The Bicentenary of Saint John's, Parts 1 and 2

             

                          The Bicentenary of St John’s

The Church of Saint John the Evangelist, Princes Street, Edinburgh was consecrated in March 1818

          

                                      CANTO ONE

                Think 1818. George III was king

                And Europe was awash with creativity.

                “Heart of Midlothian” was Scott’s new thing;

                The Marx couple celebrated Karl’s nativity;

                Gruber wrote “Stille Nacht for us to sing.

                The list o’erwhelms a heart of sensitivity.

                                It's far too long! In fact it might be speedier

                                To look the whole lot up in Wikipedia.

                And, don’t forget, this year did Mary Shelley

                Conceive her famous Doctor Frankenstein.

                (I say “conceive”. He was not in her belly,

                Rather her fecund fantasy divine.)

    I guess the Shelley household was a melée

    Of quill, ink, paper – all the author’s line.

                And this, in fact, was rather handy as

                Her Percy Bysshe was writing “Ozymandias”.

    But what about the Athens of the North,

    Then slithering from off its lofty perch,

    Street by new street towards the Firth of Forth?

    The old crown jewels were found after a search

                (That Scott again) and many a man of worth

                Thought the New Town should have another church.

                                So, just as Byron started on “Don Juan”

                                Why, Daniel Sandford thought he’d build a new one.

                These lines may make a nest for some church mice,

                Or act on my friend Dorp like an emetic,

                But “Cornerstone” is free, so there’s no price;

                I trust my readers to be sympathetic.

                A bicentenary doesn’t happen twice

                So it seems right to pen some sort of epic.

                                And what could better suit a bold romancer

                                Than write his verse in a Byronic stanza?

                                                CANTO TWO

                This Sandford – Bishop Daniel, I should say –

                Dreamed of a new church for a new season.

                His diocese perhaps would point the way

                From the Enlightenment and Age of Reason

                To post-Napoleonic piety. A day

                For Godly worship to confound the heathen.

                                He wanted most (and bless his cotton socks)

                                A Gothic temple, not a preaching box.

                Let’s have, he thought, stained glass; a solemn file

                Of lofty pillars, drifting ever higher

                Towards the vaulted ceiling in the style

                Called “Perpendicular”. Let’s have a choir

                Engendering pious musings. All the while

                He planned two churches piskies to inspire.

                                And first of these two New Town Gothic halls

                                Was Ps and Gs – in those days just St Pauls.

                But churches aren’t just castles in the air,

                Whether for Kirk Established or some sect.

                They must stand up; put up with wear and tear.

                They’re stone and mortar, lead and glass, bedecked

                With ornament. And they must have a care;

                “Authentic Gothic detail” would be checked.

                                You need an architect. They chose to turn

                                To the young, up-and-coming William Burn.

                An architect is not the only thing.

                By no means! There are plans to make. A lot

                Of funds to raise and give, donors to bring

                And many legal tangles to unknot.

                We had the man! Wealth, energy and “zing”,
                Needed the Ts to cross and Is to dot.

                                So if on May the Sixth your spirits fly, go

                                Drink a toast to Forbes of Pitsligo.

A Verse for the Solar Eclipse

After a previous eclipse of the sun I wrote the following extra verse for Joseph Addison's well-known hymn about the sun, moon, stars and planets.

          However, like a human watch
          The heav'nly clock displays a botch.
          Sometimes the moon gets in the way,
          The sun no longer shines by day.
                  Does this proclaim a faulty God?
                  That really would be very odd.
          Rather give thanks. The obscure sun
          Shows the Creator's sense of fun.

A Hymn for a Service of Blessing the Animals

I have written several jokey parodies of hymns, but only twice written serious hymns. This is one of them. At our church in Creationtide we have a service for the blessing of animals. It has become dominated by pet dogs. This is fair enough, and they are very lovable; but there is more to the animal kingdom than pets. This hymn is intended to give other creatures a look in.

 *    *    *    *    *    

A Hymn for a Service of Blessing the Animals (Tune: “The Day of Resurrection”)

Come bring your cats and guinea pigs, your hamsters and your dogs.

Come farmers bring your woolly sheep, your gimmers, tups and hogs.

Let praise for all Creation resound upon the breeze.

But if your parrot says rude words, control it if you please.

Zoo-keepers bring your charges; tapirs and wild boars.

North aisle for vegetarians and south for carnivores.

We love to see the gibbons swing, and chat to chimpanzees.

But pythons, tigers, grizzly bears – control them if you please.

All microscopic forms of life that live in sludgy gloop

We owe our life to such as you, in the primaeval soup.

The algae in the duck pond and the plankton in the seas

Shall brithers be for a’ that (but don’t bring killer bees!)

Come beasts, however humble; come rats and gnats and mice

Bless midges, worms and ladybirds; bless ants and bugs and lice.

The glory of Creation includes the ticks and fleas.

But if you’ve brought a virus, do be careful not to sneeze.

"The Bedrock: Poems on Themes from the Great Tapestry of Scotland"

“The Bedrock: Poems on themes from the Great Tapestry of Scotland” by Henry Marsh

I have posted reviews of Henry Marsh's poems before. His latest collection, “The Bedrock: Poems on Themes from the Great Tapestry of Scotland” is heartily recommended.

He was asked to write poems to go with the panels of the Great Tapestry. There are twenty-seven here. “The Bedrock” (published by Maclean Dubois) only costs £5.00. I would like to say it is available from all good bookshops, but you may have to order a copy. Possibly it is easiest to buy them from the Tapestry website which is http://www.shop.scotlandstapestry.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=67 . I know Blackwells in Edinburgh stock them.

His method has been to take one of the panels and then to immerse himself in the history before letting his original and powerful imagination go to work. This “immersion” has included visits to the places – Flodden for example - as well as reading on the subject. The result is a wonderful series of lights shone on Scottish history from unexpected angles. I have no hesitation, as a historian, in saying that these poems add extra levels of meaning and understanding, even if one has a reasonable level of conventional historical knowledge

He has a most warm and effective way with words. The filthy, de-humanising horror of the Black Death, the zeal of the Covenanters, the shape of the Forth Bridge, the dignity in poverty of the Hungry Thirties are all conjured up for us. So is the imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson:

                                                                     “….that soul

                                  was forged in an Edinburgh smiddy”

Likewise the original genius of James Clerk Maxwell who:

                                                                       “…gave us

                         a glimpse of that fundamental beauty

                         on which all beauty builds.”

The poems range from the earliest times to the modern age. In the first he imagines a mother, 8,000BC, telling her child stories of how they came north:

                                                    “Your grandfather would tell

                                             how we came from a land beyond

                                             the sunrise.”

Near the end of the book he remembers

                                                      “… the hustling Archie Gemmill,

                                               now sailing like a swan

                                               past three defenders.”

Some of you will remember that too. Argentina 1978.

If you care about Scottish history, if you enjoy contemporary Scottish poetry, if you have seen the Great Tapestry, do get hold of this little book.

"The Hammer and the Fire" - Review

“The Hammer and the Fire” by Henry Marsh 

Henry Marsh has just published his fifth major volume of poetry, “A Voyage to Babylon”. Its principal focus is on the Covenanters. His third volume, “The Guidman’s Daughter”, began with thinking about Mary Queen of Scots. I intend to review the new book – just published – in due course. But to whet your appetite I will post my reviews of Three and Four. The review of “The Guidman’s Daughter” is already on my blog. Here is my review of the fourth collection, “The Hammer and the Fire”.

John Knox is the subject of the opening section in Henry Marsh’s fourth collection of poems. The hammer and the fire of the title refer, in their first layer of meaning, to the hammers that smashed and the fires that consumed during the violent iconoclasm that accompanied Knox’s Reformation of the 1550s. (In the interest of balance it should be noted that similar “holy bonfires” also raged in Queen Elizabeth’s England, encouraged by the bishops, and that most of the image-breaking for which Oliver Cromwell has been blamed happened before he was born.) We feel the plight of the victims as

Grey friars wept in their sarks

their habits smouldering.

The adjectives of darkness applied to Knox accumulate in poem after poem: the black Knox; small, black-cloaked; with darkness wrapped about him; like a wet crow. In the very first poem in the book, “At the High Kirk, St Giles’” the contrast is made with

                        light streaming through the east windows.

                        A dawning that reminds us of the life of Christ.

Poem after poem also captures the violence of Knox’s language, sometimes direct quotation, sometimes refined by the poet’s imagination. But for Marsh we can be sure that the worst is not the abusive language but the narrow intolerance, the “scorching clarity” of a doctrine that leaves no room for mystery or ambiguity, or even for love.

But there is an honest and humane empathy with Knox as well. A different fire consumed his mentor, George Wishart, burnt for heresy; and slaving in a French galley was Not a time for subtlety. In the very short poem In Thrall a sort of kinship is admitted across the centuries:

                        This wrestling with a wraith.

                        I suspect, old fellow,

                        You’re cast in my own shadows.

And all the intense, highly pressurised contexts of Knox’s world are evoked in memorable grimness. Not really an excuse, but at least an explanation. Had things been different

                        Oh, you might have been

                        a son of the morning, were it not

                        for your justified heart. Driven

                        by the time’s plague – war of heresies.

There is a burning fire on the cover of the book – a photo of the Rosette Nebula. And this leads us on to a second theme of the book, the wonder of scientific discovery. In one of Knox’s debates with Queen Mary (and you may remember that Marsh’s previous volume, The Guidman’s Daughter focussed on her) we hear Renaissance curiosity dismissed:

                        Nicholas Copernicus, my erse.

But this collection goes on to celebrate the imaginative genius of Johannes Kepler. His mother was threatened with the agony of burning - rehearsal for Hell by a narrow-minded dogma that Knox would have enjoyed (albeit in a Catholic country). But Kepler had the openness of vision that moved mankind’s understanding of the universe forward.

                        Like magnetism, he thought,

                        the influence of sun and planet.

The contrast between the life-affirming, questing imagination of the scientist and the cold, restricted narrowness of the preacher is all too apparent.

Admirers of Marsh’s work have always loved his capacity to evoke in very few words the joy and wonder of the natural world. They will not be disappointed here. The poems on Kepler include reactions to the weird landforms of Iceland, where

                        Like infernal porridge pots, fumaroles

                        Slurp and burp.

Even greater pleasures are to be found once the focus moves to Darwin – another of Marsh’s heroes – for this in not the Darwin of voyages to the exotic Galapagos but the Darwin who both observed and loved the superficially “ordinary” life that teemed in his garden of Down House where there was

                        ivy stalking through stems of seeding

                        blue-bells, gathering for a leap

                        into a likely tree.

There follow a series of beautiful, heart warming poems to lift the spirit, as we see anew, through the precision of the poet’s vision and language, sundew, kestrels, spiders, daddy long-legs and many other creatures and plants.

Perhaps it arises from the influence of the harsh era of Knox, but I sense that the ruthlessness of nature is more readily apparent than in previous volumes, as foxes gnaw carrion, moles have poisonous bites and

                                                A heron shakes

                        its head in a bright rain

                        and

                              swallows. You watch

                        the slow

                                     slide

                                             down

                        the endless

                                          throat.

This last quotation also illustrates the occasional pleasure Marsh gives us by playing with the visual shape of the lines; never as a mere indulgence but to match his subject: the swirl of whirligig beetles, the flicker of reflections or the hammer-blows of Knox’s logic.

All through this collection we can hear the song of birds. There’s a sudden scraitch of gulls in Wishart’s ears as he is led to execution at St Andrews. Swifts scream when made homeless by the destruction of the abbeys. When Kepler’s mother outfaces her interrogators and emerges into the sun she hears sparrows are chirping. In Darwin’s garden fledgling Magpies squeal like damaged rabbits. In his Marsh’s own garden April shimmies through pollen and song.

In the final section of the book the poems become personal reflections, on private family moments but all with a universal application. Here is

                        The girl that I married now a woman

                        in a crowd.

This takes place at an Eco Demo, when Marsh, in a direct link to his objections to Knox, confesses that

                        Slogans make me bristle.

We also meet the man in the next bed in hospital

                        Worked thirty years as a miner,

                        smoked like a chimney. His lungs seemed

                        almost solid, his coughs heaving

in their Iron Maiden. I lay wincing,

dragged out of shallow dozes.

There are affectionate memories of loved ones now passed away –and again we hear the song of birds: the twitting flight of greenfinches or pewits tumbling in a wind. The birth of his youngest grandchild was also marked by a gust of jackdaws.

There are ninety-three poems in this collection, and the editor would not print my review if I referred to them all. If you have enjoyed Henry Marsh’s previous collection you will enjoy this one, and find greater depths as he tackles tougher themes and as the body of his work is enlarged. For those who come new to his writing, prepare to be transported by short, beautiful and neatly precise words to South Uist, to the lanes around Loanhead, to the life of verges and hedgerows, and to the harsh world of the old patriarch.

Many themes and images recur across the book, and more will be found as you track back and forth. For all the blinkered intolerance of Knox’s preaching, nevertheless he helped make Scotland what it has been

                        And Reid, Davy Hume –

                        the voyagers – set sail

from your Promised Land?

For all that, however, our eye is caught by the judgement of Bunty Wallace wi clorty wains:

                        Priest or meenister – wha

                        Gies a tinker’s curse?

If you know anyone who loves wild nature, or cares about Scotland’s complexities, or who wants to read some of the best of Scottish new writing, what better gift could there be?

A poet draws inspiration from Mary Queen of Scots

“The Guidman’s Daughter” by Henry Marsh

Henry Marsh has just published his fifth major volume of poetry, “A Voyage to Babylon”. Its principal focus is on the Covenanters. His fourth volume, “The Hammer and the Fire” began with thinking about John Knox. I intend to review the new book – just published. But to whet your appetite I will post my reviews of Three and Four.

This is a review of his third volume. His friends and former pupils will not be surprised to hear that he is now regarded - by better informed judges than me - as one of the leading poets writing in Scotland today. One of the things that make him so highly regarded is that his poems are accessible as well as moving. If you have never read a poem since you sat Higher English, this book might get you back into the habit.

The poems are organised into sections which reflect the various themes. His reactions to paintings form one section – Titian, Rembrandt, Hopper, Kym Needle, Renoir. The Titian under discussion is “The Virgin and Child with St John” - and a lamb.

           

            The scene is pastoral, seemingly tranquil

But then, sixteen lines later, comes the shock:

                                    It has no comfort for her.

            She knows that lambs are for slaughter

Through Henry’s eyes we become very aware of the artists, and the models, and the subjects, as human beings, caught up in the creative artifice of picture-making. Why on earth, for example, does Rembrandt put such heavy armour on a half-grown boy? We can enjoy the poems, and be led ourselves to look deeper into paintings when next we are in a gallery.

 

Another section is inspired by his beloved South Uist. It takes just a handful of words to create a special place.

            A sea, deep blue, cavorting,

            running south…..

or

                                    From a doubt

            of sea or cloud the Atlantic

            resolves to milky green

There is passion here for the sailing fulmars and clues of machair flowers. But there is also wry wit at the local games:

            Grim, they are, in their wee shelter

            on the machair – the pibroch judges

and the poet has an eye for twenty-first century marauders:

                                                They hurtle

            past in cars. Their lager cans

            lie buckled in a ditch.

I hope you can get a glimpse, in these few quoted lines, of the sharp eye, the well-tempered, finely chosen words, and the deep humanity of the vision.

Other sections deal with his family, private moments of love laid out for us to wonder at, to sense the loveliness, and to share. Those of you who know Jackie Marsh will at once recognise the lady in blue of the opening section (and the dedication), with her insistent goodness. I guess that most people’s favourite verses will be the ones arising out of moments with his grand-daughter; I defy anyone who has ever loved a lively infant to be unmoved by them. We hear of her instinctive shiver under a massive pine tree, and her rapture at Tinker Bell. And it is impossible to believe that the description of her meeting with a toad will not end up as an anthologised classic.

            “Bonjour. Je m’appelle Emily….”

            Solemnly she’s addressing a toad

            in her one morsel of French.

             

There are eight sections altogether. Poems are sparked off by tunes – “McPherson’s Rant” – by spiders in the bath, by a summer holiday in France:

            Depths of sunlight where an eye might

            drown, flow in the cobbled fissures

            between shops and medieval houses.

The discovery of some of his own discarded manuscript blown off the recycling lorry under a hedge transports us in the twist of a line to the pages torn from the Sybiline books. Infant Emily plucking her first apple needs no words to set us thinking of how vulnerable is Eden. A chance encounter on a train produces one of the more moving poems, and a memory of the boyhood destruction of a garden syringe (used as a rocket launcher) one of the funniest.

Section Eight is devoted to the “Guidman’s Daughter” of the title: Mary Queen of Scots; and the final group of poems are reflections on her extraordinary career. Poets need historians, if they are to write with meaning about past (and John Guy is acknowledged in the introduction) but historians need poets too, to make sure that the individual and the personal, the human moments, the absurdities and the stresses and the tragedies and the fatigue are not ignored amongst the statistics, nor forgotten in the generalisations, nor trampled beneath insensitive analysis. Henry Marsh’s Mary is always a woman – a school leaver taking on an impossible country, a lover taken in by the beautiful boy who turned out to be the drunken, poxy Darnley, a mother, separated from her child, a victim of violent and selfish men. The mystery of her relationship with Bothwell remains a mystery:

            What desperate loyalty tied her

            after brutal nights, the anguish that reached

            the Maries through the bristling dark?

Then she was the prisoner:

            A spirit,

            confined,

            is breaking her mind.

And finally condemned and executed:

            her dignity defiant, she wrested her meaning

            from a stubborn February dawn.

Superficially this is a book of three-score separate poems, each one a pleasure in its choice words, unexpected angles and precise observation. But the more they are read the more unifying themes emerge, and are brought together in Mary’s story.

                                    Was it just,

            in the end, she was a woman?

            You can see, any night, our

            crushing Scot’s brutalities,

            the blood and glass. And you hear

            the blast of that Trumpet – a woman’s

            rule is repugnant to nature,

            contrary to God. 

Poem after poem challenges – denies – the pessimism implicit in this question. Others deal with other subject matter altogether. But all the Scots who read this collection should not only have enjoyed a treat; they will also have been moved to think a little, laugh a little, ponder a little.