Christmas Poems (22): The Magi by WB Yeats

The Magi on top of a confession box in Saint Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, Skerries, waiting to join the crib scene at Epiphany (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Patrick Comerford

The Christmas season comes to a close tomorrow with the Feast of the Epiphany. And so, for my Christmas poem this morning I have chosen ‘The Magi’ by WB Yeats.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature and was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival as well as a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 for “inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.”

Yeats was the grandson and great-grandson of Church of Ireland rectors, and was named after his grandfather, the Revd William Butler Yeats (1806-1862), who died in Sandymount Castle, Dublin, a month before Christmas in 1862.

Yeats was born in 1865 at ‘Georgeville,’ 5 Sandymount Avenue, and was baptised in Saint Mary’s Church, Donnybrook. His brother Jack was a celebrated painter, while his artist sisters Elizabeth and Susan Mary – Lollie and Lily – were part of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and are buried in Saint Nahi’s Churchyard in Dundrum, Co Dublin.

The house at 10 Ashfield Terrace (now 418 Harold’s Cross Road), where WB Yeats lived during some of his schooldays (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

Yeats was educated first in England and then at the High School in Harcourt Street, Dublin. But he spent much of his childhood in Co Sligo, which he regarded as his spiritual home. From an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult – topics that feature in the first phase of his work, although his poetry later became more physical and realistic.

In later life, Yeats largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, and in Senate debates in the 1920s he defended the place and teachings of the Church of Ireland, the Church of his birth.

He died in France in 1939 at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, and was buried in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. In 1948, his body was returned to Ireland and he was buried in the Church of Ireland churchyard in Drumcliffe, Co Sligo. His epitaph comes from the last lines of ‘Under Ben Bulben,’ one of his final poems:

Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by!

No 5 Woburn Walk ... the Bloomsbury home of WB Yeats from 1895 to 1919 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The ‘unsatisfied ones’

Yeats wrote the short poem ‘The Magi’ in 1914 while he was living in Bloomsbury, London. In this eight-line poem, Yeats follows the journey of the Magi or the “unsatisfied ones” and their unrequited search for meaning in the “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.” The religious imagery in ‘The Magi’ helps to convey the themes of desire and dissatisfaction.

Although ‘The Magi’ is a short poem, its meaning is amplified by its rich diction and syntax. The magi seem almost otherworldly as they “appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky” and are constantly in the poet’s head (“Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye”).

His use of repetition reinforces his imagery of the Magi, who are described twice as “unsatisfied” twice (lines 2 and 7). He uses a series of “S”-sounding words such as: stones, stiff, still fixed, helms of silver hovering side by side, and unsatisfied. These are the characteristics of the magi, who are unchanging with “stiff, painted clothes.” In religious art, the wise men are usually shown wearing fine, rich, royal clothing.

The Magi are weary and “pale” with “ancient faces” that resemble “rain-beaten stones” and are forever waiting, “all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more” the events that will satisfy their quest for meaning.

Yeats repeats the word “all” when he describes the Magi, alluding, perhaps, to humanity as a whole: “With all their ancient faces” … “all their helms of silver” … “all their eyes still fixed.” And, perhaps, he uses the wise men, the “unsatisfied ones,” to allude to his belief that humanity has yet to discover meaning and fulfilment in Christ’s time on earth.

Christ’s first coming has left us even more dissatisfied and more fervent in our search for meaning. We cannot be fulfilled until “the uncontrollable mystery” arrives, or the second coming of Christ, when the world is brought to the fulfilment of God’s promises for creation.

Yeats has the Magi not only witness the birth of Christ, but also see his death on Calvary. Yet, despite witnessing these events, they are left unfulfilled, “being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied.” As the wise men in ‘The Magi’ are waiting with their “eyes still fixed,” upon the bright star, they are not going to be satisfied until they are led again to the “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.”

The bestial or beastly floor is the stable in Bethlehem in the Christmas story. Or, perhaps, it is our world today. It is not the place we would expect as the birthplace of a king. The grubbiness of that stable birthplace – whether it is the stable floor or our earthly dwelling – leads to the cruelty of the crucifixion and of our world, remembered down through the centuries.

Yeats uses the plight of the magi to point out the plight in humanity. They still hopeful of find answers, hope to find the Christ Child as the answer to their quest. Is birth more fulfilling than death? Is Yeats waiting for the promise of a new birth, for himself, for Ireland, for the world? Is there a hint of apocalyptic hope, or doom?

We are all seekers, searching for the answer to this mystery, this contradiction between our hopes for divine, loving deliverance and our knowledge of the cruelties of the world and the stark reality of the human predicament. We too are Magi still searching, and the mystery continues. It may be beyond our comprehension, but our acceptance of it is the beginning of faith.

I think it is interesting to compare this poem by Yeats with TS Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi.’ But apart from the very different mood at the ending of each poem, the poetic imaginings are different from each other.

Yeats’s Magi are archetypal, mythic and elite figures, “the pale unsatisfied ones” still searching for the meaning of “The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor” ... which some interpreters say foreshadows Christ’s Second Coming. They are “unsatisfied” with the Death on Calvary and yearn back to the scene of Birth, whereas Eliot’s Magus has found the sought-for Birth “satisfactory.”

Yeats’s Magi seem acutely aware that something mysterious and uncontrolled and new has taken place. Yet they keep returning – at least in thought and imagination – to try to comprehend what may be incomprehensible. How is it they remain, “by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,” and so have to return to the mystery of the birth? On the other hand, Eliot’s Magi are more like ordinary people, complaining of the rigours of the journey, and yet pushing on to reach their goal, the preliminary goal of the “temperate valley,” full of symbols, but yielding no information. They still push onwards, arriving

... at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

But then there are those final lines, the end of their old ways and old privileges:

this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

And yet one writes:

I would do it again but...

Yeats’s Magi hope to find the mystery underlying the coming turbulence. But Eliot’s Magi foresee the coming turbulence, and while dreading it want what the promises it holds out.

The Adoration of the Magi, depicted in the 19th century Oberammergau altarpiece in the Lady Chapel in Lichfield Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

The Magi, by WB Yeats

Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

Tomorrow: TS Eliot, ‘Journey Of The Magi’

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Christmas Poems (21): Advent by Patrick Kavanagh

“ ...the newness that was in every stale thing/ When we looked at it as children” – an old gate and gate lodge on the Castle Leslie estate in Glaslough, Co Monaghan (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Patrick Comerford

Although there are some small January flowers in the garden this morning, the Christmas season appears to be hanging on, and I am reminded this morning [4 January 2012] of two poems by Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Advent’ and ‘A Christmas Childhood.’

I have chosen ‘Advent’ as my Christmas Poem this morning – not because I am looking back at last month’s Advent season, but because, despite its name, this poem, which speaks of “God’s breath in common statement,” draws on very common, everyday scenes in rural Ireland and strong images of these post-Christmas days in early January:

O after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning –
We’ll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching ....
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour –
And Christ comes with a January flower.

A lake-side scene on the Castle Leslie estate in Glaslough, Co Monaghan ... Patrick Kavanagh found much of his inspiration in the rural life and landscapes of Co Monaghan (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967) was born in Mucker, in the parish of Inniskeen in Co Monaghan. His father was a small farmer who supplemented his income by working also as a cobbler, and he grew up surrounded by the “stony-grey hills” that were the inspiration for so much of his poetry.

He left school at the age of 13, and immediately began working on the family farm, but continued in his own self-education. The first book he borrowed from the library in Dundalk was TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. Later, as he began to write his own poetry, he would draw on images of the rural the life he shared with other local farmers buying and selling at fairs and marts, Sunday-mass going, the wakes, weddings and funerals, games of pitch-and-toss at the crossroads, local dances and football matches, and the traditions of a rural Irish Christmas.

His earliest poems were published in the local newspaper, Dundalk Democrat in1928. Three more poems were published by George Russell (Æ) in The Irish Statesman in 1929-1930.

In 1931, Kavanagh walked the fifty miles to Dublin to meet Æ, There he was introduced too to Frank O’Connor. His first collection of poetry, Ploughman and Other Poems, was published by Macmillan in 1936.

Soon after, he moved to London in search of literary work, but he returned to Ireland when he failed to make a living. An autobiography, The Green Fool, appeared in 1938 but was withdrawn after a libel action by Oliver St John Gogarty, who was awarded £100.

Kavanagh worked as a part-time journalist from 1942 to 1944, writing a gossip column for The Irish Press under the pseudonym of Piers Plowman, and later working as the film critic for The Irish Press. During those years, he also became close friends with the future British Poet Laureate, John Betjeman, who was then attached to the British Embassy in Dublin.

A long poem, ‘The Great Hunger,’ was published by Cyril Connolly in the London-based Horizon in 1942. His tragic description of the psychological and sexual frustrations of rural life was recognised as masterly by Frank O’Connor and George Yeats, who republished it in Dublin as a Cuala Press pamphlet. Many regard this poem as Kavanagh’s best, although its publication in Dublin attracted the attention of the police and censors. Later, Tom MacIntyre adapted The Great Hunger for the theatre and it was staged in Dublin by the Abbey Theatre in 1983.

‘Lough Derg’ was also written in 1942, but it was not published until 1971. A collection of verse, A Soul for Sale (1947), was followed by his novel Tarry Flynn (1948), which was said to be “not only the best but the only authentic account of life as it was lived in Ireland this century.” This too was briefly banned, but Tarry Flynn was dramatised later by PJ O’Connor and was staged by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and in Dundalk in 1967. Conall Morrison made a second dramatic adaptation of Tarry Flynn for the Abbey Theatre in 1997.

Kavanagh and his brother Peter, a university professor and also a writer, established a weekly paper, Kavanagh’s Weekly, which was edited by the poet. They called it a “journal of literature and politics” and it ran for 13 issues between 12 April and 5 July 1952. Patrick Kavanagh contributed most of the articles and poems, usually under pseudonyms.

In 1952, a Dublin paper, The Leader, published a profile that depicted Kavanagh as an alcoholic sponger, and he sued for libel. When the case came to trial in 1954, Kavanagh was harshly cross-examined by John A. Costello, defending The Leader, and he lost. The following year he was diagnosed with cancer and had a lung removed.

At this low point, Kavanagh experienced a sort of personal and poetic renewal. Recent Poems (1958) was followed by Come Dance with Kitty Stobling (1960). These two collections include some of his best-known shorter poems. His Collected Poems was followed by Collected Prose (1967).

He married Katherine Barry Moloney in April 1967 and they lived in Waterloo Road, Dublin, until he died on 30 November later that year.

When The Irish Times took a poll of “the nation’s favourite poems” in 2000, 10 of Kavanagh’s poems were listed in the first 50. His poem ‘Raglan Road,’ has been recorded by Luke Kelly and The Dubliners and many other artists, and it remains an ever-popular song.

However, at this time of the year I think of Kavanagh’s poem ‘A Christmas Childhood,’ in which he develops images from his childhood already recalled in The Green Fool, and now recalls “In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland” when he “was six Christmases of age.”

Its rustic realism recalls Tom Kettle’s war-time poetry and his

... dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,
and for the secret Scripture of the poor.”

A rusty gate and an old shed on a farm in Co Monaghan ... there is a rustic realism in the poetry of Patrick Kavangh (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

There is an evocation of the stable birth in Bethlehem at an early stage in the poem when he talks about

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven’s gable ...

and of the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child when he recalls:

There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

His mother becomes an image Christ’s mother:

Outside the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

There are echoes of TS Eliot’s “three trees against a low sky” in ‘Journey of the Magi’ as Kavanagh recalls how:

I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — The Three Wise Kings

or of Eliot’s “Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver” when he talks of how

I nicked six nicks on the door-post.

There is a more adult collection of reflections on Christmas and the Christmas season, however, in his poem ‘Advent,’ which is my selected poem this morning.

“We’ll hear it in ... the streets where the village boys are lurching” ... a street scene in the village of Glaslough, Co Monaghan (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Advent, by Patrick Kavanagh

We have tested and tasted too much, lover –
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child’s soul, we’ll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.

And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

O after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning –
We’ll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we’ll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won’t we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason’s payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God’s breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour –
And Christ comes with a January flower.

‘And Christ comes with a January flower’ – Patrick Kavanagh ... flowers in my garden in Knocklyon this week (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

Tomorrow: ‘The Magi,’ by WB Yeats.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Christmas Poems (20): Song at the Year’s Turning by RS Thomas

‘Lost in the world’s wood / ... under naked boughs / The frost comes to barb your broken vows’ – RS Thomas (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

As we move from celebrating Christmas and the New Year to facing the stark realities of the year ahead, my choice of a Christmas poem this morning [3 January] is ‘Song at the Year’s Turning,’ written in 1955 by the Welsh priest-poet RS Thomas, and the title poem of the collection that brought him to the attention of the wider world beyond his own Wales.

The Revd Ronald Stewart Thomas (1913-2000) is one of most important Welsh poets of the 20th century, alongside Dylan Thomas. This priest poet writes about his own people in a style that can be compared with the harsh and rugged terrain they inhabit.

John Betjeman, in his introduction to Song at the Year’s Turning (1955), the collection of Thomas’s poetry that brought him to the attention of the wider literary world – and that includes this morning’s poem – predicted Thomas would be remembered long after Betjeman was forgotten. Professor M. Wynn Thomas said: “He was the Alexander Solzhenitsyn of Wales ... He was one of the major English language and European poets of the 20th century.”

Saint Michael’s College, Llandaff, where RS Thomas trained as an ordinand (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2007)

RS Thomas was born in Cardiff in 1913, and his family moved in 1918 to Holyhead, where his father worked with a ferry boat company operating between Wales and Ireland. He studied classics at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and studied theology at Saint Michael’s College, Llandaff, before being ordained deacon in the Church in Wales in 1936 and priest in 1937.

Between 1936 and 1978, he would serve in parishes in six different towns, acquiring first-hand knowledge of farming life and becoming familiar with a host of characters and settings for his poetry. As a curate in the mining village of Chirk in Denbighshire (1936-1940), he met his wife, Mildred (Elsi) Eldridge, an English artist. They married in 1940, and for all their married life, until Elsi died in 1991, they lived on a tiny income and lacked the comforts of modern life, largely by his choice.

From 1942 to 1954, he was the Rector of Manafon, near Welshpool in rural Montgomeryshire. There he began to study Welsh, although he later said he learnt Welsh too late in life to write poetry in it. At Manafon he published his first three volumes of poetry, The Stones of the Field, An Acre of Land and The Minister.

In 1954, he became Vicar of Saint Michael’s, Eglwysfach, in Cardiganshire (1954-1967). A year later, he achieved wider recognition as a poet and was introduced to a wider audience with his fourth book, Song at the Year’s Turning: Poems 1942-1945 (1955), a collected edition of his first three volumes, introduced by John Betjeman.

In the 1960s, he worked in a predominantly Welsh-speaking community and he later wrote two prose works in Welsh, Neb (Nobody), an autobiography written in the third person, and Blwyddyn yn Llŷn (A Year in Llŷn).

From 1967 to 1972, Thomas was the Vicar of Saint Hywyn’s, Aberdaron, at the western tip of the Llŷn Peninsula in Gwynedd, with Saint Mary, Bodferin. The Llŷn Peninsula is the point in Wales that is closest to Ireland. Finally, he was Rector of Rhiw with Llanfaelrhys (1972-1978). He retired in Easter 1978, and he and his wife moved to Y Rhiw, a beautiful part of Wales. However, their cottage was unheated and the temperature sometimes dropped below freezing.

In retirement, he became more active in politics and campaigns, and he was a strong advocate of Welsh nationalism, although he never supported Plaid Cymru. He was a keen supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and described himself as a pacifist. But he also supported the fire-bombings of English-owned holiday cottages in rural Wales, arguing: “What is one death against the death of the whole Welsh nation?”

His eightieth birthday was marked by the publication of Collected Poems, 1945-1990. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, but that year the prize went to Seamus Heaney.

When he died in 2000 at the age of 87, his life and poetry were celebrated in Westminster Abbey with readings from Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Gillian Clarke and John Burnside. His ashes are buried close to the door of Saint John’s Church, Porthmadog, Gwynedd.

Spiritual questioning and cultural scepticism

The beauty of the landscape is ever-present in the poems of RS Thomas, marked by spiritual questioning and cultural scepticism (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Bishop Richard Clarke has described him as “a rather terrifying Welsh Anglican clergyman who evidently scared the living daylights out of his parishioners but who was also, and unquestionably, one of the greatest poets in the English language over the past century.”

Thomas was not always charitable and was known for being awkward and taciturn, to the point that he was even accused of being “formidable, bad-tempered, and apparently humourless.” Indeed, he admitted himself that there is a “lack of love for human beings” in his poetry.

When he began to write about the Welsh countryside and its people, Thomas was influenced by Edward Thomas, Fiona Macleod, and WB Yeats. Fearing that poetry was becoming a dying art, inaccessible to those who most needed it, “he attempted to make spiritually minded poems relevant within, and relevant to, a science-minded, post-industrial world,” to represent that world both in form and in content even as he rejected its machinations.

His earlier works focus on the personal stories of his parishioners, the farm labourers and working men and their wives, challenging the cosy view of the traditional pastoral poem with harsh and vivid descriptions of rural lives. The beauty of the landscape is ever-present, but it is never a compensation for the low pay or monotonous conditions of farm work.

As his poetry develops, Thomas moves from the first impact of rural life on a young curate to a more introspective examination of his own agonies and difficulties. His later poetry is marked by spiritual questioning and cultural scepticism.

Thomas’s poetry is often harsh and austere, written in plain, sombre language, with a meditative quality. He uses simple words and short nouns, in a spare, ascetic style that reflects his disenchantment with the modern world and the scientific age. His poems are filled with compassion, love, doubt, and irony. Despite the often grim nature of his subject matter, his poems are ultimately life-affirming.

Thomas the priest poet

As a priest, Thomas imbues his poetry with a consistently religious theme, often speaking of the lonely and often barren predicament of the priest, who is as isolated in his parish as Iago Prytherch – an archetypal rural Welshman found in many of his poems – is on the bare hillside.

He believes one of the important functions of poetry is to embody religious truth, and his work expresses a religious conviction uncommon in modern poetry. Archbishop Rowan Williams – also an acclaimed Welsh priest poet – says Thomas, like Soren Kierkegaard, was a “great articulator of uneasy faith.”

An early poem, ‘In a Country Church,’ from Song at the Year’s Turning (1955), announces some of the themes that would dominate his later poetry:

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body.

The opening stanza is a powerful image of silence. The only sounds come not from words but from the wind, not from the wings of angels but of bats. While there is no word from God, the poet gropes for a signal of grace and wrests from the silence a vision of a wintry image of love and crucifixion – perhaps a divine response.

Thomas returns to this theme in ‘In Church,’ a poem from his collection Pieta (1966):

Often I try
To analyze the quality
Of its silences. Is this where God hides
From my searching? I have stopped to listen,
After the few people have gone,
To the air recomposing itself
For vigil. It has waited like this
Since the stones grouped themselves about it.
These are the hard ribs
Of a body that our prayers have failed
To animate. Shadows advance
From their corners to take possession
Of places the light held
For an hour. The bats resume
Their business. The uneasiness of the pews
Ceases. There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

In this poem. Thomas confronts the paradox of presence and absence, faith and doubt. DZ Phillips, in RS Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God, reads the last lines as a realisation that the poet-priest “has to die to his old questions. It is only by dying to the old questions that wonder can come in at the right place.”

“... and throw/ on its illumined walls the shadow/ of someone greater than I can understand?” – RS Thomas (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

But did he feel lonely, isolated, or even trapped in parish ministry? He writes, in ‘The Empty Church’:

They laid this stone trap
for him, enticing him with candles,
as though he would come like some huge moth
out of the darkness to beat there.
Ah, he had burned himself
before in the human flame
and escaped, leaving the reason
torn. He will not come any more
to our lure. Why, then, do I kneel still
striking my prayers on a stone
heart? Is it in hope one
of them will ignite yet and throw
on its illumined walls the shadow
of someone greater than I can understand?

Thomas has been described as “not a poet of the transfiguration, of the resurrection, of human holiness,” but as “a poet of the Cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness.”

For Tony Brown of the University of Wales, Thomas’s emphasis remains on the cross, trusted and finally understood as “the ultimate demonstration of love defeating time and mortality.” Rowan Williams concludes that “God, for Thomas, is both the frustration of every expectation and the only exit from despair. And that God is encountered only in the embrace of finitude.”

“Light’s peculiar grace/ In cold splendour robes this tortured place” – RS Thomas (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Song at the Year’s Turning by RS Thomas

Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.
The props crumble; the familiar ways
Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.
The heart’s flower withers at the root.
Bury it then, in history’s sterile dust.
The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.

Love deceived him; what is there to say
The mind brought you by a better way
To this despair? Lost in the world’s wood
You cannot stanch the bright menstrual blood.
The earth sickens; under naked boughs
The frost comes to barb your broken vows.

Is there blessing? Light’s peculiar grace
In cold splendour robes this tortured place
For strange marriage. Voices in the wind
Weave a garland where a mortal sinned.
Winter rots you; who is there to blame?
The new grass shall purge you in its flame.

Tomorrow:

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Christmas Poems (19): Ring out the old, ring in the new, by Alfred Lord Tennyson

“Ring out the old, ring in the new,/ Ring, happy bells, across the snow ...” the bells of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, in the snows of last January (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

In the Calendar of the Church of England, today [2 January] commemorates Saint Basil the Great (379) and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (389), Bishops and Teachers of the Faith. Today, many of us are still ringing in the New Year, even if we are returning to work this morning after a long holiday. How many of us heard over the last few days those words written in 1850 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892):

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

For my Christmas poem this morning I have chosen ‘Ring Out, Wild Bells,’ which was published by Tennyson in 1850, the year he was appointed Poet Laureate. It forms part of ‘In Memoriam,’ Tennyson’s elegy to Arthur Henry Hallam, his sister’s fiancé, who had died at the age of 22.

Although Tennyson has probably gone out of fashion, many of us remember reading at school poems such as ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ ‘Crossing the Bar,’ ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ ‘Locksley Hall’ and ‘Ulysses.’ A number of phrases from Tennyson’s writings have become commonplace in the English language, including “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all,” “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die,” “My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure,” “Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers,” and “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.”

But for a long time I had forgotten ‘Ring Out, Wild Bells’ until I was reintroduced to listening to Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man, where the second, seventh and eighth stanzas are set to music by Jenkins in the finale (‘Better is Peace’).

Tennyson was born in Lincolnshire in 1809, the son and grandson of Lincolnshire rectors. His father, the Revd George Clayton Tennyson, was the Rector of Somersby; his maternal grandfather, the Revd Stephen Fytche, was the Vicar of Saint James’s, Louth, and of Withcall (1780).

Trinity College, Cambridge ... Tennyson entered as an undergraduate in 1827 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

After attending local grammar schools, Tennyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where Byron and Thackeray were undergraduates too in the early 19th century.

At Cambridge, he joined the Cambridge Apostles, a discussion group that began in Trinity in the 1820s and 1830s, and that has played a part in forming the minds of many leading members of the British intelligensia. Other “apostles” around that time included George Tomlinson, later Bishop of Gibraltar, the theologian and Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice, Charles Darwin’s brother Erasmus Alvey Darwin, the future Archbishop of Dublin Richard Chenevix Trench, and the Dublin-born theologian Fenton John Anthony Hort. Later members included AN Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, GM Trevelyan, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Rupert Brooke, Lionel Penrose, Eric Hobsbawn, Jonathan Miller and Anthony Kelly – and the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.

Soon after going up to Cambridge, Tennyson published his first collection, Poems by Two Brothers (1827). Two years later, in 1829, he was awarded the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge for ‘Timbuctoo,’ and in 1830 he published the collection Poems Chiefly Lyrical, which included two of his most celebrated poem, ‘Claribel’ and ‘Mariana.’

However, the death of his father in 1831 forced Tennyson to leave Cambridge without receiving his degree, and he lived with his mother at his father’s former rectory for some years. In 1833, he published his second book of poetry, which included ‘The Lady of Shalott.’

He later moved to High Beach, near Epping Forest in Essex, and from there to Chapel House in Twickenham. His two-volume collection in 1842 included ‘Locksley Hall’ and ‘Ulysses.’ In ‘Ulysses,’ Tennyson had a very different understanding about Odysseus and his return home than the approach of Constantine Cavafy in yesterday’s poem, ‘Ithaka’ [1 January].

Tennyson reached the height of his career and his fame in 1850 with the publication of his masterpiece, In Memoriam AHH, a tribute to his closest friend at Cambridge, Arthur Henry Hallam.

In Memoriam was an immediate success, and that year Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate in succession to William Wordsworth. His later works included ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1855), and in 1885 he was given a peerage.

Tennyson was born into a strongly clerical family, and I mentioned on Saturday [31 December] how some influences from Tennyson are reflected in TS Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding.’ But Tennyson’s views of Christianity were often unconventional. In In Memoriam, he wrote: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.” In Maud (1855), he said: “The churches have killed their Christ.” In Locksley Hall Sixty Years After he wrote: “Christian love among the churches look’d the twin of heathen hate.” In his play, Becket, he declared: “We are self-uncertain creatures, and we may, Yea, even when we know not, mix our spites and private hates with our defence of Heaven.”

Tennyson died on 6 October 1892 at Aldworth, at the age of 83, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. A memorial was erected in All Saints’ Church, Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight, where the rest of his family is buried, and there is a large statue of him the ante-chapel in Trinity College Cambridge.

Tennyson’s statue in the Ante-Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

According to a popular story, the “wild bells” in the poem were the bells of the church at Waltham Abbey. The story is told that Tennyson was staying nearby at High Beach when he heard the abbey bells being rung. It was a stormy night, and some accounts say the bells were being swung by the wind rather than deliberately.

However, Tennyson may also have been influenced by his memories of the bells in the Clock Tower in the Great Court at Trinity College, Cambridge. The clock strikes the hour twice, first on a low note and then on a much higher one – Wordsworth had earlier described it in his ‘Prelude’ as the clock “with a male and female voice.”

The ‘Great Court Run’ involves attempting to run around Great Court within the time it takes the clock to strike the hour of 12, including the preparatory chiming of the four quarters and the two sets of 12 as the clock strikes each hour twice. The course is 347.5 metres long and striking the hour at 12 can take between 43 and 45 seconds. Great Court is the largest court or quad in either Cambridge or Oxford, and Trinity undergraduates regularly attempt this feat, while athletically-inclined members of Trinity attempt the run every year at noon on the day of the Matriculation Dinner. The Great Court Run forms a central scene in David Putnam’s film Chariots of Fire (1981), although it was filmed in Eton and not in Trinity.

Despite Tennyson’s often belligerent nationalism, this poem expresses interesting values that make this an appropriate poem to select this morning. Despite Tennyson’s unconventional ideas about Christianity, he concludes with visionary hope in the prayer: “Ring in the Christ that is to be.”

The bells in the Clock Tower in Trinity College, Cambridge, strike the hour twice, first on a low note and then on a much higher one (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Ring out the old, ring in the new, by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Tomorrow: ‘Song at the Year’s Turning’ by RS Thomas

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin

Christmas Poems (18): Ithaka by CP Cavafy

The naming and circumcision of the Christ Child, depicted in a stained-glass window in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

Patrick Comerford

Today is New Year’s Day, a day for new beginnings, for renewing relationships, for new beginnings, and for setting out on new ventures.

In the Church Calendar, this is not the beginning of the Church Year – the Church Year begins with Advent. Instead, today [1 January] we recall the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus.

The celebration of this festival marks three events: firstly, the naming of the infant; secondly, the sign of the covenant between God and Abraham “and his children for ever,” thus Christ’s keeping of the Law; and thirdly, traditionally the first shedding of the Christ’s blood.

The most significant of these in the Gospels is the name itself, which means “Yahweh saves” and so is linked to the question asked by Moses of God: “What is your name?” “I am who I am,” was the reply, thus the significance of Christ’s words: “Before Abraham was, I am,” or the “I AM” sayings in the Fourth Gospel.

The readings in the Revised Common Lectionary for the Eucharist are: Numbers 6: 22-27; Psalm 148; Galatians 4: 4-7; Luke 2: 15-21. In Gospel reading, Saint Luke recalls the Circumcision and Naming of Christ in a short, terse summary account in one, single verse: “After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2: 21).

This feast has been observed in the church since at least the sixth century, and the circumcision of Christ has been a common subject in Christian art since the tenth century. A popular 14th century work, the Golden Legend, explains the Circumcision as the first time the Blood of Christ is shed, and thus the beginning of the process of the redemption, and a demonstration too that Christ is fully human.

Saint Luke does not say where the Christ Child was circumcised, although artists (Rembrandt in particular) have often depicting the ritual taking place in the Temple, linking the Circumcision with the Presentation, so that Christ’s suffering begins and ends in Jerusalem.

The beginning of redemption, the beginning of the New Covenant, the beginning of the New Year … as TS Eliot opens and closes ‘East Coker’:

In my beginning is my end
… In my end is my beginning

“In my beginning is my end … In my end is my beginning” … a sign for the old year and the new year in Saint John’s Hospital, Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

If Eliot unites our beginnings and our ends, then for the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), in his poem ‘Ithaka’ (1911) – which I have chosen as my Christmas poem this morning –the beginning of the journey is seen as important as the end itself, the journey as important as the destination.

The harbour at Pythagoreio on the island of Samos ... for Cavafy, the beginning of the journey is as important as the end, the journey as important as the destination (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

When I was in Kephallonia some years ago, it was impossible not to want to set sail for Ithaka, and when I was in Alexandria it was impossible not to go in search through the backstreets for Cavafy’s home in the former Greek Quarter. The Alexandria Cavafy writes about in his poems has now mostly vanished, and there are few Greeks left in the city today, alongside Cavafy’s apartment, which is maintained as a museum and library by the Greek government, the hospital he was treated in, a few sea front cafes, and a few churches, including Saint Saba, the seat of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria.

As I visited his former apartment, I was told again how, in his dying days, Cavafy had asked: “Where could I live better? Under me is a house of ill repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is the church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital, where we die.”

Some 20 years after Cavafy’s death in 1933, WH Auden spoke of his “unique perspective on the world” and his “unique tone of voice.” The Greek poet George Seferis conceded that he was the most important poet in the 20th century writing in Greek. Auden spoke of the unique capacity of Cavafy’s work to survive translation, so that the reader who has no Greek still feels on reading a poem by Cavafy that “nobody else could possibly have written it.”

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis regarded Cavafy’s ‘Ithaka’ as one of her favourite poems and asked for Maurice Templesman to read it at her funeral in May 1994. He concluded his reading by saying: “And now the journey is over, too short, alas, too short. It was filled with adventure and wisdom, laughter and love, gallantry and grace. So farewell, farewell.” I was in Crete at the time, and when the New York Times reprinted the poem, it inspired a rush of sales of Cavafy’s Collected Poems, with new printings and new English translations.

That sudden rise in interest in Cavafy, brought about by such a simple poem, shows how most of us have a inborn ability to love poetry. Cavafy paints captivating images of ships sailing into harbours on summer mornings, of exotic bazaars and souks. Yet the lasting image is of the journey of life being of value in itself, rather than any of the honours or recognition we strive in vain to achieve.

Penelope waiting for Odysseus … Μαριάννα Βαλλιάνου, Η επιστροφή, Mariánna Valliánou, ‘The Return’

In the poem ‘Ithaka,’ Cavafy transforms Homer’s account of the return of Odysseus from the Trojan War to his home island. This transformation is a variation on how Dante and Tennyson handle the same theme. They offer an Odysseus who arrives home after a long absence only to find Ithaka less than fully satisfying and who soon makes plans to travel forth a second time.

However, Cavafy answers them by telling Odysseus that arriving in Ithaka is what he is destined for, and that he must keep that always in mind: one’s destiny, the inevitable end of the journey, is a thing to be faced for what it is, without illusions.

“May there be many a summer morning when,/ with what pleasure, what joy,/ you come into harbours seen for the first time” … the Venetian harbour in Réthymnon in Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford 2010)

The meaning of Ithaka is in the voyage home that it inspired. It is not reaching home or again escaping its limitations once there that should occupy Odysseus so much as those elevated thoughts and rare excitement that are a product of the return voyage.

As Edmund Keeley says, this new perspective is what frees the voyager’s soul of the monsters, obstacles and angry gods, so that when the voyager reaches his Ithaka he will be rich not with what Ithaka has to offer him on his return, but with all that he has gained along the way, including his coming to know that this perspective on things, this unhurried devotion to pleasure and knowledge, is Ithaka’s ultimate value.

“As you set out for Ithaka/ hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery” (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

Ιθάκη, Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης

Σα βγεις στον πηγαιμό για την Ιθάκη,
να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος,
γεμάτος περιπέτειες, γεμάτος γνώσεις.
Τους Λαιστρυγόνας και τους Κύκλωπας,
τον θυμωμένο Ποσειδώνα μη φοβάσαι,
τέτοια στον δρόμο σου ποτέ σου δεν θα βρεις,
αν μέν’ η σκέψις σου υψηλή, αν εκλεκτή
συγκίνησις το πνεύμα και το σώμα σου αγγίζει.
Τους Λαιστρυγόνας και τους Κύκλωπας,
τον άγριο Ποσειδώνα δεν θα συναντήσεις,
αν δεν τους κουβανείς μες στην ψυχή σου,
αν η ψυχή σου δεν τους στήνει εμπρός σου.

Να εύχεσαι νάναι μακρύς ο δρόμος.
Πολλά τα καλοκαιρινά πρωιά να είναι
που με τι ευχαρίστησι, με τι χαρά
θα μπαίνεις σε λιμένας πρωτοειδωμένους
να σταματήσεις σ’ εμπορεία Φοινικικά,
και τες καλές πραγμάτειες ν’ αποκτήσεις,
σεντέφια και κοράλλια, κεχριμπάρια κ’ έβενους,
και ηδονικά μυρωδικά κάθε λογής,
όσο μπορείς πιο άφθονα ηδονικά μυρωδικά
σε πόλεις Aιγυπτιακές πολλές να πας,
να μάθεις και να μάθεις απ’ τους σπουδασμένους.

Πάντα στον νου σου νάχεις την Ιθάκη.
Το φθάσιμον εκεί είν’ ο προορισμός σου.
Aλλά μη βιάζεις το ταξείδι διόλου.
Καλλίτερα χρόνια πολλά να διαρκέσει
και γέρος πια ν’ αράξεις στο νησί,
πλούσιος με όσα κέρδισες στον δρόμο,
μη προσδοκώντας πλούτη να σε δώσει η Ιθάκη.

Η Ιθάκη σ’ έδωσε τ’ ωραίο ταξείδι.
Χωρίς αυτήν δεν θάβγαινες στον δρόμο.
Άλλα δεν έχει να σε δώσει πια.

Κι αν πτωχική την βρεις, η Ιθάκη δεν σε γέλασε.
Έτσι σοφός που έγινες, με τόση πείρα,
ήδη θα το κατάλαβες η Ιθάκες τι σημαίνουν

Ithaka, Constantine P. Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon – you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbours seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind –
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

– Constantine Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

Tomorrow: ‘Ring out the old, ring in the new,’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Christmas Poems (17): from Little Gidding, by TS Eliot

“What we call the beginning is often the end ...” – TS Eliot. A lakeside winter scene on the Farnham Estate in Co Cavan (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

Patrick Comerford

As we prepare to say farewell to 2011 and to welcome 2012, I am reminded of TS Eliot’s words in ‘Little Gidding’:

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice ...
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

“ ... last year’s words belong to last year’s language/ And next year’s words await another voice” – TS Eliot ... tangled bicycles abandoned in the snow in Dublin’s Temple Bar, Dublin, last winter (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

And so, for my Christmas poem this morning, I have chosen the last part of Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding,’ the fourth and final poem in his Four Quartets. The Four Quartets – ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936), ‘East Coker’ (1940), ‘The Dry Salvages’ (1941) and ‘Little Gidding’ (1942) – are best understood within the framework of Christian thinking, theology, tradition and history. In these four poems, Eliot draws on the theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, and mystics, such as Saint John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.

The “deeper communion” sought in ‘East Coker,’ the “hints and whispers of children, the sickness that must grow worse in order to find healing,” and the exploration that inevitably leads us home all point to the pilgrim’s path along the road to sanctification.

The Nicholas Ferrar Window in the chapel of Clare College, Cambridge

Eliot visited the village of Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire only once, in May 1936. Three centuries earlier, it had been the home of a religious community established in 1626 by Nicholas Ferrar, and the Ferrar household lived there according to High Church principles and the Book of Common Prayer. Charles I visited the community in 1633, and he returned in 1646, fleeing Parliamentary troops.

The community at Little Gidding maintained 24 hours of prayer, including long hours of night vigils. Little Gidding was a place “where prayer has been valid” and where “prayer is more/Than an order of words”:

… You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

Eliot started writing ‘Little Gidding,’ ¬after completing ‘The Dry Salvages.’ However, his work on ‘Little Gidding’ was delayed because of his declining health and his dissatisfaction with earlier drafts. ‘Little Gidding’ was not finished until September 1942, and was published the following month in the New English Weekly.

In ‘Little Gidding,’ Eliot relies on ideas also found in ‘In Memoriam,’ written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1850. But he also imagines at the beginning a meeting with meets Dante; and there are hints throughout the poem too of Shakespeare, Swift, Shelley, Mallarmé, Ezra Pound and WB Yeats,

As he imagines meeting Dante in the fires of war-time London, Eliot also recalls Brunetto Latini in the depths of Hades who had cried out to Dante in Canto XV of the Inferno. The dead master warns Eliot of the fate of his poetry:

and pray they [your words] be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both Bad and good. Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.

The tomb of Lancelot Andrewes in Southwark Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In ‘Little Gidding,’ Eliot draws deeply on the Catholic faith as set out by the Caroline Divines, particularly by Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), who also influenced his Ariel poem, ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1930). Andrewes was also one of the key translators of the Authorised Version of the Bible, whose 400th anniversary we have been marking this year.

He echoes Lancelot Andrewes in his Christmas Sermon of 1618 – which Eliot constantly draws on in his work – in paradoxical lines that crystallise the significance of the Incarnation:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

… A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

Set in mid-winter, which is like a “spring is its own season,” when “the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,” ‘Little Gidding speaks of this “dark time of the year,” with its “windless cold,” hedgerows that are white from snow rather than the May bloom.

But, while Eliot’s one and only visit to Little Gidding was in May 1936, the poem has hints of being set in these days shortly after Christmas – “Last season’s fruit is eaten/ And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail./ For last year’s words belong to last year’s language/ And next year’s words await another voice” – and at the height of the London Blitz. Eliot was an air raid warden when the most devastating strike his London on the evening of 29 December 1940. German aircraft attacked the City of London that night with incendiary and high explosive bombs, causing a firestorm that has been called the “Second Great Fire of London.”

“... You are here to kneel/ Where prayer has been valid” – TS Eliot ... The Church of Saint John the Evangelist in Little Gidding

Stepping through the devastation, Eliot imagines revisiting the chapel where Nicholas Ferrar and his community had lived and prayed in the past:

... You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
...
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

The destruction of the Little Gidding Community 300 years earlier did not bring an end to either prayer or hope. Just as he is caught between two years, Eliot sees himself caught between war and peace, between devastation and the promise of new life, between two worlds, between two periods of time, but with the promise of renewal and transfiguration:

... History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

Despite the destruction all around him, Eliot is reassured by the words of Julian of Norwich:

All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.

He links the end of the year, with the end of Christ’s life on the Cross, imagining “three men ... on the scaffold.”

In ‘Little Gidding’ Eliot emphasises, time and again, time and our place within it. He focuses on the unity of the past, the present, and the future, and sees how the eternal is found in the present and how history exists in a pattern.

He concludes that in sacrifice an individual may die into new life. But out of the frost and fire come life, the fire of destruction and the rose of perfection are united, and the rose of the soul can blossom, for then “the fire and the rose are one.”

Remembering Little Gidding

The Church of Saint John the Evangelist in Little Gidding

Eliot was buried in East Coker, but in 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, he was commemorated in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey with the installation in the floor of a large stone inscribed with words from ‘Little Gidding’:

... the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond
the language of the living.

The Society of the Friends of Little Gidding was founded in 1946 by Alan Maycock, with TS Eliot as one of the members, to celebrate the life of Nicholas Ferrar and his community in Little Gidding, to help maintain the church there, and to arrange pilgrimages, visits and hospitality.
.
A trust was founded in the 1970s to buy the farmhouse for a new community and as a place of retreat. This community become the Society of Christ the Sower, but was dissolved in 1998. The Society of the Friends of Little Gidding was re-established in 2003. Ferrar House is owned by the Little Gidding Trust, while the church is the responsibility of the Parochial Church Council. The friends also work closely with the TS Eliot Society.

Little Gidding V, by TS Eliot

“And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ When the tongues of flame are in-folded/ Into the crowned knot of fire /And the fire and the rose are one” ... sunset in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2011)

V

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Tomorrow: ‘Ithaka’by CP Cavafy.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Christmas Poems (16): On Christmas Day to My Heart by Clement Paman

Snow in Cloister Court, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge ... Clement Paman was a student here in the 1620s and 1630s

Patrick Comerford

This second last day of the year, 30 December, has no other name, number or commemoration in the calendar, apart from being the “sixth day of Christmas” when my true love sent to me “six geese a-laying.” But even by today, most people fail to get that far in this Christmas song, if they ever remembered that many lines.

And so, for my Christmas poem this morning I have chosen ‘On Christmas Day to My Heart,’ a poem written around 1660 or 1661 by Clement Paman (ca 1612-1664) and was first published in Dublin in 1663. Paman and his poetry are largely forgotten today – forgotten more than today’s ‘six geese a-laying’ may be. But I have chosen him because of his links with the Caroline Divines, with the Church of Ireland and with Sidney Sussex, College, Cambridge, where I have stayed regularly during the last four years.

This poem is difficult, almost turgid, to read today, with a now-awkward reference to stretching tight by turning a screw, especially to increase the tension or pitch of a musical instrument by winding up the screws or keys:

Today,
Then, screw thee high,
My heart, up to
The angels’ cry;
Sing ‘glory’, do

The reference is so awkward that it needed a footnotes in the programme for the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1999. Yet this poem also contains these memorably beautiful lines:

Today,
A shed that’s thatched
(Yet straws can sing)
Holds God.

As a poet, Paman is sometimes associated with the “Cavalier Poets,” who include Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick and Thomas Carew, and he has been described as “perhaps the most talented poet of the 17th century never to have had a poem published over his name.”

The Pamans appear to have been well-off, untitled Suffolk gentry, and Clement Paman was born in Chevington, Suffolk, in 1610 or 1611. His name is sometimes spelled Payman in Church of Ireland records. The Paman family is listed in the parish registers of Chevington, and his father, Robert Paman, probably lived at Dunstall Green in Dalham. He may have been related to the physicist, Henry Paman of Saint John’s College, who was at Cambridge at the same time.

Snow in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge ... here Clement Paman was a student of Samuel Ward

Clement Paman was educated at Lavenham School and Bury School. Atv the age of 16, he was admitted on 16 February 1628 to Sidney Sussex College, which at first had been a Puritan foundation. Earlier students at Sidney Sussex included Oliver Cromwell, who left in 1617 without taking a degree, and Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester, who graduated in 1622 and who was a key commander of the Parliamentary forces in the English Civil War.

But Paman was not unusual among Sidney Sussex students for his political and religious views: John Bramhall, who had been there ahead of Cromwell, became the Archbishop of Armagh at the Caroline Restoration.

At Sidney Sussex, Paman was a student of Samuel Ward (1572-1643), Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. Ward began life as a moderate Calvinist, but as a loyal Anglican he suffered persecution during the Civil War. When Ward died after being imprisoned in Saint John’s College, he was buried in the chapel in Sidney Sussex.

Paman obtained his BA in 1632, his MA in 1635 and later became a Doctor of Divinity at Cambridge University, and received the degree DD ad eundem at Trinity College Dublin in 1661. One of his earliest works is a tribute written after the death of a young Irish poet who was his contemporary in Cambridge: ‘Poem on the Death of Edward King.’ King, who was also the subject of John Milton’s ‘Lycidas,’ was born in Ireland in 1612, and was admitted to Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1626. Four years later, he was elected a fellow in 1632, and he intended to proceed to ordination. But his career was cut short by the tragedy that inspired Paman’s and Milton’s poems. In 1637, he set out for Ireland to visit his family, but on 10 August the ship struck a rock off the Welsh coast, and King was drowned.

Some sources say Paman first came to Ireland along with John Bramhall as the chaplain to the Lord Deputy, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford. But this detail is confusing as Strafford was Lord Deputy from 1632 to 1639, while Paman was still in Cambridge.

But Paman seems to have arrived in Ireland by 1640 at the latest, for David Crookes, in his Clergy of Kilmore, Elphin and Ardagh identiifes Clement Paman with Cleremont Panham, who was Rector of Saint John’s, Sligo, in 1640. However, this rectory was lost in a subsequent dispute, and he returned to England.

John Cleveland’s epitaph on the death of the Earl of Strafford, ‘Here lies Wise and Valiant Dust’ (1647), has recently been ascribed to Paman:

Here lies wise and valiant dust
Huddled up ’twixt fit and just,
Strafford, who was hurried hence
’Twixt treason and convenience.
He spent his time here in a mist,
A Papist, yet a Calvinist;
His Prince’s nearest joy and grief,
He had, yet wanted all relief;
The prop and ruin of the state;
The people’s violent love and hate;
One in extremes loved and abhorred.
Riddles lie here, or in a word –
Here lies blood; and let it lie
Speechless still and never cry.

From 1648 to 1653, Paman was Vicar of Thatcham in Berkshire, in the Diocese of Oxford. During that time, he wrote of how he was inspired by Edward Benlowes’s poetic masterpiece Theophila, or Love’s Sacrifice, a Divine Poem (1652): “All my pleasure is, yt I have obeyed you, & somewhat rays’d my owne heart wth these imaginations.”

In 1653, Paman’s right to his Berkshire vicarage was disputed. He lost the living, and remained without a church appointment until the end of the Cromwellian era and his return to Ireland in 1661.

The ruins of Elphin Cathedral in Co Roscommon

Following the end of the Civil War and the Caroline Restoration, Paman was appointed Prebendary of Monmohenock in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, in 1661, and he was Dean of Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Elphin, in Co Roscommon, and Vicar of Saint John’s, Sligo, from 1661, and Vicar of Castledermot, Co Kildare, in the Diocese of Glendalough, from 1662 until his death in 1664.

During his time as Dean of Elphin, the cathedral – which had been destroyed during the rebellion of 1641 – was rebuilt by Bishop John Parker (1661-1667), and in the following century the poet Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) attended the school attached to the cathedral.

After his death, a memorial to him was erected in the chapel of Sidney Sussex College, although I have failed to find it over the past four years.

The chapel and Chapel Court in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Peter Davidson, in his introduction to Poetry and Revolution, describes Paman as a “moderate Protestant.” However, in Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order, Margo Todd calls him an “ultra-royalist cleric.” She says his writings on Christian charity are liberal for their time, and cites his idea that alms should be given “even to the loose and impious.”

While he was Dean of Elphin, Paman published Poems by Several Hands in Dublin in 1663. However, only three of his poems were published in the 17th century and the majority of his poems remained in manuscript collections in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

His poems are mainly of a devotional nature. Perhaps the best-known is ‘On Christmas Day to My Heart,’ a poem written ca 1660. His other poems include ‘Good Friday,’ ‘On Christmas Day 1661,’ and ‘On his death.’ He also wrote a lengthy tribute to the dramatist and poet Ben Jonson (1572-1637). Peter Davidson notes that Paman’s style is complex, “abounding in extended metaphors” and more “overly Baroque” than some of his contemporaries, being a development of the “epigrammatic style of Jonson.”

King’s College, Cambridge ... ‘On Christmas Day to My Heart’ was included in the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve 1999 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2010)

Today’s poem, ‘On Christmas Day to My Heart,’ was included in the Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1940) and in Norman Ault’s collection, A Treasury of Unfamiliar Lyrics (1938). But until the 1990s, Paman remained unknown except among those interested in the manuscript collections of 17th century poetry.

There was a renewed interest in his work with the publication of the anthology, Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse (1998). A year later, ‘On Christmas Day to My Heart’ was set to music by Richard Rodney Bennett for the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge in 1999.

On Christmas Day to My Heart by Clement Paman

Today,/ A shed that’s thatched/ (Yet straws can sing)/ Holds God … the altarpiece by the Venetian painter Giovanni Pittoni in the chapel of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today,
Hark! Heaven sings;
Stretch, tune, my heart!
(For hearts have strings
May bear their part)
And though thy lute were bruised i’ the fall,
Bruised hearts may reach an humble pastoral.

Today,
Shepherds rejoice,
And angels do
No more: thy voice
Can reach that too:
Bring them at least thy pipe along,
And mingle consort with the angels’ song.

Today,
A shed that’s thatched
(Yet straws can sing)
Holds God; God matched
With beasts; beasts bring
Their song their way: for shame then raise
Thy notes! lambs bleat, and oxen bellow praise.

Today,
God honoured man
Not angels: yet
They sing; and can
Raised man forget?
Praise is our debt to-day, now shall
Angels (man’s not so poor) discharge it all?

Today,
Then, screw thee high,
My heart, up to
The angels’ cry;
Sing ‘glory’, do:
What if thy strings all crack and fly?
On such a ground, music ’twill be to die.

Tomorrow: from ‘Little Gidding’, by TS Eliot.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Revised: 19 January 2012