Who knows the fate of his bones?

 At the risk of turning this blog into a calendar of saints' days, I must, as a Mercian and now a Lichfieldian, note that today is St Chad's Day, marking the death in 672 of Chad, Bishop of the Mercians and Lindsey People, and founder of the church that is now that tri-spired wonder Lichfield Cathedral. Chad's death was heralded by the beautiful sound of angels singing joyfully and telling the saint (he was already regarded as a saint) that they would return in seven days to take him to his heavenly reward. They flew back, punctual to the day, and, still singing, took his soul to its rest. Egbert, a friend of Bede's, related that someone in Ireland (perhaps Egbert himself) had seen the heavenly host coming for Chad's soul and later returning with it to heaven.   
   Chad's body was buried in the nave of his church, but his head was preserved in a specially built Head Chapel beside the south choir aisle, where it became a revered object of pilgrimage. 'But,' as Sir Thomas Browne asked, 'who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?' Sadly, the chapel was destroyed at the Reformation, and Chad's relics were passed, as it were, from hand to hand, turning up in the mid-17th century under a farmer's bed, then being divided, with some bones sent to St Omer in France, before the relics returned to Staffordshire, and were finally given to the new Roman Catholic cathedral of St Chad in Birmingham, where they still reside in an ark designed by Pugin. Happily, one bone was returned to Lichfield cathedral in 2022 and is housed in a new shrine in the retrochoir. 
   It is thought the famous, and beautiful, Lichfield Angel might have been the end piece of a shrine containing the bones of St Chad.

And this year St Chad's Day also turned out to be the day I saw my first butterfly of the year – a Brimstone (unusually a female) flying vigorously over the garden. It begins again – hurrah!

Llanddewi-Brefi

 The first day of Meteorological Spring, and the sun has been sighted here in Lichfield, though it seems to have disappeared again now. It is also Chopin's birthday (born 1810) – and St David's Day. To mark the last of these, here is a poem by R.S. Thomas – one that requires a word of explanation. First, the title: Llanddewi-Brefi, long before it found fame as the home of Little Britain's 'only gay in the village', was the scene of a sixth-century synod, at which the Welsh saints and bishops (pretty much the same thing in those days) gathered, and various miracles were performed, some of them by St David (Dewi). While he was preaching at the synod, the ground mysteriously rose under him, elevating him to a position from which he could be heard and seen by the large crowd that had gathered. It is this miracle that Thomas is recalling in his poem, which begins with a surprising echo of 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' – 

Llanddewi-Brefi

One day this summer I will go to Llanddewi,
And buy a cottage and stand at the door
In the long evenings, watching the moor
Where the sheep pasture and the shadows fall
Thick as swathes under the sun's blade.
And there I will see somewhere beyond the wall
Of the old church the moles lifting the ground,
And think of the saint's cunning and how he stood
Preaching to the people from his secret mound,
A head's breadth above them, and they silent around.

PS

 Here's something I wrote about J.L. Carr for the excellent Engelsberg Ideas. Follow the link...

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-man-who-gave-books-away/

Park Life

 Yesterday I came dangerously close to falling in love with London again – but then I reminded myself that it was not London, that 'human awful wonder of God', that had stirred my heart, but one hallowed spot: Holland Park, the city's most beautiful park, and one for me replete with fond memories. I had been having lunch with my old friend Bryan (Appleyard), and we spent the afternoon strolling in Holland Park and visiting Leighton House, with its gorgeous oriental interiors, vast studio and impressive art collection, a monument to high Victorian taste at its most Olympian level. But the park was the thing. This was the park to which I eagerly escaped on so many lunchtimes of my working life, breathing its air, seeing its sights, delighting in the butterflies and birds, the trees and flowers, enjoying the woodland walks, the Japanese garden, the remains of the big house – and the pigs and longhorn cattle that were occasionally employed to do some useful rootling and grazing. Holland Park was for years balm to my soul, a microcosm of so many of the things I love – and all within a short walk of my workplace. London has nothing else like it – which is why I am not, after all, falling back in love with the place.  
[More on my Holland Park lunchtimes here...]

Cotswolds and Celandines

 Yesterday I was walking in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. It was a well planned five-miler, taking in three good churches (Turkdean, Hampnett and the magnificent wool church of Northleach – all open), a decent lunch, and glorious rolling countryside with wide views – pastureland and paddocks, drystone walls, picturesque villages, cloud shadows passing over the landscape. We didn't get the unbroken sunshine promised in the weather forecast, but the sun came and went, never staying long enough to really warm things up. Disappointingly, there was not a single butterfly to be seen – it wasn't quite warm enough – but bumblebees were flying, and at one of the churches darker, smaller bees were swarming high up on the South wall. Birds were singing – a cheery twitter of small birds, rooks conversing loudly as they built their nests, skylarks rising singing from the fields, buzzards and kites mewing... As for the wild flowers, these were in their early spring glory, with snowdrops, crocuses, primroses and daffodils all in full flower, along with speedwell, lungwort and a few early windflowers. Also in full flower was that golden harbinger of spring, the Lesser Celandine – a flower that Wordsworth loved so much he devoted three (pretty bad) poems to it, and wanted to have one carved on his gravestone. That stone, however, in Grasmere churchyard, remains unadorned, the celandine featuring instead on his memorial plaque, originally intended for Westminster Abbey but now in Grasmere church. Alas, the sculptor – Thomas Woolner, no less – embellished the plaque not with the ground-hugging Lesser Celandine that Wordsworth loved but with the upright, poppy-related Greater Celandine. Oh dear. 

Talking of Short Poems...

I spent the weekend over the border in Derbyshire, visiting my cousin, and on Saturday we found ourselves dodging the rain in Belper. Where better to shelter awhile than in a large charity bookshop? There I spotted an anthology edited by Wendy Cope – The Funny Side: 101 Humorous Poems. Having found much to enjoy in another of her anthologies, Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems*, I naturally bought this one. When I went to pay for it, the helpful volunteer at the cash desk told me he had another little anthology out the back which I might be interested in... It was Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems, edited by Simon Armitage – so of course I took that too. 
 The poems in Short and Sweet range in length from 13 lines (any more and they'd be trespassing on a companion volume, Don Paterson's excellent 101 Sonnets) to no lines at all, the latter represented by Don Paterson's On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him. None of Dick Davis's epigrams appears in Short and Sweet, but I found this brilliant three-liner by Yeats, which was new to me – 

Three Movements

Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land;
Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand;
What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?

A first look also yielded this, by Geoffrey Hill – one of the most shattering four-line poems I have ever read...

I Had Hope When Violence Was Ceas't

Dawnlight freezes against the east-wire.
The guards cough 'raus! 'raus! We flinch and grin,
Our flesh oozing towards its last outrage.
That which is taken from me is not mine.

[The title is from Paradise Lost, Book 11: 'I had hope When violence was ceas't, and Warr on Earth, All would have then gon well, peace would have crown'd With length of happy dayes the race of man; But I was farr deceav'd; for now I see Peace to corrupt no less than Warr to waste...']

* an anthology which includes Dick Davis's great love poem 'Uxor Vivamus'.

An Epigram on Epigrams

 Dick Davis, one of our finest living poets (and translators), has always published sparingly. If and when his complete poems are published – and they really should be – they will not make a fat volume. Davis favours short forms, including epigrams. Here is one of my favourites – 

On Epigrams

This neat, egregious house-style
Parades its insights pat, on time: 
It smiles a very knowing smile...
Here comes another fucking rhyme.

(Its doubles entendres are subtle, supple – 
'To fuck' here means, of course, 'to couple'.)

I've written about Davis before – a search for 'Dick Davis' brings up these posts... 

Here, for good measure, is another short poem by Davis (not an epigram) –

With John Constable

Slow-rotting planks and moody skies;
I look with your impassive eyes

Whose tact is love for what is there –
The worked soil and the moving air,

The reticence of grief: I hear
Through silence your dead voice draw near –

Those words you gave to Ruisdael's art,
'It haunts my mind, clings to my heart.'