A Walk and The Undead

The other day I was walking in Gloucestershire again, with my brother and walking friends – this time a stroll beside the Severn from Deerhurst to Tewkesbury and back. Deerhurst (a name that sounds more Kent than Gloucestershire) boasts a very remarkable Anglo-Saxon church – a large, complex building which is still not fully understood, but is unmistakably an impressive survival from those times, with later changes and additions. I'm no fan of Anglo-Saxon architecture, which seems to me aesthetically impoverished and frankly rather crude (so kill me), and Deerhurst church is – as even my brother, usually a great one for the Anglo-Saxon, remarked – hard to love. Apart from its antiquarian interest, its major attraction is the Deerhurst Angel, a sculpture that survives high up on what is now an external wall, and which, it has to be said, doesn't look like much compared to that other marvellous survival, the Lichfield Angel. The village also has Odda's Chapel, a chantry built shortly before the Norman Conquest, which was rediscovered in Victorian times, incorporated into a timber-framed farmhouse. So, a feast of Anglo-Saxon, somewhat wasted on me...
   And then there was Tewkesbury, and the great abbey there, with its imposing crossing tower – the largest and finest of its period in England, in Pevsner's opinion – looked even better than I remembered it from an earlier visit a good many years ago. The nave is breathtakingly beautiful, its Norman weight offset by wonderful airy vaulting, complete with painted roof bosses and corbels, and a fine chevet of chapels radiate from the apse; there are some excellent stained-glass windows, medieval and modern, and a collection of medieval monuments second only to Westminster Abbey. The town, or at least the part of it nearest the cathedral, is pleasingly unspoilt and full of historical interest – and of course a river runs through it, which is always a good thing.
  The Tewkesbury pub where we had lunch was already elaborately gussied up for Halloween, even though All Hallows Eve is a fortnight away. As with Christmas, the run-up seems to get earlier every year – and Halloween, barely celebrated in this country in my youth, gets bigger and more over the top every year.
  Talking of Halloween, here is an uncharacteristically macabre (but characteristically brilliant) poem by Richard Wilbur –

The Undead

Even as children they were late sleepers,
Preferring their dreams, even when quick with monsters,
    To the world with all its breakable toys,
        Its compacts with the dying;
 
    From the stretched arms of withered trees
They turned, fearing contagion of the mortal,
    And even under the plums of summer
        Drifted like winter moons.
 
    Secret, unfriendly, pale, possessed
Of the one wish, the thirst for mere survival,
    They came, as all extremists do
        In time, to a sort of grandeur:
 
    Now, to their Balkan battlements
Above the vulgar town of their first lives,
    They rise at the moon's rising. Strange
        That their utter self-concern
 
    Should, in the end, have left them selfless:
Mirrors fail to perceive them as they float
    Through the great hall and up the staircase;
        Nor are the cobwebs broken.
 
    Into the pallid night emerging,
Wrapped in their flapping capes, routinely maddened
    By a wolf's cry, they stand for a moment
        Stoking the mind's eye
 
    With lewd thoughts of the pressed flowers
And bric-a-brac of rooms with something to lose,—
    Of love-dismembered dolls, and children
        Buried in quilted sleep.
 
    Then they are off in a negative frenzy,
Their black shapes cropped into sudden bats
    That swarm, burst, and are gone. Thinking
        Of a thrush cold in the leaves
 
    Who has sung his few summers truly,
Or an old scholar resting his eyes at last,
    We cannot be much impressed with vampires,
        Colorful though they are;
 
    Nevertheless, their pain is real,
And requires our pity. Think how sad it must be
    To thirst always for a scorned elixir,
        The salt quotidian blood
 
    Which, if mistrusted, has no savor;
To prey on life forever and not possess it,
    As rock-hollows, tide after tide,
        Glassily strand the sea.