Vast and Musical

 Well, that's done then. The new King is duly crowned. Vivat Rex! 
As I watched the grand ceremony unfolding in Westminster Abbey, a line of Larkin's kept floating into my mind. It's in his bleak late masterpiece 'Aubade', where he describes religion as 'that vast moth-eaten musical brocade' (no consolation to the thanatophobic Larkin). The line is less about religion itself, I think, than the church and its ceremonial, specifically the Church of England. Well, what was on display in the Abbey today was certainly musical, and vast, but it hardly seemed to me moth-eaten: indeed it came across surprisingly spruce and fresh and vital, perhaps because we haven't seen this particular ceremony for 70 years. 
  Musical it assuredly was, quite magnificent from the pre-service concert right through to the last note. And vast? Yes, the vastness was in the setting, the whole context – that soaring, lofty interior (so French, and yet so English), all that continuity, stretching back 'God knows how long', those centuries of history and tradition embedded in the building and the ceremony; the regalia, the costumes, the carefully structured language, the choreography, the beauty of a crowning which begins with the monarch presenting himself as a servant, and continues with the ancient magic of an anointing – and, beyond the ceremony itself, the context of the wider world in which the monarchy continues to function and evolve, forever changing, forever the same. The figure at the centre of all this seemed in himself touchingly small and wan, out of scale with the grandeur and pomp of the occasion, all that vastness. But who wouldn't be? It is the institution that matters, not the individual, and today's ceremony seemed to me, in its indirect, very English way – more magical (and musical) than logical – to be an eloquent argument for the continuation of that strange, irrational but somehow durable (and, I think, immensely valuable) thing, the British constitutional monarchy. God save the King!