It’s wonderful to have you here, as you wend your way to Oxford from
Archatheos, (pronounced Ar KAY theos) from the realm of Deliverance to the grave of the Maker of Middle Earth himself, JRR Tolkien. Apparently you were the first Bard of the realm. That's got to be good summer camp work!
So in the midst of this mythopoetic pilgrimage, I’m delighted that you’ve agreed to comment on the next two poems that fall to you… Numbers 13 and 14..
Now, I have to say that this is just a little poem, number 13 and I almost didn’t put it in:
‘With Tom on the Island of Bol, in the cove below the Monastery’
I just wrote it because I enjoyed being there in Croatia, but several people have really liked it and I’m wondering what you saw in it.
Well, you say it’s a little poem but it’s sometimes the little things that are the most important!
‘There are layers of blue in the grey mist
Sea coloured sky coloured
Wave and deep down pebble coloured
All is one before me.
Pine trees, lightening lime and needle green soft
Tender, spiked at tip
Grace wind-bent trunks
Offering bundled foliage with a
Sheltering care
And underneath
Their shade
We watch the Pirate ship with empty masts
Balance slyly
Along the sharp fine line of the horizon.
One of the things that struck me was the great contrast between praise and those things that take us away from praise.
How exactly?
I see it in the contrast that you continually try and bring between those things that would slyly take us away from the sacramental mind, (the mind that sees things in their true context), such as tenderness or grace found in the sheltering world, but then there's the slyness of the pirate ship, which is in its own shade, trying to take us away from that horizon of meaning that is grounded in the transcendent and the eternal.
Well I love that!
So this contrast between the transcendent scheme of the oneness that leads us to praise and that which would take us away from true ecstasy – movement outside of itself.
And it's grounded in the monastic identity, the monks, offering the little prayer that seems meaningless or insignificant, but which is in fact fruitful. Because it is true praise of the creator and in this sense I was touched by the natural imagery rightly understood ..in the context of praise.
So it did mean something that the monastery was there and that there was a cove?
Sure because a cove is the place of encounter with the sea.And the sea is a symbol of our praise – the incessant nature of the waves.
And the horizon is entering into God, so there is this kind of encounter with the mystery of the eternal.
This contains the previous one but with more depth and also has a human narrative bound within. The story of Our Lady of the Pirates.
"I saw the Oleander and the Tamarisk tree beside the shore.
You took me there at night,
Where the shutters of the old stone houses
Creaked with age beneath theyellowing moon.
Our Lady of the Pirates - what a tale you told
Of the old church
At the far point of the bay
As we came to the stone well..."
You see the tension between the Life of God and ours …we have pirates in the previous one but in this one they physically make an assault upon an image of Our Lady, but there is a deeper interpretation at play because this attack upon the Holy has been turned into something tremendous and beautiful, so God is writing a deeper narrative beyond the piracy of human history, right?
Well that's very beautifully expressed. Indeed, the spring bursts forth when the image is rescued from the sea and placed on the ground.
‘and there the well was built, and now the church’
Pirates steal within the created order, but God is able to reintegrate this theft into a greater and more glorious song. And we have a great joy here in the image of the redemption like a thread that is too bright to see.
The thread too bright for the eye – that is a a line quoted from George Mackay Brown in fact.
And this is one of the key ideas of the divinely planned narrative which is historically manifested in the story of Our Lady of the Pirates, which is in itself an allegory of redemption. Every human life will participate in the theft from God’s creation. Everyone is a thief in some way.
Like Bilbo Baggins?
Everyone is in some way a pirate, but God sends us Our Lady of the Pirates to help bring us all home. As Tolkien says, the shipwreck is continually happening, we just have to find companions for the shipwreck!
And that is a comforting thought in an adventurous kind of a way. But in the poem, I'm not so sure that the pirates make it home - 'All that was drawn up from the wrecked boat, was this image.'. hopefully they do, in the end, perhaps as a result of the 'polyphonic voices of the women dressed black'.
I'm also intrigued by what is gained by trying to make the 'meaning of a poem' explicit and what is lost.. Perhaps it's the resonance in the heart that matters most. So that anyone from any tradition can be nourished and awoken to the sound of their own soul. But that's probably a conversation for another post.
So thank you so much Dan and all the best on your pilgrimage to the Eagle and Child with Tyrrell and to the tomb of JRR himself, on the very anniversary of his death. I know that you are committed to the cause of his canonisation and have written a prayer for that intention? Do put it in the comments later! I think some people would be keen to see it.
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If you've enjoyed these this, you might enjoy these too -
1)
The Audio book, out now on Audible for only £5.59 or free if you join Audible. The only reason it's so cheap is that they price according to length, which isn't too sensible for poetry. However it is the length of 3 albums - at 2 hours and 35 mins. But it does mean that the book and audio together are very affordable, which was the point of making the audio, so that you could listen and then read if you wanted to remember or study one poem in particular. You can also listen as you read;
2) My Poetry and Prosecco night at the
St Michael's Festival on 4th October 2018 at 7.30pm for only £12.50 including the Prosecco! Invite friends and let's have a poetry party with plenty of discussions afterwards. You can book
here - Books will also be available to buy on the night. Places limited.
The Artistic Director of the Festival writes on the Eventbrite page -
An evening of seemlessly blended sparkle, profundity and joy, with performance poet and inspirational story-teller Sarah de Nordwall, back at the 2018 Festival by popular demand.
Sarah held us spellbound last year with her wisdom and wit, poetry and sheer delight at the universe, and StMaf18 is thrilled she has agreed to come back to charge our glasses for a second time...
