the poets of windhover marsh

this story was originally dedicated to eugene peterson at the time of its magazine publication and of its book publication

it is posted in eugene's honour with this addition, that it is also dedicated to his wonderful wife Jan

thank you both for 13 years of warm and sincere and enduring friendship





THE POETS OF WINDHOVER MARSH by Murray Andrew Pura
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with original poetry by Rod Peter, Lyyndae &
Murray Pura, and Loren Wilkinson
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this story is for eugene
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THEY GATHERED EVERY SUMMER at the cottage in the marsh because they knew the only hope for the Church and for the world was poetry and plenty of it. If God gave a resurgence of prayer, that was fine, as long as there was poetry in the prayers, however simple or stilted the words. If people felt they must repent, then they must do so, but let the repentance burn with sonnets and soliloquies, however halt, however lame. Let preaching be metaphor and simlie and allegory and parable, let sermons rhyme and not rhyme, let there be sprung rhythm and running rhythm and inscape. Let Industrial Christianity come to an end. Rise, Blake! Let the Metaphysical Poets take the van! And you, Hopkins, remind us eloquently of the grandeur of God.
Too long has the Church groaned under the burden of men who spoke words that were blocks of wood. Were they true? In content, some, yes, but in spirit? Let us have women of substance now, whose words are winged, let us have the men, lit with flame, whose God is Truth, and whose sentences hurl sparks upon all the dead forests and brittle grasses of Christendom.
The Church speaks but there is no poetry, so her words fall lifeless and litter the earth. The Church cries in passion but there is no poetry, so no one knows of the heart on fire because no one can hear the voice. The Church argues and remonstrates against monstrosity and materialism but there is no poetry, so no one hears the archangel’s shout above the roar of the satanic mills. The Church may formulate and articulate as precisely as she wishes. But without poetry, there are no words for what she believes, the vocabulary is impoverished and inadequate and obscene, the word of God is impossible. Without poetry, it is as if the Church never were.
So they believed. They gathered seven times a year at the marsh. But all of this actually began a long time before the 21st century. These poets were not the first. Squire Able Henry had purchased the marsh just before the civil war and Cromwell, who captured him, had let him keep it, even though the squire was a fervent royalist, because the property had no real value. It was north of the English border in the Scottish lowlands, there was no arable land unless you drained the marsh, and, well, it was just a swamp, wasn’t it?
From the beginning it was called Galashiels Marsh, even though it was nowhere near Galashiels, then it was Moorfoot Marsh, which was a bit closer to home, then it was Pripkin’s Marsh, Wynden Marsh, and finally Macleod’s Marsh, the first time it bore a proper clan’s name. A failed poet and successful naturalist by the name of Lovegrove bought it in the 1920’s, because she loved marshes and she had a very great fear someone else would buy it, drain it, and plant brussel sprouts on it and a lot of other rubbish. There had always been a small stone cottage on the finger of land that poked into the marsh proper, a hunting cottage that went back to Culloden, at least, and she had a new slate roof put up, some sturdy black woodstoves moved into the two bedrooms, scoured boot sales in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St. Andrews for furniture that could handle weight and substance (G.K. Chesterton was a close friend), and then she brought out naturalists to watch waterfowl in the marsh and talk about it, and she brought out poets to watch God in the marsh and write about it.
There was a legend that Hopkins had been there on a holiday from his teaching post at the Royal University in Dublin, the guest of a student named Macleod and his family, who at that time owned the marsh. This was never substantiated but Chesterton, who came there at Lovegrove’s invitation six or seven times, was adamant about Lovegrove’s sense of the thing and insisted the land must be held in perpetua as a poets’ muse, and renamed in honour of the young Jesuit whose poems were just then becoming better known. He did not mean to offend the Scots by exchanging the Macleod title for another but it was holy ground. He recited many of his own poems at the cottage, seated in a great oak chair by the ancient hearth, a hearth a local man told them went back much farther than Culloden, took his meals at the massive table Lovegrove had wangled out of the owner of a down-at-the-mouth castle, and slept in a four poster bed (all the furniture held).
“Fools!” he thundered once on the grassy sward between cottage and marsh, so that a flock of mallards rose in alarm, squawking, to circle the forest and return. “I also had my hour, one far fierce hour and sweet, there was a shout about my ears, and palms before my feet.” He penned a copy of the poem and began the tradition of poets leaving handwritten copies of their own poetry folded and stuffed into little niches between the stones inside the cottage walls. As this habit took hold among her guests, Lovegrove would let the poems be for a year and then unwad the papers and add them to her collection in a black book as large as a family Bible.
On Chesterton’s last visit, he scrawled his favourite Hopkins poem on a sheet of parchment and Lovegrove framed that and placed it over the hearth. So the marsh was renamed Windhover Marsh, but following Chesterton’s death in 1936 the cottage itself was forever after referred to as The Donkey. T.S. Eliot was fond of saying to friends in London, whenever he felt devoid of inspiration, “I need to journey north to visit the donkey,” or, “Let us go up and ride the donkey.” He travelled to Windhover Marsh often. A friend might join him at Lovegrove’s insistence and Eliot would sit in one of the punts and let the friend ply the quant (you had to be good, the mud was like grasping hands). He wrote the better part of The Four Quartets there and all of Burnt Norton. Chesterton and Eliot spent a night in the cottage together in the early 30’s, a time of candles and rich talk, that only ended with the dawn when both took paper and sat at the kitchen table and scribbled furiously in the white of the early light.
Many paths crossed at the marsh. Geese came and went, and grey blurred to green, while the poets made their journeys and listened to one another, and to the crickets, and ate the simple fare Lovegrove provided from the icebox and the stewing pot. Belloc finally came after Chesterton’s death and met C.S. Lewis there, and John Masefield, and wrote Courtesy, which he read aloud at a fire where sparks flew to stars, “Our Lady out of Nazareth rode, it was her month of heavy load, yet was her face both great and kind, for Courtesy was in her mind.”
Everyone loved Masefield’s sea poems. Lewis was particularly fond of Sea Fever, but Masefield preferred to recite from The Everlasting Mercy and another longer poem he set down at the marsh’s edge, “The wild duck, stringing through the sky, are south away. Their green necks glitter as they fly, the lake is grey. So still, so lone, the fowler never heeds. The wind goes rustle, rustle, through the reeds.” He often ended the poem before its proper conclusion, staring at the fire or out the window as he spoke about Christ’s crucifixion, “Darkness come down, cover a brave man’s pain.”
Charles Williams understood that sort of line. He came twice with Lewis, and once on his own for a month when he worked intensely on The Region of the Summer Stars, completing it shortly before his untimely death in 1945. He loved it when the marsh misted and he watched one long summer evening as the stars burnt white-hot holes through it. J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t care to come when Williams was there. He showed up once in Lewis’ company before their falling out and another time with his son Christopher at the height of a storm. Gollum was created there, so he confided to Lovegrove, and he confessed that a good deal of The Ring had taken shape and substance where reeds and murk met. “The bog,” he called it cheerfully, and Masefield never forgot working on Good Friday at a card table set up outside the cottage door, and glancing up to see Tolkien, pipe billowing, hunched over in a punt with a pad of paper, pounding a rhythm with one gnarled fist and jotting down one of the hobbit songs with the other, all the time the punt spinning and drifting over the entire marsh.
Dorothy came up three or four times too, on her own or with a lady friend. She stayed in her bedroom one whole day to get a good start on The Zeal of Thy House, but most remember her huddling by the hearth in a great shawl when she was being bitterly attacked for writing up a Jesus who spoke modern English in her radio play. The last broadcast was during the height of the Stalingrad battle, October 18th, 1942, and people were in a dark mood anyway, but she took some fearful stones. Lovegrove fed her copious amounts of tea and thick slices of fresh bread she had baked in a special pot, a sort of Dutch Oven, right in the fire. Dorothy would mutter something about this when she was down south and rattling through a tough go with Lord Peter Wimsey: “Bread, Lovegrove, bread, something God-wrought to sustain me.”
It was an incredible century at The Donkey, poet laureates like Masefield knotted in thought, and Robert Bridges too, clutching hardboiled eggs and a shaker of salt, with his “Whither away, fair rover, and what thy quest?”, trading sea stories and sea shanties with John, refusing to confirm or deny the legend about his friend Hopkins and the marsh, but leaving with Lovegrove as a special gift a 1918 first edition of the Hopkins poems that he had collected. There was Lewis with his ale, wading into the marsh up to his knees, pipe clenched between his teeth and reciting No Beauty We Could Desire, as if he was attempting to be heard over a street brawl in Belfast. There was even Robert Graves, cloistering himself for a week and dashing off In The Wilderness, a poem about Jesus’ forty days of temptation - “He held communion with the she-pelican” - but refusing to explain which way his spirit was leaning when he left. It all ended too soon. Belloc dead in ‘53 - “My Rhyme is written, my work is done” - Lewis in ‘63, Tolkien in ‘73, Dorothy in ‘57, Masefield in ‘67. They weren’t the only ones of course, just some of the principal players.
A chap at Peebles finally told Lovegrove on her own deathbed that his grandad had seen Robert and Elizabeth Browning at the marsh in the 1850’s, when the old man had been hunched over in a blind waiting for a shot at some ducks. The Brownings had never seen him, but they stayed at the cottage the entire morning and not a mallard landed for grandad, even with the fine decoys he’d carved and painted the winter before. Elizabeth fished one out of the water and walked away with it, and the old chap didn’t have the nerve to step out of his camouflage and ask for it back. He met them in a tavern a week later and that’s how he found out who they were.
It was as splendid as a deathbed can be for Lovegrove. A white-haired gentleman dropped by and related how, as a young boy catching tadpoles and frogs at the marsh, he’d met George MacDonald on a sunny afternoon in 1902. MacDonald sat down with him and told him a bit of whimsey, a story of a princess and a grand dragonfly, which no one has ever seen in print, and explained that he came down to the cottage to rewrite his poems and fantasies, since they always turned out better the second time if he took a stab at them by Macleod’s Marsh. Lovegroved died contented. She was buried in what she called holy ground, just off from The Donkey in a grove of willows, flashing a sun’s bright gold when they put up her stone: LOVEGROVE. Give me but these, and though the darkness close even the night will blossom as the rose. A line from Masefield, already gone.
After her came the quiet years, though there’s no denying poets made their way to the cottage. The locals knew. They clipped the grass and put a block of ice in the icebox along with some victuals once a week, and they left cookies and pies they’d baked, and fresh cream. A poet might starve for words but not for shortbread and biscuits at Windhover Marsh. Still and all, the years were lean compared with the holy foam and ferment of the decades before.
It wasn’t until early in the next century that a crowd began to gather again, in God’s time, they said, and these explained some thirty years dearth on a world smothering God and God’s poetry, and a Church that went along with it, preferring the God of the limited vocabulary and the trite slogan, rather than the great God of smoke and blood, the fine shining God of the singing liturgies and the deep-running creeds. Though the whole lot of them disliked agendas, they had one just the same. “God created the world by imagination!” they cried, echoing Nicholas Berdyaev, the Russian religious philosopher and emigre, whom many swore had made the trek from Paris to Windhover Marsh sometime in the 1930’s.
They felt the earth would never turn on conventional apologetic, not in two-double oh-two, and they shared a heartsfire to infuse the Church and her spirituality and her theology with the earth, wind, and fire of a poet laureate. They were much more of an association than the poets had been in the 20th century, calling upon everyone to meet at The Donkey seven times a year, and they even had a motto, non verba sed tonitrua, not words but thunderclaps. Women and men came in from all over the world for The Seven, not hundreds, but no gathering lacked a quorum of twelve. Poets came at other times, of course, back and forth every season of the year, but no one wanted to miss The Seven, it did your soul such good and crammed your notebooks with shooting stars.
Who replaced Lovegrove? Partridge did. God knows where he came from (none of the poets did), but he was splendid at chopping wood, repairing punts, brewing tea and baking scones, and he delighted in proffering mince pies on any Sunday between All Saints Day and Lent. He knew Lovegrove’s traditions and the folded poetry in the cracks whitened the interior walls. If a poet was discouraged, Partridge was there with tea and good cheer. If a poet needed words, Partridge offered to ply the quant and slip them between the lilypads and the blackbirds. Did they lack faith? Partridge opened the Family Bible, as the ancient collection of poems was called. Did they need prayer, Partridge knelt. Did one desire a homily from the Good Book, Partridge did that, quietly but with a tethered fire. If there was hunger, how did he do it, Partridge carved roast fowl and rotisseried duck, but he never harmed the feather of any bird that called the marsh home for a night or for a lifetime.
There were five poets that were particularly important at Windhover Marsh in the first half of the 21st century, Malcolm St. Michaels, Roman Greene, Andrew Becket-Burns, Rowena Cove, and Heather Mary Cameron. Becket-Burns and Cameron were the most intense of them all when it came to expostulation - “We must have a rolling ripe theology!” - but all five could gutter a candle when it came to night writing or what Greene called “star scribble”. In other generations the poets had merely plied their trade to the glory of God and had no plans to innundate the earth. But the new breed wanted theologians to write like MacDonald or Lewis and preachers to preach like John Donne or Lancelot Andrewes, or at least exhibit the eloquent pithiness of Bunyan. Their own poems hung like ruby pendants with God’s weight or darted like starlings with his spirit, so that there rose the expression in Christendom of Roman, Rowena, and Heather contra mundi.
They swayed some, they could not sway all, yet there is no question that as Athanasius preserved the Trinity, the poets preserved linguistic beauty and reinstated theology as the Queen of the Sciences. They dusted her off and burnished her and made her shine like Victoria of old. She was quicksilver through the West again, a queen of all the peoples of the earth, no more an academic’s plaything. For many years, certainly until 2060 or later, it was impossible to stand up at Oxford or Cambridge or St. Andrews or King’s and speak like a block of wood. If you wished to be obfuscatory, you had better be a jolly Shakespeare at it, for truth became so wrapped up in the precise and crystalline language of the poet, it was impossible to get a posting at any school that made a fig of a difference on earth without a laureate’s panache and a filigreen turn of phrase.
It was not simply about eloquence alone, about stringing pretty words together. Truth and significance had to entwine your prose and your passion. Nor was complexity an honour. If it all went somewhere and did so splendidly, well and good. But labyrinthine casuistry that lit lanterns to nowhere made no lasting impression. A man might write with the simplicity of Aesop, but if he had Aesop’s wisdom and Aesop’s spare eloquence, why then, he stood alongside not only Christ’s plain parables but Augustine’s City of God.
One journal called it the resurrection and revolt of the Metaphysical Poets and perhaps it was that. At the height of the furor, from 2013 to 2027, when all the marsh poets, not just The Five, needed to hear from an angel of God to sustain them, Partridge was planting a border of rosebushes and flowering herbs right around the cottage. At the front and back door he wished to place fresh flagstones, since the old ones had cracked so often they were like chunks of gravel. As his spade pried the pieces out and he dug past them to loosen the soil at the front door, there was a ringing as iron struck iron. Partridge bent over, saw it was a strongbox, and swiftly unearthed it. St. Michaels and Greene came from around the back where they had been setting up hoops for croquet when they heard Partridge shout.
“It’s locked,” noted Greene.
“I’ve got a hacksaw,” panted Partridge, and he went to the small stone toolshed Lovegrove and Belloc had mortared in 1948.
“Perhaps we don’t want to open it,” cautioned Greene.
“Whyever not?” Partridge was incredulous.
“You know. Pandora’s box.”
St. Michaels snorted and gripped the bowl of his pipe, a bowl as big as a small ham. “For heaven’s sake, Roman, what do you think, the curse of the mummy will come against us? This is Scotland, man.”
Roman crossed his arms. “Scotland is a queer bird.”
St. Michaels waved his pipe. “Welcome to your gory bed or to victory, Roman. Open it, Partridge.”
Partridge had paid their quibbling no mind. He was groundskeeper and tender of the hearth. They just wrote things. The thick padlock came away in a few minutes, sweat popping on Partridge’s arms and face.
“Right then.” He opened the black iron lid.
“No monkey’s paw, Roman,” grunted St. Michaels as he bent to look. Partridge had pulled back a frayed and yellowed cotton cloth. “Just paper.”
Roman remained aloof. “Whose?”
Partridge was reluctant to touch the stack of papers with his dirty hands so St. Michaels lifted a sheaf of them and studied them for a few moments.
“Well, Malcolm?” demanded Partridge.
“Impossible,” St. Michaels muttered, looking at page after page. He gave six or seven of them to Greene. “What do you make of this, Roman?”
Roman took them with no desire to appear interested or impressed. But after glancing at three of the pages his blue eyes opened from indifferent slits to great orbs of astoundment.
“I don’t believe this!” he snapped. “Partridge, did you put this here? Is this some sort of prank?”
Partridge daggered his eyebrows. “I am not a trickster, sir.”
“But this is impossible.”
“What are they?” Partridge finally got to his feet. He tried to take one of the papers but Greene jerked it away.
“Wash your hands!”
Partridge had no running water to work with at the cottage but there was a freshwater stream, resplendent with mixed salmon trout, which flowed into the marsh and from which he fetched water for tea or cooking or cleaning. He rinsed his hands there now and dried them thoroughly on the long green grass at the stream bank, then hurried back. St. Michaels was kneeling and riffling through the rest of the box, his pipe jammed into a shirt pocket still smoking, while Greene stood where he was, scanning whatever St. Michaels passed up to him.
“Extraordinary,” Greene murmured.
“Give me one!” Partridge snatched a paper from Greene. It was stiff paper and heavy, and it had a bit of yellowing. There was writing and it was dark but faded in a few places, like old fountain pen ink. He attempted to decipher the scrawl.
“Therefore that he may raise the Lord throws down,” he read out loud. Greene looked at him.
“It can’t be!” protested Partridge.
“Well, then,” responded Greene, “what do you make of this one?”
More of the same scrawl. Partridge squinted. “Batter my heart, three personed God. For you as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend. No!”
“Or this?” St. Michaels handed up several pages of the same sort of paper but the writing was completely different.
“Reversed thunder,” read Partridge, struggling, “Christ-side-piercing spear . . . church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood, the land of spices, something understood. God in heaven!” This last was Partridge’s shriek.
“What do you think?” asked Greene.
“But these are originals!”
“Malcolm and I think so.”
“God in heaven! Who else is there besides Donne and Herbert?”
“Malcolm has pulled up Marvell, you’d expect that. But there’s Blake too. Spenser. And look at this.”
Greene held out a thick sheaf of papers that had been bound by a ribbon which disintegrated as soon as St. Michaels had attempted to loosen it. Yet another hand had penned this. Partridge held the first sheet up to the sunlight.
“I can’t make it out. Ah! Till one greater Man restore us, and regain the blissful seat. Do you mean to say?” He quickly brought up the last sheet and scowled at the final lines: “They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow through Eden took their solitary way. The whole poem? All of it in Milton’s hand?”
“Or someone’s. I don’t know Milton’s hand myself,” said St. Michaels getting to his feet. “Do either of you know Spanish? Or Latin?”
“Cove knows the Spaniards,” answered Partridge. “She winters near Madrid when she can. What is it?”
“Something about death, isn’t it?” suggested Greene, peering over St. Michaels’ shoulder. “Que muero porque no muero?”
“Becket-Burns knows Italian. Did a thesis on Italian poets at St. Andrews.”
“Where is he?” asked St. Michaels.
“Iona. On retreat. He’ll be up for next week’s Seven.”
“Then we will have to wait until he and Cove show up.” St. Michaels put his papers back in the iron box. “A touch from God, I think, gentlemen. Croquet, Roman?”
“It’s hardly appropriate.”
“What? God becomes man and you can’t play croquet after a visitation?”
“Did Mary?”
A week later fifteen of them sat with kerosene lamps distributed among them burning hotly. Cove had just finished speaking when Partridge bustled through the door with some sticks for kindling.
“Put it down, P!” Cameron shot. “Did you hear what Cove said?”
“Of course not.”
“We don’t need a fire. Your lamps are roasting us. Que meuro porque no meuro. En mi yo no uiuo ya y sin Dios biuir no puedo.”
Partridge was peevish, he’d wasted time getting wood for a fire no one wanted. “So?”
“Dying for my dying day,” recited Cove. “Life within me? Not a spark. Without God’s a deadly dark! It’s San Juan de la Cruz.”
“It is not!”
“It is P!” This from Cameron.
“And what about that other? That great thick bit that was wrapped in leather?”
“We’re just getting to it. BB has been looking at the whole thing.”
Becket-Burns got to his feet, still staring down at the manuscript he held in both hands. He didn’t look up. “I’ve been going over it since St. Michaels gave it to me last night. Listen to this: La gloria di colui che tutto move per l’universo penetra e risplende in una parte piu e meno altrove. Nel ciel che piu della sua luce prende fu’io, e vidi cose che ridire - The glory of Him who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines in one part more and in another less. I was in the heaven that most receives his light and I saw things . . . It’s the opening cento of Paradiso.”
“Surely it’s not an original?” asked one of the poets.
“I’ve studied Dante. I can’t say I know his hand. But this is the original Italian text. The whole Comedy is here.”
The night had been overwhelming for everyone but Partridge, Greene, and St. Michaels who had already been overwhelmed and had had several days to try to get used to it.
“You mean to say you think Dante came up here and just left the Comedy in a stone hut in Scotland?” asked another poet.
“Or someone brought the manuscript up here from Italy with Dante’s blessing.” Becket-Burns shrugged.
“Or stole it?”
“No!” barked Partridge. “This is holy ground. The poets and their own words come here. No one knows about this place except an angel tells them.”
“Well, BB told me.”
They laughed but another poet broke through the merriment.
“It looks like a hoax.”
Roman Greene stood up. “Yes, Malcolm and I thought about that. But who would have perpetrated such a hoax? Would Chesterton have done this? Or Eliot? Or Masefield? Could you accuse any of them of such chicanery?”
The poet’s face soured. “Well, a local then.”
“What? A farming lad from Moffat or Tinto Hill? Using different handwriting? Using Spanish and Italian? Writing out hundreds of pages of Milton and Dante and St. John of the Cross? To what purpose? To trick us into inspiration? What is the effect of having these old poets among us? Does it enervate us? No, there is a flash flood in your blood to go further and to strike deeper with all your words.”
St. Michaels was cramming his pipe bowl with tobacco from a leather pouch. “At any rate, we were up to Edinburgh to have an expert look at the paper. All of it’s hundreds of years old. No one makes paper like that anymore. All the writing’s in old mixes of ink and done with quill. The fellow was astounded. Wanted to know how we came to have the poetry. I think he thought we’d pinched it from a museum. He said he was going in the back room to ring up a colleague but Roman and I were sure he was calling the police. So we left in a hurry.” St. Michaels snorted as the pipe gushed a pillar of fire. “Different quills too. Different birds. Different parts of Europe.”
Rowena Cove smiled. “It’s a miracle then.”
“What shall we do with them?”
“We ought to give them to Oxford or Cambridge or to the British Museum.”
“No poetry leaves the marsh,” declared Partridge.
“But they’ll deteriorate here.”
“They’ve done pretty well for a few hundred years,” St. Michaels growled around his pipe stem. “The box was pretty much airtight. I’m sure Partridge can preserve them adequately.”
“But they’re relics.”
“All the more reason they should be here.”
“Are we sure?”
Partridge began to remonstrate in the chiaroscuro of the ancient stone cottage, the sheaves of the old poetry scattered about the room in people’s laps. “This is not our decision. Its been made for us. Do you imagine I or any of us have the rights over Chesterton’s poems that he left here, or Belloc’s, or Tolkien’s? They meant for them to be here. We didn’t know about the strongbox. But hundreds of years ago those poets found this place because God intended for them to find this place, and they left their poems here because God intended for them to leave their poems here. I’ve told you, this is a holy place. This is a great cathedral, one of the wonders of the world, it took a thousand generations to build it. After we’ve gone God will continue to bring poets here so that he can inspire them, and replenish the Church with their words, and revitalize the earth. Isn’t that what we’re doing now? Isn’t that what others will be doing in a hundred years? Is there anyone here who doesn’t want to get off on their own right now and write a poem, perhaps one of the best they’ve ever written? Why? Because you know the good Lord Christ is in this, don’t you? You can read his lines, you know his hand, we all do. This is no serendipity. You were meant to find these poems and draw fresh fire from them to ignite your own verse. All of the poetry must remain at the cottage, every page of it, old and new. A woman will be drawn here at the turn of this century, a woman from Brazil who will scarcely know what she’s about, but she’ll find your poem, Heather, or one of yours Rowena, or even one of yours, BB, and she’ll take heart and clutch a pen and write with pinions and theophanies and all the scalding cascades of light. This is God’s doing and we dare not seek to undo it.”
No one stirred. Until St. Michaels stretched and climbed out of his chair. “I don’t know about anyone else, but I have work to do before the night is spent. It’s time for some star scribble. Roman?”
Greene, with his black turtleneck and tightly curling black hair and pierce-the-dark blue eyes, was staring directly into a lamp. “It’s true,” he said.
So they broke up and found their niches and began to write. Partridge scurried about brewing coffee and tea and baking fresh scones. It was summer but he fashioned some mince pies anyway. Once dawn pelted them with bright stones and the writers grew weary and sore, Partridge had everything ready for bed.
To begin with, he had altered both the bedrooms months before. Now one was for men, the other for women, and each had bunk beds and linen for four. Then he had eight cots. If he had a mix of men and women, as he did for that Seven, he put up a line between the walls of the cottage and strung blankets. It didn’t take long for everyone to settle in. Heather Mary Cameron snored with ferocity.
“Heaven help us,” sniffed Partridge, moving his bed linen to the toolshed. “The pipes.”
Partridge had closed up the privy he had dug ten years before and reopened the one Lovegrove and Lewis and Tolkien had built up with field stone and mortared together in 1954. Lovegrove had penned a note about it in the Family Bible: “A very hot day. The loo almost done. Jack and Ronny mucking about, quaffing ale and guffawing, did me good to see it. They got into a mock sword fight with their trowels, both of them shouting out rubbish in Latin, dotty old men, spotted their faces and clothing with mortar, then sat and had a pipe and went on about King Arthur till sunset, when they asked me to spear portions of fresh Angus on green sticks so they could cook them over a fire. A lad from Motherwell had brought the beef by that morning. Ronny quite proud of them building the fire up from scratch. They were on about the Old Norse language and archangels and what sort of steel was in the swords the apostles wore at the crucifixion. Went to bed and they were singing lustily in West Saxon, beating the rhythm on the ground with great sticks that showered the sward with orange sparks. Woke at dawn and they were still up. They had caught some fish in the stream, which they named Oxblood, and were at grilling them over their precious fire. Wondered how our Lord had cooked his fish on the beach at the resurrection. Swore to me in Latin that they would finish up the loo after breakfast and then fell asleep under the willow. Used the old plaid blankets with the MacDonald tartan. Expect they’ll rise from the dead with the moon. Midsummer’s Day.”
The privy was in the round and you could see CSL stroked in the mortar between two stones and the trace of a lion’s head, while nearby a finger had poked JRR with a lot of runic characters. There were two separate compartments. It had been used through the last half of the 20th century, the pits were deep, much had decomposed, and once Partridge had cleared off twenty-five years of blackberry thorn the poets used it gladly. By common consent they nicknamed the two compartments Gollum and Marsh-wiggle.
No one who was there for that Seven ever forgot it. They wrote some of their finest poems and returned to their churches and academies to inspire others, so that a kind of divine prose flared over Christendom that scorched the heart of the earth. It became a season of Eucharist and Redemption. It exhilarated. Of a certainty, there were stepping stones between earth and heaven, between wind and fire, between Christ and marsh.
Each of the Five wrote a poem and folded it away into the venerable grey walls that week. In time, of course, Partridge plucked them free and smoothed them down into the Family Bible. He placed them one after the other, beginning with Becket-Burns. BB had called his The Eucharist of the Fall.

a season now
frescoed
a thousand pietas
losing all and lost
and aging, greying
and barren, bereft
losing all and lost
but the losing in the losing
twice gold, thrice gold
sun, tree, and spotted grass
all diving, rising
a ripe orchard
a ripe orchard’s harvest
bright apple round peach
lights and lights and lights
flying
whether owl or kingfisher or wren
or leaf or branch or root
upon the green water lying
till all dying
is light, is flight
till knowing this brightwork
is right, is God’s right

Rowena Cove wrote Twelfthtide.

harvest moon honey moon
hunter’s moon devil moon
and december moon christ’s moon

the sands the wood
the two walk etched in chalk

each ocean drop beneath the fire
holds high its singing candle

the processional to the shore

Heather Mary Cameron made noise when she wrote, as if each syllable was wrested or pried violently out of her soul, and she wrote with both fists clenched, for the whole process of putting her poetry on paper was a battle and a hammering, and her eyes glinted and her cheeks filled with blood, and she crumpled paper and she stabbed with her pen, and sometimes roared. The poem she left behind she sealed with tape, a seal that only Partridge broke. She called it Lament. Only two stanzas of it were legible.

Your children
play with stones
stained with ancestral blood
they dance in streets
paved with judgement.

O Israel, child of holy promise
your destitute ways
your tattered soul
tears painfully
at the heart of a grieving God.

Roman Greene gave no title to his. He put it down in fountain pen ink, folded the ivory paper neatly, slipped it into a hole by the front door, and quietly went on his way.

I would to speak a thousand times
the words I hold so dear,
but thousands times a thousands times
their message seems unclear.
Tis not the words themselves be rough
though kinder could they be,
it be the form that seeks their depth
that hides their sympathy.
A man like any man is he
who bends those pretty words,
to straggled heaps of shapeless dreams
and deeds of lesser worth.
But yet to speak those dear dear words
is what my being cries,
to live their fate and breath their flame
tis here my heart’s hope flies.
So thus to say I love you dear
does set this heart at ease,
and should I live till earth dies old
these words I’ll try to please.

Malcolm St. Michaels found a stump in the woods over beyond the marsh and wrote there, wreathed in Scotch mist, cinders from his ubiquitous pipe burning fine black holes through his verse.

February, and time to burn the Christmas tree
(Dropping needles in its desolate corner).
In December, already dying, it hinted still
Of green wilderness, and we hung our family’s past
On its resinous bounty.

(Noriko’s origami stars; Judy’s sheep;
From Whidbey Island, Andy’s painted pins;
Crocheted snowflakes from Lola on the Greensprings,
And Bruce and Robin’s lion and lamb,
Still peaceful in their play-dough wreath.)

But now not even the coloured lights
Can hide the spiderwebs, the brown.
So put the relics all back in their boxes
And with a hatchet lop the limbs
Till the trunk stands naked in its bucket.

Burn them all night long in the orange roar,
The flaming sword, of long-gone Eden:
Burn them like straw in the flame that burns
At the heart of things with the unsung names
Of the one who is,

Burn the pine like frankincense:
That baby too grew up to be consumed.
You and I will sleep
On this warm hearth’s holy ground
And in the morning mark our heads with ash.

He called it Burning the Christmas Tree. In due time, Partridge laid it in the great book with the others, with Lewis and Bridges and Williams and Greene, neat and white and dark-spotted.
So they changed the world. Or rather, God shaped a new world out of the words, out of their words and his words, out of the poetry of cross and resurrection and epiphany, out of blood and clay and light, and they all died except St. Michaels, who buried Partridge by Lovegrove and took his place, brewing tea and stirring soup and pruning rosebushes for another generation who made their way in fits and starts to Windhover Marsh. St. Michaels puttered about the cottage and grounds, showed the new poets the Family Bible and the Strongbox, and blew storms of spark and thunder from his pipe as they wept and slept and rose and wrote and fashioned streams of streaming sunlight and told of a dying and rising God who was beyond all words, beyond creation, beyond fashioning, and beyond them. And sometimes St. Michaels would open an old and dark Bible, Blake’s it had been, and read out loud, usually by the hearth, whether lit or cold, and St. Michaels dearly loved St. John and the Christ in reeds and rushes there. And post sometimes came to Windhover Marsh from Peebles and if poets asked how to find the cottage, St. Michaels would write, Come down by way of Holy Island, by way of the Lammermuir Hills and the Moorfoot Hills and the Tweedsmuir Hills, come down by way of County Lothian and County Borders, by way of Peebles and Galashiels, come down by way of Lough St. Mary’s and you will make out all right.
St. Michaels was at home at the marsh. It is true that there were days and even weeks when it was just he and the waterfowl and butterflies fuller than your spread hand and the cooling Scotch mist and bright heaven’s sun. These were fine times to pray and to worship and to wander. His mind would tumble and turn with the words of all the poets who had ever come to Windhover Marsh and he jotted down a bit of doggerel about it.

a thousand poems he had read
a hundred of the thousand stormed daily through his head
Blake and Donne and Thomas Stearns
Masefield and Dante and Becket-Burns
up and up and over the ark
to hear the song of the Hopkins lark

in crisps of curl off wild winch whirl
look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
o look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
the bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
in what distant deeps or skies
burnt the fire of thine own eyes?
on what wings dare he aspire?
what the hand dare seize the fire?
for I, except you enthrall me
never shall be free
nor ever chaste
except you ravish me

what? is it all one?
is he, the three, truly one?
and his poets
whether Hopkins, Blake, or Donne
all one, truly one?
and we and all we write
the wit of his Son?

St. Michaels would take out a punt or tug on his wellies and circumnavigate Tolkien’s “bog” and Spenser’s “reeking swamp”. There was much to see and the angle of light over the far hills was always not as it had been and he prised from the muck and rushes what he never knew. A shoe, whose? A pen that wrote, what? A cup and saucer, Royal Doulton, a pattern not known. One day, a long-necked brown bottle. Black lettering had been painted on it and was legible. TO BYZANTIUM BY WAY OF SEA AND MARSH ON HIS MAJESTY’S SERVICE. The bottle was stoppered with a rubber cork and papers were rolled tightly within. St. Michaels had to lay aside his pipe and completely destroy the cork before he could get at them. They turned out to be poems. A bit of water had trickled in and smeared some ink but for the most part the poetry was sharp and readable.
Chesterton was writing: So we commit these to the deep until the sea shall give up what needs be read.
The first poem was Hopkins, but not in Chesterton’s hand, Inversnaid, This darksome burn, horseback brown, his rollock highroad roaring down, in coop and in comb the fleece of his foam flutes and low to the lake falls home, degged with dew, dappled with dew are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, and the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
The next was MacDonald, in MacDonald’s own hand and signed, Thy fishes breathe but where thy waters roll, thy birds fly but within thy airy sea, my soul breathes only in thy infinite soul, I breathe, I think, I live but thee, oh, breathe, oh, sink - O Love, live into me, unworthy is my life till all divine, till thou see in me only what is thine.
The final sheet was more of Chesterton’s scrawl, which he titled A Prayer in God’s Good Light, but which has come down to us under a different name. St. Michaels framed all three fragments, what had not been obliterated or damaged by marsh water, and placed them on the walls of The Donkey, The Windhover already hanging over the fire.
So it came to be that when a poet picked his way over briar and unmortared wall, when she came down by way of Lothian and Borders and Peebles and Galashiels, when he opened the stout door the Tinker himself had nailed sturdy and true, betwixt and between the writing of a pearl that “may in a toad’s head dwell”, when she ate and drank and slept, and there was Hopkins on the two long walls, and when he went out to the back door to write, all flicker and faint, there was MacDonald on his way for courage, and then, in due time, the turning time, time to leave the valley and the stones and the marsh and the fire-folk sitting there, back out the Tinker’s door to heaven and hell and all angels, she would pause, and see perhaps for the first time the small frame of willow branch and the bit of Chesterton scribble there and she, in her pause, could read and not forget, and in this the poetry of her spirit should live and those that chose, on the turning earth, live and live and live, even if upon a dark is layered a dark and another dark. And they would turn when they read it, to look back at St. Michaels, to look back at the open door, open on the marsh, and then go on down the road in the gloaming to Peebles and Galashiels and the Moorfoot Hills and the Holy Island and the great seas and somewhere, to a quiet garden by a humming water, to sit and write beautiful truths beautifully, and give it back, oh give it back, give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s self and beauty’s giver, and think of Chesterton thumping along by the shore, swishing rushes with his cane in the dark falling world, tempted perhaps to never write again, to never try again, and then standing still in the evening damp of wonder, for men say the sun was darkened, yet I had thoughts it beat brightly, even on Calvary, and he that hung upon the torturing Tree heard all the crickets singing, and was glad. Christ’s last word to parting poets.

And so tired, I am tired, my God but I am tired, but I am glad, so very glad, I am glad I was here when and when and when. And then St. Michaels went through the reeds and the trees round by the marsh and up past the marsh to the sward of thick green grass and so to the cottage, old, old, to write a word and drink a cup of tea and to see God sitting at the hearth and the stones and their poems ringing and an earth coming free and a liberty steeped in burnished mists a-day-a-day’s walk from Long Forties and the North Sea and Devil’s Hole and a Lindisfarne Mystery, a Farne Deep and a love to sing, and closed round by these great grey stones, I see, I see, and from out of the earth and these Scottish mists the poets and Lewis come to me.


All this, indeed, I do not remember.
I remember the remembering, when first walking
I heard the golden gates behind me
Fall to, shut fast. On the flinty road,
Black-frosty, blown on with an eastern wind,
I found my feet. Forth on journey,
Gathering this garment over aching bones,
I went. I wander still.

But the world is round.

a bookshop at the end of christendom

A BOOKSHOP AT THE END OF CHRISTENDOM


Bryanna loved books, read them before sleep, when told to turn off her light, did so and squirrelled under the blankets with a flashlight. She loved the outpouring of summer heat, played long and hard with the other boys and girls in her neighbourhood. But she longed for the rainy, overcast days when she did not have to go outside to play, for then she could take another book and climb into a corner of the attic in the midst of a herd of old trunks. (In her mind, she sat in tall African grass and around her, nothing to be alarmed about, squatted her sleeping elephants, her sentinels).
When God burst upon the scene she was astonished, not because she did not believe in God but because she did - she had not expected him to wish to become so personal. In the end, it turned out well enough. The best places for her to talk with him were elm groves, riverbanks, the quiet of her bedroom - or among the elephants in the attic. She and God got along fine. She gave him her love for books and he returned the love to her with a thought: Instead of becoming a pastor’s wife (someone at her new church had mentioned this), why not own and manage her own bookshop?
It began modestly enough out of her parents’ rec room while she was still working on her MA in English literature. Between seven and ten each week night she welcomed two or three people through sliding glass doors into a rec room bright with fresh pine shelving and coloured racks. There was a section for used books and texts, as well as a section of brand new titles. She offered a ten percent discount on every purchase. Her inventory was not large but it was not dull either. Word got around not only to students but began to percolate through the town’s population, including the Christian community. She had a shelf or two for religious books, trying to select the most profound, the most thoughtful she had come across in her own reading, whether new titles or old. Not many were purchased. Her pastor had coffee with her and tactfully recommended a few contemporary Christian authors. She located the books mentioned, read them, did not find them to her taste, refused to stock them. What did it matter? This little basement shop was not so much a business as it was an intrigue, a passion, a blessing.
She pursued her PhD in literature. Her parents died. Her sister and brother wanted the house sold and the equity shared. She arranged to pay out their shares in the home but this placed a financial burden over her she had never experienced before. Suddenly, the volume of her weekly and monthly sales began to matter a great deal. Taking the plunge, she moved her stock out of the rec room into a retail outlet, walked through other bookstores, took notes, improved the scope of her inventory, and opened for business.
It quickly became apparent that in order to secure the Christian market more changes would have to be made. Persons from various churches would drop by looking for books on angels, on demons, on spiritual warfare, on the end of the world. Where were her titles? She showed them what she had: William of St. Thierry, Bernard of Clairvaux, Johann Arndt, Brother Lawrence, John Wesley, John Bunyan, Thomas a Kempis, John Calvin, Menno Simons, Theresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Philip Doddridge, Thomas Goodwin, C.S. Lewis’ lesser known works...
No, no, no. Where were the Christian westerns and frontier sagas? Where were the romances, the big thick ones? And the books on the Anti-Christ and Armageddon, giving days and hours and accurate timetables? Where were the spiritual thrillers, where Christians took on houses full of demons and witches and Satanists? No, no, not those mysteries written by G.K. Chesterton about Father Brown or those ones by Dorothy Sayers about Lord Peter Whimsey. The new thrillers, the books with dark clouds and vicious bolts of lightning on their covers.
Had it been only one or two customers, Bryanna could have ignored it, which is what she intended to do. But the bank mumbled over her sales figures, hours could go by without a person in the store - except for the quaint, talkative types she loved who browsed but scarcely ever bought. Back in her attic, she prayed among the elephants and listened, but only heard the rustling of pigeon wings on the roof. Reluctantly, she developed a section pretty much overnight, just a small section, the bestsellers of contemporary Christendom, fiction and nonfiction.
People noticed and snapped the new titles up. She expanded the section. Soon it was generating more income than any other part of the store. A few of the quaint customers grumbled about the new section. She did not care for the books either but business was business. She had to make a living. Certain mornings, especially mornings when God struck fire in her soul, her spirit quailed when she unlocked the front door of the bookstore and was assaulted by lurid dust jackets of bursting bombs and rumbling tanks and the scowling faces of sinister world leaders - the Biblical Prophecy section - or she was brought up short by the flowing hair, air-brushed beauties of the Christian romances who looked like their counterparts on the local drugstore racks, except the Christian heroines were somehow purer and more angelic. Bryanna would steel herself to march past the rows of demons and the rows of angels on her way to the till. From this vantage point the worst eyesore was the area of how-to, self-help books: How to Pray Like Jesus in Seven Days; Fasting and Praying for Financial Success; Self-Exorcism Overnight; Seven Sermons for Insomniacs; How to Build a Propsperous Christian Business and Expand Your Spiritual Influence. The whole direction her store was taking spawned a ferocious warfare in her mind and soul. She knew she needed the money. Without the Christian book sales the bank would shut her down.
And what if they did? What difference did her store make? What sort of minds was she helping form, what sort of souls? Why not sell marshmallows instead of books and see if anybody noticed?
“I still have my section on Christian classics. I stay open to sell them.”
“Sell them? You couldn’t give them away with any purchase under five dollars. Who bought the last one? Who?”
Bryanna punched out the code on her main till, refusing to answer the taunt from her warring mind.
“You did.”
Some days she could ignore it. The hours passed in a blur, she had six staff, she could hide herself in her office if she wanted, to all appearances scanning her computer screen for special orders on Christian fitness videos - in fact, the one time someone peered over her shoulder, she was reading Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship on CD-ROM.
The days she could not hide were the most stressful, usually when staff were ill or the Christmas crush was on. Then she had no choice but to face the onslaught that was late twentieth-century Christendom. Angel lapel pins for blessig and good fortune? Yes, sir, right over by the Jesus Is The Real Thing ball caps. Losing Weight, Finding God? Three left in hardcover in the Contemporary Christian Lifestyles section. Gregorian chants done as rap? Mainstream Christian Artists.
Sometimes she would snap and say whatever came into her head:
Look, she would plead, why this? Why a book on prayer written by a financial whiz and ex-football star? Why not this book here, by Metropolitan Anthony, Beginning to Pray? Slim, but lucid and full of wisdom.
Met. Mets? He’s a ball player?
No, a leader in the Orthodox Church.
No, no, I need something by a strong Christian, someone who’s still alive, who has a testimony, someone who’s succeeded at something else besides Christianity and can talk to ordinary people about God, someone they’ll listen to.

C.S. Lewis wrote this book also, ma’am.
Yes, well, was that before or after his conversion?
Oh, after. It’s very good, very insightful.
All I need is a set of The Chronicles of Narnia. You have those, don’t you? That’s his best known work, isn’t it?

George MacDonald also wrote these extremely interesting sermons.
No. I just need one of his romances.

Do you have a section on plays?
There are some over there. We also have T.S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers in this section.
No. I need something people can understand, something written in the past year or two. Over there?
Yes. Over there.

In one of her darkest indulgences in self-destruction, she loaded her spiritual self-help section with books on plumbing, pouring concrete, roofing, wiring, caulking, and even set up a tool display. The books sold quickly, within a month the tool display with them.
“It goes well with the store,” a customer encouraged her.
Her posture had always been firm and erect. As the years in the bookstore thundered over her head like a herd, she began to yield and bend. The more she fought expanding her store into a Christian retail outlet - Jesus watches, Mickey Mouse watches with Bible verses, rubber Christs and rubber crosses with magnets for the fridge - the more she yielded and the closer she seemed to slip towards the earth, the more her shoulders slumped with her neck, the more her gait became a shuffle: “I remind myself of Marley with manacles.”
At 63 she sold the store to a huge Christian retail chain, paid off the loan from the bank and the mortgage on her parents’ house, and disappeared. Six months later a new bookstore opened in the city, a small ad popping up in blue in the Yellow Pages. Its name was simply Queer Duck. The quaint ones who browsed much but bought little found the store soon enough. Yes, thank God, it was Miss Bryanna. A warm little shop from out of the storm. Others found her too, new customers who wandered up to the pale yellow house trimmed in white and opened the sliding glass doors. Grateful for the titles, they became her friends. Her pastor, now retired, shook his head. Obscure titles, obscure authors. She nodded and smiled, tall and straight as a white aspen, standing firmly behind a brown birch counter.
“Plenty of other stores have the popular ones,” she responded.
“You won’t make any money.”
“I was thinking about helping people love God with their minds this week. Having a special.”
“You’re not being realistic, my dear.”
“Perhaps I ought to extend the special to the end of my life.”
“Bryanna! And you ought to think about changing the name of your bookstore. It’s bound to offend, turn some away.”
“I rather like my life again, pastor. I expect I’ll leave my shop this way unless God drops Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon from his own bestseller.”
She died in the shop one summer night that was full of crickets and moon. A pale arm was draped over the birch counter like a long thin taper, and her hair had unravelled and fallen over her face and features like gentle snow. Not surprisingly, the other hand held a book. She had been reading a paperback that looked brand new but had the cover design of a pocketbook from the 1930’s or the 1940’s - part of her old stock of Christian classics she had found discarded in a dumpster a few days after the book chain had purchased her store. They tried to slide the book out from under her hand but eventually had to pry it loose from her tenacious fingers: Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. A friend thought it best to cremate the book with Bryanna.

the jesus poems of dylan thomas

this paper is posted in dedication to EMP







THE GENTLEMAN OF WOUNDS
A Prodigal Poet’s Christ

Dylan Thomas and the Jesus Poems



a paper presented at the CCL Western Regional Conference
Trinity Western University
May 10-12, 2007


Murray Andrew Pura, PhD (candidate)
University of Liverpool, UK





I. The Dylan Paradox


Dylan Thomas grew up in Wales, a land saturated in Christian spirituality and history, and the images of that faith filled his childhood and poetry. In Fern Hill he muses:


The foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams . . .

. . . it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.


In Poem in October, Thomas begins, “It was my thirtieth year to heaven,” and adds phrases about “the heron priested shore,” “water praying,” and the line, “I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother through the parables of sun light and the legends of the green chapels.” In other poems he speaks of the “Christ-cross-row of death,” “my Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree,” “long breath that carried to my father the message of his dying christ.” The truth is, as we shall see, Christ is a persistent figure in a number of Thomas’s poems. But not because Thomas was a Hopkins or a Donne or an Eliot whose Christian faith found expression in verse. He once wrote the American John Malcolm Brinnin that his poems were “poems in praise of God’s world by a man who doesn’t believe in God.”(1) A year before his death the avowed atheist wrote in the preface to his Collected Poems, “These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.” (2) Thomas was not a believer. And then, somehow, he was.

Thomas biographer Andrew Sinclair comments,


All his life, religion had bothered him and the world had dumbfounded
him. He could not escape God because of the beauty of His works.
As Dylan wrote of the poems in 1951, they were ‘poems in praise of
God’s world by a man who doesn’t believe in God.’ There again, that
statement was not quite true. Dylan was unwilling to believe in God,
but his very thoughts and words and rhythms were suffused with
biblical themes and heavenly references, for a natural god or God in
nature. (3)


In Over Sir John’s Hill, Thomas writes,


It is the heron and I, under judging Sir John’s elmed
Hill, tell-tale the knelled
Guilt
Of the led-astray birds whom God, for their breast of
whistles,
Have mercy on,
God in his whirlwind silence save, who marks the sparrows
hail,
For their souls’ song.


And Sinclair ruminates,


These were not lines written by an unbeliever, but by a man
slowly won over to what Dylan called . . . ‘the godhead,
the author, the milky-way farmer, the first cause, architect,
lamp-lighter, quintessence, the beginning Word, the
anthropomorphic bowler-out and blackballer, the stuff of all
men, scapegoat, martyr, maker, woe-bearer - He, on top
of the hill in heaven, weeps whenever, outside that state of
being called his country, one of his worlds drops dead,
vanishes screaming, shrivels, explodes, murders itself. And,
when he weeps, Light and His tears glide down together, hand
in hand.’ (4)


Where did the bipolar spirituality come from in Thomas, what made him a hybrid of believer and unbeliever, embracing the things of God and Christ in many of his poems and words, and then breaking the embrace, scorning anything resembling a Christian lifestyle in his native Wales, tipping back the bottle to killing excess, plunging himself into multiple sexual affairs, thumping his chest repeatedly about his atheism, in some of his poems arguing passionately against Christian doctrine?

Thomas was born into a Wales that a decade before had experienced the great
Welsh Revival of 1904. Hymns were sung before football matches - as they still are today - and ministers and churches and a lively evangelical Christian faith were honoured throughout the land. His mother was a faithful church-goer and his mother’s sister, Aunt Dosie, married a minster, Reverend David Rees, well known for his ability to work a congregation into a holy fervour. As a young boy his mother took him to the Walter Road Congregational Church in Swansea.

On the one hand, Thomas gained a great deal that was positive from his early
exposure to an evangelical revivalist style of Christianity.


Let me say that the things that first made me love language
and want to work in it and for it were nursery rhymes and folk
tales, the Scottish Ballads, a few lines of hymns, the most
famous Bible stories and the rhythms of the Bible, Blake’s
Songs of Innocence, and the quite incomprehensible
magical majesty and nonsense of Shakespeare . . . (5)


The Bible . . . its great stories of Noah, Jonah, Lot, Moses,
Jacob, David, Solomon and a thousand more, I had, of
course, known from very early youth; the great rhythms had
rolled over me from the Welsh pulpits; and I read for myself,
from Job and Ecclesiastes; and the story of the New Testament
is part of my life. But I have never sat down and studied the Bible,
never consciously echoed its language, and am, in reality, as
ignorant of it as most brought-up Christians. All of the Bible
I use in my work is remembered from childhood, and is the
common property of all who were brought up in English-
speaking communities. (6)


The spoken word as an art form and as a spiritual act was highly regarded in Wales and even though Thomas wrote in English the Welshness wound and ploughed its way
through his verse and prose. He was influenced by the hwyl or chanting sermon, a musical and lofty and forceful style of preaching, as well as by the hiraeth, the spiritual vitality that rose out of the congregational singing of Welsh hymns. The impact of this Welsh Christian spirituality stayed with him and his art a lifetime. So did the significance of his middle name, Marlais, given him in honour of his paternal great uncle, Gwilym Marles, who had been a famous preacher - and a poet.

On the other hand, there were the angry preachers on the Swansea beaches railing against sin, there was his uncle, the Reverend David Rees, whom he referred to as “The Reverend Crap, a pious fraud”. (7) Dylan: “I hate you from your dandruff to your corns.” (8) For his part, the Reverend Rees thought Thomas should be placed in a
madhouse. None of this boded well for a Thomas who might embrace his mother’s faith
with a whole heart. Nor did his father encourage him, a schoolmaster who was an avowed atheist, who nevertheless cursed God roundly for the difficulties of his life and quoted the Bible out loud at home. In time, Thomas rebelled against “Welsh puritanism”, as Sinclair points out, “with its insistence on righteousness and a severe God, who could not be questioned.” (9) This rebellion also took the form of heavy drinking. And sex. His infidelities were prodigious and eventually drove his wife Caitlin to engage in infidelities of her own. Thomas became the quintessential “bad boy” of English letters, so much so that despite his fame as a poet he was denied a plaque in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. When Jimmy Carter, as American President, visited Westminster Abbey and asked why there was no memorial for Dylan Thomas, a poet who had inspired him personally, the Dean of Westminster stated it was because of Thomas’s immoral life. Carter responded, “You put him in here. And I will pray for him.” (10)

So the plaque was placed in 1982. The truth is, Thomas’s profligate lifestyle was not simply adopted to offer a cliched revolt against Christian doctrine and morality. He got drunk because he could not hold his liquor, because he hoped it would drown his insomnia, because it was what the others did, because, as Thomas himself said, “They expect it of me.” (11) Sinclair states, “The trouble was the old romantic and decadent notion that every orgy of excess was permitted to the Artist.” (12) Charlie Chaplin, however, was not impressed with Dylan’s frequent displays of vulgarity and once confronted him with the words, “Even great poetry cannot excuse such rude, drunken behaviour.” (13)

Along with the drinking and the promiscuity came poverty, for what money that came his way ran through his fingers like the sands of Swansea beach. He was forever asking his friends for financial help. Even on his deathbed in New York a blistering letter arrived from his wife Caitlin in Wales demanding money to avoid legal action, saying she would have to take up prostitution to feed the children, that he had “a lump of iron slop, instead of a man’s heart in your flabby breast.” (14)

Dylan’s death in 1953 came about as a result of over drinking, pneumonia, and
medical malpractice - an overdose of morphine administered to help ease the pain and
discomfort he experienced from his drinking during a speaking tour of America. The tour saw him using drugs, as well as alcohol, to increase his stamina and enhance his ability to perform his readings on stage, and certainly contributed to the complications, the coma, and the medical mistreatment that ended his life at 39. An old friend, Vernon Watkins, was asked by the London Times to write an obituary. “Innocence is always a paradox,” Watkins said, “and Dylan Thomas presents, in retrospect, the greatest paradox of our time.” (15) Watkins, a Christian, would never allow anyone to criticize Dylan, “insisting that he was a religious poet in the broad sense of the word, if not a religious man.” (16)

To his death, and since, the controversy continues to swirl about who and what Dylan Thomas was. Simply a rebel? Or a rebel, in Sinclair’s words, who “never escaped that first puritan training, that sense of sin, that holy infusion of childhood. He was more at home with Vaughan and Blake than with Marx and Proust.” (17) Glyn Jones, a friend and writer, described Dylan and his followers as “Bible-blest and chapel-haunted.” (18) His wife Caitlin argued that Dylan was not as free of his Welsh upbringing as he liked to think: “There was a very strong puritanical streak in him, that his friends never suspected; but of which I got the disapproving benefit.” (19) He tore the skin off his hands with his fingernails once, shouting, “To get at the bone, and then to get rid of that! What a wonderful thing!” (20) It was Dylan who asserted, as he did several times over his 39 years, that “the joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.” (21) Six days before his death he told his American lover, Elizabeth Reitell, as he collapsed exhausted and weeping, that he wanted to die and “go to the garden of Eden.” (22) His favourite poem, perhaps surprisingly, perhaps not, was Milton’s On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity. Yet his American companion John Brinnin remained shocked at Dylan’s behaviour when he wrote his memoir, Dylan Thomas In America, that “the purest lyrical poet of the twentieth century” could live such a disjointed life,
being a disciplined and wonderful artist on the one hand and then seeking consolation, on the other, in “liquor, bar-room garrulity, encounters with strangers, and endless questing for meaningless experience.” (23)

Andrew Sinclair sums up this Dylan paradox:


These were the contradictions of the man who was the finest
lyric poet of his age. He had one foot in Eden, the other in
Babylon. He had one hand on the Bible, the other under the
bedclothes. His heavy head was lifted to the sky, his feet
were set on the bar-rail. A frail angel became gross, a self-
declared Lucifer took in his aged parents. The sensuous
prophet of the adolescent, the generous wastrel of middle
age, the fierce mourner of the dead . . . He was the bard of
the mysteries of heaven and hell . . . (24)



II. The Jesus Poems


It was in the big cities, like London and New York, that Dylan did his heaviest drinking and the least of his writing. It was in Wales, where he went to dry out and recollect himself, that the poems tumbled out of him, and God and Christ with them. Biographer Paul Ferris points out,


Like many writers he [Dylan] drew energy from a location . . .
West Wales, imprinted on him as a child, was the place that
consistently provoked him to write . . . It is a fact that nearly all
his poems were written there. The last period in which he wrote
intensively over a short period, faintly echoing the frenzy of his
adolescence, was the year from mid-1944 to mid-1945. He
was based in Wales all that time, with intermittent trips to
London. (25)


His wife Caitlin concurs, “Luckily to Dylan the tomb came late, and he solved the issue of integrity quite simply; whenever in town, and confronted by the easier joys of telling endless stories to buddies in pubs from morning till night, by not working at all until he was back in the penitence of the country.” (26)

In was in Wales that Dylan wrote his poems of Jesus. “He laid aside,” writes Milton in the poem Dylan loved best, “and here with us to be, forsook the courts of everlasting day, and chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.” From the very beginning of his writing days, filling notebooks with poems in Swansea, Dylan wrote of Jesus and his sufferings. “His own poetry,” observes Ferris about Dylan’s early years, “. . . was likely to have Marx and Jesus in it; he was an agnostic somewhere on the fringes of belief who liked to argue about religion, far into the night.” (27)


Where, what’s my God among this crazy rattling
Of knives on forks, he cried, of nerve on nerve,
Man’s ribs on woman’s, straight line on a curve,
And hand to buttock, man to engine, battling,
Bruising, where’s God’s my Shepherd, God is love?
No loving shepherd in this upside life. (28)


Even in his poems about sex and lust he could not prevent images of a suffering Christ from creeping in:


The dancing women all lie down;
Their turning wheels are still as death;
No hope can make them glad,
Lifting their cheery bodies as before
In many shapes and signs,
A cross of legs
Poor Christ was never nailed upon (29)


Sinclair comments:


Veering between belief and despair, most of the later poems
of the Notebooks demonstrated Dylan’s early search for a
mystical fusion of the contradictions that were to torment him
all his life. He could not wholly reject the censorious society
that loved him, while longing fiercely for the appalling freedom
of the poet. He could not spurn God though he boasted in 1933
that God had been deposed years ago and the Devil reigned.
He could only try to resolve the conflicts between the outer
obvious world, which had to be lived in and enjoyed and endured,
and between his inner vision of some impossible unity in creation.
The knowledge of the artist was ‘of the actual world’s deplorable
sordidness and of the invisible world’s splendour.’ Even Dylan’s
own poems did not seem satisfactory to him because they dealt
too much with the necessary outer world. ‘Perhaps the greatest
works of art are those that reconcile, perfectly, inner and
outer.’(30)

For Dylan, as for William Blake and John Donne before him, the human body was
metaphysical as well as physical: “Man be my metaphor.” (31) And what was
essential to comprehending the mingling of the metaphysical and the physical in humanity was Christ.


Jesus Christ, indeed, became the key to this mystery of God in
man, even to the agnostic and doubting Thomas, whose poems
of the period were awash with the blood and the body and the
pain of the crucifixion. Yet, finally, Dylan was always the heretic,
the Gnostic, believing that part of the godhead was somehow
in every body, that each being was somehow his own suffering
Jesus. (32)


Swaying back and forth between belief and unbelief, or if not exactly unbelief, a tormented vision of the Christian faith Wales had given him, Dylan seemed to closely identify with Christ in his sufferings, not only when he wrote his poems away from urban tumult, but even in letters he wrote to friends, describing himself as lonely as Christ in a poor, dirty land. (33) When he was 19 he wrote a poem in his Notebooks that he called his “Jesus poem” (34) which was entitled Before I Knocked. The Christological metaphors and images of crucifixion and suffering are very strong:


As yet ungotten, I did suffer,
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

. . . .

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death’s feather.
I was mortal to the last
Long breath that carried to my father
The message of his dying christ
You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And doublecrossed my mother’s womb.


Commenting on the “Jesus poem” Walford Davies points out that Dylan “often
fuses his own and everyman’s identity with Christ”. (35) And there is certainly
more than one Jesus Poem in Dylan’s canon. At the same time as Before I Knocked Dylan
wrote a poem called In The Beginning which is also full of Christological references: “In the beginning,” says Dylan, echoing Genesis and the Gospel of John, “was the pale signature, three-syllabled and starry as the smile; and after came the imprints on the water” - he speaks of Jesus stepping across the Sea of Galilee - “stamp of the minted face upon the moon; the blood that touched the crosstree and the grail touched the first cloud and left a sign” - he speaks of the first tree in Eden as well as the tree that was the Cross of Christ. Later in the poem, paralleling the Gospel of John exclusively, Dylan says, “In the beginning was the word, the word that from the solid bases of the light abstracted all the letters of the void.”

In this same period of time, 1933, we have a third Jesus Poem by Dylan that he
wrote on Christmas Eve, a poem that is worth quoting in its entirety. Originally entitled Breakfast Before Execution Dylan later renamed it This Bread I Break. Davies says of the poem:


Paradoxically, the life Christ gives in the eucharist involves the
death of nature . . . [the poem is] a version of ‘The Last Supper’ at
which Christ inaugurated the ritual. Ostensibly spoken by Christ,
the poem is both an expression of the central Christian tenet that
new life comes from suffering and breakage and an ironic resistance
to the urge to abstract significance from what is already a
significant, living world. (36)


This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wind at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape’s joy.

Once in this wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.


Possibly the most momentous of the Jesus Poems is the one entitled Altarwise by owl-light which Dylan wrote between Christmas 1934 and Christmas 1935. He went from

being 20 years old to 21. It consists of ten sonnets of which five are examined here. Christ speaks frequently throughout. The poem contrasts the integrity of the true Christ or “gentleman of wounds” with the Christ that is “the fake gentleman” who represents what Christianity has become - a corrupt version of what Jesus intended.

In Sonnet I, Davies comments, “Christ, crucified and castrated by some originating power, appears to either the newly born poet or to Christ’s own newly born self in Bethlehem, and declares both his immanence (his “bed”, cradle and grave, is as large as the tropical expanse of the world, of “Capricorn and Cancer”) and his partnership in the world’s sexuality (Capricorn, the goat) and its mortality (cancer).” (37)


Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven’s egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the halfway winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter,
I am the long world’s gentleman, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.


In Sonnet II, “the resurrected Jesus, speaker of the last two lines of the first sonnet, continues as the speaker of the whole of the second.” (38) This continues into Sonnet III where Jesus discusses his Incarnation: “When “three dead seasons” (spring, summer and autumn) on the ‘climbing grave’ of the year had brought the world to winter (the season of the Nativity), Christ dipped himself ‘in the descended bone’ of a human body come down to earth.” (39)


First there was the lamb on knocking knees
And three dead seasons on a climbing grave

. . . . .

Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow-ladle
Out of the wrinkled undertaker’s van,
And, Rip Van Winkle from a timeless cradle,
Dipped me breast-deep in the descended bone


In Sonnet IV “the speaker in the octave is now the growing boy, either the poet or the young Christ. Growing in intellectual curiosity, he asks those abstract questions that can have no meaningful answers in a solid world.” (40)


What is the metre of the dictionary?
The size of genesis? the short spark’s gender?
Shade without shape? the shape of Pharaoh’s echo?


“Thomas the young whippersnapper,” says Davies, “or Christ the young iconoclast are then answered in the sestet by the resurrected Christ’s calmer emphasis on Love.” (41) The fifth sonnet highlights the corrupt Christianity that now exists, juxtaposing an artificial Christ over against the authentic Christ of the first four sonnets.



And from the windy West came two-gunned Gabriel,
From Jesu’s sleeve trumped up the king of spots,
The sheath-decked jacks, queen with a shuffled heart;
Said the fake gentleman in suit of spades,
Black-tongued and tipsy from salvation’s bottle





Davies comments:


The first five lines are spoken by the poet as narrator,
describing a corrupted and hypocritical form of
Christianity, promoted by a card-sharping ‘Western’-
type Bible-thumping evangelist. He is a fake gentleman
as different from Christ, the gentleman of wounds of the
first sonnet, as general western Christianity is from Christ’s
original teaching. (42)


In 1940 Dylan wroteThere was a saviour, a poem that “dramatizes the radical
Blakean view of Christ as a person betrayed by the organized religion founded in His
name.” (43) In a letter to a friend Dylan said, “The churches are wrong because they
standardize our gods, because they label our morals, because they laud the death of a
vanished Christ, and fear the crying of the new Christ in the wilderness.” (44)


There was a saviour
Rarer than radium
Commoner than water, crueller than truth;
Children kept from the sun
Assembled at his tongue
To hear the golden note turn in a groove,
Prisoners of wishes locked their eyes
In the jails and studies of his keyless smiles.


The people who had hoped for more from Christianity, “prisoners of wishes”, are locked up in their minds and spirits by institutional Christianity, yet still seek the freedom available in Jesus who does not imprison or lock up with his “keyless smiles”, even though he has come not to bring peace but a sword (Matthew 10:34), “a saviour . . . crueller than truth”. This poem makes it clear that in Dylan there was no rejection of Christ, no matter how often he asserted he didn’t believe in God, and that any dichotomy which existed in him was the same dichotomy he believed existed between the true Christ and what organized religion had made of Christ, especially in his native Wales. This affinity with Jesus remains evident in a poem written four years later, Ceremony After a Fire Raid, where Dylan sets out his lines and stanzas in the manner of a Christian litany and declares,


I know the legend
Of Adam and Eve is never for a second
Silent in my service
Over the dead infants
Over the one
Child who was priest and servants,
Word, singers, and tongue
In the cinder of the little skull,
Who was the serpent’s
Night fall and the fruit like a sun,
Man and woman undone,
Beginning crumbled back to darkness
Bare as the nurseries
Of the garden of wilderness.


Christ is the one Child, whom Dylan identifies with a child alive only a few hours before it was killed in a German air raid, “who was priest and servants, Word, singers, and tongue . . . who was the serpent’s night fall”, the undoing of Satan and the evil in the world, “and the fruit like a sun”, also the fruit of Satan’s work because Christ came in response to the wickedness Satan unleashed. Again, we see not only that fascination with Jesus but a certain proximity to orthodox beliefs about Christ’s Advent, his Incarnation, his death to defeat Satan on the Cross, and more than a proximity, sometimes almost an embrace, obvious in the other Jesus Poems as well.

Dylan biographer Paul Ferris argues that ”there are two views about Thomas and
religion. One that he was a ‘religious’ poet, and his life a movement towards God. The other (which seems to me the only feasible view) is that religion was a stage-prop of his poetry; he used its language and myths, which he learned in childhood, without ever absorbing or caring much about its central beliefs”. (45) Having looked at Dylan’s Jesus Poems with slightly more than a passing glance it is impossible to agree with Ferris. On the one hand, this is not a poet like Herbert or Donne or Blake or Hopkins or Eliot. On the other hand, Dylan’s wrestling with Christ and Christianity in his poems, his identification of Christ with the human race and human suffering, his sympathy for Jesus over against a corrupt institutional Christianity, his entanglement in Christ’s Incarnation and Atonement - all these speak of a passion for Jesus that goes far beyond using him as a stage prop or as poetic license. A man who is always reading and quoting Donne and Blake and even Hopkins and whose favourite poem is by Milton, and a poem about Christ at that, is not someone who is taking the mysteries of divinity and Christ lightly. There was a world he lived in the pubs and in the promiscuities and vulgarities of his skin, another world he lived within where he looked for what was truest and best, where he looked for a true God and a true Christ, and put his struggles with it all down on paper for the world he cared so much about to read. This is the third way of looking at Dylan, that he was a prodigal who believed in Christ but turned his back on Christianity and said he did not believe, only to limp home from his debaucheries and seek Christ again and again in his imagination and in the poems that spun the thinking and feeling out of his deepest darkest depths and brought them shining into the light of day. Two years before his death he competed Poem on his Birthday, where he wrote some of his most haunting verse, and proved that the prodigals’ journey to and from the divine “spinning place” had not ended but was still continuing, even though the unaware saw only his drinking and his sensuality and his unbelief.


And freely he goes
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.


. . . .


That the closer I move
To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
The louder the sun blooms
And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
And every wave of the way
And gale I tackle, the whole world then
With more triumphant faith
Than ever was since the world was said
Spins its morning of praise,


I hear the bouncing hills
Grow larked and greener at berry brown
Fall and the dew larks sing
Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
More spanned with angels ride
The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
Holier then their eyes,
And my shining men no more alone
As I sail out to die.








ENDNOTES


1. Dylan Thomas, in a letter to John Malcolm Brinnin, quoted in Walford Davies, ed., Dylan Thomas, Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2000), p. x.

2. Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1952), preface.

3. Andrew Sinclair, Dylan The Bard (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2000), p. 171.

4. Ibid., p.172.

5. Ibid., p. 196.

6. Ibid., p. 197.

7. Dylan Thomas quoted in Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas, The Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977; rev. ed., 1999), p. 76.

8. Thomas quoted in ibid., p.14.

9. Sinclair, p. 53.

10. Jimmy Carter quoted in Sinclair, p. 216.

11. Thomas quoted in ibid., p. 79.

12. Sinclair, p. 90.

13. Charlie Chaplin, quoted in Ferris, p. 284.

14. Caitlin Thomas quoted in Sinclair, pp. 211-212.

15. Vernon Watkins quoted in Ferris, p. 362.

16. Watkins quoted in ibid., p. 128.

17. Sinclair, p. 222.

18. Glyn Jones quoted in ibid.

19. Caitlin Thomas quoted in ibid., p. 224.

20. Dylan Thomas quoted in ibid.

21. Dylan Thomas quoted in ibid., p. 200.

22. Dylan Thomas quoted in Ferris, p. 356.

23. John Malcolm Brinnin, quoted in Sinclair, p. 177.

24. Sinclair, p. 226.

25. Ferris, p. 3.
26. Caitlin Thomas quoted in Sinclair, p. 91.

27. Ferris, p. 82.

28. Notebook poem quoted in Sinclair, p. 54.

29. Notebook poem quoted in ibid., p. 52.

30. Sinclair, p. 54.

31. Last line of If I were tickled by the rub of love

32. Sinclair, p. 55.

33. Dylan Thomas quoted in Sinclair, p. 82.

34. Dylan Thomas quoted in Davies, p. 116.

35. Davies, p. 116.

36. Ibid., p. 119.

37. Ibid., p. 127.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid., p. 128.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., p. 139.

44. Ibid.

45. Ferris, pp. 28-29.

places to go when you die

Places To Go When You Die

(under the title Spades this story was short-listed for the John Spencer Hill Literary Award)



Deep into the earth, crushed grass and damp soil scenting the

air, he put aside his shovel and leaned his chest against the side

of the grave. Only his head and neck could be seen. He lifted his

cap and placed it back over his wet hair. Sunlight slid quickly

down the slope as a cloud tugged free. He squinted. One part of

the hill was crosses and monuments. The other was still grass.

Since the spring before they had been working their way down into

it. He had cut into acres of grass, as if he were a farmer,

mounded the earth neatly, come back to fill the hole by himself or

with a partner, watched the stones grow up behind him as he opened

new rows and slipped closer and closer down to the river. There

was a fence that had been built two years earlier. One day they

would fill in the last of the holes and the cemetery would have to

expand in a different direction. Generations of bodies. Sometimes

the end of families, no children left to carry on. A bloodline

begun in England or Poland or Germany five hundred years before.

Ended here on the Canadian plains. There was plenty of room for

more if you made the prairie one huge enclosure. Could Russia or

Ukraine be more full of earth and distance? Sun settled like dust

on his forearms.

“I don’t see any bodies, Nicholas,” he told his son. “Just

wooden boxes.”

“Can I come and look?”

“There’s nothing to see.”

“Can I dig with you?”

“No.”

“Taras,” said Nicholas’ mother. “He just wants to see where

his father works. What is the difference between a grave and a

ditch?”

Taras took the boy to the cemetery. Nicholas refused to look

or act tired. When his father stopped to drink coffee he kept

shovelling. Sometimes their spades clanged together.

“The bells of the dead,” his father grunted.

“How far down do we go?”

“A lot farther. Tired, eh?”

“No.”

Taras made Nicholas prop up his shovel for lunch. Grandmother

had made the sandwiches, dark rye heavy with sausage and pickles.

There was a small bottle of warm milk for Nicholas. Delicate

spring light flicked at the purple and white crocuses in the grass

and at their fingers.

“Can I have some coffee?” asked Nicholas.

“Aren’t you hot?”

“Yes.”

“The coffee’s hot. Drink your milk.”

“It tastes funny.”

“Let me see. Tastes all right.”

“If I’m digging with you I should be allowed to drink

coffee.”

“Who says so?”

Nicholas shrugged.

“Did you want coffee or a coffin?”

Nicholas laughed. “Coff-eee!”

“Here. I’ll dump some into your milk.”

“Do you like doing this, Papa?”

“It’s hard to get work, Nicholas. Does it bother you?”

“There’s nothing here. Mama said it’s only mud and grass.”

“Do you want some more coffee? We have to get back to our

work.”

“When are they going to use it?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who fills it in?”

“I do.”

“When?”

“In the afternoon.”

“I’ll fill it in with you.”

“Nicholas. This is not a game.”

“Can I help you?”

“No.”

They picked up their shovels and chopped at the clay that was

at the bottom. At night Nicholas dug past the clay and past the

rock. He found a large cavern full of people who had skin as pale

as worms. They were sitting in rows. They smiled. A man came

towards him.

This is where the dead come after your father buries us. He

has done a good job. You may join us. You won’t have to die.

I want to go back.

You can’t. You have to stay here.

I want to go back.

He tried to make himself wake up but the dream was too

strong. The man had an arm on him. He kicked and bit.

“You’re all right, Nicholas,” said his father. “You’re in

your bed. You’re with us. What were you dreaming?”

“I don’t know.”

“It was not about the graveyard?”

“No.”

“Remember what your mother told you. It’s only mud and

grass.”

“It wasn’t about the graveyard.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have to go and use the bathroom.”

“Are you sick?”

“I have to pee.”

“Don’t wake your Uncle Michael. He’s napping on the couch.”

When he came out of the bathroom he opened the back door and

stood for a moment under the apple tree. The sky was clouded over

and the darkness was like the walls of soil that had surrounded

him while he dug. He touched the tree trunk and crushed a blossom

in his fingers. A breeze moved up his leg, over his head, and

disappeared. He could not hear anything. He turned quickly and

went back into the house.

“Uncle Michael.”

“What?”

“Uncle Michael.”

“What? What is it, Nick?”

“Is it only mud and grass in the graveyard?”

“I was sleeping, Nick.”

“Where does everybody go when they die?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Haven’t you seen people die?”

“Sit down.”

“Do they stay here?”

“What are you afraid of?”

“After you’re dead is it like you’re trapped somewhere? Is it

like you’re suffocating?”

“Is that what you think?”

“Is it like there’s a ton of dirt on top of you?”

“I don’t know, Nick.”

“Haven’t you seen anyone die?’

“Yeah.”

“What happens to them?”

“They stop breathing.”

“But do they breathe somewhere else after they’re dead? Do

they see anything?”

“A good Catholic would say you go to purgatory for awhile and

then you go to heaven. It’s supposed to be bright and clean. Wide

open. You could take in big lungfuls there. See God. Other

people.”

“Is that what you think? Do you think that happens?”

“I’m not much of a Catholic, Nick.”

“What would you like to happen?”

“What would I like to happen? You think that makes a

difference?”

“If you died. What would you want to happen?”

“I kind of miss the jazz bands in Chicago. A little of that

wouldn’t hurt. A whole lot of brass and some very smooth sax. That

would help.”

“Did you ever feel like you were going to die?”

Uncle Michael’s face burst into flame and glowed as he drew

on a cigarette.

“In the war or anything? Did anything ever happen?”

“There’s been a few times.”

“When?”

“Vimy. I thought my head had been cut off and it was spinning

away. Everything was going around and around and up and down. I

vomited all over myself. Couldn’t hear a thing. Then the spinning

stopped. All I could see was a bunch of stones. I was on my

stomach. I was dead. But pretty soon I got a ringing in my ears.

Then I could hear voices. And guns going off.”

“Was there blood on you?”

“Just puke.”

“Was that the only time?”

“No. There were others. It’s all the same. You get confused.

You don’t know whether you’re coming or going. Can’t think

straight. Don’t remember anything. Then you come out of it.”

“When was the last time?”

“Take it easy, Nick.”

“Does it ever scare you?”

“It’s too fast.”

“Did you ever feel like you were suffocating?”

“No.”

“Did you ever feel like you couldn’t get out of it?”

“You don’t even think about stuff like that. You’re just here

and suddenly you’re there. You’re looking at something and

you know what it is. So you’re okay. You know you’re okay.”

“What if you don’t recognize anything?”

“Then you’re dead and it’s over with. No more nightmares.

Pain. Hunger. Love. It’s all finished. The end.”

Nicholas watched Uncle Michael smoke. Uncle Michael’s eyes

never moved from him. Nicholas looked down at the floor. At the

strips of wood.

“Go get yourself a drink of water, Nick. You’ll be all right.

It was just a dream.”

Nicholas left the house by the back door and stood under the

apple tree again. The darkness remained solid and without motion. Starlight

fell like rain upon his face. He took a deep breath and let it out as

slowly as he could.

clouds

CLOUDS


Ever since he’d been a child he had heard the stories. Out beyond the village and the hills there was another world. The sun shone brightly there and you could watch it rise and set. There were streams and waterfalls and tall green forests. There were mountains, some of them capped with snow, as high as the blue sky.
“Fairy tales,” his father told him.
“People cannot accept that this world is all there is,” said one of his teachers. “They desperately want to believe our existence is much more than what we see. So they invent a heaven on earth. They fill it with strange colours and glittering rivers and magical beasts. But no one has ever seen such a place. It is a fantasy. We must learn to live in the real world.”
“My son, “ smiled his mother, “all that you need is right before you. School. Home. Work. Food. Sleep. There is nothing else. But this is more than enough.”
“But haven’t others gone to look and see if this other world exists or not?” the boy asked.
“Fools have gone looking,” replied his father, “as fools always will, instead of putting their hands to decent labour. They chase their pots of gold. But nothing has ever come of it.”
“We know of 237 people who have gone looking for this second world,” responded his teacher. “None of them returned. Not one. They perished in a barren wilderness.”
“My son,” answered his mother, “you are almost a man. Put these thoughts aside. Be a horseman like your father. Or a teacher like your uncle. You are too old for nursery rhymes now. Fill your head with the things that are real.”
He grew up and went to college and took several degrees. But even after he had begun to teach he stood for hours and gazed at the thick clouds. They covered the horizon no matter which way you looked. The sun emerged from them at ten in the morning and vanished behind them again at two in the afternoon. They were charcoal grey and impenetrable. Mountains are there but you cannot see them, went the childhood rhymes, sunrise and sunset but you cannot see them, animals with horns but you cannot see them, waterfalls and lakes but you cannot see them.
Once his mother and father and his teacher were dead - “The hole in the ground is the wonderful finality, it is the greatest reality,” his books said - he pulled on his sturdiest boots, filled his largest pack with food and bedding, strapped a knife to his waist, took up a stout oak staff and made his way at night towards the clouds. He had to elude the many soldiers and police who guarded the way to the clouds “in order,” the law said, “to save people from themselves,” but he was successful, even though there were many more guards than he had been led to believe. For a month he travelled over a rough boulder-strewn landscape, often having to hide from patrols mounted on horseback - one officer was even calling out his name - but in time he reached the edge of the cloudbank and began to pass through it.
It was cold and dank for days. Once in awhile he thought he was following a trail but at other times there was nothing and he tread on bare rock. His food ran out. Water grew scarce and tasted like mud. There was no colour to the world. No light. He thought of turning back. But which was the way back? Suppose he was walking in circles? What would happen to him if even the muddy water no longer oozed out from the stoney ground? He emerged from the cloudbank when it was night. Stars were all over the sky like water drops. There were too many for it to be his own land for they stretched from horizon to horizon in front of him, with no clouds to obscure their light. And he was high in the sky. Higher than he had ever been before. Tall jagged shapes rose up all around him like arrowheads against the starlight. On several of them white glistened.
“I know what you are,” he said, “but I am going to sleep first, and then wake up, and then I will be sure of it.”
The light on his face made him open his eyes from a dream of thick grey mist. He jumped to his feet. It was impossible that the sky should be so blue, the sun so bright and so close to the horizon and the clouds near it so thin and so striped with purple and red. It was impossible that the mountains should be so large and their peaks so sharp and the snow on them so white. Near him there was a bush of red berries. Birds with blue wings ate them so he ate them too. Further down the rocky slope on which he stood silver water gushed from a hole. He thrust his head under it.
In time he made his way to the foot of the mountain he had been standing on. After a few days he found other villages and the people in them greeted him warmly. They had all come from his world. He did not recognize any of them but some had known his father and his mother and his brothers and sisters. They showed him waterfalls and lakes and deer and elk with great antlers. They showed him eagles and hawks and larks. They showed him fruit orchards they had planted that stretched for miles - oranges and grapes and peaches and pears.
“But this is wonderful!” he exclaimed. “Far better than anything in the nursery rhymes. The people back home have no idea. I must go back and tell them what I have seen.”
“Don’t you think others have tried?” one man told him. “They will not listen to you. They will not believe you.”
“No one has come to the village in my lifetime and tried to tell us about these things,” he protested.
“The guards kill them,” a woman spoke up. “They kill them if they catch them trying to leave the village and they kill them if they catch them trying to come back.”
“I cannot believe that!” he cried. “Our own people would not kill us! How do you know this?”
“Because I survived the attacks,” a young girl said to him. “They slaughtered my family at the edge of the clouds on our way in. And when I tried to return to the village with two of my friends and tell them about the elk and the waterfalls and the sunsets they killed them too.”
“They will not kill me,” he answered.
A few days later he climbed a mountain and went down the other side into the clouds. The trip through the charcoal mist did not seem so long this time. When he came through to the other side he hid by day and travelled by night and eluded all the mounted patrols and all the guards. He showed up in his classroom early one morning and stood smiling as his students walked in. They were delighted to see him.
“They told us you had been killed in the clouds,” the students told him.
“No,” he responded, “as you can see I am very well. The clouds were good to me. They let me pass through and they revealed the secret world that lies beyond them. Look.”
Out of his pack he pulled oranges and clusters of purple grapes and three yelow pears. There was an eagle feather and another from a red-tailed hawk. A small antler a deer had dropped and a great rack that had fallen from a bull elk. “Animals with horns,” he said, “but you cannot see them.”
The substitute teacher had been standing at the back watching all this. Then he slipped away and returned with the school principal and four guards with heavy swords at their hips. The principal smiled.
“You should have told me you were back,” the principal said, “so I could have welcomed you properly. Listen. The mayor is anxious to see you and hear your tale. Yes, please bring all these artifiacts with you. They will be invaluable. You can show them to the students again tomorrow.”
But there was no tomorrow. The students did not see their teacher again. “He vanished in the night,” the principal told them. “He died in the clouds.”
“What about the grapes and the feathers and the horns?” asked one girl, putting her hand up.
The principal smiled sadly and shook his head. “All fake. All made out of pottery and turkey feathers. I am afraid the clouds drove your teacher mad.”
School went on, work went on, life went on. The cloudbank clung to the horizon in all directions. Some said the teacher really had gone back into the clouds and disappeared. Others said the guards had killed him and buried his body and his artifacts. Still others said he was locked up with other crazy people far away from the village behind a string of brown hills. Soon no one talked about him at all.
But at night when everyone was asleep one boy who had been in the classroom that day would pull a small deer antler out from a box he hid in his bedroom. He would light a candle and turn the antler over and over in his hands. It had fallen from the teacher’s pack. A small nick showed where the boy had cut it with his pocket knife. Not clay. No, the antler had not been pottery or clay or turkey feathers. It was real, and the animal it had come from had been real and the boy knew that the world the animal lived in must be real as well. The antler had not been made by the hands of any man or any woman.