poetry

The Bright Field: Sermon Preached on 30th July 2023 (8th Sunday After Trinity)

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In the foreground, lush fields of grass on a cloudy day, among which a small hill is lit up by a sunray. In the middle distance a lake with an island, all in shadow, and amove them some clouds backlit by the sun.

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Romans 8: 26-39; Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52

“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field … someone … sells all that he has and buys that field.”

I have a photograph which I have named The Bright Field. It is taken from the top of Black Mountain, the highest of the chain of hills that erupts immediately to the west of Belfast, looking not towards the city, but the rich grasslands to the west. Lough Neagh, the largest lake in these islands, lies immediately behind. It was taken on a stereotypically gloomy Irish summer evening – this disappointingly dull and breezy summer in Wiltshire, with the jet stream parked further south than usual, is just like a normal summer in Belfast.

A single gap in the clouds had opened up to cast lovely golden light on a single small hill, covered in fields, a couple of miles away, while all around and behind it remained deep in shadow.

In the foreground, lush fields of grass on a cloudy day, among which a small hill is lit up by a sunray. In the middle distance a lake with an island, all in shadow, and amove them some clouds backlit by the sun.

View west from Black Mountain, 3 August 2018,
© Gerry Lynch

It called to mind perhaps the finest of the poems by the Welsh Anglican priest, RS Thomas, itself a surprising shaft of light amid what is otherwise a gloomy literary output. It begins:

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it

In that spirit, let me give you a little something to ponder at a time of year when many of us are about to go on holiday.

Often, when I go to church while on holiday, my irreligious friends will ask me afterwards if the service was “uplifting”, hoping to be kind and supportive, nodding and expecting an answer in the affirmative. Sometimes it was, but sometimes I tell them it wasn’t. Sometimes that was my fault, because my mind was miles away. But sometimes I tell them that the prayers were anodyne, or the worship sloppy, or the sermon insipid. And then I tell them that, even though the service wasn’t “uplifting”, I was still glad that I went.

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Salt, Light, and Doomed Rulers: Sermon Preached on 5th February 2023 (Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany)

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Preached at St John’s, Devizes

1 Corinthians 12. 1–12; Matthew 5. 13–20

“I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified … so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.”

You may know the famous poem by Shelley, named Ozymandias. In it, he gazes at an enormous, ancient, shattered statue lying in the pieces in the middle of a desert. The face has broken off from the main body of the statue, and now lies half buried in the sand, but its “sneer of cold command”, artfully and accurately sculpted, still bears witness to a long-forgotten ruler who was used to having his every instruction obeyed.

The inscription below reads:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

This was a man who could clearly strike terror into the hearts of his subjects and his enemies alike. The wise thing was obviously to not put yourself at the wrong end of Ozymandias’ power. And yet the poem concludes:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

A stonecarved bust of young and handsome man with some damage to the skull, in a museum room. The young man's expression is a sneer of cold command.
The famous bust of Ramses II (ca. 1250 BC) immortalised in poetry by Shelley. © Pbuergler and used underCC BY-CA 3.0

It is said that Shelley penned those lines after reading descriptions of the statue of the Pharaoh Ramses II, who lived 3,200 years ago and whose bust now stands in the British Museum. He ruled Egypt shortly before the great crisis of climate and economics that we now know as the Late Bronze Age Collapse, which upended the Mediterranean world of its day. For all his might and power, Ramses’ legacy was swept away by forces of history beyond human control.

As St Paul reminds us this morning, the rulers of every age before us have passed away. Those of our age are doomed to pass away also, through forces that they are unlikely to be able to detect in advance, let alone control. The last remnants of the world that I came of age in, that of the long boom between the end of the Cold War and the financial crisis of 2008, have just been swept away by a virus invisible to the naked eye. Perhaps some future poet will see the wreckage of an ancient statue of President Putin, or President Macron, or Boris the Unsteady, and write a meditation of the quality of Shelley’s on the transience of power and the shortness of human life. This poem speaks to us not so much because it teaches us something new, but because it reminds us of things that we instinctively know, but which the world, and especially the media locked into its over-excited twenty-four hour news cycle, risks making us forget.

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A Soldier Shot on the Afghan Frontier, 1889

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In Rochester Cathedral, a cross executed in memory of Lt Archie Harris of the Royal Engineers “[s]hot while in pursuit of a Pathan robber on the Afghan frontier”, 11 October 1889. History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. “A scrimmage in a Border Station-A canter down some dark defileTwo thousand pounds of educationDrops to a … Read more

IN MEMORIAM GERARD BENEDICT NEWE 1907-1982

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Where Layde’s old tombstones tell the taleOf time before we felt the flailOf England’s “for your own good” yokeYou must have stood on many a mornAnd blessed the day when you were bornIn May’s bright sunshine and turf-smoke.  As the dog clambered on your kneeYou looked at Scotland past the seaWhere flew the exiled childer Lir. Framed by hedges … Read more

The Bright Field

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Late on a summer evening, as I took photos from the summit of Divis (478m above sea level) the highest of the Belfast Hills towards Lough Neagh, suddenly a shaft of sunlight broke through and illuminated the fields on top of Budore Hill, about 4 km away. Clearly visible on Lough Neagh is Ram’s Island, … Read more

To A Young Fisherman

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TO A YOUNG FISHERMAN
Fairer still than a rose, your cheeks aglowing,
Your feet more graceful than a tulip’s stem
And in your eyes there sparkled like a gem,
For friendship, such an infinite deep longing.

Behind us was the endlessness of the sea,
Above us greyly gazed the endless light,
We two stood on the strand, so solit’ry,
With just the sea’s smell. No-one was in sight.

Last day together, townwards I remove.
Contentedly he fishes, while I brood
And find no peace in fields nor city streets.

I am exhausted, so many loves I’ve had.
Forgive me much, ask not what I withstood
And pray your beauty ne’er my will defeats.

By Jacob Israël de Haan, 1917, translated from the Dutch by Gerry Lynch.

Jacob_Israel_de_HaanThis poem is famous as the last line of the first stanza adorns Amsterdam’s Homomonument. Jacob Israël de Haan (1881-1924), its author, was a human rights activist avant la lettre and a very out gay man indeed by the standards of his time. He was also a devoutly religious Jew who emigrated to Israel after the end of World War One, ended up the political spokesman of the Haredi community in Jerusalem and was assassinated by a member of the Haganah. His Wikipedia entry is worth a read! As well as his famous gay poems, he travelled extensively by train in England in the early 1910s, and wrote some charming poems in Dutch on his English experiences.

I have started and failed to finish translating this poem for close to a decade. Rupert Moreton is translating many Russian and Finnish poems at the moment and inspired me to finally get it done.

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CONVERSION EXPERIENCE: A poem for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfT-xUV1Nok] CONVERSION EXPERIENCE Voice and light that left him blinded,      Lashed him like a cattle prod. “That you do for me is evil!      That you thought the devil, God!” ‘Did I really intrigue murder?’ –      Pride that led to such a fall! Sin in haste, shed tears at leisure,      O such sorrow, poor St. Paul. … Read more