil Sayer’s voice over the speakers…), and by the end of this weekend another major part of it will have crumbled completely away.  I will certainly miss the familiar presence of these old units, with the many associations they hold for me.

A final farewell, Mitcham Common, 4 February 2022

But let us end with the nearest a 455 ever came to attaining railway glory.  Under the pre-2018 timetable, one single passenger service each weekday was booked to run non-stop down the fourteen-mile line from Dorking to Horsham, and this was generally allocated to a 455 unit.  So, just before that timetable was abolished, I took one of the last opportunities to experience this run, and filmed the journey from just beyond Betchworth Tunnel to just short of Horsham.  As I have said, 455s hardly ever had the chance of a clear non-stop flat-out run like this, and certainly in their latter years Horsham was the furthest south they ever ventured in regular service.  So it was a rare treat to see this humble suburban unit reliving the glory days of the old Bognor expresses, accelerating to the full line speed of 75 mph along probably my favourite stretch of railway in south-east England.  (We really begin to pick up speed after Holmwood, five minutes in, and after Ockley, at six minutes, there is the added bonus of some jointed track, which we hammer over at full tilt.)  The date was the 14th May, 2018 — four years to the day, as it turns out, before the final withdrawal of the class.

Gipps’ Fifth to receive its U.S. première

Now this is very exciting news: on the 15th April 2023, the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra will give the United States première of Ruth Gipps’ Fifth Symphony.  Of her four ‘mature’ symphonies, this is the only one yet to have an outing in the ongoing Gipps Revival, yet it is a work as beautiful as, if not even finer than, any of the others.

In the past few years the Seattle Philharmonic, under its director Adam Stern, have excelled themselves in their dedication to Gipps’ music, putting the American premières of both the Second and Fourth Symphonies to their name.  It is no small risk to perform such large-scale works by a composer whose name until recently has, however unjustly, been so little-known to audiences.  Yet this orchestra has now proven itself bold enough to do so three times — each time bringing the music to new and appreciative listeners — and they surely deserve to be known as Gipps’ foremost champions in America.

The story of the Fifth Symphony offers a perfect example of the frustration and injustice that dogged Gipps’ career.  Completed in 1982, when atonalism still reigned triumphant, its persistence in clear melodies and unveiled romanticism were the final proof, if any were needed, of her refusal to compromise her artistic convictions for the sake of the Zeitgeist.  The symphony’s intricate craftsmanship, imaginative sonority and varied palette of moods counted for nothing, it seemed, against the tide of fashion.  Gipps’ previous symphonies had received at least one broadcast on BBC radio, but this time the composer fought in vain even for that.  In the end, a sole performance was given by the London Repertoire Orchestra, the ensemble founded by Gipps herself for newly-trained musicians.  A scratchy but complete recording of this rendition can be heard on YouTube.

Next year’s concert in Seattle will, then, incredibly, be only the second time that this symphony has ever been heard in the forty years since it was written.  And yet, as I hope can be heard in the extract below, this neglect is no reflection of the quality of the music.  It is, as I have said so often before, intricate, distinctive, at turns characteristically spiky and mellifluous, full-throated and beautifully-crafted music.  Many thanks to all involved in the decision to perform this symphony, and very best wishes for its success.  I have only one question — might there please be the chance of streaming the concert online, or of releasing a recording of it, for those of us who find ourselves on the wrong side of ‘the pond’?

Full information here: 

https://seattlephil.org/concerts-and-tickets/concert/gipps-fifth/

https://visitseattle.org/events/seattle-philharmonic-orchestra-presents-a-major-u-s-premiere-ruth-gipps-fifth/

This article has been updated to reflect a change in the scheduling of this concert from an initial date of September 4th, 2022.

The first movement of the fifth symphony, in which one of the most beautiful clarinet solos ever written develops eventually into a majestic anthem-like summit.  The London Repertoire Orchestra is conducted by the composer.

Poetry, Our Daily Bread

‘What poetry needs is a place at the table,’ begins a recent piece by my friend Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh which I heartily enjoyed and recommend, not just because he goes on to write very attentively and generously about a poem of mine, but because I agree so strongly with the more general point he is making: that poetry has become strange to us, and that this is a tragedy.

The reason for its scarcity in our lives these days, he argues, is not that we do not revere it, but almost that we revere it too much, so that, thus ‘safely exalted and ignored’, it has been forgotten and grown strange.  When we do meet with it, it seems unfamiliar and discomfiting.  We know that it is Important Language, but we don’t know why; we forget, except on rare occasions, what the poetic register is for.  We intuit its sincerity and its seriousness, but not its purpose, even though our forbears throughout the ages understood this naturally.  We think it is perhaps a kind of public therapy session for the poet, an unburdening of his emotions and preoccupations, and listen to it out of politeness if nothing else.  Perhaps we think of it as a porcelain dinner service, kept in the dresser for special occasions.  We think it is only for the solemnest moments, for funerals and centenaries, to be intoned only by professional actors and public figures.

But this is to miss a vital element of poetry.  Poetry is a craft, something that belongs to a community, and is to be shared and enjoyed by many, and often.  We treat music and film in this way; Maolsheachlann argues; why not poetry?  He says,

Whenever I’ve shared my poetry with people (with a very [few] exceptions), the reaction is generally twofold:

1) I like it.

2) It makes me think of X or Y or Z.

But what I was really gunning for is a critical reaction. What is good about it? What is bad about it? What does it suggest to you in terms of meaning and association? Exactly the sort of critique anyone would have about a film, a novel, a painting, a piece of music. I just want my poem to be treated as a piece of work, not as pure sacred self-expression, immune from analysis.

The price of our present misunderstanding is that we hardly encounter poetry at all.  And yet it is an essential vitamin, a vital mineral; it should be our daily bread.  It involves emotion, yes, but also the distillation and disciplining of emotion.  It is elevated language, yes, but not actually sacred.  We should not shrink from its invitation to attentiveness any more than we would begrudge such an invitation from a film or a piece of music.  We should welcome it into our lives.  It should season our speech like salt, deepening its flavour, and, by making us more attentive to our words, make us in turn more mindful of our human dignity.  

But like all good things, like all gifts, it is also an end in itself, to be cherished and rejoiced in for its own sake.

Maolsheachlann’s whole article can be read here.

Happy St. George’s Day!

May St. George and indeed St. Edmund and Our Lady of Walsingham save and protect England, this small precious portion of the Earth’s surface: much misunderstood, much maligned, much afflicted in various ways, but still the home of many people of good will, and still to be honoured, cherished and defended.

The Fantasy in E Major by Harold Darke (1888–1976) in an arrangement for strings by C. Jenkins, accompanied by a sequence of paintings by James Lynch (b. 1956) mainly of scenes in Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.  Many thanks to YouTube user David Harris for putting the two together. 

Happy Birthday to H. M. the Queen

Wishing a very Happy Birthday to Her Majesty the Queen, who celebrates her ninety-sixth birthday today.  May God save and bless and keep her always. 

Happy Easter!

Where all was dark there is suddenly fire; where there was death there is life once more.  Happy Easter to one and all!

In Święta Lipka in north-eastern Poland, on the 4th May 2019, an irresistible arrangement of a familiar tune is sung by participants in one of the many Liturgical Music Workshops that are run by Hubert Kowalski (conducting) and others across the country and elsewhere in Europe.  They sing, ‘Pan zmartwychwstał i jest z nami’ — ‘The Lord is risen, and is with us’ — or, as we know it in Britain, ‘Jesus Christ is risen today’.

In the Next Few Years

Half the battle, in these next few years, will be to keep our heads.  These are troubled, unreal, topsy-turvy times, and even leaving aside, if we can, the war in Ukraine, where the horrors of the 1940s have come howling back into our continent; even if we concentrate on our own society and culture, there is a widespread sense that the world has gone mad, and is going steadily madder. 

The first thing is not to follow it: we must not panic and go mad ourselves.  There are at least two false paths to be avoided — to give in and simply go along with the world’s insistent lunacies, or to allow ourselves to be goaded into an opposite, contrarian madness.  Both are easier than we think, even for honest and well-intentioned people.  Not for nothing do we speak of sanity as the state of being ‘well-balanced’, as a kind of equilibrium which has to be maintained, and which by implication it is more than possible to lose.  And such a balanced mind can indeed be hard to maintain, or to be sure of having maintained, especially if all around are losing theirs.

How, then, do we keep ourselves steady?  There is some considerable strength to be drawn simply from calm observation of the situation at hand.  With the right bearings we can, in all humility, taking into account our own flaws and follies, still have the confidence to point out the world’s madnesses, and to be sure that they are indeed the world’s, and not ours.  We can say that women and men, though radically equal in dignity, are also different from each other in certain essential ways, and that the blurring of such distinctions carries great risks, including to that same equal dignity.  We can say that an undue preoccupation with racial and ethnic characteristics, even with the ostensible goal of eradicating unjust prejudice, will actually do more harm than good to race relations.  We can say that the freedom of adults must not take precedence over the flourishing of children.  We can say that political causes do not make good religions.  And so on.  It helps simply to be able to say these things, to reassure ourselves that we at least have kept our heads.

 

All the same, the situation we find ourselves describing may still be a grave one.  We churchgoers, for instance, are trying not to find particularly daunting the displacement, by means of a potent blend of secularist, materialist and progressivist ideologies, of the Christian imagination of Europe: a process which has been going on for several centuries but which seems in our times to be ascending to a new climax.  Now because we are churchgoers we know too, of course, that this is nothing new.  The forces of chaos — and human beings in general — have been in rebellion against God and good sense since time immemorial.  We saw it yesterday, on Good Friday, which I find more shocking with every passing year.  The silent treachery of Judas, the queasy pragmatism of Pilate before the hissing Sanhedrin, the spittle-flecked blood-thirst of the mindless mob, Peter’s three (three!) denials, the exquisite ingenuity of the malevolence of the soldiers, the agony beyond agony of the road to Golgotha and the anguish of the Mother who stood beside it, the skull-stark desolation of the Cross itself, and then the final, unthinkable horror actually coming to pass: ‘He bowed his head and gave up his spirit.’  We were not there, and yet in truth we are there all the time.  For we know what this is all about: we have all heard of such things, or witnessed them, or indeed committed them; it is the history of the world.  Yes, we know all this.  And yet, since the forces of rebellion take different forms in different times and places, it is possible to make observations about the particular circumstances of different ages; and in our own day, it seems to me, the various threats to the Church add up to something that is without precedent in history.  

In part this is because these threats are not usually overtly violent: they are often invisible or intangible as well as appearing sophisticated and civilised, and therefore more insidious, disorienting and difficult to oppose.  So, for instance, here in Britain we have, in only a century or so, and with scarcely any controversy, transformed ourselves from an at least outwardly Christian civilisation into a largely secular-progressive one.  Perhaps because the trend itself has remained constant for most of our lifetimes we might not realise how great a shock this is, but we should not underestimate its effect: even taking into account the atheism and scepticism already widespread in the British establishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it amounts to a swift and drastic revolution, and one by which we have made serious alterations to the moral and ethical foundations and fabric of our society.  Partly it came about by the sheer cost of the the two world wars, whose shattering violence left intangible things as well as tangible beyond straightforward repair: social solidarity, love of country, standards of decency, trust in institutions.  Then since the war we have had the Revolution of the Self, a phenomenon that Ed West has gone so far as to call a second Reformation, and whose general coarsening and cheapening influence successfully ushered in a radical transformation of our understanding of family, morality, culture and of truth itself.  The attack was deep, determined and aimed more or less directly at Christian morality.  Wise and brave people sounded warnings to no avail.

In recent years, though, something else has begun to happen.  Partly it is something we might have been expecting: some kind of counter-reaction to that Revolution of the Self, as the sheer magnitude of the cost of its false promises became clear.  Something along these lines has now indeed begun to materialise, but it not the sort of thing we might have hoped for.  Angry beyond coherence, it rails indiscriminately against more or less anything that is inherited from the past, so that, instead of vindication for the Church, we now, to our horror, find ourselves actually lumped in with the Sixties revolutionaries, as if we straightforwardly share the blame for the problems they caused.  Never mind that it is the Church that has, say, warned most strongly and consistently against the myth of ‘free love’: no, the traditional Christian understanding of marriage is still considered as grave a threat to the fulfilment of women as the post-Sixties status quo.  Likewise, in the renewed focus on the wounds left by the slave trade, there is scant acknowledgement of the Christian motivations of the abolitionists, still less a willingness to make the distinction between the teaching of a religion and the decision by some nations and individuals at times to disregard this teaching.  We might also have hoped for any counter-revolution to have a cleansing, refreshing effect on our culture and language, and to restore some of the old care and courtesy in self-expression, but what has happened instead is that new and arbitrary speech-codes have been drawn up, so that we are terribly nervous about words like ‘Christmas’ and ‘Easter’ or ‘man’ and ‘woman’ or ‘unborn baby’, while the public conversation in general remains as casually crass and foul-mouthed as ever — and they accuse us of using hurtful language.  It is all deeply unfair and demoralising.

A hostile culture is by no means an unprecedented proposition for the Church.  But what seems different in our own time — what makes our mission a New Evangelisation — is precisely this complexity, this many-layeredness of the hostility of the twenty-first-century West towards the Church to which it owes so much.  We are not dealing with straightforward persecution, but a sulky, cynical, irreverent, suspicious, yet also strangely gullible society.  Meanwhile it often feels as if the Church has no traction, no way on it; that we lack the language and credibility to address the world (though this is partly our own fault as well).  The words of the Gospel, however rich and life-giving they may sound within our sanctuaries, can seem to ring hollow or trite in the stale atmosphere outside.

In the face of all this, our feelings, too, are complex.  We might be fearful of being wrong-footed by our culture’s many self-contradictions, never mind embarrassed by its vulgarity and narcissism.  We know we need a new kind of courage, and a great deal of it.  All this understandably makes us hesitant about what to do next.  

There is often, too, a sense of not only being attacked but tormented and goaded.  To use the famous phrase of Benedict XVI (to whom Happy Birthday, for he turns ninety-five today!), the steadily consolidating ‘dictatorship of relativism’ — which, as he put it so presciently, ‘does not recognise anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires’ — has brought about some maddening, bewildering situations.  For instance, we are witnessing simultaneously this aforementioned obsession with fundamentally unimportant distinctions regarding ethnicity, yet also the vehement rejection of essential and crucial distinctions between the sexes.  To take another example, the long revolution against marriage has not demolished it straightforwardly, as one might have feared in the Sixties, but instead captured and refashioned it in a new image by means of sleight of hand and word games.  For the meaning of such a fundamental word to change underneath our feet, for it to be stripped of its transcendent, cosmic significance and shrunk to something beholden to human whim, is almost more dismaying than plain iconoclasm would have been.  It was not enough for marriage to be destroyed; it had to be disfigured and then destroyed.  It is not enough for abortion to be permitted as a necessary evil or last resort; it must now be championed as a positive good and a civil right.  It is not enough that the Church should be defeated — the Church must be humiliated and then defeated.  Truth must be twisted and then toppled.  Christ must not only be crucified; He must be mocked and crucified.

This being Holy Saturday, these words are necessarily sombre.  I know that, amid all these woes, opportunities for good are emerging all the time — such as the fact that most ordinary people, whether believers or not, remain reassuringly normal and sane; or the youth and vitality of the pro-life movement — and also that, every minute of every day, we have the unwavering assurance of Providence that all manner of thing shall, in the end, be well.  But even if all evil is ultimately in retreat — even if any advancing menace or host can only hope for a Pyrrhic victory, and a temporary one at that — this Triduum gives us the opportunity to acknowledge the dreadful strength that evil can and does wield.  Evil is frightening; it roars and ambushes and twists the knife and goads us even as it wounds us.

But however many bearings we feel we are losing, we always have the faith and the saints and the True North of the Mass.  For alongside the long history of human power and human misery is the other, parallel, unsung history, forgotten by the chronicles but every bit as true: the history of all the Masses said every day, all the prayers uttered, as well as all the words and deeds of kindness and courage done by people of good will.  It is by this compass, always present, never erring, that we keep ourselves sane and rooted.  Let it be recorded, not on this ephemeral blog but in hearts and minds now and in years to come, that even in these unreal years there were those who still believed in the eternal verities, who still cared about the inheritance of their forefathers; who cherished such things and passed them to their descendants in the confident hope that evil shall in the end be outlasted, outweighed and outdone by good.  If we do this, then we shall have kept our heads; if we keep our heads, then that will be half the battle won; and a half-won battle is one we can hope to win outright.  Let us keep heart too, then, as well as our heads, so that generations to come will enjoy heart’s ease and happiness in a gentler culture, a fairer society, and a world closer than our own to the will of its Creator.

DrewCR2 · There is a green hill

The too-seldom-heard setting by Herbert Sumsion (1899–1995) of Cecil Frances Alexander’s hymn ‘There is a green hill far away’, sung here by the choristers of Grimsby Parish Church, directed by Andrew Cantrill, and with the organ played by David Leigh.  I have a soft spot for ingenuous Victorian Evangelical hymns like these, and the fine balance they strike between sentimentality and starkness.

He died that we might be forgiven,

He died to make us good,

That we might go at last to Heaven,

Saved by His precious blood.

Good Friday

Words from the second Psalm, sung by the choir of Westminster Cathedral.  ‘They arise, the kings of the earth; princes plot against the Lord and his anointed.’

A treasured prayer, the tenth of the Solemn Intercessions for Good Friday:

Let us pray, dearly beloved,
To God the Father almighty,
That he may cleanse the world of all errors,
Banish disease, drive out hunger,
Unlock prisons, loosen fetters;
Granting to travellers safety, to pilgrims return,
Health to the sick, and salvation to the dying.

A moment of silent prayer.  Then the Priest says:

Almighty ever-living God,
Comfort of mourners, strength of all who toil,
May the prayers of those who cry out in any tribulation come before you,
That all may rejoice,
Because in their hour of need
Your mercy was at hand.

Through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

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.